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The Role Of Political And Sexual Identity In The Works Of Klaus Mann, James R. Keller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This critical study of Klaus Mann attempts to determine the role of sexual and political identity in his works. By examining such recurrent thematic patterns as the work of art as progeny, supernatural births, the image of the writer as soldier and monk, or obsession with death, among others, the study finds in Klaus Mann a characteristic sense of "social self-identity." The study considers Mann's fiction and non-fiction prose, drama, and diaries to show the interrelationship between his political development as an anti-fascist and his sexual identity as a gay writer.

The theoretical approach to Mann's works contrasts earlier twentieth-century …

"To Sew Or To Sow?” European Gender Images And Development In Rural Ecuador, Barbara Grunenfelder-Elliker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the impact of a gender specific Swiss development project on Andean artisans women who struggle to intensify their craft production in the face of an increasing subsistence crisis characteristic among rural small producers around the globe. The selection of a project which has proven sustainable over a number of years allowed the author to conduct fieldwork in three different settings (1992-1995): among two hundred artisan women from eleven rural communities in Ecuador's Azuay province, who embroider table linen and apparel for export; among Ecuadorian and expatriate Swiss development specialists in Quito and Cuenca; and, to a limited …

An Examination Of The Socio-Economic Determinants Of Punishment Using Abductive Polynomial Networks, Farrukh Behzad Hakeem

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this research is to examine aspects of the relationship between socio-economic conditions and imprisonment in a particular historical setting. Previous research suggests that this relationship is problematic and situationally variable. The approach taken in this dissertation reflects a belief that earlier studies can be faulted for their failure to take account of the fiscal climate of the state as an influence on the size of prison populations.

This analysis will employ the Marxist model, as developed by Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939) and widely applied (though with mixed results) in research conducted over the last half-century. This model …

Social Consequences Of Delayed Childbearing And Infertility, Joan Liebmann-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is a qualitative longitudinal study of delayed childbearing and infertility. The initial sample consisted of 35 women. Although they knew they might never have biological children, most did not regret postponing parenthood.

Because infertility is a socially defined illness, the doctor-patient relationship was fraught with conflict. It tended to follow a set pattern: from dependency to disappointment to discord to dissociation. The optimal doctor-patient relationship was mutual participation.

Infertility adversely affected marriages. The "medicalization of masturbation" and intercourse caused many marital problems. Couples also argued over how often and with whom to discuss infertility, when to stop treatment and …

Automatic And Controlled Information Processing In Alzheimer's Disease, Linda S. Carozza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research investigation explored the cognitive processing operations of 18 healthy elderly (HE) subjects and 12 Alzheimer's Disease (AD) subjects in the mild clinical stage of the disease in their performance on a semantic priming task involving semantic lexical activations of both automatic and controlled processing natures.

Relatively little conclusive evidence has been documented regarding the relative roles of attention and memory processing in the lexical-semantic impairment of Alzheimer's Disease. A lexical decision processing task was implemented to investigate the effects of normal aging and neuropathological damage of Alzheimer's Disease on subjects' semantic priming abilities. The research design was based …

Child Sexual Abuse, Moral Panic, And The Mass Media: A Case Study In The Social Construction Of Deviance, Steven M. Gorelick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is a case study of newswork in a moral panic. Specifically, Stanley Cohen's concept of "moral panic" is used to examine the practices of a group of reporters who covered a widely publicized case of alleged child sexual abuse in a day-care center. Moral panics occur when a perceived threat to the social order emerges with such force, and with such little overt warning, that routine discourse about right and wrong gives way to a flood of indignation about an extraordinary breach of normal moral boundaries. Suspending normal rules governing social control, officials rush to crack down on the …

From Idyll To Exile: The Transformed Self In The Early Works Of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Elizabeth Powers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines works of Goethe's pre-Weimar period and his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, which reconstructs that early period as the emergence of poet and oeuvre in terms of the abandonment of the idyll. It disputes the traditional view of Goethe as the poet of experience ("Erlebnis"). It seeks instead to demonstrate that Goethe wrote in the manner of his poetic forebears–by the imitation of literary models–and that "experience" was created in his work by emptying these models of their communal content. Once liberated from traditional literary forms, the new subjective lyric voice was literally homeless and its encounters with …

Mary Mccarthy, Mary Gordon, And The Irish-American Literary Tradition, Stacey Lee Donohue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a distinct literary canon in the United States, composed of Irish-Catholic-American writers, which requires different modes of criticism or evaluation than other U.S. literatures, particularly the dominant, largely Protestant or Protestant-influenced, American literary canon. In addition, as a recently recognized literary tradition, many women writers have either been ignored or unnoticed because their works do not immediately fit into the evolving criteria of evaluation for the Irish-American literary tradition. My purpose in this study is not to survey the Irish-American literary canon, but to examine two women writers who have not always been admitted to an innately misogynistic …

