Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Efficacy Of Comedy, Mark Anthony Castricone

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Efficacy of Comedy: Focusing on the efficacy of comedy as a genre, utilizing Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Heidegger’s philosophy. It begins with a historical analysis of the efficacy of comedy in Ancient 4th and 5th century Athens focusing on Aristotle’s conceptions of comedy. It analyses what Aristotle wrote about comedy and attempts a reconstruction of what his book on comedy from the poetics may have said. It then examines the shift to aesthetics rather than the Philosophy of Art with a focus on Kant and the Critique of Judgment. Comedy here is used as an interpretive tool in order to …

Trial & Error: Royal Authority & Families In The Colonization Of The British Floridas, 1763-1784, Deborah L. Bauer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation will examine the relationship between families, the British Crown, and colonization patterns in mid-eighteenth-century Florida. Agents of royal authority, such as colonial governors, and White, European, Protestant families, would serve as the bulwark upon which the Crown would design and implement its ideal colonization scheme. Carefully created by royal officials, adherence to the plan would result in the successful establishment and growth of loyal and productive colonies. Noncompliance ultimately foreshadowed failure. The state used the social unit of families in East and West Florida as a "tool of empire” to ensure the political, economic, and military success of …

The Progressive Transformation Of Medellín- Colombia: A Successful Case Of Women's Political Agency, María Auxiliadora González-Malabet

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Medellín, Colombia, once one of the most corrupt and violent cities in the world, is now one of the most progressive and democratic cities in South America. This transformation was due to the mobilization of women’s movements and the influx of women in the city’s executive branch. Female political agency and new urban development programs reshaped democratic practices for the citizenry. This research examines the robust association between women’s organizations, women from Compromiso Ciudanano (CC), and a solid and active civil society. The theoretical framework covers democratization, good governance, and Latin American/Indigenous Feminism. The sources include interviews, polls, news articles, …

Perceived Discrimination And Cardiovascular Outcomes In Blacks: A Secondary Data Analysis Of The Heart Score Study, Marilyn Aluoch

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite the consistent reduction in morbidity and mortality associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD) over the last four decades, CVD remains the leading cause of death globally. In the United States, Blacks are disproportionately affected by CVD compared to Whites. Blacks are also more likely to report incidence of perceived discrimination. Perceived discrimination has been linked to cardiovascular risk factors such as smoking, hypertension (HTN), hyperlipidemia, and obesity. However, the relationship between perceived discrimination and cardiovascular outcomes such as stroke, myocardial infarction, acute ischemic syndrome, coronary revascularization, and cardiac death remains unclear. The primary goal of this study was to examine …

An Ecology Of Care: Training In Dependence And Caretaking In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Elizabeth Rossbach

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project investigates the popular open-world fantasy RPG, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (CD Projekt RED 2015) and the ways in which the Witcher 3 brings questions of care and dependence to a digital medium so often thought of in terms of violence and/or mastery. Much of the previous discourse on video games, particularly role-playing games, has tended to center on violence and what this might mean for players behavior or the potential real world effects of this violence. Departing from a focus on violence I argue that the Witcher 3, reveals the potentials of open-world RPG video games to …

Book-Sharing As A Context For Fathers And Mothers To Enhance Language Development Of Their Preschool Children, Yagmur Seven

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Poor reading levels is a pervasive problem in the US. For example, two of every three eigth grade students in the US are estimated to demonstrate insufficient reading comprehension skills. Early use of decontextualized language, in which the language expressed is removed from the here and now, serves as a precursor of academic language proficiency. Starting as early as the third year of life, decontextualized language is less likely to be practiced in lower socio-economic status (SES) households. Although storybooks offer a rich context for practicing the language with young children, reading storybooks alone is not adequate to promote conversational …

Heidegger's Will To Power And The Problem Of Nietzsche's Nihilism, Megan Flocken

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nietzsche is not a nihilist as Heidegger interprets Nietzsche to be.

