Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Destruction At The Root: Religious Genocide In Tibet?, Jackson Elijah Sherratt

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

What constitutes genocide is a matter of considerable debate. Stripped to its theoretical core, however, genocide requires the presence of a) perpetrators and victims, and b) the established intent of the former to destroy the latter, by c) such methods that can be reasonably be considered genocidal. As such, isolating and identifying these variables becomes an essential task for anyone wishing to establish that a particular historical event, or set of events, amounts to genocide. The United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime and Genocide (UNGC) represents the legal standard in this regard, and codified therein …

Agent Of Change: Trickster In Ojibwa Oral Narratives And In The Works Of Louise Erdrich, Patrick B. Benton

Honors Theses

Change is not only a theme of Louise Erdrich’s work, but the paramount theme. Critic John Purdy concurs, writing that “the characters who people her pages are immensely recognizable to an audience comprised of many cultures: they exhibit all the frailties and strengths, the failures and triumphs one would expect for humans who face what we all – as individuals, as cultures, and as species – must face: change” (Purdy, 8). What is this change, though? And, who is the agent of this change? Casual readers of Louise Erdrich’s works may not be aware that her characters are informed by …

Apple And The Tree: Shakespeare’S Use Of Father-Child Relationships In Character Construction, Elizabeth Finn

Honors Theses

Before he stood the test of time, William Shakespeare had to survive the fire of the early modern marketplace. The surviving records indicate that Shakespeare was quite successful, not only artistically but also financially. In his home of Stratford-upon-Avon, he owned an impressive house, New Place, as well as significant amounts of arable land (Greenblatt 330). Meanwhile, he also became a part-owner in the Globe and Blackfriars theaters (Greenblatt 368). To accumulate such funds, Shakespeare had to write plays that would sell tickets; plays that would intrigue audiences and keep them coming back for more. Thus, he must have had …

Collective Moral Responsibility, Allyson Rudolph

Honors Theses

What is collective moral responsibility? And why should you care? The answer to the former, like any good philosophical question, is largely unresolved. Although writing on collective responsibility has flourished, particularly in the wake of the Holocaust, and despite the existence of an increasingly consistent bibliography of essential writings in the field, there is no definitive authority on the subject. Unlike individual moral responsibility, however, there is little consensus among the ranks. Many theories disclaim the existence or the possibility of collective moral responsibility—a group is just not the sort of thing that can ever be considered a morally responsible …

Demon Rum, Devious Politics: The Lessons Of Neal Dow’S Crusade For The Maine Prohibition Law, Andrew J. Herrmann

Honors Theses

One of the fundamental conflicts in American political history is the one that pits the need to guarantee personal liberty against the desire for the government to pass legislation that will benefit the overall good. Dating back to the very founding of our nation and the deliberations over the ratification of the Constitution, this debate has played itself out over and over again through the course of American history as politicians decide how to balance each of these important considerations. One such manifestation of this debate was the campaign for alcohol prohibition1 in the mid-nineteenth century, a battle which raged …

Dialectics Of Diaspora Space: A Study Of Contemporary, Diasporic, South Asian Fiction, Christopher A. Zajchowski

Honors Theses

In light of these continuing debates concerning immigration, national identity and belonging, re-examinations of immigrant and ethnic communities, often referred to as ‘diaspora,’ have become increasingly popular and prudent. Khachig Tololian, editor of Diaspora magazine, calls diaspora “exemplary communities of the transnational moment.”5 In an increasingly globalized world, where labor, capital, and resources are passed fluidly from continent to continent, diaspora are created by relocation or displacement of immigrant workers and their descendents.6 For these unskilled, immigrant laborers, middle class immigrants, and the children of both groups, adaptation to the culture, society, and life in a new ‘host’ country can …

Gendered Struggle For The Freedom From Violence Using Frantz Fanon’S Theory In Three Postcolonial Novels: Albert Wendt’S Pouliuli, Tsitsi Dangarembga’S Nervous Conditions, And Edwidge Danticat’S Breath, Eyes, Memory, Robin M. Respaut

Honors Theses

While studying abroad in New Zealand last year, I became intrigued by Albert Wendt’s novel Pouliuli, because it was my first literary view into Pacific Island culture. My interest in the novel was part of my awakening to the particular damage done by the west in Oceania. By attending classes on the anthropology and sociology of postcolonial Pacific societies, I discovered how the west had acted in the region to encourage progressive technology in ways that handled native traditional culture with unconscious disrespect. I was stunned to learn that Oceania is the most aided region in the world today, surpassing …

In Any Weather : A Collection Of Short Stories, Stephen J. Plocher

Honors Theses

Short Stories

Messy Love: Collection Of Short Stories, Mindy Favreau

Honors Theses

Messy Love: Collection of Short Stories

“Nothing That Is So, Is So”: Indeterminate Language In Shakespeare, Matthew K. Crane

