Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Destruction In Search Of Hope: Baudrillard, Simulation, And Chuck Palahniuk's Choke, Kurt D. Fawver

ETD Archive

Chuck Palahniuk's Choke is a text that perfectly constructs a world of simulation as theorized by Jean Baudrillard. However, rather than reveling in meaningless, if entertaining, hyperreality as Baudrillard does, the text attempts to find escape from the endless barrage of mediated images and information inherent in such a simulatory existence. It advocates an evolution (or de-evolution, as the case may be) of communication and signification, a willful ignorance of sorts, that will allow images to be reconnected with meaning and signifiers to be reunited with concrete corresponding signifieds. Following a line of postmodern literature begun by Pynchon and Delillo …

Pop-Culture Artifacts, Ellyn M. Stepanek

ETD Archive

In dealing with literary work such as Neil Gaiman's, fiction that both inhabits and defies conventions of genre and medium and thus easy definition, it is clear that an examination of such work benefits from as eclectic a style as Gaiman's own approach to story-telling. While this essay attempts no summary of the author's entire literary corpus, an analysis of the underlying influences of the novel American Gods is necessary to map the details of its territory. A survey of the convergence of the various genres and allusions within this one text, and the ways in which Gaiman measures Old …

Building In The Styles Of Their Time: Fugman, Cramer And Uhlrich, Rebecca L. Barrett

ETD Archive

The impetus for this project was an unsual promotional book by an obscure local architectural firm. Greater Cleveland Architecture by Godfrey Fugman and C. Frank Cramer presented a unique glimpse into the nearly forgotten firm. Its meticulously photographed, pristine images of buildings in their intended environment provided crucial visual primary source material for my work. Investigating the firm of Cramer and Fugman (1887-1896) naturally led to its successor firm of Fugman and Uhlrich (1899-1903). Primary research was conducted working with building permits, newspapers and periodicals of the profession such as Inland Architect and Builder, Interstate Architect, and Ohio Builder and …

Of Earth And Sky: Lev Tolstoy As Poet And Prophet, Alan Cliffe

ETD Archive

In this study I consider Lev Tolstoy's life and thought by reference to their national and historical context. My purposes here, of course, have to do with understanding that context as well as with understanding Tolstoy. In Chapter II, I consider and try to evoke the nineteenth-century Russian landscape to which Tolstoy was born. Also in Chapter II, I introduce, for comparative purposes, a figure from a generation of Russians later than Tolstoy's, a man very different from Tolstoy who nonetheless admired him greatly. I am referring to the man who became known as Lenin. I extend and expand the …

An Analysis Of "The Real," As Reflected In Conrad's Heart Of Darkness, Beverly Rose Joyce

ETD Archive

Heart of Darkness, as a framed narrative, questions perception and authenticity. It is difficult to discern Marlow's individual voice, for it is buried within a layering of narration. Critics ascribe the words of the text to Marlow, claiming he is the one who, in Achebe's words, dehumanizes Africans. Yet, the quotation marks suggest otherwise. Perception is relevant to an analysis of Heart of Darkness, for it is unclear whose point of view constructs the text, that of Kurtz, Marlow, or the frame narrator. Since the narrative is likely composed of multiple perspectives, it is difficult to determine whose reality it …

An Army Of Housewives: Women’S Wartime Columns In Two Mainstream Israeli Newspapers, Shira Klein

History Faculty Articles and Research

At the height of Israel's 1948 war, women's columns in the newspapers Ha'aretz and Ma‘ariv offered readers advice, stories, and letters. They focused on domestic practices such as preparing food, sewing clothes, dressing fashionably and providing comfort. At first glance, they completely ignored the war raging around them. However, this essay shows that the columnists portrayed housewives' roles, no less than men's front-line fighting, as an important part of the nation's wartime effort. The columnists and their responding readers took the housewives' domestic practices, which made them seem so unfit for battle and turned them into a battlefield of their …

Tintoretto And James: Exposing The Shattered Subject, Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

Though “influence” may be too strong a word, the compositional affinities between James and Tintoretto are pervasive and worthy of comparative analysis, especially because both artists capture the moment when wonder gives way to the lonely and final uncertainty of our knowledge—of self, of others, of secular or spiritual truth.

Separated by three centuries, these two artists both stage a forceful assault on the conventions of their medium and engender in the viewer or reader (as well as internal “perceivers”) a kind of vertigo—a visual and psychological dislocation that is the basis of a new kind of insight. In Tintoretto, …

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2008)

Quidditas

Alice Blackwell

The Breck Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a junior scholar at the annual conference.

