Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Importance Of Effective Listening Skills: Implications For The Workplace And Dealing With Difficult People, Amy Ogrodnik Sullivan Ma

All Student Scholarship

A survey of University of Southern Maine (USM) employees was conducted to identify the importance of the leadership skill, effective listening, in supervisors and supervisees, and to evaluate its implications in the workplace, specifically when dealing with difficult people in everyday interactions. USM employees were asked their opinions about the importance of effective listening skills, their perceptions of their own effective listening skills as well as those of their coworkers, experiences of dealing with difficult people in the workplace, and the importance of training regarding these skills for leadership and general work performance. Results of the qualitative and quantitative survey …

Spectrum 2011, Saint Mary's College Of California

The Undergraduate Spectrum

No abstract provided.

Poema Of Lieutenant Schmidt’S End: Pasternak’S Dialogue With Tsvetaeva Through The Prism Of Genre., Ludmila Lavine

Faculty Journal Articles

Boris Pasternak’s poemy are acutely self-conscious of their place in the epic tradition. Lieutenant Schmidt (LS) represents one attempt at exploring the parameters of the poema itself as the poet makes a “difficult” transition from “lyric thinking” to “the epic.” In this article I examine this transition against a contemporaneous example in the genre, Tsvetaeva’s Poema of the End (PE). In LS, structural elements of the poema are counterposed to those of PE. While PE amplifies the individual voice, LS muffles what is personal for the sake of the public voice. While PE is atemporal, LS is historical. While PE …

Social Justice And Common Good: What Are They For?, Thomas Hughson

Theology Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Miracles In Christianity, Ralph Del Colle

Theology Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Contents Page

Sound Scripts

No abstract provided.

Sonic Pleasure, Absence And The History Of The Self: An Alternative Approach To The Criticism Of Sound Art, Jonathan W. Marshall

Sound Scripts

Historical, psychoanalytic and cinema criticism have characterised the history of Western modernity and the individual subject as founded upon an affective lack. Pleasure is solicited by the promise of fullness, but this is never fulfilled, fuelling further desire. Sound art however is more typically theorised as inherently present and immersive, as a form that offers direct experience, which literally touches the subject. I draw upon the work of Jonathan Sterne, Steven Connor, psychoanalysis and film criticism to rearticulate not just modernist media and subjectivity as characterised by lack and absence, but the perception of aestheticised sound. Starting with an analysis …

Master And Slave In The Music Of Coil, Drren Jorgensen

Sound Scripts

For Theodor Adorno, pop music perpetuates thedrudgery and alienation of working class existenceby providing a distraction from it. This paper turns toa similar critique of pop music, in the work of Coil.Born out of the UK industrial scene, Coil distort thepop song format, reproducing and appropriating itssounds with cynical manipulations. This cynicismshines through a mastery over the forms of popmusic and its sounds, that Coil configure withoutveering into pop's more explicit commercialism. Byestranging the familiarity of pop music, Coil point tohow listeners are enslaved by the industrial mode ofmusical alienation, by reproducing this alienation in anew way.

Authors/Presenters

Sound Scripts

No abstract provided.

Aspects Of Rhythm In The Music And Improvisation In Six Pieces By Bassist Avishai Cohen, Nicholas L. Abbey

Theses : Honours

This dissertation examines significant aspects of rhythm in the music and improvisations by the trio of the seminal bassist Avishai Cohen through transcription and analysis of a selection of his recorded works. Repertoire examined has been selected from Cohen’s Gently Disturbed and Seven Seas releases to demonstrate some important devices commonly used by the group. This study is fuelled by interest in the trio’s use of rhythmic devices to create free-flowing and consistently interesting music despite rhythmic complexity inherent to the compositions. In the context of modern jazz, the group’s rhythmic approach is more complex and unique than its treatment …

Minimalism And The Guitar, Melissa Claire Branson

Theses : Honours

This dissertation aims to investigate musical minimalism and its influence on the classical guitar repertoire. Minimalism is defined through a taxonomy of minimalist techniques and the use of minimalist techniques is then traced through a preliminary survey of the guitar repertoire. While classical minimalists Steve Reich and Terry Riley have written several guitar works, the true pioneer of minimalism on the guitar is shown to be Cuban composer Leo Brouwer. Use of minimalist techniques is also particularly prevalent among Australian composers, including Nigel Westlake, Peter Sculthorpe, Robert Davidson, and Phillip Houghton. Curiously, a large number of guitar works employ minimalist …

Review Of Branded To Kill, Michael Adams

Publications and Research

Review of Seijun Suzuki's 1967 crime film.

