Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Concept Of Intrinsic Goodness: Essays In Moorean Moral Philosophy, Miles Tucker

Doctoral Dissertations

I defend and explicate a Moorean program in value theory. I claim that intrinsic goodness is the fundamental concept of axiology, and argue that the notion should be understood as G.E. Moore suggested in the Principia Ethica. In the first three chapters, I address popular challenges to the Moorean project, including objections raised by Judith Jarvis Thomson, Shelly Kagan, and Christine Korsgaard. After, I turn to explication: I attend to the connection between goodness and other normative notions, and present what I take to be the most attractive version of the Moorean view. Finally, I address a perennial puzzle …

Fantasy Frontier: Old West Theme Parks And Memory In California, Amanda Tewes

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines sites of Old West tourism—specifically the three California theme parks of Knott’s Berry Farm, Calico Ghost Town, and Frontier Village—as avenues through which the myth of “the West” gets propagated, even among the people of the American West, and even if these sites do not reflect the actual history of the region. California’s Old West theme parks act as windows into mid-twentieth-century cultural conflicts of politics and identity within the state. But these sites are artifacts of a particular historical moment and their fantasy of the Old West memorializes mid-century renderings of the past rather than nineteenth-century …

Materializing Transfer: Writing Dispositions In A Culture Of Standardized Testing, Lisha Daniels Storey

Doctoral Dissertations

This research begins with questions about transition and transfer—about the dimensions of writing happening across and in between contexts. As a writing teacher and writing center worker, I endeavor to help students make their own writing experiences, values, and attitudes a site of inquiry as they move in and out of different educational spaces. Motivated by these interests, and informed by materialist perspectives that situate writing education in material conditions and relations, I conducted an interview study of thirteen college writers to explore their values, attitudes, and beliefs about writing within a culture of standardized testing. In doing so, I …

Applications And Extensions Of Counterpart Theory, Bridgette Peterson

Doctoral Dissertations

An exploration of the details of counterpart theory, and some applications of the view. In Chapter 1, I set out the view and clarify the most important features: that the counterpart relation is a context dependent similarity relation, and that individuals are world-bound entities. I then set out what I take to be the most promising methods of filling in important details. Chapter 2 is a discussion of an alternative view, lump theory. I attempt to distinguish lump theory from counterpart theory, and argue that several attempt to do so fail. Chapter 3 is an attempt to apply counterpart theory …

Dialogue And "Dialect": Character Speech In American Fiction, Carly Overfelt

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the linguistic construction of race and place in turn-of-the-century American novels and short stories. Literary analyses of character speech continue to reinforce the old dichotomy of Standard versus nonstandard/dialectal English. I challenge the ideology of Standard English in my readings of works by Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett, and little-known Cherokee author, Ora V. Eddleman Reed, among others. I argue that these texts create their own standards that interact with (and sometimes resist) the language ideology of their time. By analyzing all variation, rather than only what has been traditionally viewed as “dialect,” I reveal …

Novel Buildings: Architectural And Narrative Form In Victorian Fiction, Ashley R. Nadeau

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, “Novel Buildings: Architectural and Narrative Form in Victorian Fiction,” offers an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between the economic and social histories of built space and the Victorian literary imagination. At its most fundamental level, it claims that the spaces we inhabit shape the stories we tell. Reading Victorian literature through the architectural archive of the period, it argues that the nineteenth century’s rapidly evolving built environment resulted in a new set of narrative possibilities and laid the foundations for authorial innovations in genre, style, and form. Organized taxonomically around four architectural types reinvented in the nineteenth century—courthouses, …

Demanding Spaces: 1970s U.S. Women's Novels As Sites Of Struggle, Kate Marantz

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a new view of 1970s gender and race politics in the United States by analyzing struggles in and over space in four women’s novels: Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (1970), Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976), and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977). My project reads space as a dynamic, politically charged realm of interactions between lived bodies, physical landscapes, and imaginative territories—including the formal characteristics of fiction. Using this critical lens, I highlight how these authors interrogate conditions of sexism and racism by representing their characters making and responding to “demands” for …

“The Blackness Of Blackness”: Meta-Black Identity In 20th/21st Century African American Culture, Casey Hayman

Doctoral Dissertations

The central claim in this dissertation is that much contemporary African American cultural expression would be better conceptualized not as “post-black,” as some would have it, but as what I call “meta-black.” I use the preface “meta-” because while this contemporary black identity also resists sometimes constrictive conceptions of “authentic” black identity from within the African American community, I diverge from theorists of “post-blackness” in observing the ways that, as Nicole Fleetwood observes, blackness necessarily “circulates” within a technologically-driven mediascape, and these postmodern black subjects work within and against the constraints of this aural-visual regime of blackness in order to …

