Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Felt, Yvonne Pierce James

LSU Master's Theses

My work is largely autobiographical and the way I express myself is the product of memories and life experiences. I grew up as one of a family of ten children and learned early the values of sharing and helping others. We were also taught not to waste anything. We learned to recycle as part of our daily life. As you will see in my work almost all of the materials I use are found objects or recycled materials. In growing up as part of a large, rural, southern family, there was also a tradition of ‘women’s work’. Nearly all of …

The Economics Of Neutrality: Switzerland And The United States In World War Ii, Matthew Schandler

LSU Master's Theses

The following study addresses the contentious issue of Swiss economic policy during the Second World War. In particular, it concentrates on the deterioration of Swiss-American relations that resulted from Switzerland’s economic ties to Nazi Germany. It is argued that Switzerland’s survival as a neutral and democratic country depended less on the defense preparations of the Swiss Army and more on the difficult trade negotiations with both the Axis and Allies. Varied sources that include American and Swiss governmental reports, diplomatic documents, and contemporary accounts of the war, support the argument that although moral considerations played a secondary role to economic …

Failing The Race: A Historical Assessment Of New Orleans Mayor Sidney Barthelemy, 1986-1994, Lyle Kenneth Perkins

LSU Master's Theses

New Orleans’ voters elected Sidney Barthelemy as the city’s second African American mayor in 1986. Historical treatments of Barthelemy’s tenure generally do not hold him in the same high regard as New Orleans’ first African American mayor, Ernest Morial. Yet, unfavorable evaluations of Barthelemy reflect the maturation of African American politics in the Crescent City. Symbolic victories no longer resonate with an African American populous in need of substantive gains to redress longstanding social and economic inequities. With the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the struggle for African American equality entered its next phase, the transition from …

An Investigation Into A French Fifteenth-Century Book Of Hours, Mary Dawes

LSU Master's Theses

A Books of Hours refers to a personal prayer book that was used by the laity, rather than the clergy. The laity's version of these texts is often accompanied by enchanting illuminations. Although the text and subject matter of the images within each codex remain similar, no two Books of Hours are alike. In the Middle Ages the popularity of Books of Hours was such that today they form the largest extant category of illuminated manuscripts. This thesis concentrates on one particular manuscript: a yet uncatalogued Book of Hours that is currently within the collection of Louisiana State University's Hill …

Aquinas And The Knowledge Of God, Casey Edler

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis concerns the introduction of mystical knowledge into a debate about God that relies on scientific evidence. The thesis focuses in particular on the relevance of Thomas Aquinas' view of mystical experience. After first presenting Aquinas' theory of rapture as an anticipation of the beatific vision and distinguishing it from other ways of knowing God, I argue that such a theory convincingly renders mystical knowledge inadmissible into a debate about God that relies on scientific evidence, owing to one's inability to either remember or communicate such an experience. As a result, introducing mystical knowledge into the debate causes the …

Mordred: Treachery, Transference, And Border Pressure In British Arthurian Romance, George Gregory Molchan

LSU Master's Theses

This study focuses on the question of how Mordred comes to be portrayed as a traitor within the British Arthurian context. Chapter 1 introduces the question of Mordred’s treachery. Chapter 2 charts Mordred’s origins and development in Welsh and British literature. Chapter 3 focuses on the themes of unity, kinship, loyalty, adultery, and incest that emerge in connection with Mordred’s character. Chapter 4 deals with the idea that Mordred’s treacherous characteristics have been transferred upon him in the course of the British Arthurian narrative’s development. Chapter 5 discusses the possibility that Mordred’s development is in part due to Geoffrey of …

Martin Heidegger's Phenomenology And The Science Of Mind, Charles Dale Hollingsworth

LSU Master's Theses

Phenomenology and cognitive science present two very different ways of looking at mental activity. Recently, however, there have been some attempts to incorporate phenomenological insights and methods into cognitive science, drawing especially on the works of Martin Heidegger. The purpose of this thesis is to determine if a useful combination of cognitive science with Heidegger’s phenomenology is possible, and to determine the form such a combination might take. This thesis begins with a brief overview of the field of cognitive science, and of some of the problems within the field that might benefit from a phenomenological analysis. It then reviews …

The Book Of Breathings In Its Place, Kerry M. Muhlestein

Faculty Publications

Michael D. Rhodes's publication on the Hor Book of Breathings is an unusual book in many ways. It is a scholarly Egyptological work, dealing with an understudied type of text from an understudied era of Egyptian history, appearing in the midst of a series that has been dedicated to the exploration of a book considered to be scripture by the Latter-day Saints. Additionally, it deals with what many have incorrectly considered to be a text that can be used to test the revelatory ability of the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints.