Taking An “Ecological Turn” In The Evaluation Of Rhetorical Interventions, Peter Cannon

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to develop a new method for the evaluation and assessment of therapeutic libraries in a health ecology. To do so, I employ a modified version of Lloyd Bitzer’s rhetorical situation as a methodological tool for the investigation of health ecologies by applying an ecological analysis to an alcohol and other drug (AOD) treatment center in Tampa, Florida. By modifying Bitzer’s rhetorical situation schema and expanding the concept of health ecologies, I develop several innovations useful for tracing the impact of actants and rhetorical events specific to health and medicine. A major focus of this dissertation is a …

"The Weak Are Meat, And The Strong Do Eat"; Representations Of The Slaughterhouse In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century Literature, Stephanie Lance

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores how literary representations of the slaughterhouse predict the trajectory of human greed that is fueled by capitalist economic practices that shape environmental policies. I argue that literature brings attention to what is generally hidden from public view: the way humans and animals are erased in the production of food, which includes the inhumane treatment of humans and other animals in the slaughterhouse. The literature in this dissertation provides an avenue through which we can investigate the entangled oppression of humans and other animals in an effort to challenge perceptions that reduce animals, and marginalized humans, to objects. …

Reading Rape And Answering With Empathy: A New Approach To Sexual Assault Education For College Students, Brianna Jerman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The issue of sexual assault on college campuses is addressed in part by a mandate that all college students complete some form of sexual assault education. While current education programs have proven successful in teaching bystander education and dispelling rape myths, they have not proven to increase reporting rates while also decreasing the number of sexual assaults. This dissertation makes a pedagogical argument for a new approach to sexual assault and prevention education at the college level that would use literary rape narratives to dispel sexual assault myths, teach trauma theory principles, and address intersectional aspects of rape culture with …

Seeing King Solomon Through The Verses Of Hafez: A Critical Study Of Two Safavid Manuscript Paintings, Richard W. Ellis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is focused on a previously unpublished collage comprised of two manuscript fragments from Safavid Iran. One fragment contains a painting that depicts an enthronement scene featuring King Solomon, which, as I argue, was taken from a copy of the Majalis al-Ushshaq by Kamal al-Din Gazurgahi. The other fragment contains verses from the Divan of Hafez. The fragment from the Divan has been gutted and overlaps the painting of Solomon, effectively framing the image. Through visual and textual analysis, I argue that both fragments come from manuscripts that were produced in Shiraz. I further argue that the painting of …

Adaptations Of Ovid’S Metamorphoses In Late Medieval France: Material And Moral Recontextualization In The Tapestry Of Narcissus At The Fountain, Morgan J. Macey

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As a result of Ovid’s prominence in Northern Europe from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, French adaptations of and commentaries on the Metamorphoses from the late medieval period abound. Here, I address the physical and moral transformation of the Narcissus myth in the tapestry of Narcissus at the Fountain. Specifically, I explore how the tapestry’s presentation of the youth transforms Ovid’s verse in a tantalizing yet moralizing image. To aid in this endeavour, I survey the intermediate sources which inspired said transformation. I argue the lavish clothing, lush garden, ornate fountain, and solemn reflection featured in the tapestry …

An Archaeological Investigation Of Enslavement At Gamble Plantation, S. Matthew Litteral

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I have compiled information from archives, remote sensing, and archaeological excavation to shed light upon an understudied chapter of Florida’s history, specifically, African American heritage components at Gamble Plantation. My goal is to provide a better understanding of the daily lives of enslaved individuals who were held in bondage at Gamble Plantation (8MA100), located along the Manatee River in Ellenton, Fl. Through my work, I hope to engage descendant communities in future archaeological research and promote a more balanced and inclusive historical narrative for Gamble Plantation State Park.

A Quiet Valley At Roztoky: Testimony Of Singularity In The Landscape Imagery Of Zdenka Braunerová, Zdislava Ungrova

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although Czech artist Zdenka Braunerova (1858-1934) has been recognized by scholars for her contributions to the Czech cultural scene, thorough visual analyses of her artworks are rare. By investigating a single landscape painting, A Quiet Valley at Roztoky, and placing it into the visual and contextual frame of its creation, this thesis thus approaches Braunerova’s artistic oeuvre in an uncommon way. I argue that if understood within its social, cultural and historical context, the painting transcends the purely optic qualities of a landscape genre and acquires instead the self-referencing character of a self-representation.

By subjecting the chosen painting to a …

Pathways To Parenthood: Attitudes And Preferences Of Eight Self-Identified Queer Women Living In Tampa Bay, Fl, Emily Noelle Baker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This small-scale ethnographic study looks at the how queer women living in Florida imagine navigating family building decisions under the current climate of policies such as a lack of federal non-discrimination protections and the largely unregulated use of assisted reproductive technologies. Despite the federal legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States in 2015, state and county legislations continue to vary greatly on the extent of support they will provide for LGBTQ families. The goal of this research is to evaluate parenting desire, intentions, and preferences for queer women living in Tampa Bay since the passage of the Marriage Equality …

Autonomy, Suffering, And The Practice Of Medicine: A Relational Approach, Michael A. Stanfield