Tragicomic Transpositions: The Influence Of Spanish Prose Romance On The Development Of Early Modern English Tragicomedy, Josefina Hardman

Doctoral Dissertations

The critical origin story for early modern English stage tragicomedy has frequently centered around Italian playwright and theorist Giambattista Guarini, who offered a tragicomic model in his play Il pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd) and in his treatises on the genre. While Guarini’s impact on playwrights such as John Fletcher is undeniable, tragicomic critics have generally ignored the pervasive influence of Miguel de Cervantes’ work on seventeenth-century English playwrights. This project is the first sustained study of the influence of Cervantean prose romance on the development of early modern English tragicomedy. By looking at English tragicomedies with Spanish …

Me, Myself And I: Reflections On Self-Consciousness And Authority, Jonathan Rosen

Doctoral Dissertations

The Rationalist conception of the self identifies the subject, the “I”, as a “captain” wielding autonomous rational authority over his subservient attitudes and behaviors—his “crew”. I argue that such a conception of the self is metaphysically untenable and that its practical and ethical ramifications are unattractive. In its place I recommend an alternative, Holistic, “Crew of Captains” conception of the self, and explain its metaphysical, practical and ethical advantages.

Beyond The Boundaries Of Childhood: Northern African American Children's Cultural And Political Resistance, 1780-1861, Crystal L. Webster

Doctoral Dissertations

Notions of childhood as a distinct developmental period of life were concretized during the nineteenth century. Features of children’s lives including innocence, play, and exclusion from labor became markers of ideal childhoods as part of the racialized modernization of childhood. This dissertation uncovers the ways in which modern constructions of childhood attempted to subjugate northern African American children throughout the nineteenth century and highlights the means by which black children and conceptualizations of black childhood became agents and sites of resistance. In doing so, it demonstrates both how African American children experienced age-based forms of subjugation as well as their …

Para Donde Miran Los Ojos: Confluencias Entre Locura, (Des)Identidad Y Violencia En La Obra De João Guimarães Rosa, Silvina Ocampo Y Luis Martín-Santos, Giseli C. Tordin

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies the representation of madness in the literary works of three twentieth-century authors, namely, João Guimarães Rosa (from Brazil), Silvina Ocampo (from Argentina), and Luis Martín-Santos (from Spain). The first chapter argues that madness in Ocampo’s “El castigo”, Rosa’s “Buriti”, and Martín-Santos, Tiempo de silencio, reveals a series of conflicts between tradition and modernity, rather than the alleged symptoms of an individual suffering from a mental illness. After comparing the three works, it is evident that the decisions of their characters reproduce certain values idealized by authoritarian cultures. The second chapter discusses Rosa’s “Substância”, Ocampo’s “La casa …

Theatres Of War: Performing Queer Nationalism In Modernist Narratives, Elise Swinford

Doctoral Dissertations

Queer writers in Britain during the early twentieth century found themselves in a fraught geopolitical context formed by imperial violence and the First World War. In this dissertation, I argue that many queer modernist artists employed performative strategies in order to navigate the increasingly narrow vision of WWI-era British national culture that accompanied this historical context. While performance allowed them to express queer politics and desires without risking total exposure and persecution, their performative aesthetic depended on a problematic use of racial tropes through which these desires were channeled. By attending to moments of national and gendered performances in the …

Theaters Of Voice, Body, And Page: Beckett, Sophocles, Homer, Joyce, Barry A. Spence

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation makes a comparative study of Homeric Greek, Classical Greek, Modernist, and late modern works of storytelling with particular attention to strategies and techniques that achieve an exceptional degree of performative immediacy. As such, theater (the dramatic mode) forms a central concern, viewed as the fulfillment of direct performative embodiment—building on Aristotle’s idea of mimesis. An analysis examining multiple media demonstrates how oral epic poetry, Athenian tragedy, modern theater, the short story, and the novel can make use of seemingly disparate storytelling methods that share underlying mechanisms whose effects are decidedly theatrical. Four authors—Sophocles, Samuel Beckett, Homer, and …

We Are Roses From Our Mothers' Gardens: Black Feminist Visuality In African American Women's Art, Kelli Morgan

Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT WE ARE ROSES FROM OUR MOTHERS’ GARDENS: BLACK FEMINIST VISUALITY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S ART MAY 2017 KELLI MORGAN, B.A., WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERISTY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Manisha Sinha We Are Roses From Our Mothers' Gardens posits that in differing historical periods African American women visual artists employed various media and create from individual political thoughts, intellectual views, and aesthetic interests to emphasize the innate unification of a Black woman’s race, gender, sexuality, class, and selfhood and how this multifaceted dynamic of Black women’s identity and material reality produces a …

