Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Overheard And Misheard: The Paranoid Unreliable Narrator Of The Conversation, Ryan Jones

Cinesthesia

The Conversation is a character study of an individual consumed by his fear of the death of privacy. Each of the film’s major formal elements ultimately seek to trap the audience in the world of Harry Caul: the paranoia, the desperate need for privacy, the isolation. Through careful sound and visual design, the film keeps its audience at the level of its characters and implicates them in the fear that pushes the protagonist to overturn his life. This paper seeks to describe the formal aspects of the film which produces these reactions.

A Culture Of Loyalty And Secrecy: Spotlight And The Power Of Organized Religion In America, Sara E. Juarez

Cinesthesia

The paper utilizes the imagery and story of Tom McCarthy's 2015 film Spotlight to create reveal how deeply rooted Christian values are in American society. The paper also challenges this dominant ideology by highlighting the corrupt institutional efforts to maintain a pure image of the Church.

Love Simon As A Modern, Gay Coming-Of-Age Narrative: A New Point Of Contention And Engagement For Queer And Popular Culture, John H. Haley Jr.

Cinesthesia

Historically, coming-of-age romantic comedy stories depicted on screen have been centered around heterosexual couples; the 2018 film Love, Simon challenged conventions by depicting a gay protagonist while building on the traditions of the genre. This paper aims to examine the effect of this film on fan behavior and critical perception of the genre. Examining the impact of Love, Simon reveals how an unconventional narrative both expanded how viewers and critics understood the genre while also inspiring new forms of fan engagement with the film. The author concludes that this groundbreaking narrative, by providing a previously unavailable opportunity for a wider …

An American Oilscape: The Affective Emotionalism Of Petroleum In There Will Be Blood, Maren Loveland

Cinesthesia

Underlying the physical and ideological lives of Americans is the pulsating force of oil, a power dictating not only modes of transportation and energy, but the emotions and ideas of societies dependent on the exploitation of this natural resource. Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood displays the evolution of the Californian landscape under the pressure of the oil industry, demonstrating to the audience the emotionalism imbued within oil, separating it from pure physicality and introducing it as the ideological pulse underlying California. Drawing on the vernacular of Maria Löschnigg’s work, “Sublime Oilscapes,” I posit that the closeness of oil …

Grand Valley Forum, Volume 043, Number 08, December 3, 2018, Grand Valley State University

2018-2019, Volume 43

Grand Valley Forum is Grand Valley State's faculty and staff newsletter, published from 1976 to the present.

Examining The Rosary Of Francisco Marto, Austin Mazur

Honors Projects

Within this document you will find an analysis of the young Catholic saint, Francisco Marto, and how the Holy Rosary drastically changed his life.

The Historiography Of Black Workers In The Urban Midwest: Toward A Regional Synthesis, Joe William Trotter, Jr.

Studies in Midwestern History

Focusing on Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Milwaukee, this article explores the transformation of research on black workers in the urban Midwest from the foundational years of the early 20th century through recent times. While much work remains to be done, a century of innovative research on different time periods, topics, and themes provides an excellent opportunity to craft a regional Midwestern synthesis of black labor and working class history.

This article is based upon Professor Trotter's keynote address, "Toward a Regional Synthesis of the Black Working Class: The Urban Midwest from the American Revolution to the Postindustrial Age," …

Midwestern Writers Need Midwestern Historians, Bonnie Jo Campbell

Studies in Midwestern History

These remarks were given on a plenary panel titled "Writing on the Midwest," held at the Fourth Annual Midwestern History Conference in Grand Rapids on June 6, 2018. Bonnie Jo Campbell received her MFA in creative writing from Western Michigan University. Her 2009 book, American Salvage, published by Wayne State University Press, was a finalist in fiction for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Ike’S Constitutional Venturing: The Institutionalization Of The Cia, Covert Action, And American Interventionism, Jacob A. Bruggeman

Grand Valley Journal of History

U.S. covert action from the 1950s onward was shaped, in part, by the success a CIA-orchestrated coup d'état in which the United States deposed the popular Iranian nationalist Mohammed Mossadegh. Ordered by president Eisenhower, the coup in Iran set the precedent for utilizing covert action as a means of achieving State goals. In so doing, President Eisenhower overturned the precedent set by his immediate predecessor, President Truman: that is, the precedent of using the CIA in its intended function, gathering and evaluating intelligence. The coup, then, is an exemplary case of venture constitutionalism. Eisenhower, in ordering the coup, extended his …

Grand Valley Forum, Volume 043, Number 07, November 19, 2018, Grand Valley State University

2018-2019, Volume 43

Grand Valley Forum is Grand Valley State's faculty and staff newsletter, published from 1976 to the present.

