Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Rhetoric Reframed: “Obamacare,” “Obamacore,” And The Failure/Future Of Political Discourse In The United States, Jaclyn Elyse Hilberg

Masters Theses

This thesis utilizes metaphor theory and, in particular, the work of cognitive linguist George Lakoff to explore contemporary political discourse surrounding the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") and the Common Core State Standards ("Obamacore") in the United States. I investigate the different moral frameworks, grounded in metaphorical notions of the ideal family, that underlie both liberal and conservative ideology in the US. After demonstrating that liberals and conservatives have coherent positions toward both the Affordable Care Act and Common Core, I argue that conservatives have been more successful at framing political issues in terms favorable to their own views. I conclude …

Response To The Unthinkable: Collecting And Archiving Condolence And Temporary Memorial Materials Following Public Tragedies, Ashley R. Maynor

UT Libraries Faculty: Peer-Reviewed Publications

From Oklahoma City to Columbine to the Boston Marathon finish line, individuals around the world have responded to violent mass deaths publicized in mainstream media by creating ever-larger temporary memorials and sending expressions of sympathy—such as letters, flowers, tokens, and mementos—by the tens and even hundreds of thousands. Increasingly, there is an expectation that some, if not all, of the condolence and temporary memorial items will be kept or saved. This unusual and unexpected task of archiving so-called “spontaneous shrines” often falls to libraries and archives and few protocols, if any, exist for librarians and archivists in this role. This …

Responsibility, Blame And The Psychopath, Matthew William Ruble

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the moral responsibility of psychopaths. I begin with an analysis of the concept of psychopathy by situating it within the context of a central debate in the philosophy of psychiatry over the conceptual nature of mental illness to demonstrate that psychopathy is an inherently value-laden concept. I argue against the disease-model of psychopathy and against their automatic exemption from moral responsibility as argued for by many moral philosophers. Psychopaths possess sufficient agency such that exempting them from moral responsibility is problematic both epistemically and morally. Yet psychopaths frequently offer reasons for their behavior that reveal their distance …

The Academic Writing Of Evangelical Undergraduates, Emily Ann Cope

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to better describe and understand the academic writing and experiences of evangelical undergraduates at a public university. Previous composition studies have drawn attention to undergraduate diversity and the role of religious rhetorics in writing classrooms. However, because much of the existing scholarship identifies evangelical students by their “problematic” writing, the field has focused on writing that does not conform to academic expectations and is obviously faith-motivated. Additionally, because most composition studies of religious student writing report on classroom anecdotes, it has prioritized instructors’ experiences rather than student experiences. In contrast, this dissertation used qualitative …

The Matter Of Jerusalem: The Holy Land In Angevin Court Culture And Identity, C. 1154-1216, Katherine Lee Hodges-Kluck

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation reshapes our understanding of the mechanics of nation-building and the construction of national identities in the Middle Ages, placing medieval England in a wider European and Mediterranean context. I argue that a coherent English national identity, transcending the social and linguistic differences of the post-Norman Conquest period, took shape at the end of the twelfth century. A vital component of this process was the development of an ideology that intimately connected the geography, peoples, and mythical histories of England and the Holy Land. Proponents of this ideology envisioned England as an allegorical new Jerusalem inhabited by a chosen …

Crafting Memory And My Collector, Katherine Ann Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

This creative dissertation is a partial novel entitled My Collector as well as a critical introduction that explores both the usefulness of a craft essay, and how memory is rendered in fiction through the intersection of time management and point of view. In the critical introduction, I conduct close readings of two of John Banville’s novels—The Sea and The Untouchable—and apply ideas about time and memory from essays by Maud Casey, Joan Silber, and Adam Braver. My explorations demonstrate that the role of memory in fiction is more than setting up a cause-and-effect or a simple explanation for …

The Greek Youthening: Assessing The Iconographic Changes Within Courtship During The Late Archaic Period, Jared Alan Johnson

Masters Theses

During the late sixth century and early fifth century B.C., Athenian vase painters started experimenting with a new medium (i.e. red figure). Black figure was still the predominant medium by the early fifth century B.C., and its pederastic scenes on some of the vases belonged to a coherently consistent presentation or a conventional set of images. However, the conventional pederastic motifs of black figure, such as the differentiation in height between figures, the variation among lovers (e.g. bearded erastes and unbearded eromenos), and the appearance of courtship gifts all started to disappear in red figure throughout the fifth century B.C. …