The Spectacle Of Suffering: Repetition And Closure In The Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel, Rebecca E. Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the publication of The Castle of Otranto in 1764 initiated the genre of the gothic novel, critics have claimed that gothic endings are bland, inadequate, or otherwise unsatisfying. Analyzing works written in the period 1764 to 1820 by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, Mary-Anne Radcliffe, Mary and Percy Shelley and Charles Robert Maturin, this dissertation demonstrates that the focus on endings has blinded critics to the reader's source of pleasure in the gothic. I have drawn upon a representative sampling of novels to present a model of the interaction of reader and gothic text focused on …

The Tradition Of Autobiography In Music, Antoni Pizà

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A survey of autobiographical writings by composers from the fourteenth century to the present focusing on the question of how composers create a self. Although, the Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (1528-96) can be considered the earliest autobiography by a composer, the genre also stems from lexicographical practices in eighteenth-century Germany (scholars such as Walther and Mattheson requested autobiographies from composers with the intention to include them in biographical dictionaries of music). In the nineteenth century, Wagner's autobiographies show the composer's concern with providing a solid image of himself through writing. Stravinsky's Autobiography demonstrates the composer's preoccupation for giving an exegesis …

Some Consequences Of Semantic Externalism, Consuelo Preti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Semantic externalism is the view that meaning and mental content are determined by relations to the world of objects and properties outside the physical boundaries of the subject of mental states. What you mean by your words–what you're thinking when you're thinking about something–is essentially constituted by the world at large. It has become customary to formulate externalism in terms of so-called twin earth cases–cases where (some kinds of) content do not supervene on inner states, but this formulation can be shown to be too limited to be of any great use in characterizing a theory of mind. A more …

Perceptions Of Patients Meeting The Criteria For A Diagnosis Of "Multiple Chemical Sensitivities": Exploration Of Social Situation And Need, Beth Miriam Lewis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While no one explanation as to the possible nature of "multiple chemical sensitivities" has gained unanimous acceptance within the medical/science community, similar controversy does not exist with regard to the recognition of social problems generated for people suffering from this condition. In an effort to identify areas of psychosocial need requiring social work intervention, a descriptive study was carried out with a group of patients seen in an outpatient occupational health clinic. Medical charts of a deliberate sample of 423 clinic patients, seen during the period 1980-1990, were reviewed, yielding a total of 83 patients meeting criteria specific to MCS. …

Saving The Environment: Science And Social Action, Patricia D'Andrade

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes environmental arguments for their stance toward science. It is a sociology of knowledge investigation of arguments made primarily by environmental scientists in the United States in the 1960s and 70s.

The environmental crisis puts science in question but at the same time looks to science for information and solutions. Thus, science is a center of contention around which arguments develop and oppositions are established. Science is beginning to take the place of political thought in providing legitimating concepts for arguments intended to effect social change. Major environmental books and articles by American authors of the 1960s and …

Psychoanalysis And Constructionalism: Clinical And Metapsychological Implications, Richard H. Loewus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Attempts to reconceptualize the epistemological basis of psychoanalytic metapsychology and clinical praxis from constructionalist perspectives are reviewed and critiqued. The constructionalist epistemology of the American philosopher, Nelson Goodman, is absent in these discussions. Goodman offers a relativism with restraints, a constructionalist epistemology that asserts no one given reality to which our constructions must answer, but does not accept that therefore all constructions are equally valid. Instead, constructions, or what Goodman calls world versions must answer to standards of "Rightness". Goodman's reconception of philosophy subsumes the concept of truth as a special class of rightness, and replaces the concept of knowledge …

Acting Hysteria: An Analysis Of The Actress And Her Part, Lydia Stryk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the woman's part in dramatic representation as a hysterical construct and explores the hystericizing effect that the playing of this construct has on the actress. Drawing on feminist psychoanalytic analyses of male psychology and on the historical origins of male-invented female hysteria, this study uses dramatic representation as a model and metaphor for woman's hystericization in Western culture.