A Site Of Nation: Black Utopian Novels In The Late 19th And Early 20th Centuries, Xianzhi Meng

Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT Contrary to the traditional view that there is lack of utopian dimension in African American literature, this dissertation argues that African American literature not only develops an exuberant utopian tradition, but also forms its own utopian uniqueness. Based on this conclusion, the dissertation specially focuses on the period between the 1880s and the first two decades of the 20^th century that witnessed the first peak of African American utopian writing. Meanwhile, this era has been claimed as the “Golden Age” of Black Nationalism. Through the examination of the historical background of the co-existence of these two conflicting strains, …

The Socialist Devout: Religious Orders And The Making Of An East German Catholic Community, Kathryn Julian

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation explores the central role of Roman Catholic orders in the creation of a resilient and stable Catholic community in post-1945 East German society. The persistence of these highly visible religious figures as well as their work in charities, retirement homes, schools, and hospitals not only threatened the socialist state’s mission to create a secularized society, but also bolstered and unified the dispersed East German Catholic population. Though the German Democratic Republic (GDR) ostensibly embraced scientific atheism, religious orders remained important in the postwar era, particularly in their performance of social functions. Catholic institutes upheld the integrity of their …

Peppermint Kings: A Rural American History, Dan Allosso

Doctoral Dissertations

Explores rural history through the experiences of three families that dominated the American peppermint oil business from its beginning in the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. The rural entrepreneurs who became Peppermint Kings acted in ways that challenge traditional historical depictions of rural people. The freethinking Ranney clan built a family business that extended from Massachusetts to western New York and Michigan during the first half of the nineteenth century. The Hotchkiss brothers entered the international market and ventured into finance and banking at a time when the United States government was reducing opportunities for regional bankers. …

Translation, Rewriting, And Fan Fiction: A Literary History Of Transformative Work, Shannon K. Farley

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the relationship between rewritings of source texts and their cultural contexts in an attempt to raise the prestige of fan fiction. In these early years of the twenty-first century, it's becoming increasingly clear that we're living in a “participatory culture,” in which consumers of texts are becoming more and more engaged with the texts they are consuming. Producers of films and television shows create fictional websites for fans to visit and continue interacting with the stories outside of their regular viewing schedule. Fans have created their own communities, mostly online, where they analyze, debate, deconstruct, reconstruct, and …

‘Woman Thou Art Loosed’: Black Female Sexuality Unhinged In The Fiction Of Frances Harper And Pauline Hopkins, Crystal Donkor

Doctoral Dissertations

Race-sex narratives that dominated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries permeated the political, scientific, and social fabric of the nation, but did not solely center on black bodies. These narratives demeaned and degraded a race of black citizens, characterizing them as sexually deviant social pariahs. Consequently, these same notions elevated whites to the highest rungs of society, marking them as moral and desirable. This crafting of racial identity acted as just one way to justify racial subordination through the creation of notions that proved detrimental to black life and worthiness. Writer-activists penning their tales of fiction after the Civil War …

Transgressive Acts: Adapting Applied Theatre Techniques For A Transgender Community, Theo F. Lefevre

Masters Theses

This MFA Thesis traces my work as a joker (a la Theatre of the Oppressed) and facilitator through a three-year-long project with a trans applied theatre troupe. The troupe explored several techniques, including Image Theatre, Playback Theatre, storytelling exercises, and somatic movement. In three semester-long workshops, the troupe focused work around three sets of techniques. In the first workshop, the troupe explored the community-based interview process of Undesirable Elements, as designed by Ping Chong in collaboration with Talvin Wilks and Sara Zatz. These techniques were interrogated using queer and trans temporalities. In the second unit, the troupe practiced Augusto …

Les Corps Démoniaques Dans La Démonomanie Des Sorciers : Un Examen Ontologique Et Épistémologique, Steven Davis

Masters Theses

The numerous ontological and epistemological paradoxes found within La Démonomanie des sorciers, a demonological treaty of the 16^th century, are studied within the context of demonic corporality: exploiting a rich philosophical and theological intertextuality as well as, more generally, a confessional model of logic, La Démonomanie (1580) constructs a linguistic world of demonic bodies capable of copulation, transformation, and imbuing humans with the power to practice magic. Following in the footsteps of the demonologists who precede him, Bodin constructs a system of the real and of knowledge which is as much dependent upon the authoritative ethos of his …

Recursive Properties Of Srdc Structures In Golden Age Musical Theater Songs, Morgan Markel

