Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Re: Publics: Woman Of Color Feminist Rhetorical Process Shaping Safe Spaces For A Rehumanizing Discourse, Eloisa E. Moreno

Theses and Dissertations

The discourse of women of color feminists over the last thirty years follows what I refer to as woman of color feminist rhetorical process in three recursive phases: location, deliberation, and restoration. The process is a significant contribution to rhetorical theory in the form of woman of color consciousness. This way of knowing considers complex identities at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexual identity. The woman of color feminist rhetorician asks us to view self, community, and our notions of love as political constructs. By doing so, we are able to move beyond identity politics and build new …

Historias De Psicopatas Desidiosos Y Solitarios En La Frontera, Silvia H. Vera-Huesca

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a collection of short stories and poems. The first part focuses on short-fictional stories based on the problematic violence trending in the border between Mexico and the United States, triggering psychosis, sloppiness and loneliness to the characters. The second part of this project includes poetry in prose, based on my own psychotic, sloppiness and lonely experiences living in the border for the past few years.

Mack Thomas: The Total Beat, James B. Welton

Theses and Dissertations

Mack Thomas enjoyed both an audience seat and a role in the Beat Generation. He lives the life that fits one of his mottos, “if at first you don’t succeed, quit”. Thomas was the author of two autobiographical novels Gumbo and The Total Beast, a jazz and literature columnist for Grove Press in the 1950s and 1960s. Thomas was also a jazz musician worthy to share the stage with Miles Davis, inventor, and entrepreneur among numerous other interests. His friendship with William S. Burroughs was forged by their Texas ties while they were neighbors living in Paris, France and offered …

Poetic Appropriations In Vergil’S Aeneid: A Study In Three Themes Comprising Aeneas’ Character Development, Edgar Gordyn

Theses and Dissertations

In Vergil’s Aeneid, Aeneas’ character development into the leader of the new Roman race is depicted in light of three significant themes: the bees, whether they appear in the epic’s similes or in the prophetic vision in book 7, the theme of passion, particularly ira, and the theme of reason, whether in Aeneas’ spoken commands or in his increasingly purposeful actions in founding his intended city. These themes, I argue, are interdependent and together highlight Aeneas’ character development into a model Roman leader, as well as highlight significant depictions of Vergil’s vision of the model Roman state.

Psychic Fax On Vibrate, Received On Phantom Limbo, Jake Borndal

Theses and Dissertations

I offer a cloud of observations about language and art. I will prioritize my questions about how language operates in art, the way it functions within my own studio practice, and locate aesthetic interstices throughout. There will be insights gleaned from the various orderers of order (Lacan, Saussure) and orderers of disorder (Derrida, Agamben), walks in terra-incognita, and even some poetry on my part. I will take this chance to orient myself among different structures and deconstructions that have piledup around language, aesthetics and art.

“Rampant Signs And Symbols”: Artifacts Of Language In J.D. Salinger’S “For Esmé—With Love And Squalor” And Glass Family Stories, Courtney Sviatko

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the use of language in J.D. Salinger’s “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters. It establishes a narrative pattern in which sensitive individuals such as Seymour Glass and Sergeant X are isolated by the insensitivity of the superficial modern world, attempt to communicate their concerns to others through an exchange of language in material forms, and ultimately find relief in silence. By analyzing various examples of linguistic artifacts and the impact they have on both sender and receiver, this thesis identifies criteria for successful communication as well as …

Hissār, Sohail Abdullah

Theses and Dissertations

Hissaar is a noun and a verb, it is the periphery and the extremities, and the walls and the fortress. And it is to encircle, to wrap and to contain. This paper is an inexhaustive account of thoughts, experiences and lessons learned, of varying forms that influence my aesthetic sensibilities, my art-value system, and my art- ethical concerns. They provide for my art the impetus for its perpetual (and perhaps circular) journey. It is about finding connections between the fraying ends of free floating ideas. The following fragments explores how words make ideas, ideas make images, images make memory; memory …

White Sands, Laura Vitale

Theses and Dissertations

I’ve constructed a narrative thread that connects experiences, events, and artworks made during my time in graduate school. This narrative, which has the perspective of time, betrays the firsthand experience of wayfaring through the projects and places I describe. The narrative loosens as it approaches the present moment. Rather than to arrive at any conclusions, my goal for creating this narrative is to understand a tension between expectations: of systematic rationality and subjective knowledge, of play and display. I understand that my work productively fails to r-r-resolve contradictions about the way things are.