The Continuing Relevance Of C. Wright Mills: His Approach To Research And What We Can Learn From It, John E. Miller

Studies in Midwestern History

C. Wright Mills (1916-1962), remembered primarily for his 1956 book, The Power Elite, and for his 1960 essay “Letter to the New Left,” which helped launch the rising New Left in the America of the 1960s, was a major American sociologist, but he also had much to teach historians. Although he focused his research on national and global subjects, students and scholars of regionalism can also learn much from his wide-ranging, critical approach. Like all good sociologists, Mills always assumed that historical context was an essential element of any adequate analysis of society, economics, and politics. Born in Texas, …

Grand Valley Forum, Volume 043, Number 06, November 5, 2018, Grand Valley State University

2018-2019, Volume 43

Grand Valley Forum is Grand Valley State's faculty and staff newsletter, published from 1976 to the present.

Bill Evans Senior Honors Project, Reese Lyon Rehkopf

Honors Projects

A paper on the life and music of Bill Evans and his influence on jazz music. This project consists of three transcriptions of Evans' jazz improvisations and a paper.

Grand Valley Forum, Volume 043, Number 05, October 22, 2018, Grand Valley State University

2018-2019, Volume 43

Grand Valley Forum is Grand Valley State's faculty and staff newsletter, published from 1976 to the present.

Mari Sandoz And Her 1956 Fifty-Year Predictions, John R. Wunder

Studies in Midwestern History

Wintertime 1956 in New York City for Mari Sandoz was a time of reassessment. She had been thinking about a commitment she made, and it was time to meet it. She had agreed to compose predictions about American life for the next fifty years (from 1957 to 2007) that along with at least 57 others would be placed in a time capsule and stored in the cornerstone of the building that housed KETV in downtown Omaha.

Sandoz typed up her predictions on her typewriter in her relatively new apartment and entitled the five double-spaced pages "December, 2006 A.D." and sent …

Grand Valley Forum, Volume 043, Number 04, October 8, 2018, Grand Valley State University

2018-2019, Volume 43

Grand Valley Forum is Grand Valley State's faculty and staff newsletter, published from 1976 to the present.

Grand Valley Magazine, Vol. 18, No. 2, Fall 2018, Grand Valley State University

Grand Valley Magazine

Grand Valley Magazine is a quarterly publication about Grand Valley State University produced by University Communications since 2001.

A “Self-Made Town”: Semi-Annual Furniture Expositions And The Development Of Civic Identity In Grand Rapids, 1878–1965, Scott St. Louis

Peer Reviewed Articles

In the later decades of the nineteenth century, prominent business figures in the city of Grand Rapids had reason to be both ambitious and optimistic. Striving to pull every last cent of profit out of available resources, they rationalized production workflows and integrated the latest technologies into their factories. They also perceptively discerned that a maturing railroad network connecting Grand Rapids to an emerging Victorian consumer economy would empower the city to achieve new levels of prosperity and fame through an industry on the verge of unprecedented growth: domestic furniture production.

These entrepreneurs acted upon their hopes for the community’s …

Grand Valley Forum, Volume 043, Number 03, September 24, 2018, Grand Valley State University

2018-2019, Volume 43

Grand Valley Forum is Grand Valley State's faculty and staff newsletter, published from 1976 to the present.

The Tet Offensive: Are We Mired In A Stalemate?, Colin A. Sawyer

Grand Valley Journal of History

The Tet Offensive of 1968 is commonly looked at as the "turning point" of the American Vietnam War. This leads to the question "what did the American and South Vietnamese militaries think about this 'turning point'?" Using the reports to the White House from General Westmoreland and the retrospective work by Colonel Hoang Ngoc Lung, the conclusion can be reached that the Tet Offensive did not change the military's perception on the course of the conflict.

