Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Change” In The 2008 Presidential Campaign: A Study In Rhetorical Definition, Graciela Saez Kleriga

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Every election cycle, the major party candidates accept a nomination for the presidency and launch the general campaign. These rhetors not only weave a narrative about themselves as qualified candidates; they also forward an argument about how the public should choose between two candidates. In particular, the 2008 presidential campaign's central question asked Americans about the type of change the nation should undertake. By tracing the definitional arguments utilized at the outset of the general election, this project analyzes how Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain utilized this desire for "Change" as a strategic theme.

After The Fall: The Post-Apocalyptic Frontier In The Road And 28 Days Later, Jeffrey J. Lavigne

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Previous scholars have identified three scenes of the American frontier myth: the sea, the west, and space. This evolution of frontiers reflected key changes in the expression of America’s cultural identity. While Janice Hocker Rushing called space “the final frontier,” the prominent place in contemporary society held by zombies and other minions of the occult hint at the emergence of yet another scene of the American mythos: the post apocalypse. In contrast to previous frontiers, which are defined geographically, the post-apocalypse is much broader, for in the wake of a global cataclysm, everywhere is a potential frontier. This decentralization of …

Taming The Waters That Taketh From The Devil’S Playground: A History Of Flood Control In Clark County, Nevada, 1955-2010, Jarvis Marlow

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Las Vegas valley is the driest metropolis in the United States, with an annual rainfall of less than five inches. A large majority of the annual precipitation occurs between May and September in the form of high intensity thunderstorms. Since the founding of Las Vegas in 1905 until the formation of the Clark County Regional Flood Control District in 1986, the five jurisdictions that make up the Las Vegas valley: Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, Henderson, Boulder City, and Clark County, struggled to manage stormwater. The principal defect was that they reflected the particular whims of each government entity, …

Woman Or Warrior? How Believable Femininity Shapes Warrior Women, Jessica D. Mccall

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My dissertation is an exploration of how femininity is constructed in the characters of warrior women. I define and apply my theory of believable femininity: the notion that in order for characters gendered female to be accepted by an audience, specific textual markers must render them submissive to a dominating male figure. I examine the following warrior women at length: Britomart and Radigund from Spenser's The Faerie Queene; Christine de Pizan's treatment of Amazons in her Book of the City of Ladies and Hippolyta's specific portrayal by de Pizan in comparison to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, and the …

“'You Done Cheat Mose Out O' De Job, Anyways; We All Knows Dat'”: Faith Healing In The Fiction Of Kate Chopin, Karen Kel Roop

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1850, the half-way mark of the century in which the country itself would be broken in two, Kate Chopin was destined to bear witness to the many divisions that have distinguished the United States. Especially noticeable in the post-Reconstruction period in which she wrote was the expanding chasm between the races. This dissertation argues that even Chopin's most seemingly orthodox Southern stories betray a quest for a theology capable of healing the physical, emotional, and spiritual ills omnipresent in the country and especially apparent in the post-Civil War South. The alternative to mainstream Protestantism …

Summerview, Laura Breitenbeck

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Summerview is a thesis-length work of fiction in fulfillment of the requirements of the MFA program in Creative Writing. It is a story about a religious family with a disruptive event in its past. It is also about objects such as billboards. Everyone in the story lives in the United States of America and is afraid of something.

Raise The Still Rabbit, Michael Kroesche

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My first collection of poetry, Raise the Still Rabbit, explores the literal landscape we live in, the themes of language and lyric, as well as the relationships between people. The poems are rooted in the experiential, the moments when the act of writing becomes a navigation of the various themes of the local environment, cohabitation between individual people, and the geography of the poems' content and textual construction. Navigating these themes, the poems attempt to dissolve the illusory barriers that appear to separate subjects such as the interior of a home from the desert surrounding it. In this collection, …

From Khaki To Brown: Community Formation, Homeownership, And Mobility In Santa Ana, California, 1950-2000, Stefani Jan Evans