Signifying Ruins: The Wreck And Rebirth Of Modernity, Language, And Representation, Audrey Farley

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores formal and thematic representations of ruins in twentieth century literary texts, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck.” Analyzing these texts and concepts of ruins in the theoretical work of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, and Julia Kristeva, I argue that ruins underscore the arbitrariness—and, thus, the fragility—of symbolic systems of signification. Ruins, by virtue of their fragmentation, invite nostalgic projections of totality only to betray totality as an illusion. Thus, the imagination of wholeness that the ruin incites allows—only to disallow—meaning. Modernity and …

Space: A Discovery Of Visual Language, Kelley White

Theses and Dissertations

Space is a visual communicator. The act of perceiving space is a neurological soiree that projects and negotiates meaning in our constructed world. The poetry that we observe within space is tied directly to our emotions and to previous experience. Within ourselves, we each have particular feelings, unconscious or not, relating to height, length, and depth, as well as light and shadow. For example, a long, narrow hallway may elicit anxiety, while an open, sunlit nave in a cathedral may bring about feelings of serenity and joy. Our observations and interactions within the perceptual confines of space reveal clues to …

Exploration, Language And Application: An Approach To Teaching Beginning Instrumental Jazz Improvisation, Jeremy Todd Pownall

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to provide preservice and inservice teachers with an alternative approach to teaching beginning jazz improvisation to instrumentalists in a classroom setting. It was determined that there exists a need for an accessible (to both teacher and student) method for teaching beginning jazz improvisation to instrumentalists. This is due to the lack of emphasis on jazz improvisation at both the public school and university level, as well as the inclusion of improvisation in both the national and Georgia state standards for music performance. The teaching method presented in this study is based on previous research, …

Detect, Bite, Slam, Ali Miharbi

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores the influences, ideas and motivations behind my MFA thesis exhibition. It primarily focuses on how I developed my work for the show in connection to my previous work as well as work created by other artists who explored the impacts of new media in the last decade. With the advancement of social media, digital technologies no longer have their infamous coldness. Our perceptions and the metaphors in language are all reflected onto the machines we create while in return they also shape and redefine our lives. It becomes increasingly difficult to talk about dialectics such as machine-human, …

Talk To Me, I Am Listening, Larbi Sami Ben

Theses and Dissertations

An introductory conversation with a new person I just met usually goes like this: So, where is your accent from ? Are you American? Well, yes, .....but no. Not really. I do have American citizenship and I lived in the US for fifteen years but I grew up in France. Ok, so you’re French? Well, yes, but .....not totally. My mother is French but my father is Tunisian. Ok, so you’re Tunisian? Well, yes, but... not wholly. I don’t speak Arabic, so I don’t totally feel Tunisian. So what are you? American? French? Tunisian? With my work, I ask the …

Teaching Vocabulary Meaningfully With Language, Image, And Sound., Doraina D. Pyle

Theses and Dissertations

This study was an exploration of how an instructional technique that uses language, image, and sound—that of a meaningful presentation of language with image by gradual, step-by-step sequencing—affects vocabulary acquisition. Research was carried out with volunteers from the BYU language community, who were randomly assigned to one of two testing groups. The two groups viewed Arabic language presentations wherein the presentation for the experimental group received line drawings to indicate vocabulary meanings, and the other group received English translations. Following the treatment, learners completed an online vocabulary test, and one week later, the same online vocabulary test. Statistical analyses indicated …

Rethinking The Historical Lens: A Case For Relational Identity In Sandra Cisneros's The House On Mango Street, Annalisa Wiggins

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis proposes a theory of relational identity development in Chicana literature. Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera offers an interpretation of Chicana identity that is largely based on historical models and mythology, which many scholars have found useful in interpreting Chicana literature. However, I contend that another text, Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, not only illustrates the need for an alternative paradigm for considering identity development, but in fact offers such an alternative. I argue that Cisneros shows a model for relational identity development, wherein the individual develops in the context of her community and is not determined solely …

Sugar Nine: A Creative Thesis, Emily L. Dyer

Theses and Dissertations

This collection of short stories explores the different ways women tolerate violence in exchange for some form of validation. The narratives focus on women and the reverberations of small moments which carry violent mass. While the violence occasionally includes physical elements, the collection is more concerned with the ways women accept emotional and psychological violence—specifically from men. Themes, motifs and symbols from the Clytie-Helios myth are threaded throughout the collection as well as a concern for space and touch, art and the creation of art, silence and voice. All of these elements involve control as the women characters in these …

Say Yes To Who You Are, Brooke Ann Inman

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Trümmerliteratur: The Aesthetics Of Destruction Ruins, Ruination, And Ruined Language In The Works Of Böll Grass, And Celan, Kurt R. Buhanan

Theses and Dissertations

Trümmerliteratur - literally “rubble-literature" - is a brand of literature that became important after the Second World War, led by Heinrich Böll, whom I term the apologist of German Trümmerliteratur. Typically included under this classification are the writers who began to produce in the years immediately following the war, and in whose work the rubble and ruins of the landscape figure prominently. Böll provided the programmatic framework for the movement in his “Bekenntnis zur Trümmerliteratur" but his relationship to another type of ruin writing presents a point of friction when he appears to be working in a romantic mode to …

Would You Believe Me If I Said I Didn't Need You, Andrew Kozlowski

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an attempt to expand upon the ideas that permeate the practice of art making that has developed over the past two years. Art criticism, theory, history, and practice are used to give definition to the boundaries of my ever-shifting body of work. Focusing on the elusive nature of communication in both public and private spheres, these projects range from installation and sculptural work, to web projects, photography, and drawing.