Italian Militants And Migrants And The Language Of Solidarity In The Early- Twentieth-Century Western Coalfields, Stephen Brier, Ferdinando Fasce

Publications and Research

This article uses the life and experiences of an Italian immigrant and labor militant, Carlo Demolli, to examine a range of issues, including: the intersection of ethnic and national identity and labor militancy and solidarity in the organizing efforts of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) among the ethnically diverse workforce of coal miners in the American West at the turn of the 20th century; the role of a "language of solidarity" as expressed in an Italian language version of the UMW Journal, Il Lavoratore Italiano, in sustaining a militant Italian immigrant workforce in the coal mines; and the …

An Original Composition, "Concerto For Tenor Saxophone And Wind Ensemble," And A Comparative Analysis Of The Concerti For Orchestra Of Béla Bartók And Witold Lutosławski, Joseph Timothy Patrick

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is in two parts. The first part is an original composition, “Concerto for Tenor Saxophone and Wind Ensemble.” The second part is a comparison of two major works of the twentieth century: Concerto for Orchestra by Béla Bartók and Concerto for Orchestra by Witold Lutosławski.

“Concerto for Tenor Saxophone and Wind Ensemble” is a work in four movements. The first movement is in an incomplete sonata form, as the second theme group does not appear in the recapitulation. The second movement has a traditional tertiary form, with the middle section comprised of a brass chorale. The third movement …

Process As Product: The Culture Of Development And The Twenty-First Century American Dramatist, John Patrick Bray

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Simply stated, my research and my experiences as a playwright have led me to believe that the present condition of the playwright is that of a relic: that is, because of the notion that all plays need a developmental workshop, playwrights have not only lost authority over their art, but have also been driven to write plays meant for staged-readings rather than production. I argue that playwrights who create self-producing companies not only reclaim confidence in their craft, but also learn how to engage with the larger community via the collaborative process theatre. In this dissertation, I employ a theoretical …

Differences In Depression Levels Among Tenors, Baritones, And Basses, Rhiannon Jane Talbot

Honors Program Theses

Music and speech are closely related to one another. Both have specific elements, such as average fundamental frequency, pitch variation, and speed, to accurately communicate emotion. Some emotions have characteristic speech patterns; in the case of sadness, a low mean fundamental frequency, slow speed of speech, and minimal pitch variation are common. Both music and speech also utilize physical metaphors (up/down, high/low, etc.) to express positivity and negativity. The study was intended to determine whether male vocal register correlated with levels of depressive symptoms. Specifically, tenors were expected to have lower levels of depression than baritones and basses. Participants (16 …

Raising Good Soviets: Media Depictions Of Soviet Life And Upbringing Under Khrushchev, Chelsea Miller

Honors Program Theses

Policies on education and upbringing affected almost every individual in the Soviet Union, from the youngest child to the oldest pensioner. These policies reflected the current ideological path of the party and the need to train the children to accomplish the country’s goals. On a more personal level, these policies helped the children evolve into successful adults able to easily enter the workforce. When the public saw that these policies were not being enforced or implemented, they expressed their dissatisfaction. These individuals were able to safely voice their criticisms by pointing out the educational system’s failures within the ideological framework …

Musical Eating And Culinary Listening: Composing With Sounds And Flavors, Isaac Brockshus

Honors Program Theses

My interests in music are wide-ranging. While the majority of my energies as a student are invested in the mastery of music that is more or less conventional, I also find myself obsessing over ideas intended to clear new avenues of expression while establishing new perspectives on the familiar. My experimental side thrives in a vast playground of extant musical constructs, free to be exploded, reassembled, and reexamined. Within these constructs come certain audience expectations for the music. The presence of these expectations and the practical issues resulting from a clash of expectations served as instigators of creative thought throughout …