Illusions Of Safety: Poems, Stephanie Elaine Dugger

Doctoral Dissertations

The poems in Illusions of Safety bear witness to growing up on a farm in Alabama and how rural life—whether traumatic or romantic—influences a narrator who falls outside of her family’s norms. In their attempt to investigate the complexities of the notion of safety, the poems primarily rely on space (and the conflicting ideals of both security and splintering associated with space) by developing the space on the page through form and by juxtaposing city with country, fields with rooms, and the West with the South. The poems seek to understand what is safe, what can be safe, what should …

„I Am God“ Und „Femen Akbar“: Die Beziehung Der Aktivistischen Frauenrechtsbewegung Femen Zu Christentum Und Islam, Lisa Breddermann

Masters Theses

Feminist movements that arose in the early 2000s have triggered renewed discussions in academia and in the media about the validity and the future of feminism in the 21^st century. One important protest group in the context of post – and popfeminism is the group FEMEN, a feminist protest group that originated in Ukraine. Research has already begun to discuss FEMEN’s protest forms and their ideologies, and their bare-breasted calls for the demolition of patriarchy. So far, researchers mostly concentrated on the question if FEMEN are feminists and if FEMEN’s naked protest is effectively reaching their goal to liberate …

Avatars Des Independances En Afrique: Ahmadou Kourouma Et Mongo Beti, Falone Domle Jiejup

Masters Theses

This thesis analyzes Les Soleils des Independances (1968) by Ahamadou Kourouma and Trop de Soleil Tue l’Amour (1999) by Mongo Beti with the main objectives of examining how the postcolonial societies in Africa are touhced by many kind of problems addressed by authors in literature. In fact, the two books chosen for this exercise cover the question of the disappearance of traditional beliefs, the poor management of economical and political aspects of the societies, the dictatorship under the name of democracy, corruption as a norm, and many other points. In both Ahmadou Kourouma’s and Mongo Beti’s work, poor and vulnerable …

Everything Leaves A Trace: D. H. Lawrence, Modernism, And The English Bildungsroman Tradition, Justin Miles Mcgee

Masters Theses

During the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth-century, the Bildungsroman acted as a vehicle for artists’ reflections on the turbulent time. The Bildungsroman is especially well suited to capture the fragmentation and disillusionment characteristic of modernism because of its sensitivity to the community’s role in the individual’s social normalization. D. H. Lawrence’s autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers (1913) embodies the jarring transition from the world of the Victorian Bildungsroman to modernity. While Lawrence’s novel still relies on characteristics of the Victorian Bildungsroman, it makes a significant attempt to break away from the Victorian Bildungsroman. Lawrence uses the …

Spectacle, Consumer Capitalism, And The Hyperreality Of The Mediated American Jury Trial: The French Perspective On O.J. Simpson, Casey Anthony, And Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Bailey Miller Wamp

Masters Theses

This study investigates modern French criticism of jury trial mediation in the United States. By engaging the work of twentieth-century French theorists Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as French journalistic reporting on the jury trials of O.J. Simpson, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and Casey Anthony, this study argues that mediated images of the American jury trial abandon the pursuit of justice in favor of a consumer capitalist endeavor to create spectacle. Ultimately, jury trial mediation generates a hyperreality in which the media simulates the pursuit of justice with no reference to the “real” pursuit of justice.

In order …

From God Terms To Gaga: The Bad Romance Between Motherhood And Female Suffragists In American Film, Mary Ellis Glymph

Masters Theses

Ninety-five years ago, the Nineteenth Amendment was passed by Congress, and women across America were given the right to vote. Nearly a century later, the long-gone figure of the female suffragist continues to subtly permeate American film, a reoccurrence that is not easily justified. Why would viewers in the English-speaking world continue an interest in a historically-contextualized feminist that seems, at first, to have little to do with what a “modern-day feminist” portrays?

