American Studies Commons^™

Suburban Realities: The Israeli Case, Tamar Berger

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Suburban Realities: The Israeli Case" Tamar Berger discusses the nature of the new building in Israel in the last 3-4 decades. Israel, she claims, has been going through a process of massive suburbanization, which is drastically changing the face of the country. Some of the features of the new space are similar to those of other places, globally, but it has its particularity, the result of both the local spatial history and the nature of Israeli society. Suburbs in general are hard to define. Still, a set of typical features of the Israeli suburbs can be noted: …

Irony, Revenge, And The Naqba In Yehuda Amichai’S Early Work, Hannan Hever

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article offers a materialist reading of the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, the most well-known Israeli poet outside Israel. The article explores the political role of irony in Amichai’s early work, situating him as a prominent member of the “State Generation” poetry. Challenging accepted readings, the essay argues that Amichai’s poems that deal with the 1948 war, should be read as a post-traumatic response, which uses irony and rich and bold metaphorical devices to distance itself from the horrors of the war, and therefore also form the political and ethical meanings of the Naqba. That Amichai’s poetry translates the language …

Introduction: Israeli Critical Reflection After Post-Zionism, Or The Opening As Interpretive Horizon, Oded Nir, Ari Ofengenden

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay attempts to situate this special issue as an intervention, from a materialist perspective, in the field of Israeli cultural studies. We interrogate the common periodizations of Israeli culture, and its contemporary characterization as “post-post-Zionist.” We try to show that the latter betrays an unacknowledged failure of historical narration, present throughout Israeli cultural production. We then argue that rather than being satisfied with this failure, the goal of Israeli cultural critique today should be to search for new ways to narrate “big” history, to reassert the indispensability of relating personal experience of the present, in all its details, to …

Dmt And “The Man Box:” Provoking Change And Encouraging Authentic Living, An Arts-Based Project, Steven Reynolds

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

This thesis explores the mind-body experience through an arts-based research approach to examine, and redefine the emotional capacity and usefulness of males through societal determinants that limits and hinders men from living their authentic selves. Through the lens of a metaphoric “Man Box” 112 men participated in a workshop recreating their personal narratives of socialization through, style of dress, coping mechanisms, belief systems and who they should be as men through society's standards. In the “Man Box,” male bonding, and emotional feelings are discouraged, while the objectification of women, material property and physical/emotional strength are encouraged. This research investigates the …

Secret Selves: Surveillance And Twentieth-Century African American Literature, Kelsey Kiser

English Theses and Dissertations

Black writers, thinkers, and artists found themselves on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s watch list for radicalism and sedition as early as 1919. Secret Selves explores how twentieth-century African American writers, namely Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Ishmael Reed, and Gloria Naylor responded to a surveillance state that monitored their lives and works for radicalism and sedition. By recrafting the African American künstlerroman—a genre that birthed the African American literary tradition—these writers embedded codes into their works that concealed personal details from Bureau agents and simultaneously articulated a new narrative: that to be black and to …

“Of Nobler Song Than Mine”: Social Justice In The Life, Times, And Writings Of Fitz-James O'Brien, John P. Irish

Graduate Liberal Studies Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation will be a detailed study of the life, times, and writings of a mid-nineteenth century Irish-American writer, Fitz-James O’Brien. This will be the first full length study of O’Brien’s thought and writings. O’Brien was known, during his day, for two different types of writing: fiction of the supernatural and his writings on social justice, written in the emerging style of literary realism. It is his writings on social justice which this dissertation will explore. O’Brien’s writings on social justice covered three main topics: children, women, and animals. I look at how the historical context, O’Brien’s life, and his …

The Making Of Cleveland’S Artist: The Aesthetic And Cultural Politics Of Boundary Crossing In The Industrial Landscape Paintings Of Carl Gaertner, 1923 - 1952, April N. Johnston

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT The Making of Cleveland’s Artist: The Aesthetic and Cultural Politics of Boundary Crossing in the Industrial Landscape Paintings of Carl Gaertner, 1923 – 1952 by April Johnston Master of Arts in American Culture Studies Washington University in St. Louis, 2019 Dr. Iver Bernstein, adviser In 1923 Carl Gaertner captivated jurors at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s annual competitive May Show with a painting of a local bolt factory titled Up the River at Upson’s. What made the painting so arresting was its rendering of the elements of factory, nature, and the human spaces that mediated between them, as …

Supernatural Pilgrims: A Journey To A New Apostolic Reformation Congregation In The Ozarks, Samuel Wayne Gingerich

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Birthed out of the revival events of the 1990s, the New Apostolic Reformation is known for its charismatic leaders and provocative theology. As an emerging third wave Pentecostal movement, the New Apostolic Reformation is redefining the edifices of American Pentecostalism. While academics and journalists are currently focused on exposing the influence of some of its leaders such as C. Peter Wagner, Bill Johnson, Randy Clark, and Heidi Baker, there is little scholarship regarding the congregations and communities of believers who find themselves a part of this dynamic movement. This thesis takes a step towards understanding the larger story of the …

The Politics Of Federal Environmental Policy: An Analysis Of Six West Virginia Counties, Hannah O'Keefe

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The prevalence of politics in federal environmental policy has been evident for decades, and this thesis will seek to identify the impact of implementing rival policies at the county level. The two federal policies being examined are the Clean Power Plan that was devised by the presidential administration under Barack Obama, and the Affordable Clean Energy Rule created by the presidential administration under Donald Trump. The county selection was chosen in the state of West Virginia because of the state’s high economic dependence on extracting and exporting coal, a current source of domestic and foreign electric power. The study area …