Masters Theses

The srdc is a four-part phrase pattern in popular music consisting of four formal functions: statement (s), restatement (r), departure (d), and conclusion (c). In recent scholarship, the applicability and scope of the four-part pattern has been vigorously debated. The question of whether entire song forms, such as the AABA and verse–prechorus–chorus song forms, can be interpreted as large-scale SRDC patterns has become a primary topic of interest among popular music scholars. In this thesis, I seek to further the argument for the large-scale SRDC reading of the AABA song form by demonstrating the recursive potential of srdc structures in …

Forgetting Traumatic War Memory: A Case Study Of The Japanese Anime Series "The Big O", Naomi Chiba

Masters Theses

This thesis addresses the issues of traumatic war memory concerning remembering and forgetting as presented construction of war memory in popular culture by closely examining the Japanese television anime series The Big O. The thesis proposes that the story told in The Big O can be seen as a vehicle for understanding why the Japanese wished to forget traumatic war memories related to the defeat of Japan in World War II. The Big O is a science fiction story that is set in a postwar defeated society. The protagonist of the story is Roger Smith, who searches for his …

Second Language Acquisition Of Chinese Verb-Noun Collocations, Ying Cai

Masters Theses

This study aims to investigate the acquisition of verb-noun collocations in Chinese by learners who study Chinese as a foreign language. By conducting a survey, this research attempt to discuss the following issues. 1) Does learners’ acquisition of verb-noun collocations increase with years of learning? 2) Is learners’ acquisition of verb-noun collocations related to the usage frequency of the verbs? 3) Are there any differences between patient objects and non-patient objects in verb-noun collocation acquisitions? 4) Does natural L2 exposure have an impact on collocational competence?

Seven verbs are selected in this study, 看 kan, 开 kai, 做 …

Fostering Change: Evaluating Digital Scholarship For Professional Credit, Seth Denbo

Open Access Week

As the field of digital humanities becomes an ever more important facet of both research and teaching, we need to find means for ensuring that the work is properly evaluated and that credit is given to the scholars who engage in it. The problems associated with developing this are complex, and new modes of research and publication have proven difficult to incorporate into disciplines that have traditionally put high value on print. Scholarly societies have an important role to play in encouraging creative thought and action about how best to accommodate these new modes within our disciplines.

A Linguistic Study On The Four Editions Of BǎIjiā Xìng 百家姓 In Hp’Ags-Pa Script, Sicheng Wang

Masters Theses

The hP’ags-pa script was created in the late 13th century (the early Yuan dynasty) which was intended to transliterate all the languages of the Mongol empire such as Tibetan, Uyghur and Chinese into a single writing system. Among all the Chinese hP’ags-pa materials, the primer Bǎijiā xìng 百家姓 [Surnames of the Hundred Families] (BJX) offered us extensive hP’ags-pa syllables and their corresponding Chinese characters.

The BJX in hP’ags-pa script has four editions that are currently known to scholars. A careful comparison and examination of the four editions of the BJX text reveals three main types of …

Conformity And Digression: Change Of Narrative In A Chinese Peasant's Personal Writing, Danping Wang

Masters Theses

Rural China has gone through dramatic transformation from the Mao era to the post-Mao era. China scholars have been studying the institutional changes closely in the past few decades. However, Chinese peasants’ living experience and their memory and understanding of the past have not yet received enough attention and discussion. By examining personal writings of a peasant named Luo Xuechang in Jiande, Zhejiang province, this paper discusses the complex interactions between the state and the individual. This paper attempts to unfold the juxtaposition of state narratives and personal narratives embedded in Luo’s unpublished memoir, almanacs from 1972 to 1980, notebooks …

Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, And Censorship: Reflections On Religious And Political Radicalism In John Adams’S The Death Of Klinghoffer, Allison R. Smith

Masters Theses

The issue of anti-Semitism in John Adams’s 1991 opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, has been widely discussed by scholars such as Richard Taruskin, Robert Fink, and others. For instance, Taruskin asserts that Adams favors the Palestinians through musical grandiosity and by describing them as “men of ideals.” However, this fails to consider the possibility that Adams intended to portray an evenhanded view of diverse religious groups. Through close readings of the libretto and select numbers from Klinghoffer, such as the “Chorus of Exiled Palestinians,” the “Chorus of Exiled Jews,” and the “Aria of the Falling Body,” my thesis maintains that …

Meter In French And Italian Opera, 1809–1859, Nicholas Shea

Masters Theses

Current and historical methods of metric analysis often assume that the first beat of a metric group is stronger than the second. This, however, is not the case in all repertoires. For example, a study by William Rothstein (2011) demonstrates that Verdi’s midcentury operas often place emphasis on even-numbered beats. This paper shows this metric trend to be even more prevalent in a corpus of 208 nineteenth-century operatic excerpts, (1809-1859).

I present a formal model that classifies phrases according to anacrusis length and prosodic accent, showing where large-scale metric accents fall within a phrase. This model produces three metric types …