Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Struggle For Acceptance: Continued Resistance To Female Ministers In Rural Holston Conference., Thelma June Neal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study was conducted to determine if ordained women clergy experience resistance or lack of receptivity to their appointments. If so, does the resistance more readily occur with churches in a rural area? The focus of the study was women clergy of the Holston Conference of the United Methodist Church. My study reveals there are Methodist women clergy who continue to have churches outright refuse their projected appointments. My study also reveals that this problem is more often found with churches in rural areas where the culture is connected to long-standing scriptural interpretations and traditions that do not theologically and …

Selected Resources For Ministers Of Music In Evangelical Christian Churches., Brian Emory Sharp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ministers of music in Evangelical Christian churches today are usually trained as choral conductors but take positions that require them to unexpectedly be an instrumental conductor, administrator, counselor, recruiter, evangelist, and even associate pastor.

There was no central resource for information to assist these musicians, thus this annotated bibliography was developed. It includes books and magazine articles on vocal and instrumental pedagogy, conducting, hymnology, theology, musical terminology, leadership skills, evangelism, and administration.

Because of time limitations, only sources available at Sherrod Library, East Tennessee State University, and on the Internet were cited. Time restraints also limited the number of resources …

England’S Exodus: Jewish Readmission And English Identity, Patricia M. O'Sullivan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis concerns the published writings of the men and women who engaged in the seventeenth-century debate over the readmission of the Jews to England. Historians who have studied this topic, among them David Katz, Cecil Roth, Lucian Wolfe, H.S.Q. Henriques, Peter Toon, and Mordecai Wilensky, have been at a loss to explain why those who ardently argued for Jewish readmission suddenly withdrew their support when Oliver Cromwell called a council to discuss the terms under which readmission would occur. I hope to contribute to this discussion by considering the one issue on which all of the pamphleteers could agree: …

Explorations & Redefinitions Of New Media Aesthetic Concepts In Contemporary Art Culture, Phillip S. Delacruz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My thesis pursues the exploration, invention, and redefinition of the role of Aesthetics through artistic practices of 3d digital graphics, 2d print, video, and sculpture. Aesthetic research altruistically generates visual installations informed by utopian idealism, science and technology centric culture, pop culture iconography, art history, international contemporary art and design.

Fractures, Elizabeth Hastings

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A stoplight at night. A dim bedroom. The smell of smoke and loss in summer. In winter, the crackle of snow underfoot, the city cold as a lavender planet. These are the settings within Fractures, and it is to these backdrops that the conflicts of the poems' speakers bare themselves. In the glow of these places, the truth of fractures, the gaps and slivers within us all, are illuminated. Below the visible wholeness of life lies a masked truth, the truth of a world that exists as a collection of fragments, of lives, of stories that connect, intersect, and sometimes …

Moonflowers And Other Stories, Sarah Bethany Prevatt-Harris

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Moonflowers and Other Stories is a collection of short stories focusing on complex relationships among characters who are estranged from their families and their pasts; some seek to reestablish connections, while others decide to simply walk away. All of the stories are set in Florida. In "Stained Glass," Abby returns home after seventeen years to help care for the father who disowned her. In "Blue Green Red," Melaney is compelled to find her brother after years of lying about his existence. Selina, the protagonist of "Fatty Walsh" is so embarrassed by her family she will not tell her friend Alucia …

Two Blades Come Together: Stories, Mark Edward Pursell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection of seven short stories details the emotional triumphs and complications of characters whose lives are altered by issues of sexuality and disconnection. An adolescent girl feels her father slipping away from her and, in turn, willfully destroys the imaginary world of the boy she babysits; a speech therapist struggles to make headway with a young patient while finding himself unable to communicate with his ex-lover; a gay poet cheats on his boyfriend in a desperate attempt to fuel his failing art. The dramatis personae of Two Blades Come Together is comprised of individuals who struggle towards grace and …