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I argue that the conventional view of personal autonomy that is operational in contemporary American culture, bioethics and medical practice places undue emphasis on individualism and a limited range of personal qualities and attributes (such as self-sufficiency). Instead, I argue in favor of a relational approach to autonomy which recognizes that each person that exists has certain minimal connections or relations to others, and these connections/relations are identity-forming. Unfortunately, current medical practices have tended to overemphasize individuality and choice (consistent with the conventional view) while minimizing or excluding these relational aspects. As a result, informed consent and …

Remembrance Of A Wound: Ethical Mourning In The Works Of Ana Menéndez, Elías Miguel Muñoz, And Junot Díaz, José Aparicio

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Remembrance of a Wound: Ethical Mourning in the Works of Ana Menéndez, Elías Miguel Muñoz, and Junot Díaz explores Latinx experiences of ethical mourning, an act akin to a scar remaining after a wound heals. This literary ethical mourning respects the memories of people and places no longer present. I define ethical mourning in Derridean terms and connect it to testimonio to illustrate how certain Cuban American and Dominican American characters, having lost their homeland through exile, immigration, and political turmoil, become practiced at mourning. For Derrida, ethical mourning employs poetic language to bear witness to a loss in such …

On Her Own: A Qualitative Study On The College-To-Career Transition Of Black Second-Generation Alumnae, Ladessa Y. Mitchell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe the college-to-career transition of Black second-generation alumnae in the development phase of emerging adulthood using Schlossberg’s (2011) Transition Model. As the researcher, I collected data from Black second-generation alumnae of predominantly White public universities in Florida to examine how their intersecting identities (i.e., race, gender, and educational status) and use of metaphorical capital (i.e., social, cultural, and human capital) influence their transition. The conceptual framework for this study is based on the 4 S’s of Schlossberg’s Transition Model as well as emerging adulthood, forms of capital, and the intersecting identities of …

Examining The Effect Of Context On Responses To Social Interaction, Renee R. Hangartner

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The ambiguous nature of social interactions between coeds may lead to under reporting of sexual harassment. Sexual harassment has been studied using mostly cross-sectional methods for over 30 years. However, despite decades of research, prevalence rates of sexual harassment have been found to vary considerably across and within studies. This inconsistency in findings makes drawing conclusions about the prevalence of sexual harassment challenging. Thus, the focus of the field should shift to identifying what behaviors are perceived to be sexual harassment and how that perception may vary by context. To reduce the ambiguity surrounding the labeling of an interaction as …

Abelard's Affective Intentionalism, Lillian M. King

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The work contained within this dissertation is a textual exegesis of Abelard’s ethics. The goal is to elucidate Abelard’s sort of intentionalism given his use of “intention” within his wider corpus, the grammatical and syntactical patterns in his prose, and Abelard’s own interests, biography, and situation as a twelfth-century monastic figure. As a result, this project should be understood as a history of philosophy dissertation. I am not attempting to build upon Abelard’s ideas but to clarify them. This is not to say that building upon Abelard’s ideas is not a worthwhile project. It is merely to say that doing …

Queer Authority In Old And Middle English Literature, Elan J. Pavlinich

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I argue that select early English texts queer normative authorizing conventions to authorize Old English and Middle English literatures. During the European Middle Ages, Latin cultures and literatures were privileged with authority that extended to and subverted the cultural capital of the inhabitants of England at the edge of the known Western world. I identify four exceptional English texts that employ authorizing conventions to disrupt normative networks of power that traditionally privilege Latin and to authorize English literature instead. The Norman Conquest had altered the English language and social structures; still, these altered networks of power continued to marginalize English …

No One Wants To Read What You Write: A Contextualized Analysis Of Service Course Assignments, Tanya P. Zarlengo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation takes a systematic approach to answering the question of what services course assignment should accomplish in curricula by looking at the assignment from a contextual perspective that takes into consideration the programmatic factors in which the assignment circulates. The dissertation accomplishes this work by studying curricular artifacts, to include course syllabi and assignment descriptions, as well as textbooks. Additionally, interviews with program administrators and textbook authors are analyzed. The results of this analysis posit a programmatic network that visualizes connections between program, course, and staffing administrative factors with assignments as the nexus of the network. This dissertation illustrates …

From Meaningful Work To Good Work: Reexamining The Moral Foundation Of The Calling Orientation, Garrett W. Potts

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The calling orientation to work represents the seed that has germinated into the exponentially growing ‘work as a calling’ literature. It was first articulated by Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton within Habits of the Heart in the 1980s. The following critical analysis of the ‘work as a calling’ literature, and of the moral foundation of the calling orientation more specifically, is intended for two particular audiences.