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis examines the first fifty years of a modest 1950 housing tract of one hundred thirty-nine houses and five commercial lots in Santa Ana, California. I analyzed deeds, maps, newspapers, powers of attorney, building permits, city directories, and promotional material and interviewed nearly one hundred former and current residents to determine who came to Santa Ana in the mid-twentieth century, why they came, and why they stayed or left. Contrary to what contemporary Los Angeles boosters might have thought, mid-century Santa Ana was not simply a suburb of Los Angeles. In 1950 Santa Ana, with 45,533 residents and forty …

Colonel John R. Bourgeois: A Biography And Analysis Of Transcription Style, Jeffrey Alan Malecki

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Colonel John R. Bourgeois (b. 1934), Director Emeritus of the United States Marine Band, "The President's Own," has acquired an international reputation in the wind band profession through his exemplary leadership of "The President's Own" as well as dynamic recording and commissioning. Notwithstanding, very little information concerning Bourgeois's life is available. Through a series of meetings, beginning in October 2008, and culminating in a three-day interview in February 2011, I have collected a substantial body of biographical data, including candid narration of important musical and personal events spanning Bourgeois's artistic life.

Bourgeois's reputation has fostered the writing and publication of …

Chaucer’S Reading List: Sir Thopas, Auchinleck, And Middle English Romances In Translation, Ken Eckert

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Middle English romance has never attained critical respectability, dismissed as ―"vayn carpynge" in its own age and treated as a junk-food form of medieval literature or kidnapped for political or psychoanalytical readings. Chaucer‘s Tale of Sir Thopas has been explained as an acidly sarcastic satire of the romances‘ supposedly clichéd formulas and poetically unskilled authors. Yet such assumptions require investigation of how Chaucer and his ostensible audience might have viewed romance as a genre. Chaucer‘s likely use of the Auchinleck manuscript forms a convenient basis for examination of the romances listed in Thopas. With the aid of a modern translation, …

The Right To Privacy In Light Of The Patriot Act And Social Contract Theory, Betsey Sue Casman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

There is a continual debate between individuals who attempt to measure the individual’s right to privacy against the government’s right to know in order to provide for the security of all citizens.

The questions that beg to be answered are whether the individual’s right to privacy outweighs the government’s duty to provide security; and if security is deemed more important, can there even be a right to privacy. It is critical to our nation’s anti-terrorism effort that our intelligence agencies possess the legal capacity to intercept all forms of communications utilized by terrorists and hostile intelligence agents. Inevitably this will …

Political History After The Cultural Turn., Steven Pincus, William J. Novak

Articles

Traditional political history is dead and is still dying. Over two decades ago, Lynn Hunt observed, "Social history has ovenaken political history as the most important area of research in history." The proponents of the new social history called for a broader, bottom-up, and more sociological account of the past. These scholars turned to historical sociology, social theory, as well as new empirical, socialscience methodologies in creating a fresh approach to history. More recently, of course, cultural history has ovenaken social history as the historical subdiscipline in which most doctoral research is conducted. While literary theory has played an important …

The Bass Clarinet: Its History And Role In The Symphony Orchestra, Katlin Macbride

Honors Program Theses

This thesis is a three-sectioned guide to the bass clarinet to be used by players starting out their orchestral careers. Research was done to provide insight for the orchestral bass clarinetist about auditions and compositions that have an important bass clarinet part.

The first section focuses on the origins of the bass clarinet. In this section, the reader will learn why it was invented, the difficulties inventors had in creating it, and the first compositions for this instrument. Knowing the structural history of the bass clarinet gives the performer knowledge of the bass clarinets available when a piece was written, …

Citrus, Katherine Butler

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

Chelsea, Ricky J. Martinez

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

Millennium, Elyssa Diraffaele

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

Kokoro, Michiko "Misha" Maggi

Calliope

No abstract provided.

Love Letter, Susan H. Kim

Calliope

No abstract provided.

Invincibility, Danielle Procope

Calliope

No abstract provided.

A Dialogue Of Sorts, Fred Gowan

Calliope

No abstract provided.

Golden Gate Sunrise, Theresa Gallagher

Calliope

No abstract provided.

Pondering What I'M Pondering, Marian Ting

Calliope

No abstract provided.

