Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Educational Patterns In The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall, Vilja Johnson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Roughing It: Twain’S Response To Pop Western Culture, Amanda Evans

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

The Way Beyond: Puritan Covenant Theology Burst Open By Levinas’S Thought, Maren Haruko Miyasaki

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

A Natural History Of The Mind : Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Michael Edmund Jonik

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project examines how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American writers drew on European natural science and philosophy - specifically in terms of concepts of form, perception, and experience - to open new possibilities for thinking the relationship between the mind and the physical world. In each of the moments of American intellectual history here considered - the natural theology of Calvinism, the idealistic natural history of Transcendentalism, and the movement towards an evolutionary process-philosophy of Pragmatism - "place" becomes not only geographical location, but a dynamic field of interactions of natural historical, literary, theological, and philosophical knowledge. I trace this through …

Proactive Procreation : Ethical Implications Of New Genetic Technologies For Parental Obligations To Future Offspring, L Syd M. Johnson

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation examines the ethical implications of recent genetic innovations, particularly preimplantation genetic diagnosis, for the obligations and duties of parents to future children. I critique common but uncompelling objections to the use of genetic information, diagnosis, and technology to influence the characteristics of future offspring, and conclude that genetic selection and enhancement are not different in kind or degree from other means of selection, direction, and enhancement that parents engage in to shape the lives of their children. Procreation is morally risky -- it risks imposing substantial burdens on persons who would not otherwise have to bear those burdens, …

Fishers Of Men : The Jesuits In Bilad Al-Sham, 1625-1660, Mazin D. Tadros

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

For several decades historians have struggled with the dynamics of cross-cultural contact and the creation of perceptions of the "other". Detailed studies of the European image of the Islamicate world during the pre-modern period rarely analyze why and how these representations were formed. Through the analysis of Jesuit missionary correspondences made during the first half of the seventeenth century, this study aims to articulate the variables that impacted the development of Jesuit attitudes toward the people and environment of Greater Syria. Jesuit written sources conveyed the challenges to the mission that arose from a multiplicity of sources, including from fellow …

White Institutional Presence : The Impact Of Whiteness On Campus Climate & The Relational Context Of White Institutional Presence, Diane Lynn Gusa

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation purports to offer a new lens on the retention puzzle of African-Americans in Predominately White Institutions. The purpose of this paper is to notice the properties of a PWI and analyzes the relational context these properties create for its African-American undergraduates. This dissertation is formatted into two sections. The first section frames, examines, and theorizes the "racism effect" in higher education - the "ways in which race and racism explicitly and implicitly impact on the educational structures, processes, and discourses that affect people of color" (LatCrit Primer, 2000, p. xx). I maintain that African-Americans' experiences of marginalization and …

Family Literacy And Digital Literacies : A Redefined Approach To Examining Social Practices Of An African-American Family, Tisha Yvette Lewis

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Abstract

"Keep Going" : African Americans On The Road In The Era Of Jim Crow, Gretchen Sullivan Sorin

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

"Keep Going": African Americans on the Road in the Era of Jim Crow

Translating The Transatlantic : West African Literary Approaches To African American Identity, Kelly Opal Secovnie

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

My dissertation, Translating the Transatlantic: West African Literary Approaches to African American Identity, takes a literary-historical approach to the question of Anglophone West African conceptions of African American identity, an often overlooked topic. It represents an important intervention in the fields of African diaspora and African literary studies, both of which continue to suffer from a US-centric view of Africa, and supplements work done in postcolonial theory and cultural studies to include West African conceptions of cultural translation. My project also examines numerous plays by Ghanaian and Nigerian playwrights to understand the ways that African American characters and culture are …

The Archaeology And Translation Of Greek Tragedy : Tragedy And The Emotions, Daniel Edward Gremmler

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The history of interpreting Greek tragedy and the emotions is a history of logos. Tragedy, however, is poiēsis and speaks the language of muthos. This project approaches popular interpretations of tragedy and the emotions as problems of translation between various discourses: between Greek and English, past and present, historical and transhistorical, logos and muthos. After identifying the ways in which logos clashes with logos from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and modern classicists, we suggest a new framework through which the emotional effect of tragedy, the tragic pleasure, can be understood: the thaumon and the deinon (wondrous and terrible).

