Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Four Scenes From Berenice, A One-Act Opera, Carlos Eduardo Verdam Maria

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This thesis presents a music composition of four out of five scenes from Berenice, a one-act opera based on Edgar Allan Poe's homonymous short story, with libretto by Gabriel Gudding, for three singers and a chamber orchestra.

KEYWORDS: opera, Edgar Allan Poe, libretto, chamber orchestra, timbre, register

Keats And Shelley: A Pursuit Towards Progressivism, Serenah Minasian

Theses and Dissertations

An analyzation of the poems, letters, and works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley from a perspective focusing on the history of sexuality, breaking gender binaries, and pushing towards progressivism. This thesis proves how John Keats is both an effeminate man who displays exemplary ways of breaking gender expectations but also a man who possess misogynistic tendencies. Also, this thesis analyzes Percy Shelley’s use of gender expectations and how he breaks them with the use of his characters. Studying these two British Romantics shows how these two cisgender, straight, white men provide an ability to push back on their …

Bewitching The Blame: The Crucible's Legacy Of Appropriation And Sexual Shame In Popular Culture, Hope Kristine Morris

Theses and Dissertations

In The Crucible Arthur Miller uses tropes of female characters, Abigail and Tituba, to tell a story of male heroism. In the process, he dismisses and appropriates the true stories of women who suffered during the Salem witch trials for his own political and personal gain. In this thesis, I argue that Miller’s appropriation and sexualization of women continues into contemporary popular culture depictions of the Salem witch trials including the movie adaptation of The Crucible and the television shows Salem and American Horror Story: Coven. These depictions appropriate and sexualize women’s stories in order to fulfill the male gaze. …

Narrating The Movement: A Rhetorical Analysis On The Digital Mobilization, Remix, And Hijack Of #Metoo, Rocky Roque

Theses and Dissertations

The Me Too movement garnered digital disclosures after Alyssa Milano’s initial tweet in October 2017. Over the period of two years, different remixes of #MeToo surfaced which led to the subsequent hijack of the hashtag. Furthermore, Boyle (2019) argued that the movement can be studied as a “moment” or a “discourse.” Scholars have examined Me Too as a moment, or a singular occurrence that emerged due to mainstream popularity. However, this analysis will study the movement as a discourse, to reveal the intricate interactions present with each remixed hashtag. Through Fisher’s narrative paradigm, an in-depth analysis will be conducted to …

How Hbo's A Black Lady Sketch Show Utilizes Humor To Cope And Resist Against Racism And Sexism, Regina Lynnette Sanders

Theses and Dissertations

HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show is a sketch comedy series with a cast and crew of Black women. I draw on rhetorical scholarship from various traditions and Black Feminist Standpoint to analyze how the writers and performers use humor imbued with African American rhetoric to cope with and resist systematic racism and sexism in the United States of America. I begin by analyzing interviews with the creator Robin Thede. Then I analyze sketches and the intentional use of African American rhetoric, such as rhythm, stylin’, indirection, call and response, signification, and double word choice, which leads me to three …

The Pedagogy Of Terror: Women's Education In The Gothic Novel, Faith Borland

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the distinction between terror and horror that Robert Hume first established in his 1969 article on categories of the gothic novel, a distinction that I redefine as a scholar working after the #Metoo movement and broader cultural recognition of the terror that women face in their everyday lives. “Terror” illustrates the sustained sensations produced in women’s lives as powerless and marginalized. Eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twenty-first-century women writers of the gothic, including Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, depict female characters who overcome terror through domestic, scientific and medical, familial, experiential, cultural, and academic education. Linking recent …

Ordinary Power: Frontier Sentimentalism And Cultural Perceptions Of Gender In The Nineteenth-Century West, Erin Elizabeth Hastings

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will examine nineteenth-century women and their primary role in the cultural formation of frontier sentimentalism. White, middle class women primarily moved west with their husbands and families, initially to the Midwest in the early nineteenth century, and were continuing to settle in the Great Plains and further west by the end of the century. The first generation of women who migrated west were the pioneers of frontier sentimentalism, but it prevailed in successive generations of westering women. This thesis will argue that in the formation of their own form of sentimentalism, nineteenth-century women were at the heart of …