Gaiwan's Five Wits: Technological Difficulties In The Endless Knot, Alice Blackwell

Quidditas

Traditionally, the “five wits” of the endless knot on Gawain’s shield in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” have been read as the five senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The present paper, following recent work by Peter Whiteford, Simon Kemp, and Garth Fletcher, contends that the five wits may be interpreted as the five internal wits, which include imagination and memory and determine perception. This identification of the five wits as the five internal wits calls into question Gawain’s self-identity, predicated as it is upon the five wits’ faultlessness. In this context, Gawain’s self-understanding is really a self-misunderstanding, and …

Politics And Culture At The Jacobean Court: The Role Of Queen Anna Of Denmark, Courtney Erin Thomas

Quidditas

Until recently, analyses of the Jacobean court marginalized the important role played by James I and VI’s queen consort, Anna of Denmark. While historians and literary critics now acknowledge that Anna was a key player in patronage networks and artistic circles at the time, the extent of her political involvement remains largely unexplored in favor of portraying her solely as a cultural figure. This essay seeks to examine the connections between Anna’s cultural and political activities and suggests that, by viewing Anna’s involvements thorough a dichotomous lens as being either political or cultural, a truly textured and nuanced understanding of …

Maria Fairfax And The “Easy Philosopher”: Action And Indolence In Andrew Marvell’S “Upon Appleton House”, Byron Nelson

Quidditas

Andrew Marvell dramatizes the difficult choice between action and indolence in his long pastoral poem, “Upon Appleton House.” The nameless nun’s rhetorical temptation of Isabel Thwaites, as narrated in an apparent digression from the past history of the house, anticipates the poet’s own self-seduction in the woods later in the poem. Both Isabel and the poet need to be rescued from their fallen state. The tension between action and passivity is resolved by the redemptive appearance of “Maria.” The model for her providential intervention is the Shakespearean romance, in which an innocent daughter, who is rescued from danger and degradation, …

Alphabetical Lives: Early Modern German Biographical Lexicons And Encyclopedias, Richard G. Cole

Quidditas

Those who appear obvious to us as “major players” in past eras may in part result from an unintended consequence of the work of early modern biographical lexicographers. By the eighteenth century, there were enough printed sources and available archival materials to deluge or even overwhelm historians and biographers with information about past actors of sixteenth century history. Those biographical lexicographers made choices about whom to give prominence and whom to minimize or ignore in their works.

Review Essay: Bringing The Middle Ages Into The World History Survey Course: Some Suggestions, Tiffany A. Trimmer

Quidditas

Too often World Historians neglect coverage of the European Middle Ages, and medieval history courses tend to lose sight of the ways in which medieval Europe played a part in the wider world to which it belonged. Part of this results from the artificial pre/post 1500 CE split that dominates the organization of the typical world history survey, and part from the reluctance of World Historians to realize the potential of a global history approach to the era before the age of exploration and colonization. The works included in this essay attempt to rectify the absence of earlier European historical …

Books Recommended For Courses: Denis De Rougement. Love In The Western World, J. M. Anderson

Quidditas

Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World has become something of a classic since it first appeared in 1939. Rougemont traces the development of romantic love from its origins in the twelfth century to its mutated condition in the twentieth. His thesis is that romantic love and marriage are fundamentally opposed. “My central purpose,” he wrote in his Preface to the 1956 revised edition, “was to describe the inescapable conflict in the West between passion and marriage; and in my view that remains the true subject, the real contention of the book as it has worked out.” Whereas romantic …

Books Recommended For Courses: Elena Levy-Navarro. The Culture Of Obesity In Early And Late Modernity: Body Image In Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, And Skelton, Holly Overturf

Quidditas

If next semester’s reading list is feeling a bit thin, consider fattening it up with The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity: Body Image in Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton, an important new book by Elena Levy-Navarro. The book consists of six chapters, followed by extensive endnotes and a useful index. The first two chapters introduce the next four, and seek to build a history from which a fat culture can be formed. In the last four chapters, Levy- Navarro flexes her (fat-blanketed) literary anthropologist muscles by looking for symbolic meanings of fat in selected works of …

Symposium On Stage: What's Platonic About Love?, Nichole L. Jackson

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

No abstract provided.

Preliminary Pages, No Author

The Angle

No abstract provided.

Two People's Questions, Two People's Answers, Iaen Tierson, Stephanie Woodward

The Angle

No abstract provided.

A Past Too Real, Keith J. Alexander

The Angle

No abstract provided.

Tattooing Is Not A Crime, Bryan Jones

The Angle

No abstract provided.

Wideman, Danny Uebbing

The Angle

No abstract provided.

Glittery Goodbye, Stephanie Woodward

The Angle

No abstract provided.

Boat Ashore, Erin Waffle

The Angle

No abstract provided.

In Mind, Eric Szewczyk

The Angle

No abstract provided.

Mutilation, Whitney Short

The Angle

No abstract provided.

Fine Art Awakens The Senses, Katelin Tressler

The Angle

No abstract provided.

5th Grade, February, 4p.M., Mark Overmyer

The Angle

No abstract provided.

She Tried To Draw Him, Audra Conway

The Angle

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay's first paragraph.

"Once I found my sister's drawing. It was a man; her dream man. I was rifling through her dresser drawers. I don't remember what I was looking for. Maybe money. Maybe matches. Maybe an ID to use to buy cigarettes at the corner store."

That's Pretty Much Everyone, Bryan Jones

The Angle

No abstract provided.

Searching Behind Me, Eric Parkison

The Angle

No abstract provided.