Charcot's theatricalization of female hysteria through public performances of hysterical acts and the Ophelia as psychological/aesthetic model in British mental asylums are investigated as metaphorical sources for a new definition of female hysteria as a disease of performance, of …

Pygmalion Goes To School: The Effects Of Goal Setting, The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy And Self-Efficacy On Trainee Performance, James Michael Benton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examined the effectiveness of motivation techniques for increasing performance in a skill training program. A PC based software program provided structured training to increase subjects' typing skills. Motivation was manipulated by the use of goal setting and the self-fulfilling prophecy (SFP), alone and in combination. The moderating effects of self-efficacy on motivation, defined as a generalized "can do" personality orientation, were also examined. Two levels of goal setting were employed: (1) "do your best"; and, (2) a difficult, specific goal. The SFP was tied to the situation, not the person. It was invoked by informing subjects that the …

The Psychological Determinants Of Occupational And Non-Occupational Risk-Taking Among Law Enforcement Officers, William F. Mccarthy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this study was to identify and statistically examine the psychological determinants of risk-taking among law enforcement officers. This study was conceptualized and designed on a rather simple premise that risk-taking in one's leisure would have a dramatic and predominant influence on the grouping of subjects into definable personality trait categories. The suspicion regarding these categories was that subjects who engaged in risk-taking in their leisure time would be distinctively different from all other emerging groups, with regard to the 16 PF Cattell factors. It was also suspected that this leisure time risk-taking group's personality profile would be …

The Changing Face Of Fortune In Six English Versions Of The Tragedy Of Antony And Cleopatra, Mary Aileen Mallery

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study traces the development and changes in the depiction of the goddess Fortune in a selected group of dramas written between 1592 and 1678: the six English versions of the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. The concepts surrounding the goddess Fortune and her place in any culture change with the idea of the individual's ability to shape his own destiny. In the seventeenth century in particular Fortune becomes increasingly connected to questions of personal identity and what Stephen Greenblatt has called "self-fashioning," so that by 1678 the subject of John Dryden's All for Love is not the quest for …

Influences Of The Post-World War Ii Era On The American Political Theater, 1968–1972, Lydia Alix Gerson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From 1968 to 1972, years which many historians have determined as encompassing the most focussed characteristics of the Sixties as a whole, the United States underwent enormous political upheaval which affected every one of its major institutions, including the theater. The political turmoil of the period was reflected in the theater, both mainstream and alternative. Literally hundreds of political theater pieces were produced and acted in the streets, shopping malls, church basements and stages of the United States. Yet little scholarly attention has been paid to the phenomenon. What little work is available concentrates on aesthetics; content is largely ignored. …

Visual-Spatial And Set-Shifting Functions In Patients With Parkinson's Disease, Sarah A. Raskin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) (N=20) were compared to age and education-matched normal control subjects (N=20) on 18 paper-and-pencil neuropsychological measures. These tests were chosen to measure two specific functions. The first set of tests was chosen to measure spatial orientation, and these tests were divided into those that measure personal orientation, extrapersonal orientation, mental rotation, and right/left orientation. The second set of tests was chosen to measure the ability to shift mental set. Hotelling's multivariate T² tests revealed a significant difference between the PD patients and the normal control subjects on the tests chosen to measure set-shifting ability …

Serial, Parallel And Delay Strategies In The Processing Of Structurally Ambiguous Language Constructions, Harvey Slutsky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through a set of two experiments, the present study attempted to determine which of three language processing strategies, that is, serial, parallel or delay is employed in parsing two kinds of structurally ambiguous visually presented sentences (transitive and verb complement). The study used a relatively new technique, a self paced syntactic decision task whose sensitivity to local parsing complexity was demonstrated in the first experiment through a partial replication of Ford's (1983) work with relative clause sentences. The findings showed Object relatives to be harder to process at the position of the main verb. The same findings from a followup …

Escaping The Alphabet: The Reading Of Silence In The Novels Of Virginia Woolf, Patricia Laurence

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The exploration of the theme and narration of silence in Virginia Woolf's novels in this dissertation brings under scrutiny nothing less than her perceptions of the nature of gender, being, mind, knowledge and language. Woolf, searching for a language of mind amid changing concepts of mind in the twentieth century, creates a new rhetoric of silence. In defining silence as a "presence" and not just an "absence" in life and narration, Woolf displaces the privileged place of the "speaking subject" and speech or dialogue in the novel. In Chapter 1, there is an attempt to define what "silence" is in …

The Theatre Of Adrian Hall, Jeannie Marlin Woods

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The topic of this study is the American stage director, Adrian Hall, who has been the artistic director of the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island, since 1964 and who has held the same position concurrently at the Dallas Theater Center in Texas since 1983.