How To Remain Childlike, Billy Ray Middleton

Dissertations

How to Remain Childlike examines themes of place and identity, focusing on how regionalism impacts the individual’s perception of self. The stories herein, set in the post-millennial South, focus on characters with a worldly recognition of prevailing misconceptions that cast Southerners as unsophisticated and anti-intellectual. Though these characters recognize the beauty of the South, they possess ambivalence toward the region, a desire to be less insular and more cosmopolitan. This ambivalence, a love for the South coupled with a longing to escape it, highlights the importance of place in the process of self-definition.

Moon Landing, Jennifer Ann Marquardt

Dissertations

The following short stories began and were finished—at least as finished as they appear here—during my time at the Center for Writers.

The Enemy In Our Backyard: A Study Of The German Pow Experience In North Carolina And The Program's Effect On World War Ii., Amber Adcock

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis seeks to examine the experiences of German POWs in North Carolina in World War II. It examines their activities, thoughts, feelings, and other interesting aspects of their time in the United States. This thesis also provides adequate information on the establishment of the POW program, and examines how this program impacted Americans at home and abroad.

The Misanthrope: Accepting The Notions Of Moliere Into A Modern Society, Cristina A. Skinner

Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film: Theses, Student Research, and Creative Work

“The Misanthrope: Accepting the Notions of Molière for a Modern Society” demonstrates the conceptualization, rehearsal process, and critique of the direction for The Misanthrope, produced during the fall semester of 2010 for the Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film.  The conceptualization process included historical research of France during the 1660s and 2000s, meetings with the designers, and analysis of the play through structure and characters.  The process included design meetings and rehearsals.  The effectiveness of the production was demonstrated through the responses of four reviewers and a Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival respondent.  Additional material …

The Symbolic Creation Of Cultural Performance At The Walnut Valley Festival, Maggie Colleen Cobb

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Through two years of ethnographic fieldwork and 19 interviews, I synthesize symbolic interaction and a sociological framework of culture to examine the ways in which the Walnut Valley Festival is created and experienced as a unique form of cultural performance, one that is always shifting in response to the emergent cultural creation and reception of attendees. No work to date combines the dimensions of both production and reception of music festivals as a unique form of cultural performance. In bringing back the oftentimes ignored affective dimension in cultural studies, I use Griswold's (2004) metaphor of a cultural diamond, examining the …

Predicting Dating Violence Victimization Among College Women: The Role Of Previous Exposure To Violence And Acceptance Of Dating Violence, Marie Elisabeth Karlsson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Dating violence is a worldwide problem (Straus, 2004). The majority of empirical studies and conceptual models of dating violence have focused on perpetration, and examined the impact of prior exposure, positing an intergenerational transmission model. More recently, researchers have examined the influence of other moderating and mediating variables and hypothesized that attitudes, such as acceptance of dating violence, are an important variable to examine (Flynn & Graham, 2010; Lichter & McCloskey, 2004). Focusing on victimization, this study attempted to assess the applicability of the intergenerational hypothesis (previous exposure to violence, such as witnessing interparental abuse and childhood abuse) as well …

The Lived Experiences Of Participants In The Euchee/Yuchi Language Project: A Phenomenological Study Of Language Preservation, Jessica Park

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Native languages are disappearing quickly in this country, but there are many programs that are underway trying to save Native languages before they are gone. One such program is the Euchee/Yuchi Language Project which uses a modified version of the Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program (MALLP). Elder language speakers, masters, and younger members of the tribe, apprentices, meet daily in a two-hour language session. The goal of the session is to immerse the apprentices in the language by using conversational Euchee/Yuchi in the form of lessons, props, and presentations, so they can learn the language quickly. The purpose of this study …

Multicultural Education In The Music Classroom: Definitions, Methods, And Motives, Candace Rhnea Stafford-Davis

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study aimed to understand the multicultural teaching experiences of music teachers in the Fayetteville and Springdale public school districts through the lens of James Banks' four approaches to curriculum reform. The research was intended to add to the limited literature presently found on the definition of multicultural music education and how this type of education is implemented. The study also increased knowledge of teacher motives for implementing multicultural education in the music classroom and highlight challenges that lie within implementation. Purposive sampling was used and in an attempt to get an information rich sample, two schools were chosen from …