Honors Theses

The Shakespearean canon is characterized by indeterminacy. His world is one where nothing is as it seems; men pose as women, nobles as commoners, and sisters as brothers. The resulting confusion challenges conventional norms, questioning gender, cultural, and other social boundaries. The surface uncertainty extends beneath the costumes and performers to the very foundation of theatre—language—as spaces emerge between words and meaning, and what is said and what is meant. Shakespeare’s use of ambiguous language opens his plays to multiple interpretations, creating a constant but fluctuating separation between the reader and text, the literal and figurative, and the expressed and …

Women Making Progress?: A Study Of Wide Sargasso Sea As A Response To Jane Eyre, Kaitlin M. Gangl

Honors Theses

I have always had a love for Victorian literature. Growing up I read Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Gaskell, and many more Victorian female writers I could get my mother to recommend. Reading and writing has been a passion of mine since I was young, and female writers (Victorian in particular) were always a particular favorite of mine. Despite my interest in this genre, I found myself reading Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) for the first time just two years ago while studying in London. I was taking a Nineteenth-Century British Literature course, and while I appreciated the works …

Obstacles And Stepping Stones To The Hero’S Pedestal: Reunified Germany’S Selective Commemoration Of Resisters To National Socialism, Suzanne J. Swartz

Honors Theses

Bombs, propaganda, graffiti, espionage, murder. Normally these words carry a negative connotation, unless used with regard to German resistance to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The resistance, which included groups and individuals from all areas of German society but failed to produce a single mass anti-Hitler movement, has gained little recognition outside of Germany but much within, particularly during the past thirty years. Germany has taken the one positive light from that dark time period and used it as a tool of legitimization for the government and other institutions, and as a source for heroic figures of whom Germans can …

Short History Of Waterville, Maine, Stephen Plocher

Honors Theses

If we were to simplify the story of Waterville to the lightest exploration possible, a good strategy might be to look at the city’s names. True, a good number of important events might be overlooked, but examining the names and name changes in the city’s history offers a unique view into the essence of its identity. Waterville has a rich history when it comes to names. The city itself went through a number of them in its early days, and these changes reflect the city’s continual reinvention of itself. The first people we know about who lived here, the Canibas …

Religion And Renunciation In Wordsworth: The Progression Of Natural Individualism To Christian Stoicism, Geoffrey L. Meldahl

Honors Theses

William Wordsworth was twenty-three when the French National Convention condemned the deposed Louis XVI to death, and France, under Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, dissolved into abject violence. The disappointing results of the Revolution and the subsequent events in European politics began to work a change in Wordsworth’s personal political and ethical views that would greatly affect not only his own poetry but the entire Romantic Movement. Even still, his eventual apostasy from the radical republicanism of his youth affects the way in which people read Wordsworth’s work, igniting both sympathy and resentment. The Ode to Duty is …

On Rhetoric As Gift/Giving, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In this essay, I explore the possibilities of rhetoric as gift. I begin with the Homeric gift economy and the rhetorical resources of this economy. My use of "economy" here is not reducible to a monetary exchange system, but rather a more general system of practices orchestrating cultural identity and relations. As Georges Bataille suggests, studying a general economy may hold the key to all the problems posed by every discipline (1991, 10). For Bataille everything from geophysics to political economy, by way of sociology, history and biology, to psychology, philosophy, art, literature, and poetry has an essential connection with …

Mccarthy Hearings, Paul Achter

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

What have become known as the “McCarthy hearings” refer to 36 days of televised investigative hearings led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954. After first calling hearings to investigate possible espionage at the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the junior senator turned his communist-chasing committee’s attention to an altogether different matter, the question of whether the Army had promoted a dentist who had refused to answer questions for the Loyalty and Security Board. The hearings reached their climax when McCarthy suggested that the Army’s lawyer, Joseph Welch, had employed a man who at one time …

Punk'd Lives: Or, The Effects Of White Folks, Black Folks, And Breeders On Punks, Maurice L. Tracy

Masters Theses

Punk'd Lives: Or the Effects of White Folks, Black Folks, and Breeders on Punks is a collection of short stories in the vein of Langston Hughes' The Ways of White Folks; each story looks at contemporary American, mainly middle class, society and exposes some particular, and not always pleasant, truth about those represented within its few pages. As a collective whole and at its core, Punk'd Lives examines what it means to be a young homosexual African-American male living inside of the larger (mainstream) American culture that is often White and always heterosexual.