Part 1 presents an historical overview of Hall's career, beginning with his first professional productions in Texas, continuing through his work Off-Broadway in New York in the 1950s, and covering his quarter-century at Trinity Rep and six seasons at Dallas. This segment of the study traces how Hall developed the principles that inform his …

Children's Video Usage: A Comparative Study Of Nine To Eleven-Year-Olds Living In London And New York, Seth P. Welins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this cross-cultural study identifies which video and non-video related activities are selected by nine-to-eleven year old children living in New York and London, England. Four hundred children were surveyed and interviewed about their television and VCR viewing habits and their use of computers and computer/video games as well their after-school, non-video activities.

A uses-gratifications approach provides a general framework for the analyses of the data. These data show that there is a complex interplay between children's activity choices and the occupational status of the child's parents, the child's race/ethnicity, gender, ecological environment, family structure and social structure. …

The Relationship Between Family-Environmental Processes And Academic Achievement Among Three Hispanic Groups In The United States, Manuel Martinez-Pons

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to examine (1) whether differences in academic achievement exist among students of three Hispanic groups in the United States, (2) whether such differences are related to student achievement processes, and (3) whether differences in both student academic achievement and achievement processes are related to their parents' background characteristics.

The three Hispanic groups of students that were studied were Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Central/South American. Two student achievement processes were examined: their time spent on homework and their educational-occupational aspirations. The three parental achievement processes investigated were their press for English, press for independence and …

Prediction Of Treatment Response In Chronic Pain Patients: The Relationship Between Illness Behavior And Self-Concept, Andrew Bruce Rosenblum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated self-concepts held by chronic pain patients. It was hypothesized that self schemas of probable and ideal levels of control, dependence on medical care, physical vulnerability, affiliation and conflict with physicians would predict response to treatment.

At intake into a three week in-patient program 72 pain patients were given a self perception scale which measured these five dimensions across three "possible selves" (now self, probable self and ideal self). Patients were also given at intake, and at follow-up (5 weeks after discharge), a battery of psychological and behavioral measures. Control, dependence on medical care, and vulnerability (CDV) were …

A Comparison Of The Symbolic Function In Delicate Self-Mutilators With Joyce Mcdougall's Conceptualization Of The Symbolic Function In Psychosomatic Illness And Sexual Perversion, Thomas Richard Negron

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The syndrome of delicate self-mutilation is reviewed with emphasis on the psychoanalytic interpretations that have been offered to explain this behavior. These interpretations generally find a symbolic meaning in this symptom, while also noting the pre-verbal level of development that is a marked aspect of these patient's functioning. The alternate hypothesis is offered that delicate self-mutilators suffer from a deficit in their capacity to create symbolic symptoms.

The work of Joyce McDougall with patients manifesting sexual perversions and psychosomatic symptomology is reviewed. She hypothesizes that these patients suffer a deficit in their capacity for symbolic functioning, and she coins the …

Attitudes About Disabled People And Evaluations Of A Disabled Or Nondisabled Task Partner After Success Or Failure, Joan Weisenfeld Bailey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examined the issue of ambivalence-induced behavioral amplification as applied to physically disabled individuals. The theory maintains that: (a) attitudes toward the disabled tend to be ambivalent rather than hostile, sympathetic or indifferent; (b) under certain conditions behavior toward disabled individuals may be more extreme than behavior toward nondisabled individuals; and (c) the extreme behavior is mediated by individual differences in ambivalence about disabled people in general. These three notions were tested. Internally consistent, independent scales of pro and anti attitudes toward the physically disabled were developed, supporting the notion of a high potentiality for ambivalence in attitudes toward …

The Politics Of Experience: Robert Morris, Minimalism, And The 1960s, Maurice Berger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Robert Morris's oeuvre, unlike the work of most other so-called minimalist artists, is both stylistically and intellectually diverse. His range was broad: expressionist paintings, Duchamp-inspired objects, dances and performances, minimalist sculptures, large scale installations and sound environments, earth and land reclamation works, films and videos, and political acts against the museum, the labor economy, and the Vietnam war. The philosophical sources for Morris's art (he was a philosophy major at Reed College in the late-1950s) are equally rich: Herbert Marcuse, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jean Piaget, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Charles Sanders Peirce. As choreographer, writer of influential theoretical texts, and …

Feminist Theory And Postwar American Drama, Gayle Austin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is concerned with developing feminism as a critical tool, to be applied to drama. Feminist theory from anthropology, psychology, literary criticism, and film theory is summarized and one theorist from each field is selected to serve as an example of how feminism in that field can illuminate drama written by both women and men.

I begin by outlining the three chronological stages of feminist criticism: (1) Images of women; (2) Women writers; and (3) The questioning of an entire field. The various political divisions of feminism (liberal, radical, and socialist) also need to be kept in mind, and …