Skepticism About Contextualism, William Galloway Osborne Iii

LSU Master's Theses

Contextualism is the epistemological thesis that holds context to significantly affect the truth value of claims such as “S knows that p.” A shift in context can lead to a shift in the standards by which we evaluate propositional knowledge claims, and thus a shift in the truth values of these claims: a statement “S knows that p” may be true when evaluated in one context while simultaneously false when evaluated in another context. A contextualist says it is by playing on these shifting standards that the skeptic manages to destroy knowledge with her skeptical arguments. Once this is understood, …

Sufficient To Make Heaven Weep: The American Army In The Mexican War, Brian M. Mcgowan

LSU Master's Theses

The Mexican War, 1846-1848, has often been overlooked in American history. Scholars have been more interested in assigning blame for the conflict, or assessing the role played by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in the coming of the Civil War. Only recently have scholars made any attempt to understand the motivations and attitudes brought to Mexico by American soldiers. This thesis focuses on how the racial and religious attitudes of American soldiers during the war were an implementation of the nationalism inherent in Manifest Destiny. Americans used their perceived racial and religious superiority to further the goals of Manifest Destiny. Mexico …

"To The Latest Generation": Cold War And Post Cold War U.S. Civil War Novels In Their Social Contexts, Jeffrey Neal Smithpeters

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that readings of the Civil War novels published in America since 1955 should be informed by a consciousness of the social forces at work in each author’s time. Part One consists of a study of the popular Civil War novel, 1955’s Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor; part two, 1974’s The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. Chapters One through Three explain that Kantor was especially fitted for the ideological work going on in Andersonville, then outlines the way that novel tried to contribute to the transition between World War II and the Cold War. The book attempted to aid …

Castle To Condo, Country To Corporation: What Becomes Of Hamlet In Almereyda's Modern World, Melissa Trosclair Daigle

LSU Master's Theses

This paper looks into the inner workings of Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000). Even though Almereyda updates the setting and cuts many of the lines, sometimes entire scenes, from the source text, he is able to convey the some of the themes through his use of technology and media. While some themes do transfer into the postmodern setting, the places of discord are most interesting. Of particular interest is his use of modern technologies to display the corruption found in Shakespeare's play. These technologies, including speakerphone, surveillance equipment, wiring devices, handheld camcorders, and still photography, create an atmosphere of both continual …

The Role Of Matamore In Tony Kushner's Adaptation Of The Illusion: A Production Thesis In Acting, Shawn Halliday

LSU Master's Theses

The role of Matamore in Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s The Illusion was selected as a thesis project in the fall semester of 2004. This thesis is a written record of the actor’s work on the character throughout the rehearsal process and performance in the form of an Actor’s Score. It also includes an Introduction, Chapters on the Audition Process and First Reading, Character Analysis, a Production Photo and a Conclusion.

The Gurgitators, Scott Gage

LSU Master's Theses

Hardy Runyan, an obese dishwasher from Louisiana, seeks to become a champion gurgitator through the guidance of Trina Hicks, a coach of competitive eating who’s starving to reclaim her former glory. Armed with a stunted gag reflex and a stomach he can stretch to the skin, Hardy eats his way toward a showdown in which he dethrones the world champion of oyster eating.

La Fragilitat Del Paisatge, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Dins de la galáxia teatral formada per estrelles de grans i petites dimensions que és l'escena catalana contemporània, Josep M. Benet i Jornet (Barcelona, 1940) és com un cometa; no un d'aquells estels fugaços que apareix en una de les seves obres més reeixides (Fugaç, 1992), sinó com un cometa la trajectória creativa del qual ha estat marcada per un procés constant d'evolució i renovació estètiques, un cometa que ha deixat una lluïssor indeleble, que li ha permès d'omplir el buit entre generacions. Es podria afirmar que Benet i Jornet és el dramaturg en vida més eminent i …

Els Paisatges Del Teatre Català Contemporani: De Benet I Jornet A Cunillé, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Voldria començar amb Amèrica, i no pas amb Catalunya, amb un retrat del paisatge del desert de Jean Baudrillard, en el qual aquest intellectual francès ens ofereix una perspectiva poeticofilosòfica europea d'un vast territori pos diferenciat:

La grandeza de los desiertos consiste en ser, en su aridez, el negativo de la superficie terrestre y nuestros talantes civilizados. Son lugares donde los talantes y los fluidos se rarifican y las constelaciones descienden directamente. [...] El silencio del desierto también es visual. Lo conforma la extensión de la mirada que no encuentra sitio donde reflejarse. [...] El desierto es como una red …

Religious Experience In The Age Of Digital Reproduction, Frederick Mark Gedicks, Roger Hendrix

Faculty Scholarship

A religious experience is an extraordinary event that occurs against the backdrop of ordinary life, infusing that life with a meaning it would not otherwise have. Mass culture is now replete with portrayals of such experiences. Spiritually-themed television shows, movies, books, music, and fashion are now common and even popular. This is not necessarily good news for religion and religious experience. What mass culture portrays as sacred may be merely an imitation, resembling more the ubiquitous feel-good self-affirmance of popular psychology than authentic communion with the divine.