Black, White, And Gray: The Veiled Politics Of Race And Slavery In Antebellum Literature, Emily Ramage

Masters Theses

The American slavery crisis reached a pinnacle during the time from postrevolution to the mid-nineteenth century, resulting in the most devastating loss of American life to date - the Civil War. Emotions about race and slavery ran high during this antebellum period, and many extremists on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line used the power of written language for their cause; many Americans, conversely, appeared indifferent to a race of people who neither directly affected them nor engaged their interest. That indifference itself played a role in the debate of race and slavery, which progressively reached a vast audience in …

The Interdialect Approach To Second Dialect Acquisition: Theory, Process, And Results, Shauna K. Cromwell

Masters Theses

This project outlines the theory, process, and results behind an original approach to second dialect acquisition termed the "Interdialect Approach." To begin, the historical origins and development of the non-standard dialect African-American English (AAE) are outlined, focusing particularly on the evolution of the dialect and the importance of its historical examination in relation to current studies, research, and emerging nontraditional teaching methods for second dialect acquisition. This multi-faceted approach is clearly defined and offered as an effective method for teaching non-standard English speakers, particularly AAE speakers as is noted in the discussion of two dialect studies in which the "Interdialect …

The Philosophical Quest Of Tom Joad In The Grapes Of Wrath, Eun-Young Lim

Masters Theses

When the merciless Dust Bowl sweeps through Oklahoma in The Grapes of Wrath, the major questions of what can be achieved by thinking and how can ordinary men overcome these critical circumstances pervade the entire novel. This thesis focuses on how Tom Joad, the protagonist in this novel, grows in his philosophical quest, based mainly on Steinbeck's assertion that "Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action."

Although Tom Joad is portrayed as a cynical, convicted killer who responds to stimuli or from impulse at first, he undergoes his journey both literally and metaphorically from Oklahoma to the promised …

The Myth, Paul Meske

Masters Theses

The Myth chronicles a few days in the life of a young man in search of his place in the world. Through flashbacks and discussions concerning choice and purpose, Adam tries to carve out a life for himself after everyone he knows melts away. Adam discovers many things about himself and how the people around him come to embrace their choices. In the end, Adam attempts to make his own choice and to land somewhere nice and peaceful.

Home Invasions: Victorian Domestic Space And The Figure Of The Outsider, Kathleen Rodems

Masters Theses

Victorian fiction often represents a domestic space that is designed both architecturally and psychologically to protect its residents from the external harsh and hostile world. Novelists ofthe period perceived a weakness in the domestic fortress and incorporated characters that could enter these homes in various ways, whether invited or not, and threatened to expose the families to the world they represented. This thesis investigates characters able to disrupt this domestic idea ofprivacy including the orphaned outsider Heathcliff from Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847), the impostor Lucy Graham in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley 's Secret (1862), and the detective Sergeant …

Scholarship On Religion And Communities Of Faith, Gerald James Larson

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Due to a formatting error, part of this article was inadvertently omitted from its original appearance in the 2006 issue of the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies. The article is now published in its entirety.

Humanism And Disegno: Neoplatonism At The Accademia Di San Luca In Rome, John Shannon Hendrix

Architecture, Art, and Historic Preservation Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

North American Buddhist Women In The International Context, Karma Lekshe Tsomo Phd

Theology and Religious Studies: Faculty Scholarship

Understanding North American Buddhist Women from a global perspective is a daunting task because of the enormous diversity of both North American and Asian Buddhist women. The fist question is, What does it mean to be a Buddhist? For some, to be a Buddhist means formally going for refuge in the Buddha, dharma, sangha. In other cases, a person is born Buddhist and lives her whole life as a Buddhist, without any special ceremony. Differences like theses make it impossible to generalize about Buddhist women's experiences.

Jaepl, Vol. 13, Winter 2007-2008, Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Linda T. Calendrillo

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Essays

Bell Hooks. Writing for Reconciliation: A Musing

Devan Cook. The Value of Mutual Respect: What We Learn from Student Complaints .

This essay discusses the emotional labor of teaching and the ways writing programs can support that work.

Elizabeth Gardner, Patricia Calderwood, and Roben Toroysan. Dangerous Pedagogy

Using data primarily drawn from undergraduate psychology classes, we reflect upon what humane but "dangerous" pedagogy illustrates about our teaching and our students' learning.

Karen Surman Paley. Applying "Men and Women for Others" to Writing about Archeology.

This essay explores one archeology professor's pedagogy of caring during a summer field study …

The Value Of Mutual Respect: What We Learn From Student Complaints, Devan Cook

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This essay discusses the emotional labor of teaching and the ways writing programs can support that work.

Applying “Men And Women For Others” To Writing About Archeology, Karen Surman Paley

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This essay explores one archeology professor's pedagogy of caring during a summer field study of a former state school and orphanage.

The “Not Trying” Of Writing, Rachel Forrester

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

A very spiritual "not trying," or non-work, is at the heart of composition.

Front Matter

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Editors' Message

Whitman writes in "Reconciliation":

For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead, I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near, Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

For Whitman, reconciliation is the "Word over all, beautiful as the sky," the deed that washes the world clean of the carnage of conflict. Without the act of reconciliation—the bringing together of that which …