Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Mainer From Rockland: Adelbert Ames In The Civil War, Michael Jack Megelsh

Masters Theses

Adelbert Ames, a Civil War general before he was thirty years old, exemplified the characteristics and embodied the elements of the essential solider. He, and other mid-level commanders like him, provided pivotal and instrumental leadership that helped the Union win the war. In short, Ames was one of the most talented and highly regarded young officers in the Union Army, and boasts perhaps the finest record of any "boy general" who fought for the North during the American Civil War. Ames was not just an average soldier or a mere participant in a large volunteer army. He was not a …

A Teleological Exploration Of The Plausibility Of Moral Knowledge, Kevin Lebel King Jr.

Masters Theses

Natural selection seems to offer a compelling case for the development of evaluative judgments independent of evaluative facts. If such a case can be made, then how do moral judgments correlate to moral facts? It seems that there would be no tight connection from judgments to truth and moral judgments would be unwarranted. Gilbert Harman realized the implications of a probable non-moral genealogy. Richard Joyce goes on to provide a probable non-moral genealogy that would epistemically undermine moral judgments as Harman thought. Joyce argues that in a naturalistic world natural selection can account for moral judgments, but that the truth …

A Culture In Change: The Development Of Masculinity Through P.G. Wodehouse's Psmith Series, Allison Thompson

Masters Theses

P. G. Wodehouse offers a serious and sustained critique of English society using the game of cricket as he follows the lives of two memorable characters, Mike Jackson and Rupert Psmith. Yet Wodehouse has frequently been accused of existing as too innocent of a bystander to understand the underpinnings of society, let alone to offer a critique. For example, Christopher Hitchens in a review of a Wodehouse biography by Robert McCrum states, "Wodehouse was a rather beefy, hearty chap, with a lifelong interest in the sporting subculture of the English boarding school and a highly developed instinct for the main …

American Dreams And Dystopias: Examining Dystopian Parallels In The Great Gatsby And To Kill A Mockingbird, Samuel Nathan Harris

Masters Theses

In this study I consider the recent trend of dystopian fiction in literature—both the broader genre of dystopias of the past century or so, and the contemporarily popular subgenre of young adult dystopian fiction—and examine whether certain American novels, while not typically considered dystopias, can fit into this genre or at least be established as having some parallels with works of this genre. Based on certain shared archetypes of the genre, such as “speculative myth,” a governing “ritual habit,” and a dissatisfied narrator or protagonist, I here propose that other American classics, specifically F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and …

Spiritual Transformation And Its Implications For Christian Worship, Thomas Wayne Doss

Masters Theses

The life change that Christ Jesus wants to produce in His children is nothing short of miraculous. His offer of salvation immediately transforms the accepting person, bringing him into a divine relationship with the Heavenly Father, but Christ desires to further transform the new believer into a person who more accurately bears the image of God and declares His greatness and glory to all. This is a progressive and life-long process that calls the Christian to a life that includes sacrificial worship, avoidance of worldly living, and renewing the mind with godly pursuits. Because this is the will of God …

The Many Paths Of Cyberspace: William Gibson's The Sprawl As Prototype For Structural, Thematic, And Narrative Multilinearity In New Media, Erik Marsh

Masters Theses

William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy helped set a new direction for science fiction, but his work is also a valuable tool for examining changes in the approach both readers and writers began to take to approaching literature as the text medium began its rapid evolution with the introduction of electronic hypertext. In this examination of Gibson’s fiction, a pattern of multilinear truth emerges, showing how Western culture began to fully embrace Postmodern approaches to truth claims as a default, how even a pre-electronic text can exhibit hypertext-like aspects, and how this shift in interpretive response to literature is important for Christians …

Flannery O'Connor's Redemptive Violence In Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club And Invisible Monsters, Caitlin Elliot

Masters Theses

Underground fight clubs, transsexuals, shotguns: these are the images that come to mind when one thinks of Chuck Palahniuk’s fiction—for many critics and readers, merely the stuff of pulp fiction. However, many of Palahniuk’s novels use violence to critique American culture while offering hope for the redemption of his characters and society as a whole. Thus, the violence in his works serves a purpose beyond mere shock value. The function of Palahniuk’s violence, I argue, reflects the poetics of Flannery O’Connor. Her works contain culturally-driven narratives with strange and grotesque circumstances that lead her characters to moments of redemption, and …