Rational Decision-Making In The Face Of Uncertainty: An Experiment In Jeopardy!, Trevor Boeckmann

Honors Program Theses

This paper examines the quiz show "Jeopardy!." In the game, players accumulate points then wager them in a final round on a single question. My study finds an empirically-best wagering system for these players, then calculates the benefit of using this system through additional games that would be won with the correct bet. My regression model then finds the determinants of empirically-best (EB) betters. The results show players tend to act too aggressively. Half of non-first place players wager incorrectly and nearly 90% of those non- EB wagers are too large. The regression shows players are most likely to make …

"With A Woman's Bitterness": Early Propaganda Against Female Rulers In Medieval Chronicles In The Twelfth And Fifteenth Centuries, Elizabeth Anne Wiedenheft

Honors Program Theses

In reading the descriptions of the Empress Matilda and Queen Margaret of Anjou by their contemporaries, it is clear that their male counterparts were threatened by their attempts to participate in the politics and governance of England. It is also clear that male rulers believed that these two women's use of power was a usurpation of the traditional gender hierarchy. Therefore, male chroniclers, living contemporaneously with either the Empress Matilda of Queen Margaret, created descriptions of them that reflected the propaganda promulgated against them during their lifetimes. This propaganda imposed a strict dichotomization of gender roles in order to prevent …

Review Of Ingres: Painting Reimagined By Susan L. Siegfried, Heather Belnap Jensen

Faculty Publications

Susan L. Siegfried’s Ingres: Painting Reimagined is a magisterial consideration of one of the most intriguing and elusive artists of the nineteenth century, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. As the summation of a three-decade long engagement with Ingres studies, this ambitious tome sets out to account for the strange and yet beguiling nature of his paintings, c. 1800-1840. In this book, Siegfried argues that the reason Ingres has remained an enigma has much to do with his refusal to produce works that conformed to centuries-old conventions structuring narrative painting. Ingres’s imaginative project, then, was to conceive of innovative strategies for imaging classical tales …

Ongoing Studies In Rio Grande Valley History, Milo Kearney, Anthony K. Knopp, Antonio Zavaleta

Studies in Rio Grande Valley Regional History Series

Chupacabras, a poem / Milo Kearney -- The Texas Center for Border and Transnational Studies / Antonio Zavaleta with help from others -- History Through World War I : Comparative freedom in the borderlands: fugitive slaves in Texas and Mexico from the age of enlightenment through the U.S. Civil War / Francis X. Galan and Joseph Leon -- Contraband trade in Matamoros and its impact on the northern Mexican economy during the 1820s / Melisa Galvan -- Preparando los festejos para la inauguración del Ferrocarril a Monterrey / Andres F. Cuellar -- Adolf F. Dittman and Brownsville's first motion picture …

Review Of A Poverty Of Rights: Citizenship And Inequality In Twentieth-Century Rio De Janiero By Brodwyn Fischer (2010), Salvador Salinas

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Artist Stores: An Evolution In Art And Commerce, Naomi Huth

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Climate Variability And Drought In The South Platte River Basin, Aaron Davitt

Dissertations and Theses

The South Platte River Basin has been identified as an area experiencing water overuse, making conflicts and shortages likely during times of drought. This study used multiple sources of climate and water consumption data to better understand climate and water consumption changes during drought: North American regional Reanalyses (NARR), Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS), United States Geological Survey (USGS), and Colorado Decision Support System (CDSS). A water budget was constructed for the South Platte River Basin during 1979-2006 and for the sub-periods 1990-1999 (above-average precipitation) and 2000-2006 (below-average precipitation, drought). The main focus, the drought period, revealed above-average use …

Time Out Of Mind As Distant Past Beyond Memory; Bob Dylan And His "Late Style", Koji Matsudo

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

The Cut Of A Suit, Shea Taylor

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

A Parody Of Nature Or The Nature Of Parody; Melville As Critic Of Emerson And Darwin, Benjamin Barber Rose

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Smaller Spaces, David Plick

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Tipping The Memoir, Rachel Warmington

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.