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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

All Sortals Are Phase Sortals, Justin Mooney Jun 2022

All Sortals Are Phase Sortals, Justin Mooney

Doctoral Dissertations

Contemporary metaphysics is dominated by the view that every object belongs to a kind permanently in the sense that it cannot cease to belong to that kind without thereby ceasing to exist. For example, some philosophers think that a person is destroyed if they cease to be a person, a statue is destroyed if it ceases to be a statue, and so on. I believe that this standard view is false. Being a person, or a statue, or etc., is like being a child: just as I did not cease to exist when I ceased to be a child, so …


Turning Inside Out: Reading And Writing Godly Identity In Seventeenth-Century Narratives Of Spiritual Experience, Meghan Conine Swavely Jul 2018

Turning Inside Out: Reading And Writing Godly Identity In Seventeenth-Century Narratives Of Spiritual Experience, Meghan Conine Swavely

Doctoral Dissertations

Writing about personal experience was a central component of early modern Protestant devotional practice. It was also, this dissertation argues, a creative and social practice through which the godly imagined and crafted their own spiritual identities and constructed interpretive communities into which these identities might be accepted and valued. Exploring the ways in which seventeenth-century Protestants examined interior experience and transformed interiority into a legible expression of the spiritual self, this project proposes that believers used spiritual autobiography to substantiate the intangible and invisible signs of God’s grace, employing narrative and imaginative structures to render idiosyncratic personal experiences familiar, shareable, …


Latina Identities, Critical Literacies, And Academic Achievement In Community College, Morgan Lynn Jul 2017

Latina Identities, Critical Literacies, And Academic Achievement In Community College, Morgan Lynn

Doctoral Dissertations

This qualitative case study research looks at the intersections of identity, literacy, and achievement for Latina community college students in the East Bay Area of California. The women that I center in this dissertation show how Latinas are multiply positioned within their communities, families, and schools, and how they negotiate damaging and reductive language and literacy ideologies in order to achieve their academic dreams. Following critical sociocultural theories on literacy, Critical Race Theory, and Latina Feminism, I emphasize a strengths-based, affirmation approach that positions the women as theorizers of their own lived experiences and highlights their resiliency. The data in …


The (Dis)Ability Of Color; Or, That Middle World: Toward A New Understanding Of 19th And 20th Century Passing Narratives, Julia S. Charles Aug 2015

The (Dis)Ability Of Color; Or, That Middle World: Toward A New Understanding Of 19th And 20th Century Passing Narratives, Julia S. Charles

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation mines the intersection of racial performance and the history of the so-called “tragic mulatto” figure in American fiction. I propose that while many white writers depicted the “mulatto” character as inherently flawed because of some tainted “black blood,” many black writers’ depictions of mixed-race characters imagine solutions to the race problem. Many black writers critiqued some of America’s most egregious sins by demonstrating linkages between major shifts in American history and the mixed-race figure. Landmark legislation such as, Fugitive Slave Act 1850 and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) are often plotlines in African American passing literature, thus demonstrating the …