The Romantic Egoist: Fitzgerald's View On Identity And Culture, Tara Bender

Masters Theses

"Who am I?” is a question that not only each individual asks himself or herself at various points in the process of maturation from childhood to adulthood, but also society itself as it changes and grows. During the 1920s, Americans were asking themselves these defining questions. F. Scott Fitzgerald as one of the pre-eminent writers of that time period provides examples in his novels This Side of Paradise, Beautiful and The Damned, and The Great Gatsby of the immaturity of masculine figures. Amory Blaine, Anthony Patch, and Jay Gatsby exemplify the struggle of men in the 1920s to develop their …

'Sing Unto The Lord A New Song--Just Not That One!' A Case Study Of Music Censorship In Free Will Baptist Colleges, Jon Edward Bullock

Masters Theses

Like so many of the world’s other religious institutions, the Christian church has a long and well-documented history of using music to enhance and enliven the spiritual experiences of believers. Many of the church’s greatest champions throughout history have spoken about the inherent power of music, but as history always seems to demonstrate, along with power comes the need for control. As long as church leaders have used music to attain spiritual progress, they have also censored music that threatens to impede that progress. Even today, many church leaders still rely on music censorship to protect the future and identity …

Aquinas The Pacifist? A Comparative Study, Lloyd George Pemberton

Masters Theses

It is claimed by some scholars that when recent analytical tools of interpretation are placed upon the Summa Theologica, a presumption against harm emerges from the mind of Thomas Aquinas as he formulated his just war theory. This presumption against harm is thereby construed as Aquinas having an affinity toward pacifism. The present thesis offers a comparative study between two scholars, Richard Miller and Gregory Reichberg. Miller supports this claim while Reichberg finds it unjustifiable. The thesis lays out the arguments put forth by both, ultimately siding with Reichberg as making the better case. In addition, I offer my own …

Perceptions Of Guitar Use And Training In Music Therapy: A Survey Of Clinicians, Joshua Robert Keller

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine music therapists' perceptions of guitar use and training in clinical practice. Three major research questions dealt with guitar use, guitar training, and clinicians' confidence using the guitar in clinical practice. A quasi-random sample of 1000 board-certified music therapists were invited to complete an online questionnaire with 27 questions in the areas of guitar use, guitar training and experience, and the importance of 28 specific skills. One hundred fifty music therapists (n = 150) responded.

Major findings include: (1) clinicians appear to use the guitar frequently and, on average, see guitar skills as …

The Incompatibility Of Open Theism With The Doctrine Of Inerrancy, Stuart Mark Mattfield

Masters Theses

The primary purpose of this thesis is to show that the doctrine of open theism denies the doctrine of inerrancy. Specifically open theism falsely interprets Scriptural references to God's Divine omniscience and sovereignty, and conversely ignores the weighty Scriptural references to those two attributes which attribute perfection and completeness in a manner which open theism explicitly denies. While the doctrine of inerrancy has been hotly debated since the Enlightenment, and mostly so through the modern and postmodern eras, it may be argued that there has been a traditional understanding of the Bible's inerrancy that is drawn from Scripture, and has …

Objects In Mind, Leah Kenttämaa-Squires

Masters Theses

Daily distractions and interruptions are abundant and often cause anxiety, irritability, and impatience. The world is constantly in a battle for our attention making it difficult to be in one moment. Our continuous motion of both body and mind to combat these constant disturbances cause us to lose perspective, become quick to make judgments, and unable to recognize errors. We no longer take time to fully consider where our thoughts are leading, nor do we allow for a moment to let our thoughts go.

An object can promote open-minded thought by altering our perception or perspective of it, preventing automatic …

Neoplastic Therapy : On Violence And Aesthetics, Mengyu Chen

Masters Theses

The goal of this thesis is to create a new theoretical framework to examine and understand the meaning of an art object and its relational social existence. This thesis serves as a critique on contemporary media culture and hierarchical social oppression. At the same time, it adopts a pseudoscientific way to introduce notions of art’s autonomy and its opposition to social functionality. By merging political theories on individualism, capitalism, and metaphysics with foundational structures of art creation, I am attempting to construct a new system of thinking that challenges traditional ways of understanding mediums, functions and the viewer’s relationship with …