Although the woman that history calls the suffragette hasn’t existed in America since 1920, representations of her in film and visual media have reminded viewers that this …

Kenneth Koch's Postmodern Comedy Revisited, John Campbell Nichols

Masters Theses

This thesis describes and analyzes the postmodern comedy of New York School poet, Kenneth Koch and discusses the changes this comedy underwent throughout his lengthy career. The thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter I explains the aesthetic of the New York School of poets as contrasted to the dominant New Critical compositional aesthetic embodied by poets such as Robert Lowell in the mid-century United States. Chapter II develops Koch’s comedy as expressing an emergent postmodernism. Chapter III discusses the various aspects of Koch’s comedy, sampling poems from across his career. Chapter IV traces the development and maturity of Koch’s …

“They’Re All Little Boys Who Need A Strong Mommy:” Burke’S Theories Of Form And Terministic Screens Concerning Maternal Representations In Sons Of Anarchy, Stephanie Michelle Harrelson

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to analyze one contemporary television series’ representations of mothers and what these depictions say about the trajectory of cultural perceptions. As one of the most pervasive forms of media in contemporary culture, television offers an opportune site of study about what American society deems important. While many scholars have begun exploring issues concerning gender on television, few have focused primarily on depictions of motherhood and their implications on society. Televised representations of mothers have traditionally remained in the background of shows, spending the majority of their screen time taking care of their children, husbands, and households in …

“Die Zukünftige Ehefrau” And “Alte Jungfer” In Fanny Lewald’S First Fiction And Autobiography, Judith E. Hector

Masters Theses

Celebrations two hundred years after her birth acknowledge Fanny Lewald (1811-1889), a prolific writer, as an early spokesperson for the emancipation of women from restricted social roles. Her autobiography, Meine Lebensgeschichte, published in 1861-62 when she was 50 years old, describes the first 30 years of her life. In it, she details growing up female in a middle-class home in Königsberg and how she was prepared to assume narrowly defined roles of wife, mother, and household manager (Gattin, Mutter, Hausfrau). Marriage in late 18^th and early 19^th century Germany was touted by Joachim Heinrich Campe and others …

Myth Y La Magia: Magical Realism And The Modernism Of Latin America, Hannah R. Widdifield

Masters Theses

The similarities between Latin American magical realism and European surrealism have long been regarded as part of a shared, cohesive movement in literature and art. After all, they share certain nonsensical and fantastical traits that place both movements far away from the Realism that modernism, as a whole, refutes. But in light of postcolonial theory, it becomes more and more necessary to explore magical realism as a geographically and politically situated movement with its own unique value in discussions of Modernism; not an offshoot of surrealism, but a sister genre, born in the distinct atmosphere of a region trying to …

A Failed Dream: Literacy Education In The Global South, Allison Haley Gose

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Guiding Transhumanism: The Necessity Of An Ethical Approach To Transhumanism, Marian L. Laforest

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Media And Mobilization: The Effects Of Western Media In Post-Conflict Uganda, Victoria Anne Delaney

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Social Context In The Production Of Scientific Knowledge, Kristen Lynn Beard

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

“Una Caja De Plomo Que No Se Podía Abrir”: Una Crítica Del Sistema Militar Estadounidense En Puerto Rico Durante La Época De La Guerra De Corea, Ashton Monks

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

A Study Of Greek And Roman Stylistic Elements In The Portraiture Of Livia Drusilla, Chloe Elizabeth Lovelace

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Bone Degradation Under Differing Environments, Kirby Alyssa Trovillo

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Fabrication, Evelyn T. Reed

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Voices From The Sand: Graffiti And Identity Of The Roman Army In The Near East, Emma Elisabeth Pugmire

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Cross-Dressing In Greek Drama: Ancient Perspectives On Gender Performance, Abbey Kayleen Elder

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

L'Altérité Des Femmes Dans La Littérature Française Contemporaine, Loren Lee

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Challenges Of Advancing Equal Rights For Lgbt Individuals In An Increasingly Diverse Society: The Case Of The French Taubira Law, Ashley Jakubek

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Merry Death Collector, Benjamin Wade Murphy

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

Documentary filmmaking puts life on lens and who knows what the outcome will be. The creative team chose Arnie Meredith to be the subject of the short documentary The Merry Death Collector. The oddball LaFollette, Tennessee resident collects and sells antique items from estate sales and recently purchased two buildings to house and run his business. The story follows Arnie’s struggle to open and maintain a small-town business. He attends a convention in Knoxville, Tennessee to raise funds, and even attempts to hang a biplane in one of his buildings. With his projected opening date around the corner, an exhausted …