The Perception And Production Of Portuguese Mid-Vowels By Native Speakers Of American English, Richard Ryan Kendall

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the difficulties that beginning and advanced American learners of Portuguese have correctly perceiving and producing the Portuguese mid-vowels {o} and {e}. The beginning learners were enrolled in their second semester of Portuguese and had rudimentary knowledge of Portuguese. The advanced learners had all lived in Brazil for nearly two years and were enrolled in a more advanced Portuguese course.

To test for production, informants were asked to read a group of sentences that contained one hundred occurrences of the Portuguese mid-vowels. Each production occurrence was evaluated as being correct or incorrect by linguistically trained native Brazilians. To …

Chief For Life: Harold Breier And His Era, Ronald Howard Snyder

Theses and Dissertations

Harold Breier served as Milwaukee's Chief of Police from 1964 until 1984. His tenure occurred during a time of cultural upheaval in the United States, marked by the turmoil of the civil rights movement, the peace movement, and a youth rebellion against traditional societal values and norms. Many people perceived Breier as an opponent of cultural or political change. He was accused of tolerating excessive police force, especially when minority citizens or counterculture youth were involved, and presiding over a racially segregated police department. Others credited him with making Milwaukee one of the safest cities in the country and protecting …

The Effects Of Computer-Based Metacognitive Strategy Training For Adult Second Language Learners, Heidi D. Hyte

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of a metacognitive language learning strategy training program that was implemented into computer-assisted language learning (CALL) software on second language learners' independent use of metacognition and language learning strategies (LLS). Questions under investigation included what effect this metacognitive training had on learners' independent use of metacognition, the differences in use of metacognitive strategies between fast and slow language learners, and the effect of learners' perceptions of metacognition on their use of LLS and specific metacognitive strategies.

The subjects included 239 missionaries learning Spanish as a second language at the Missionary …

The Effects Of Use Of A Metacognitive Strategy On The Language Anxiety Of Missionaries At The Missionary Training Center, Laura Millet Bichon

Theses and Dissertations

Language anxiety is a form of anxiety that can negatively affect language learners by disrupting their cognitive processing, by rendering their learning experience unpleasant, and by reducing the quantity and quality of their language production. The language anxiety research contains many suggestions for anxiety reduction, one of these being the use of metacognitive language learning strategies. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a self-monitoring, metacognitive strategy called ASWE on the language anxiety levels of young male and female missionaries in the intensive language learning program at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah. The ASWE …

Learner Concerns At The Missionary Training Center In The Technology Assisted Language Learning Program, Elaine T. Lindsay

Theses and Dissertations

Chapelle (1997) states the following as a vital question to be asked with respect to computer assisted language learning, “How good is the language experience in CALL for L2 learning?” (n.p.) In order to truly answer this question, investigators need to look to the learner and his concerns. In planning curriculum or designing a program, teachers and administrators normally look toward learner needs. However, these educators are also known to fully implement a new program, at times, without consideration of learner concerns. This appears to be especially true with the use of technology in the second language classroom. Research is …

Learning To Learn: The Training Of Missionaries In Language Learning Strategies At The Missionary Training Center, D. Brian Kohler

Theses and Dissertations

Language learning strategies (LLS) are specific actions, behaviors, steps, or techniques that learners use to improve their rate and level of L2 development. This thesis details the development and validation of a LLS training program designed to measure if training in LLS increases LDS missionaries' awareness of LLS as potential language learning tools. Specifically, it explores the question as to whether missionaries trained in LLS use and intend to use LLS more frequently, more appropriately, and with a greater range than those not trained in LLS.

The development of the LLS training program involved selecting a set of 48 specific …

Development Of An English For Gospel Purposes Vocabulary List: The Latter-Day Saint Lexicon As A Second Language, Jennifer H. Burrill

Theses and Dissertations

This study sought to explore the non-native English-speaking LDS adult's comprehension of the English LDS lexicon. Stahle (1981) conducted a study of the LDS lexicon which established at least 249 words as "basic" vocabulary. The current study had two foci: it first sought to determine how difficult these words were in both English and Spanish for native Spanish-speaking LDS adults living in the U.S. To assess this, a dual-language vocabulary instrument was administered to 245 subjects from Texas, California, and Utah. Item Response Theory (IRT) analysis was used to calculate difficulty levels of words and these values were plotted two-dimensionally …