The Self Reconfigured, Soe Yu Nwe

Masters Theses

In my work, I explore different ways of narrating my experience of alienation, confusion, pain, and psychological confinement as a cultural outsider. I seek to create narrative spaces that explore the spatial relationships between the fragmented and dislocated self with the surrounding environment along with a yearning for connection. I convey these experiences through the use of symbols (house, shrine, vessel, and snake) as metaphors for the self. As a third generation Chinese immigrant in Myanmar, I look back to Buddhist and Animistic practices in my native country, in addition to Chinese cultural practices, for inspiration in my work. The …

Multiple Influences: From Witnessing Language To Performing It, Viviane Jalil

Masters Theses

5The relationship between language and tools has always been one of influence. Our devices—pens, keyboards, smartphones—make language visible and affect its form and structure. But this exchange goes both ways: all acts of reading and writing are mediated by our expectations of content, and the instruments used to access it.

As modes of communication evolve, so too do the ways in which we think through language, creating a dynamic of perpetual adaptation. With the growing impact of technology upon our behaviors, this dialogue is becoming imbalanced, affecting how we engage with others, how we approach our machines, and how we …

The Void, The Mystery, The Vast Array, The Infinity Of Unities, The Otherworld, The Absolute, The Hidden Order, The Randomness, The Infraworld, The Nothing, The Zone Of Immaterial Sensibility, The Silence, The Hollow Of Space, The Ineffable, The Emptiness, The Wild, Drew Ludwig

Masters Theses

This thesis presents the culmination of two years of excursions into and longing for the void: the sense of absolute presence and connectivity that I have always found in the desert of the Colorado Plateau. Away from the desert, I use my artistic practice as a means of approaching this kinship with the wild, the void.

My work may be understood as a series of experiments, striving to locate and access the void through different language, logic and media. My process speaks to a deep respect for the external wild of landscape (the desert), and a growing recognition of the …

[Nos]Otros, Lucia Monge

Masters Theses

Environmental issues are part of our daily conversations but not as common in our everyday considerations. The times call on us to approach things differently. We must find alternative ways to relate to each other and to understand the real issues of our ecology. We cannot perceive the whole through our accustomed senses, so we must open and expand our perception. Art offers that possibility, allowing for points of contact across distance while physically representing that space in between.

How do we relate to other living beings around us, determine what is living, and decide who is part of our …

A Slight Hysterical Tendency, Allison Baker

Masters Theses

Sexuality, sculpture, and sadness as sites of female subversion.

A woman's internalized suffering and sadness is deployed as an act of resistance. Women have a long lineage of historically tragic female figures, particularly authors and artists that disrupt the status quo by relishing and thriving and they wallow in their sorrow. Women's collective and overwhelming sadness is both a singular and unified protest against cultural and social systems of oppression. Sad girls are bad girls.

Untitled, Esme Choi

Masters Theses

‘I’ is the most difficult entity for me to identify. The meaning of self, as I get closer, slips away. Sometimes I feel akin to one identity, and at other times, another. None of them feels completely accurate. In these moments of uncertainty, I remind myself that possessing multiple selves is acceptable and that in the spaces between them resides the power and possibility for eventually finding and defining my true self. My parents gave me four different names at different times due to our religion, Buddhism. At present, my name is Esme here in the United States, while in …

Mid-, Elise Kirk

Masters Theses

This thesis explores a personal and cultural tension between rootedness and restlessness, set against the backdrop of my native Midwest. The large-format portrait and landscape photographs reflect a paradoxical longing to pull up stakes and put down roots, and the liminal state we often dwell in as a result. Playing on the conception of the Midwest as a transient zone to be passed through en route to somewhere else, the work refers to the pervasive belief that our greatest hopes and potentials can only be realized in some other place, at some future or past time. It’s a syndrome I …

Mealspace : Beyond The Table, Lauren Tedeschi

Masters Theses

This is a chronicle of a tableware enthusiast who set out to share her ideas by designing for the everyday eater. The quest began with questioning what an ideal meal experience is and why it revolves around a static, flat table. What are the aspects of present-day eating scenarios that could be improved upon? I considered the conventions of dining, studying traditional forms, materials and spaces related to this practice, and proposed new ways of eating. I designed props for establishing a new kind of mealspace, the objects and events paired together as performances. Each project or act is documented …

Handle, Wei Lah Poh

Masters Theses

Handle pays homage to the everyday object. Since Duchamp’s appropriation of the porcelain urinal with his work The Fountain (1917), we have been conceptually challenged to prod the notion of what art can be. While Duchamp denied utility, my process shifts and redefines originally intended utility in the context of enamelware. Through my work, I re-situate these everyday objects made from enameled metal, onto the body as jewelry.