On the other hand, the appropriation and portrayal of religious experience by mass …

El Teatre Català Contemporani, L'Esfera Pública I La Figura De L'Autor: Retalls De L'Època De La Transició, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

En els darrers anys, al paisatge político-cultural que envolta Barcelona no li han faltat els seus bans moments de melodrama, d'acusacions enceses i de rampells d'histèria, que s'han pogut presenciar sobre i fora de l'escenari, tant a nivell públic com privat. Efectivament, en el món teatral català no és gens estrany que la vida real es confongui amb la de l'espectacle, oferint-nos reiteradament exemples del que el director Albert Boadella, al seu assaig El rapto de Talía, anomena el «virus exhibicionista» o «frenesí» que ha assetjat la societat contemporània. A Barcelona, com a altres llocs del món occidental, un dels …

The Photographer's Wife: Emmet Gowin's Photographs Of Edith, Mikell Waters Brown

Theses and Dissertations

Exemplified in the oeuvres of photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, and Emmet Gowin, the photographer's wife is a distinctive subject in twentieth-century American fine-art photography that fuses the domains of public and private life through the conflation of art and marriage. The transgressive nature of this juncture can be located in a confluence of gazes - the artist's, the subject's, and the viewer's - that are embroiled in constructing subjectivities. The phrase "photographer's wife" underscores an assumed imbalance of power reflecting a binary of active/passive, artist/model, and husband/wife. It is this study's contention that the complexity of the …

Charlotte Dacre’S Zofloya: The Gothic Demonization Of The Jew, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Erik Satie's Ballet Parade: An Arrangement For Woodwind Quintet And Percussion With Historical Summary, Tracy A. Doyle

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Erik Satie's ballet Parade was a historical collaboration between several of the leading artistic minds of the early twentieth century: Erik Satie, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Léonide Massine, and Serge Diaghilev. Satie's writing for winds and percussion lends itself to an arrangement for woodwind quintet and percussion; an arrangement that keeps the spirit and essence of the work intact. This study includes a historical summary of the ballet Parade and an arrangement of the music from the ballet for woodwind quintet and percussion.

Re-Envisioning My Backyard, One Brick At A Time, Kimberly Ellen Greene

LSU Master's Theses

My work is inspired by my immediate environment. I am especially interested in places which exhibit visual evidence of history, of industrial, natural and human life and the corresponding cycles of building, abandonment, destruction and salvage. In Baton Rouge, these relationships are dramatic, the lush vegetation, birds and overwhelming presence of industry make this interplay constantly tangible. My current work began with the phenomenal concerns within the struggle of nature and industry. Newly built industry is highly ordered, the perfect symbol of not only technology, but also control. However, older industry is more chaotic, with the initial order obscured over …

Religious Processions: Urban Politics And Poetics, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this paper, I will explore the ways in which processions, by their very visibility, foreground the relationships between the secular and the sacred, while contributing to a construction of identity and community, and simultaneously surfacing fractures therein. Using the example of multireligious yet secular Singapore, I will examine (a) the state's management of religious processions, including the regulation of time and space for such events, as well as regulations over noise production; (b) the tactics of adaptation, negotiation and resistance that participants engage in at an everyday level in response to the state's ideologies, policies, laws and strategies; (c) …

Pierre Bayle's Philosophical Commentary On The Words Of Jesus Christ: Compel Them To Come In, John Kilcullen, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this defence of religious toleration, Bayle discusses the words attributed to Jesus Christ in Luke 14:23, “And the Lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be full.” Bayle contends that the word compel cannot mean “force.” From this perspective, he constructs his doctrine of toleration based on the singular importance of conscience. Bayle argues that if the orthodox have the right and duty to persecute, then every sect will persecute since every sect considers itself orthodox. The result will be mutual slaughter, something God …

Imagining Europe: Carles Batlle's Combat (Landscape In The Aftermath), Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

At the end of Suite (1999), an award-winning play by Catalan dramatist Carles Batlle i Jordà, there is a memorable scene in which the spectators observe the collapse of a doll house upon the living room floor. It is a metaphor of domestic, as well as global, instability—not to mention, an ironic reference to Ibsen—in which the audience is left to wonder whether the character of Berta, confused and disoriented in the suite of an old hotel, will return to the mirage-like image of bourgeois European domesticity, to a home and marriage without foundations, or whether she will flee to …

Cultural Studies At R.I.T./U.S.A: Of Visual Culture And Pedagogical Interventions, Amit Ray

Articles

Abstract:

This paper examines the role of Cultural Studies in addressing the limitations of American visual culture through pedagogical interventions at Rochester Institute of Technology. Ray argues that despite globalization's potential to enhance international understanding, American visual media remains largely ethnocentric and resistant to representing the complex realities of global interconnectedness. Using the recent Iraq War as an example, he demonstrates how media coverage systematically obscured cultural, historical, and linguistic contexts while promoting martial nationalism. The author proposes using popular animated television programs like The Simpsons and South Park as pedagogical tools to expose the contradictory nature of contemporary media …

Staffing With Clergy Teams In The United Methodist Church, J. David Panther

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Contextualized Training For Missionaries: A Brazilian Model, Donald K. Finley

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Who We Were Meant To Be : Communicating Core Values To All Saints Presbyterian Church In Singapore, Philip Jin Teck Huan

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Beauty In Worship : A Paradigm Incorporating Philosophical And Theological Attributes Of Beauty In Assessing Worship, Wayne Allen Price

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.