Delightful Scars, Shahrbanoo Hamzeh

Theses and Dissertations

At the door of the house who will come knocking? / An open door, we enter / A closed door, a den / The world pulse beats beyond my door (Bachelard, 25).Border is a dichotomous concept. Within a border exists both the potential for protection and alienation. By exploring the closure in borders around people in both a family and a country setting I am exploring communication on both an interpersonal and intrapersonal level; how our understanding of ourselves and others can affect us; how we can be close to each other and help each other. I suggest that our …

Searching: Waves, Spencer Molnar

Theses and Dissertations

This supportive statement examines a philosophical conception of the self and how it can be identified through experience, consciousness, and perception by focusing on a human inclination to rationalize, or concretize, that which is everchanging. The methods of exploring this concept were achieved by examining the formal structure of composition and materials through the process of visual art. By pushing against historical traditions of creating spatial illusions in visual art, we can conclude that the legibility of an artwork is equally dependent on the experiential world as it is the social construction of image making. The question that is left …

“Natural Ties For Patriotic Purposes": The Committee On Public Information, Americanization, And Swedish-American Transnationalism, Race L. Fisher

Theses and Dissertations

The Committee on Public Information (CPI) was the official propaganda agency of the United States during the First World War, seeking to homogenize American public opinion and spread American ideals across the globe. Through a case study of Edwin Björkman’s work among Swedish Americans, this thesis illuminates how the CPI approached its work among immigrants, engaging questions of Americanization and transnationalism. Through an analysis of the John Ericsson League of Patriotic Service and the Scandinavian Bureau—both its domestic and foreign operations—this thesis argues that Edwin Björkman and the CPI promoted cultural pluralism rather than assimilation to a dominant Anglo-American culture. …

Material Witnesses: Deconstructing Networks Of Credibility And Objectivity In Medical Narratives From Mary Toft To The Contraceptive Pill, Krista Elizabeth Roberts

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that to better understand the tangled, embedded human and nonhuman subjects and how their testimonies function in western medical history, we need to first understand their erasure. By using relationality as a reading method, I break apart who and with whom individuals make medical decisions by considering what constitutes evidence. In the Mary Toft case, expert witnessing informs the ways in which a reader trusts what the narrator claims. The medicolegal conventions of courtroom testimony shape the ways in which medical men wrote their pamphlets. These men shore up their credibility through descriptions of nonhuman …

Peering At The Mirror Of Reflection: Agency And Design Thinking In The Development Of Writerly Identities, Elizabeth Louise Jones

Theses and Dissertations

I have always valued reflection highly — as a means of developing as a writer and as a life practice — but I have been disappointed by the lack of thought resembling reflection when asking students to write about their writing practices. This dissertation presents the results of a grounded theory study of student reflective assignments through a direct analysis of the themes which emerge from a set of reflections from a course designed around the topic of games – primarily board, card, and video games. This study differs from much of the previous scholarship on reflection in composition in …

Womanist Ways In A Man's World: Unpacking Anti-Blackness In Higher Education Enrollment Management Roles, Mesha C Garner

Theses and Dissertations

This study evaluated the phenomenon of anti-Black womanism in enrollment management at Historically White Institutions (HWIs) for Black women professionals. The qualitative study was conducted to understand dialectical functions of enrollment management and the dialectical responsibilities that Black women have while working in enrollment management. The theoretical framework of anti-Black womanism guided this study. Anti-Black womanism is a dual lens of BlackCrit (Dei, 2017; Dumas and Ross, 2016) and Womanism (Phillips, 2006). Furthermore, this study comprised the historical perspective and acknowledged the settler-colonial complex to best conceptualize the perceptions of Black people, particularly Black women. This study included 10 participants, …

The Globalgothic Vampire: Application Of And Benefits For The English Studies Model, David Lawrence Hansen

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation utilizes canonical vampire texts interlaced with pop-culture story-worlds and international cultural remediations to demonstrate the flexibility of the Globalgothic as a viable and valuable research lens to facilitate skills-based learning in undergraduate students by utilizing each of the four branches of the English Studies Model; literature, linguistics, rhetoric, and pedagogy. For this dissertation, I will be using the term Globalgothic as suggested by Glennis Byron. The focus of this literary lens is not merely to look at the conventions traditionally associated with the gothic genre, such as crumbling houses, a sense of foreboding, dark omens, and damsels in …