Visual And Verbal Rhetoric In Howard Chandler Christy's War-Related Posters Of Women During The World War I Era: A Feminist, Mary Ellen Gomrad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the development of a series of posters created by Howard Chandler Christy during the World War I era. During this time, Christy was a Department of Pictorial Publicity (DPP) committee artist commissioned by the committee chair, Charles Dana Gibson. The DPP was part of the Committee on Public Information (CPI) developed by the Woodrow Wilson administration to generate the propaganda necessary to gain the support of the American people to enter World War I. The CPI was headed up by George Creel, a journalist and politician, who used advertising techniques to create the first full-scale propaganda effort …

Frat Star, Nathan Andrew Holic

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis, a social novel in the tradition of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, is all at once an attentive first-person study of a twenty-something man close to his cracking point in his first post-college job, a detailed expose of national fraternities, and the sweeping panoramic view of an entire generation of over-programmed college students searching for direction. Frat Star follows a fragile college graduate named Charles Washington, who takes a position as an "Educational Consultant" with a national fraternity in his first semester after graduation. For sixteen …

The Rebirth Of Consciousness, Urszula Blaszak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Human beings encounter cascades of a plethora of experiences, one after another, every single microsecond of our lives. There are many things happening around. The world is full of events and occurrences. As they happen, the mind reacts to every individual input. This is a very exhausting and difficult. Thus, people have developed a process of self-defense against this horrible mishmash of information. Their minds have this amazing capacity of sorting them out and making sense out of them. Humankind's survival depends on that. If one does not sort all this information out, one might not be able to make …

Karmic Buyback: A Pilot Program, Cindy E. Dauer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Karmic Buyback: A Pilot Program, a screenplay, is the story of Oliver Harker, a water resources engineer in his early thirties, adrift in a world of lost social connections. Aside from this work, which he describes as "just a lot of redundant paperwork," his only connection to the outside world is his exuberant younger brother Van. With no father to speak of, and harboring long term resentment against his mother who ran away to Africa the day after Van's high school graduation, Oliver's defining tragic moment came three years earlier. It was then he discovered Eva, the woman he planned …

In Search Of: Stories From The Ones Left Behind, Mayra Lizzette Velez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Search Of: Stories from the Ones Left Behind introduces five young women-- June, Leila, Kiss, Marianne, and Alma-- who struggle to impede loved ones from abandoning them. One woman confronts her worst fears when she finds out about her husband's affair with a mutual friend; one comes to terms with her sister's poor lifestyle choices; another copes with her mother's sudden marriage; and yet another figures out that in order to keep her fiance, she must be willing to take on responsibilities foreign to her. And then there is the story of Alma, a contemplative but naive seventeen-year-old girl …

The Round Barn, Susan Elizabeth Fallows

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Round Barn is a novel in two parts that tells the story of two Iowa farm families during the period 1915 to 1929, a volatile time in the history of the American farm. The first part of the novel tells the story of Joe Marshall, a young man in conflict with his hard-working farmer father. At sixteen-years-old, Joe must choose whether to leave the farm to pursue his own desires or to stay where he is needed to help keep his financially strapped family afloat. Part two of the novel focuses on Mae Allinson, a woman in her early …

Tourist Trap: On Being Raised In Award-Winning Sand, Catherine Jane Carson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The literary essays in this collection explore the relationships between mind, body, and environment as the narrator explores Orlando, her beachfront hometown of Sarasota, and other "tourist traps." The traditional and experimental essays here question how residents make popular vacation destinations their own and how much trust one can put in strangers, neighbors, city planners, theme-park designers, and lovers. Dance floors, hybrid bikes, flying elephants, swing sets, and swimming pools fill these pages. Worries spiral like disco lights on dance floors, and cultural forces press down with the constant pressure of pedal strokes. With the embodiment of place comes connection …

What Is College-Level Writing? - The Common Ground From Which A New Secondary Post Secondary Composition Partnership Can Be Formed, Nancy Jane Berger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the Introduction to What is "College-Level" Writing?, editors Patrick Sullivan and Howard Tinberg state that the title asks "one of the most important questions in our profession" (xiii). However, even after 418 pages of essays written from the perspectives of high school teachers, college instructors, students, and administrators, the answer remains elusive because college-level writing does not, in fact, start in college - it starts in high school - where high school teachers believe they are instilling in their college-bound students the writing skills required by post-secondary institutions. The students, meanwhile, show up in first-year composition classes to find …

Series Of Disintegrated Memories, Simona Balas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Being absent from things or places for a period of time, we try to connect by revisiting our memories. There is always a vivid remembrance of certain objects or surroundings, but when we try to connect them, the truth in our mind deviates from the reality. The disintegration of the memories and the morphing of our imagination create a different reality in our minds that we begin to believe, considering that the truth becomes almost completely abstracted and obscured as time passes.