Toward A New Mystical Poetics Of God In The Post-Mortem Age : From God As The Supreme Being To God As The One-And-Only Being, John Francis O'Neill

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

At certain axial moments in history new religious worldviews emerge to replace prior perspectives that are no longer adequate or persuasive. A new worldview opens new possibilities for the human religious quest for meaning, being, and salvation. A fundamental conviction underlying this dissertation is that we are living in a "post-mortem age" - that is, an era defined by profound challenges to the centuries-long dominant religious worldview, culminating in the twentieth century experience of the "death of God." While disturbing and disruptive for many, this historical condition can also be seen as a liberating and even providential event, opening the …

Quiet Testimony : The Ethical Impulse Of Silence In Emerson, Douglass, Melville, And James, Shari Goldberg

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project proposes that Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville and Henry James invoke silence in order to make evident, if not audible, the oppression of slaves and the absence of the dead. Challenging the opposition between advocacy and quietism that has largely structured scholarship on nineteenth-century American literature, I argue that these writers produce testimony by engaging voicelessness in their texts. In effect, their work revises the idea that testimony consists in a first-person report of past events. Quiet Testimony consequently suggests that, in signal American texts, political claims may not be explicitly argumentative, a testifying subject bears …

Machine Learned Melody Matching Using Strictly Relative Musical Abstractions, Michael Joseph Kolta

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

We implement and evaluate a machine learning approach to improve systems for searching a database of music via melodic sample. We explore symbolic and aural input queries and test our prototypes with extensive user surveys. Our main contribution is to combine the following four elements. First is to create a unique musical abstraction that accounts for both pitch and rhythm in a relative manner. Second, our system allows for approximate matching of imperfect queries via the utilization of the Smith-Waterman algorithm that was originally designed for approximate matching of molecular subsequences, such as DNA samples. Third is to design our …

Ghanaian Immigrant Children In The Bronx : A Case Study In Acculturation, James Baffour Asare

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The aim of the current study was to examine the cultural adaptation process of the children of Ghanaian immigrants living in the Bronx, New York City. To this end, twenty-five Ghanaian immigrant children were interviewed. In an attempt to ascertain the extent to which these children have become acculturated to the host society and integrated into mainstream American culture, the focus of the interviews was on the impact of American culture on language, food, discipline, dress, religion, mate selection, and education. Interview participants were selected via snowball sampling. Employing a qualitative approach, I conducted face-to-face interviews consisting of open-ended questions …

The Practice Of Ideology : A Theory Of Ideology And Conceptual Analysis Of Irish Republicanism, Robert Marcello Mauro

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The thesis of this dissertation is that ideology is an ontologically autonomous social object that social science can reconstruct accurately only if it treats ideology as ontologically autonomous. To demonstrate this thesis, the text has three mutually supporting aims. First, it seeks to further our understanding of ideology as a form of political thought, and to develop an appropriate theory of ideology. Second, it critiques the academic literature on Irish Republicanism and, when necessary, the academic literature on Northern Irish political thought. Third, it is a conceptual morphology of Irish Republicanism. Through an examination of Irish Republicanism, the dissertation shows …

The Cultural And Literary Discourse Of War In 20th Century America, Robert Michael Ficociello

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In The Cultural and Literary Discourse of War in 2oth-century America, war is re-examined and re-historicized from an American perspective. First, war is contextualized in relation to urban studies, anthropology and literature. The dominant model, war is an extension of politics, for the analysis of war is decentered, and politics becomes the extension of war. In respect to America since the Revolutionary War, the nation is literally birthed from war, and the nation becomes an extension of that war. The perpetual re-writing of that war is seen through the discourses of history, politics, and literature. Therefore, the Cold War can …

Specular Subjects : Technologies Of Vision In The Transatlantic Novel, 1719-1850, Matthew Henry Pangborn

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Scholars of the long eighteenth century have traced the rise in modern Anglophone culture of an observational, episto-factual standard of truth and value, new techniques of surveillance and disciplinarity, image-based and global networks of consumption and exchange, and a mass culture honing its ostensibly comprehensive power of sight through new media of text and image. While debate has occurred over the origins and meanings of the ascendancy of such an overwhelmingly visual mode of engagement with the world, scholars have tended to examine such topics in isolation, with little attention to the ethical and political consequences of the material practices …

Mark Greenwold’S Excited Self, Shannon Egan

Art and Art History Faculty Publications

In a recent exhibition catalog of painter Mark Greenwold at New York’s DC Moore Gallery, the artist, in lieu of a conventional statement about his work, conducted a self-interview. To his question, ‘‘Why?’’ Greenwold responded:

"I thought that I could possibly get at things that another person might find too daunting or too polite to ask—very obvious questions by the way, that I’d probably be too thin-skinned or reactive to give an honest response to if another person asked the question." [excerpt]

Price Gouging, Non-Worseness, And Distributive Justice, Matt Zwolinski

Philosophy: Faculty Scholarship

This paper develops my position on the ethics of price gouging in response to Jeremy Snyder's article, "What's the Matter with Price Gouging." First, it explains how the "nonworseness claim" supports the moral permissibility of price gouging, even if it does not show that price gougers are morally virtuous agents. Second, it argues that questions about price gouging and distributive justice must be answered in light of the relevant possible institutional alternatives, and that Snyder's proposed alternatives to price gouging fare worse on the dimension of justice than a system in which goods are allocated by a system of market …

Front Cover

The Bridge

No abstract provided.

Back Matter

The Bridge

No abstract provided.

The Bridge, Volume 6, 2009, Bridgewater State College

the bridge

Volume 6 Staff

Sarah Haag, Editor-in-Chief
Tara M. Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief
Amanda Armas
Laura M. Bowen
Rachael Dunphy
Grant Ferro
Kyle J. Giacomozzi
Matthew Keogh
Jillian Moore
Lauren Rheaume
Shannon Rosenblat

Mary Dondero, Faculty Advisor
Jerald Walker, Faculty Advisor
Linda Hall, Alumni Consultant
Rosann Kozlowski, Alumni Consultant

Reading Between The Lines; Or, The Literary Lives Of The Davis Family, Amelia Benner, '09

Honors Projects, History

The books that the Davises read provide an insight into their personal lives while also reflecting the cultural ideologies in which they believed. Although they lived on the Illinois frontier, David and Sarah Davis were clearly products of the literate, Eastern ' middle class. Although David Davis was a voracious reader, most of the books that appear in the letters 'are mentioned by women, in an interesting parallel to the "feminization" of literature that occurred during the first half of-the 19th century. Meanwhile, many historians have pointed out that "middle-class values," such as the cult of domesticity and the idealization …

The War Of Images: An Artistic Approach To The Parting Of The Ways, Kristin Zavislak, '09

Honors Projects

The "parting of the ways" did not occur in one isolated, climactic event; it was a slow and gradual process. When exactly the split between Judaism and Christianity was completed is a topic scholars still disagree on today. To locate the date that it happened, most rely on the scriptures and Christian historical accounts; because very little Jewish writing from the second and third centuries survives, Jewish opinion on the subject is left out entirely. Through an examination of the earliest examples of 'Jewish' and 'Christian' art, on the walls of the Christian catacombs and the buildings found at Dura-Europos, …

Contradictory Keats: A Review Of Stanley Plumly's Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography, Michael Theune

Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reclaiming The Prophets: Cohen, Heschel, And Crossing The Theocentric/Neo-Humanist Divide, Robert Erlewine

Scholarship

In this essay, I examine Hermann Cohen’s and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s respective accounts of the classical prophets of the Hebrew Bible, which contend with the Protestant biblical criticism of their day. Their accounts of the prophets are of central significance for their philosophies of Judaism, which mirror and oppose each other. This Auseinandersetzung addresses the often neglected topic of Jewish responses to German-Protestant biblical criticism and stresses the cogency of Heschel’s thought. Additionally, examining Cohen and Heschel together problematizes the polarization between theocentrism and neo-humanism currently dominating the landscape of modern Jewish thought.

Voices From The Darkness: A House Of Leaves Experience, Melanie Waltman, '09

Honors Projects

House of Leaves is both a love letter to the written word and a demonstration of its inadequacies, a cautionary tale, a horror story, a romance, a bildungsroman, an eloquent mockery of literary criticism, and much else besides. It incorporates postmodern poly-vocal framing techniques, which are sort of a literary version of Russian nesting dolls, if the dolls all talked to each other and one was a pathological liar and one was claustrophobic and one denied the existence of any other dolls (but even if there were other dolls, this one would tell you, they're all crazy anyway). Granted, it's …

Prints Portfolio, Laura K. Czys, '10

BA/BFA Senior Honors Book Gallery

Print work display.

Se Tu Mi Lassi (If You Leave Me) For Choir, Katherine Spencer

Compositions

No abstract provided.