Grand Valley Forum, Volume 043, Number 02, September 10, 2018, Grand Valley State University

2018-2019, Volume 43

Grand Valley Forum is Grand Valley State's faculty and staff newsletter, published from 1976 to the present.

A Black Feminist Content Analysis Of Gender And Sexuality In Living Single, Amarri J. Smallwood, Ayana Weekley

Student Summer Scholars Manuscripts

Between the 1980’s and 1990’s there were many female-centered sitcom television shows like The Golden Girls, Designing Women, and Sex in the City that explored women’s sexuality from an autonomous perspective. However, Black women’s sexuality and the way that gender roles are challenged in sitcoms has yet to be examined as both oppositional and equally significant. This research focuses on the importance of resistant sexual and gender representations in the 1990’s sitcom Living Single. This content analysis is drawn from four episodes in seasons one, two, and three. The study uses a Black Feminist theoretical framework to analyze …

Grand Valley Forum, Volume 043, Number 01, August 28, 2018, Grand Valley State University

2018-2019, Volume 43

Grand Valley Forum is Grand Valley State's faculty and staff newsletter, published from 1976 to the present.

The Corporate Guild Order Control Of The Florentine Republic In The 13th And 14th Century, Milad D. Mohammadi

Grand Valley Journal of History

This paper discusses how professional guilds in the 13^th and 14^th century Florentine Republic rose to power and how they maintained the structure and mechanisms of their power. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates how the Florentine Republic during this period was completely dominated by these guilds through their cultural, economic, and political influence. This paper explains how the rise of aristocratic families as the new power structure ended this guild based society in the late 14^th century.

Functioning Religiously, Brent A. Smith

Funded Articles

No abstract provided.

Annie Dillard: At The Altar Of Nature, Kelley A. Kasul

Masters Theses

This thesis intends to delve into Annie Dillard’s time spent at Tinker Creek. Why Dillard chose to go into nature is critiqued, as well as what she found. One of the things it appears Annie Dillard sought and found was a connection to the Divine. She had been searching for this connection in various churches but had not found what she needed there. There is another, perhaps more pressing, issue of the mystical journey Dillard went on as well. This was an internal journey, not a physical journey. Both of these topics are vetted for the purposes of furthering the …

Reaching The Sacred Through The Secular: Biblical Elements And The Superiority Of Divine Love In Three Of Marie De France’S Lais, Sarah J. Kooienga

Masters Theses

In the Prologue to her Lais, Marie de France hints that her text possesses multiple layers of meaning: “The custom among the ancients…was to speak quite obscurely / in the books they wrote, / so that those who were to come after / and study them / might gloss the letter / and supply its significance from their own wisdom” (9, 11-16). Critics who study the Lais agree that the tales overwhelmingly focus on romantic love, and most of the existing scholarship overlooks the fact that this theme is merely one layer of the text’s significance. To the contrary, …

“Who Has A Right To Say What Focus Is The Legitimate Focus?” Tennessee Williams And Julia Margaret Cameron’S Theatrical Portraits Of Women, Jennifer M. Klug

Masters Theses

In the production notes preceding The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams said: “Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.” In spite of Williams’s emphasis on the limitations of literal representation, some of his most famous female characters were created in a tradition similar to that of portraits of women by the Victorian-era photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Both Cameron and Williams made …

Epistemic Dimensions Of Gaslighting: Peer-Disagreement, Self-Trust, And Epistemic Injustice, Andrew D. Spear

Funded Articles

Miranda Fricker has characterized epistemic injustice as “a kind of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower” (2007, Epistemic injustice: Power & the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 20). Gaslighting, where one agent seeks to gain control over another by undermining the other’s conception of herself as an independent locus of judgment and deliberation, would thus seem to be a paradigm example. Yet, in the most thorough analysis of gaslighting to date (Abramson, K. 2014. “Turning up the lights on gaslighting.” Philosophical Perspectives 28, Ethics: 1– 30), the idea that gaslighting has …

Tales Of Cherry Blossom Dreams, Kelly Dykstra

Honors Projects

I studied the writings of Female authors during the Heian era of Japan to write an original work imitating that style.