A Visual Sound, Bert Bogdany

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The repetitive nature of my work allows me to divide the tactile experience of the creative process into a contemplative state. Repetition causes the body to move automatically, less aware of its surroundings; the recurrent contact of the hand with the form causes them to merge systematically. This is the point where the sculpture for me becomes conceptually complete. It is this harmonious balance between material and the physical process that I wish to reveal to the viewer.

The Illusion Of Art: My Amalgamation Of Illustration And Contemporary Art, Victor Davila

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Drawing on archetypical aspects of human characteristics and personalities, I create images that illustrate our connection to memory, media, and culture. My work is informed by pop culture, including television, movies, cartoons and comic books as it relates to characters in our own physical world and society. The grid is used to represent both childhood games and the frames of a comic strip, where each panel equals an exact moment of time.

Double Duty: Processing And Exhibiting The Children's Home Society Of Florida Collection As An Archivist And Public Historian, April Anderson-Zorn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Children's Home Society of Florida, often referred to as "Florida's Greatest Charity", is the state's oldest non profit welfare agency. Founded in 1902, the society was instrumental in creating and reforming child welfare laws as well as helping countless children in the state of Florida find loving homes. This paper focuses on the archival processing of the Children's Home Society of Florida Collection papers and the creation of a subsequent web exhibit. The role of archivist and public historian is examined to see how each profession works toward a common goal.

The Emergence Of Central Florida's Puerto Rican Community, Cynthia Melendez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As with many cities in Florida, Orlando is becoming a melting pot of various ethnic groups. In particular, the Hispanic population in Orlando and throughout Central Florida is steadily increasing in numbers and influence. Groups such as Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Colombians are enriching the area with their culture, language, and diversity. Puerto Ricans, the largest of the Hispanic groups in Central Florida, are also emerging as the dominant group in the region as evidenced by their common language, historical and cultural heritage, shared common interests, and in some cases, residence within clear geographical areas. Between 1980 and 1990, …

Adaptive Technomythography: The Apotheosis Of Machine And Development Of Legend In A System Of Dynamic Technology, Roger Wolf

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Human beings will effectively deify any suitably complex system that cannot be explained through basic haptic interaction. Our culture loves technology. These days it seems we need it to feel whole. In an effort to explore the development of mythology and modular aesthetic in a technological age I have designed and constructed a number of interactive robotic 'organisms' to engage in arbitrary movement in geometric enclosures. Through observation and dialog I seek to assess the extent to which people assign human characteristics to the random and oft times aberrant mechanical behavior. To supplement this endeavor, a fictional astrological system that …

Brazilian Immigration: A New View Of Latinization, Patricia Martins Buzato

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Immigration and ethnic issues are currently present in political discussions in the U.S. It is important to understand how immigration as a whole helps historians understand U.S. history. An issue that involves immigration debates in the South is the idea of Latinization introduced by Raymond Mohl in his article "Globalization, Latinization, and the Nuevo New South". He defines Latinization as a low-wage and low-skill labor market emphasizing Spanish speaking Latin American workers in manufacturing, construction and agriculture. He focuses primarily on Mexican-born immigrants and their influence on the labor force of Alabama's rural and urban economy. By extending this idea, …

Truths, Realities And The Easily Transmitted Image, Elizabeth Walton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

By the documenting and examining things that are often overlooked in everyday life, I try to find the beauty of these objects, of people, their lives and their homes. I am interested in the current technology and the influence of the easily transmitted image. What is the truth and reality of the images shared by the current youth culture because of the use of camera phones, digital image takers, and the constant image transmissions through online social networking venues such as My Space and FaceBook? The current digital image is no longer a precious object as it was in the …