Historically, the objects that comprise enameled domestic kitchenware objects—from pots and pans to spoons and forks to bowls and plates—were common objects, and were handled and utilized everyday. Once massproduced and ubiquitous …

Speculative Politics -Fictionalized Spectacle, Prin Limphongpand

Masters Theses

Speculative Politics—Fictionalized Spectacle posits an alternate model for design practice. Borrowing from the genre of science fiction, this design approach activates consideration of possible realities and cultural forms. It raises questions and invents problems instead of solving them. By imagining technologies, policies, laws, and conditions that do not yet exist, design becomes an agent of investigation to highlight current and future social, cultural, and political conditions.

The projects within this thesis reconsider our present situations through methods of speculative documentation. The act of documentation becomes a process of manipulating notions of truth to render fictions from reality. Using subversion, instigation, …

Make Every Day Count: Longing, Vision, & Painting, Sarah R. Pater

Masters Theses

Images are non-verbal holders of narrative and meaning in Western culture. Historically, painting served this function—a job that we now generally give to digital photography and cinema. One task for contemporary painting, then, might simply be as a self-reflective metaphor for the experience of vision that is mostly lost in photographic technologies: seeing as looking plus touching. Paintings are simultaneously objects and images—corporeal material constructions and visceral illusionary fields. Given the current state of rapid image production, consumption, and instrumentalization, painting’s insistence on singularity and a more ‘composed gaze’—one that asks the viewer to re-read—stands out as significant and potentially …

Taking Art To The Next Level: Integration Of Advanced Placement Studio Art, 2-D Design, Krystal Kingsley

Masters Theses

Teaching High School art has brought me great joy. Along the way I have been challenged with many difficult questions. One that beckoned me to direct and intentional action is “how do I help students take their art work to the next level?” This project is the result of my personal discovery and development of an Advanced Placement Studio Art 2-D Design course. My research of multiple sources led to the development of an Advanced Placement (AP) approved course which includes: a syllabus, multiple breadth lessons, project rubrics, critiques, sketchbook assignments, summer homework, and a guide for helping students develop …

Think Again: The Decision Making Process In King Lear And Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, Elizabeth Burgess

Masters Theses

This thesis is a feminist reading of Shakespeare‟s King Lear and Jane Smiley‟s Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Thousand Acres that applies psychological insights into human behavior to explain economic decision-making. Many of the traditional readings of King Lear, including the works of critics A. C. Bradley, Maynard Mack and Stephen Greenblatt, approach the play by accepting the patriarchal view of Lear as the rightful ruler, while Goneril and Regan are wicked for taking the kingdom from their father. Smiley‟s A Thousand Acres, however, approaches the text from what she imagines Goneril‟s perspective to be and includes the …

Emotional Responses To Musical Dissonance In Musicians And Nonmusicians, Rebecca Joan Bumgarner

Masters Theses

The purpose of this project was to investigate the influence of music education on individuals’ subjective and physiological responses to consonant and dissonant excerpts. Participants were categorized as having high experience (HE) or low experience (LE) in music education. Participants listened to 40 randomized excerpts of music, half of which were consonant, the other half dissonant. Electrodermal Activity (EDA) and Facial Electromyography (EMG) data were collected for each participant, as well as self-reports of perceived pleasantness for each excerpt. It was expected that HE participants “learned” dissonance through music education, and therefore would respond more strongly to dissonant excerpts. As …

Clinical Efficacy Of Music Therapy In Addiction Counseling: A Systematic Review, Marissa Renee Rinehart

Masters Theses

A previous systematic review study by Mays, Clark, and Gordon in 2008 reviewed music therapy research to look into the clinical efficacy of music therapy and addiction counseling. Their research concluded that the present literature contained few articles that had quantitative evidence and the music therapy that was presented was not an independent therapy for treatment for patients with substance abuse. This systematic review sought to research literature within the past six years that studied the effects of music therapy on clients who were dealing with substance abuse to review the progress of music therapy research since the 2008 article …

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 …