The Psychos, Paula N. Stevenson

Graduate School of Art Theses

My current body of work is a series of drawings that juxtapose characters of fiction and reality in an attempt to explore the relationship between horror film and contemporary social issues. I strive to render an accurate portrayal of the face to draw the viewer into questioning the troubling narrative these characters illuminate. I focus on retelling stories of fear and horror, and crime and infamy. I want my work to convey ethical dilemmas as they are present within the relationship between horror movie antagonists and the audience (all of us). It is these concerns I attempt to visualize in, …

Living The Manito Trail: Maintaining Self, Community, And Culture, Trisha Venisa-Alicia Martínez

American Studies ETDs

Living the Manito Trail: Maintaining Self, Community, and Culture is an ethnographic interdisciplinary study that draws upon the voices of Manitos, or Hispanic New Mexicans, and experiences of migration from Northern New Mexico into Wyoming from late 19th century to the present. This project exemplifies how consciousness or a heightened sense of awareness derives from the value system of querencia or how one establishes a sense of self and community through place. I argue the cultural landscape of a person’s place of origin injects a set of values and distinct qualities that create a strong sense of identity, enable community, …

Marxist Ideology In Alice Chilress’S Like One Of The Family, Elizabeth Elliott

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

This paper explores Alice Childress work Like One of the Family, a collection of short stories originally published as a column the newspaper Freedom, and how Childress uses the highly personable work to advocate for socialist ideology and exhibit how socialism could positively affect the black working class, particularly domestic workers. Through her work, Childress humanizes the domestic worker, a group that was often not only disenfranchised by whites but also prohibited from labor organizing with other African-Americans. She engages with Marx’s ideology in an understandable and personal way: by utilizing the African-American oral tradition. This exposed her audience to …

Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon

English (MA) Theses

Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, …

Universe Of Things: A Human Presentation Of Food-For-Thought., Madeline Halpern

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

I present this statement under three loose categories: People, Objects and their Environment. I consider People as human, Objects as art objects, domestic objects, and food, and Environment as the shared space of the former groups. Food directs this statement as I present each concept and creative process as a metaphorical dish. Material exploration carried me from a direct practice of reorienting acrylic paint and questioning object functionality through personified sculptures into theoretical thesis work in which I use interpersonal relations and the idea of consumption to translate tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensations into digital film. In this meal I …

Queer History Through A Hollywood Lens, Long Tran

Augsburg Honors Review

Film festivals have been important platforms for promoting independent films that bring to the forefront issues of marginalized communities, especially the struggle for queer justice and visibility. This paper pursues a hypothetical opportunity for programming a film festival screening centered on queer stories. The direction of this paper will take the form of a film festival curator’s statement that links three films with common themes and issues. The overarching, common thread holding the proposed films together is the mainstream Hollywood influence behind the exhibition and consumption of the films—The Academy Awards (otherwise known as The Oscars). Three major Academy Award-winning …

(Re)Insurgent Ecologies: Dwelling Together Between Queasy Worlds, Kirsten Elizabeth Mundt

American Studies ETDs

Discourses that construct the “self” as something to be fixed, or made whole, chart a retreat from relational ecosystems back to the individual, reinforcing colonial politics rooted in bounded individualism. This project animates an ontological, relational framework that, in detaching from liberal humanist discourses of healing and “self,” makes affective links from autopoietic frameworks for healing and survival to de-colonial, sympoieitic concerns for expanded kinship. New meanings and attachments are forged within queasy border zones of incommensurability, toggling between the particular and the universal, between desires for solidarity and recognition that colonial violences continue to be unequally distributed and borne. …

Autour De Frances Benjamin Johnston, Gertrude Käsebier Et Catharine Weed Barnes Ward: Stratégies Séparatistes Dans L’Exposition Des Femmes Photographes Américaines Au Tournant Des Xixe Et Xxe Siècles, Thomas Galifot

Artl@s Bulletin

Cette étude inclut une nouvelle analyse de l’exposition des photographes américaines conçue par Frances Benjamin Johnston à l’occasion de l’Exposition universelle de Paris de 1900. Dans une mise en perspective inédite, l’événement est également replacé dans un contexte américain élargi, riche en initiatives et en débats aussi fondateurs que méconnus. Cette enquête, qui donne lieu au premier panorama des expositions collectives de photographes américaines jusqu’en 1914, aboutit à une nécessaire remise à l'honneur de Catharine Weed Barnes Ward et de Gertrude Käsebier, personnalités dont le rôle central sur ces questions est largement mésestimé.

Steam Vs. Stem: A Study And Program Proposal For Monticello, Micaela Deogracias

Honors Projects

STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and art programs have long been struggling for dominance in the education system. This fight overshadows the fact there are synergistic educative capabilities when these two schools of thought are combined, allowing scientific and artistic persons to work in tandem and be exposed to a wider variety of problem-solving options and opinions. This study aims to focus on museum education practices specifically and how implementing STEAM programs (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) versus STEM could raise the perceived value of arts in society, as well as create a more enriching educational experience by …

Exploration, Disruption, Diaspora: Movement Of Nuevomexicanos To Utah, 1776-1850, Linda Catherine Eleshuk Roybal

American Studies ETDs

ABSTRACT

Nuevomexicano villages of northern New Mexico have experienced disruptions throughout their existence. This dissertation is a study of what occurred in early disruptions leading to the great departure of the 1940s, during World War II and immediately following, known as the New Mexico diaspora, where a number of villagers moved out of New Mexico to other states, including Utah, most expecting to settle for a time with hopes of return to their home villages. The study asks what happened especially during the great disruption, discourses of disruption and movement, what Nuevomexicanos carried with them in movement, whether they returned …

Carleton, William Mckendree, 1845-1912 (Sc 3432), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 3432. Typescripted excerpt from Will Carleton’s narrative poem, “First Settler’s Story,” first published in 1881, as recited in March 1895 by Berta M. Morton.