Another Look At Gender In Prime-Time Television, Jan Carolyn Kircher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Television has become an important agent of socialization in society today. Social interaction on prime-time television was examined 24 years ago by members of the Sociology Department at South Dakota State University. That study was similar to this research project that investigates gender roles on prime-time television. The earlier study used a modified version of the Bales Interaction Scale to code male and female behavior to assess the extent to which prime-time television presented traditional or nontraditional gender roles. This study used research methods similar to those of the previous study to see if traditional gender roles depicted on prime-time …

Gender Portrayal In J.K. Rowling's “Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix”: A Feminist Rhetorical Criticism, Nicole Ackman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examined J.K. Rowling’s (2003) novel entitled, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Although this novel has not yet been classified as a fairy tale, it does contain fairy tale elements. This study reviewed literature in the field of folklore, fairy tales, and feminism. Foss’ (2004) four-step feminist criticism model was employed to analyze gender portrayals in the novel. According to Foss’ model, the novel was analyzed for masculine or feminine perspectives of the world, effects on the audience, improvement of women’s lives, and impact on rhetorical theory. Although Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix …

Engendering Agency: Literacies, Social Action, And Wangari Maathai S Green Belt Movement, Cassandra Marie Allen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the life and work of Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai, one of the foremost African woman rhetors of our time. Wangari Maathai--founder of Kenya's Green Belt Movement (GBM), Member of Parliament, and activist for democracy, sustainable development, and human rights--has cultivated a multidimensional literacy that has allowed her to truly understand and address the problems that post-colonial Kenyans face. Her strong solution-oriented approach has allowed her to develop and refine operation of the GBM, which began simply planting trees, to produce a worldwide organization that works for sustainable development, human rights, and environmental conservation/restoration (among many others) …

Representations Of The Catholic Inquisition In Two Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novels: Punishment And Rehabilitation In Matthew Lewis' The Monk And Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, Jarad Fennell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to determine how guilt and shame act as engines of social control in two Gothic narratives of the 1790s, how they tie into the terror and horror modes of the genre, and how they give rise to two distinct narrative models, one centered on punishment and the other on rehabilitation. The premise of the paper is that both Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk and Ann Radcliffe's The Italian harness radically different emotional responses, one that demands the punishment of the aberrant individual and the other that reveres the reformative power of domestic felicity. The …

Journey To The Scars: A White Trash Epic, J. Patrick Rader

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Inspired by the work of writers Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe and motivated by celebrity prevaricator James Frey, Journey to the Scars: A White Trash Epic is a memoir that attempts to redefine the genre by applying the ideals and themes of gonzo and new journalism. The opening chapter, "The Diary of John Doe Frankenstein" tells the story of a pivotal event in the author's life. Immediately following this narrative of a near fatal motorcycle accident, the author/narrator's reliability is called into question and the remainder of the memoir is the story of the author's efforts to uncover the …

Recreational Technology And Its Impact On The Learning Development Of Children Ages 4-8: A Meta-Analysis For The 21st Century Cl, Joey Templeton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research focuses on technology (specifically video games and interactive software games) and their effects on the cognitive development of children ages 4-8. The research will be conducted as a meta-analysis combining research and theory in order to determine if the educational approach to this age group needs to change/adapt to learners who have been affected by this technology. I will focus upon both the physical and mental aspects of their development and present a comprehensive review of current educational theory and practice. By examining current curriculum goals and cross-referencing them to research conducted in fields other than education (i.e. …

Patchwork Culture: Quilt Tactics And Digitextuality, Michelle P. Barrett Ferrier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Embedded in the quilt top, the fabric patches are relays, time pathways to stories and memories of their former owners. Through the quilts, the voices of the past survive. The stories trace a path of connection between oral traditions, storytelling, the invention of meaning, and the preservation of cultural memory. The theory and method described herein use the quilt patchwork metaphor as the basis for a web interface for designing and modeling knowledge-based graphical, narrative, and multimedia data. More specifically, the method comprises a digital storytelling and knowledge management tool that allows one or more users to create, save, store, …