The first audience broadly includes an interdisciplinary group of scholars working within business ethics, management, organizational psychology, and vocational psychology, among other fields of study. Amidst these scholars’ …

"Roll" Models: Fat Sexuality And Its Representations In Pornographic Imagery, Leah Marie Turner

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to use specific fat pornographic imagery as a means to help us understand fat tropes and fetishization. The goal is to use our understandings of masculinity and race within fatness to create a possible launching point for further study within the field of fat sexuality studies. My rationale for writing such a paper is because fat sexuality studies is a field which has very little content, but potential for incredible scholarship which can impact not only our understandings of fat bodies, but of all bodies. The method for this thesis involves looking at specific …

Plasticity In Animated Children’S Cartoons: The Neoliberal Transforming Bodies And Static Worlds Of Ok Ko And Gumball, Rachel E. Cox

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Through the study of OK KO! Let’s Be Heroes! and The Amazing World of Gumball, I argue that children’s cartoons represent and recreate anxieties toward money’s plasticity in the plasticity of the cartoon bodies and worlds. I closely examine the ambivalence towards abstraction’s plasticity in contemporary children’s cartoons to trace the neoliberal ambivalence towards money’s plasticity. While much scholarship has grappled with what can be understood as animatic plasticity, very little of it takes on the questions raised about neoliberal culture by televised children’s cartoons. Cartoons are important to study in this respect because their form allows for unbridled plasticity. …

Three Theorists On Religious Violence In An Islamic Context: Karen Armstrong, Mark Juergensmeyer, And William T. Cavanaugh, Ayse Camur

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Religion is often invoked as a driving force behind violence, disentangled from political, social, and economic reasons. In this thesis, we will be exploring the viewpoints of three prominent religious thinkers in investigating the principal causes behind what is called religious violence. The works of Karen Armstrong, Mark Juergensmeyer, and William T. Cavanaugh are considered as theoretical frameworks for understanding violence in an Islamic context. While Armstrong argues that the root cause of violence can be traced back to economic, political, and cultural reasons, Juergensmeyer contests that religion is the most important cause underlying all violence. In their analyses, both …

Fear, Death, And Being-A-Problem: Understanding And Critiquing Racial Discourse With Heidegger’S Being And Time, Jesús H. Ramírez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I use Heidegger’s Being and Time to understand and critique racial discourse, but to also determine Heidegger’s reach into issues like racial identity. I start by examining how his introductory statements in Being and Time on the term “existentiell” suggest a path towards a conception of identity. I then go into how a racial identity could, through his terminology, be conceived as what I call a “fear existentiell.” I demonstrate how society assists the individual in maintaining a racialized existence that is embedded in fear. I move toward an examination of Heidegger’s three concepts of death to demonstrate how two …

Representations Of Indian Christians In Bollywood Movies, Ryan A. D'Souza

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation uses discursive formation as the methodological approach to examine representations of Indian Christians in eleven Bollywood movies released during the 2004-2014 decade. The decade witnessed the exit and eventual re-entry of the Hindu Right, and the citizenry during that period experienced centrist, liberal, and secular governance. Since the present of Indian Christianity is inextricable from a colonial past, and Bollywood emerges in response to colonialism, a postcolonial intervention in methodology and theory is undertaken. A postcolonial perspective illuminates the discourses that enable the formation of the postcolonial nation, i.e., the ways a nation imagines its culture, people, traditions, …

Mobilizing Images Of Black Pain And Death Through Digital Media: Visual Claims To Collective Identity After “I Can’T Breathe”, Aryn Kelly

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the wake of Eric Garner’s 2014 public execution at the hands of NYPD officers, online spaces such as Twitter saw an influx of remediated imagery referencing Ramsey Orta’s bystander cell phone video of Garner’s death. These images often explicitly reference the chokehold that killed Garner and/or they reappropriate Garner’s last words: “I can’t breathe.” To what formal dimensions in Orta’s video are these remediated images responding? What broader cultural work is the creation of these images doing?

In this project, I regard Orta’s video as the point of entry for considering the cultural work of remediating images from it, …

Economies Of Salvation In English Anchoritic Texts, 1100-1400, Joshua Edward Britt

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the different ways medieval authors conceived of anchoritism and solitary life by focusing on three important phases of the movement which are represented by Wulfric of Haselbury, Christina of Markyate, and fourteenth-century mystics. It is grounded in the medieval English anchoritic literature that was produced by religious scholars between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Initially, lacking a tradition of their own and a language to articulate the anchoritic experience, medieval hagiographers borrowed the desert imagery from the story of the early fathers who lived in the Syrian and Egyptian deserts, which they viewed as a place of …