Arts and Humanities Commons^™

James And Shakespeare: Unification Through Mapping, Christina Wagner

ETD Archive

The art of exploration became an important aspect of theater in early modern England. Exploration is typically done through the utilization of a map. The map scene in Lear provides a focal point to peer into the political ventures of King James I. As a proponent for peace, James both unified and divided his kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland through the use of cartography as a way to show the aspirations of a king. Lear, in dividing his kingdom between his three daughters, shows Shakespeare's careful strategic planning of the division of a kingdom and what that means in …

The Hill Fire And Other Stories, Michael Ervin Putnam

ETD Archive

The following stories contained here are the culmination of two year's work in the realm of the short story. In that time, I have further honed my writing voice and shaped these works in a way where they work in conjunction with each other as well as on their own. An over-arching theme I have in the work is a character (in these instances, specifically a man) who is unsatisfied with his current position in life but unwilling to put forth much effort to make a significant change. In some instances, that change is then forced upon the character by …

Dance With Me Tonight, Yae Ram Jeong

ETD Archive

Both music and poetry are used to describe experiences and communicate feelings. They express feelings or situations that are meaningful to the artists and speak to every level of emotion. I believe all music has expressive power, some musical works reveal this more than others, but all music carries meaning, with each work uniquely expressing that meaning. Dance With Me Tonight, a poem by Kristi Day, year unknown, has 12 stanzas. The work is mostly used in weddings and anniversaries. As much as I understood of the author's work, the piece begins in a minor mood setting to demonstrate the …

19th Century Sea Shanties: From The Capstan To The Classroom, Sharon Marie Risko

ETD Archive

Sea shanties were much more than simple folk songs of the sea. They were an integral tool in wooden ship operations in the 19th century. They include universal themes that connect us with the past telling us tales of love, adventure, far away destinations, and of trials and tribulations. The tunes are rollicking, the refrains memorable, and are to be sung with ultimate abandon. When brought into the classroom, teachers can introduce musical concepts, enrich lessons, and encourage student participation through the rousing singing of sea shanties. In this study the historical evolution and function of sea shanties are explored. …

Legacy Of Shame: A Psychoanalytic History Of Trauma In The Bluest Eye, Martina Louise Hayes

ETD Archive

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s troubling short novel which focuses on the lives of a traumatized and disempowered African-American family and the community in which they live. The book openly discusses a variety of social taboos carried out by various members of a Black community in Lorain, Ohio. The most disturbing being the rape of a young Black girl, resulting in pregnancy by her father. Through the omniscient narration of a teenage girl, readers are thrown into the lives and thoughts of the adults and children within this community as they attempt to deal with these extraordinary situations as …

Contextualizing Chester Himes's Trajectory Of Violence Within The Harlem Detective Cycle, Bailey A. Capelle

ETD Archive

Long Civil Rights Movement scholars have begun to reconstruct a more accurate representation of the literary left, filling in the gap in scholarship that previously existed between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. With the aid of the backdrop set up by the "Long Movement" scholars, this study aims to add to the understanding of those authors who lives and works have yet to be fully explored because of the ramifications of the McCarthy era. This discussion focuses on Chester Himes, for his work is as influential as both Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison's, yet Himes has only …

Sexualizing The Body Politic: Narrative The Female Body And The Gender Divide In Secret History, Eileen A. Horansky

ETD Archive

Recent studies of eighteenth-century women writers have focused on the role of women as developers and proponents of the secret history. The secret history, recently defined by scholars such as Rebecca Bullard, Melinda Alliker Rabb, Ros Ballaster, Marta Kvande, and Rachel Carnell, among others, occupies space within several genres, including political satire and historiography. The genre's secretive nature and reliance on gossip and anecdotal evidence creates a new space for women writers that allows them to enter political discourse and offer a distinctly gendered social commentary. As public became private and private became secret, secret historians sought to expose the …

The Liquid Nature Of Self In Maxine Kingston's Autobiographical Story The Woman Warrior, Evelyn Jablonski

ETD Archive

This work examines the notion of self in the autobiographical narrative of Maxine Hong Kingston. Self-writing is constructing a discursive body, and Kingston presents the reader with a unique articulation of her identity. Conventional autobiographical narratives tend to define a self as an opposition to the other. In such texts the literary discourse is intended to secure the integrity of the self. This image of the self can be called conventional. While the conventional narrative self claims to demonstrate developmental stages of an individual that acquires his or her maturity by the end of the quest, the constantly changing self …

Interactions With A Violent Past: Reading Post Conflict Landscapes In Cambodia, Laos, And Vietnam, Michitake Aso

History Faculty Scholarship

A review of "Interactions with a Violent Past: Reading Post-Conflict Landscapes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam" by Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe

"Fighting Over A Shadow?": Hellenistic Greek Cities And Greco-Roman Cities As Fora And Media For Multi-Level Social Signaling, Luann Wandsnider

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

The cities of Hellenistic western Anatolia and Roman Asia Minor served as fora for complex social, economic, and political transactions. This chapter introduces social signaling theory in which these transactions are considered as social signals emitted by individuals (i.e., citizens) and groups (i.e., cities) and emphasizes the different qualities of these signals, especially their materiality and differential costliness. Social signals convey information about the otherwise difficult-to-assess capabilities of individual and groups; only some have the talents or resources to emit a high-quality signal. At the individual level, the nature, location, and possibly size of a civic benefaction signal’s an individual’s …

Conflicting Commitments: The Politics Of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights In San Jose And Houston, Jacqueline Hayes

Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies Other Graduate Student Scholarship

A review of "Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston" by Shannon Gleeson.

Condorcet And I - A Fictional Conversation Between Condorcet And Me: On The Outlines Of An Historical View Of The Progress Of The Human Mind, Michael S. Christopher

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

The thesis’ main question is: Has the reality of Condorcet’s Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind been realized with humanity becoming perfect, as Condorcet indicates? In answering that question, my thesis contention will present the fictional encounter between Condorcet and me in which we debate Condorcet’s essay. The two of us will embark upon our world views of humanism and theism in a dramatic debate, presenting our perspectives and try to get to a resolution.

Post-Colonial Female Identity: An Examination Of The Twentieth Century Narrative Between Nation And Identity In A Question Of Power, See Then Now, And Americanah, Jeannine Ortega

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

This project endeavors to explore the variations of the post-colonial condition in the context of the twentieth and twenty-first century by following a literary analysis of Bessie Head’s A Question of Power, Jamaica Kincaid’s See Now Then, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. This thesis hopes to draw together a series of snapshots that provide examples of the progress of the post-colonial condition. Each chapter models the ways in which colonial ideology and culture continue to intersect in new modes of societal expectations especially in terms of race, class, and gender. The combination of post-colonial analysis and literary narratives model how …

Educating For The Twenty-First Century: A Pragmatist's View On The Dichotomy Of Stem And Liberal Arts, Emilie L. Mears

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Current American rhetoric pushes a purely STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) curriculum under societal pressure to pull funds from liberal arts programs and train workers as cheaply and quickly as possible. When this happens, higher education is no longer a means of learning and acquiring the tools for adaptability, ethic responsibility, and civic courage, but a commodity, bought and sold for immediate employment. While advocates for STEM-focused education aim to boost the nation’s economic productivity and global competitiveness, many worry that neglecting the arts and humanities will lead to a one-sided education that fails our culture and society by …

Symposer's Dream, Mehdi Taifi

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

This is a creative writing project titled Symposer’s Dream. The first part is the novel itself (seventy pages) and the second part is a research paper (fifteen pages). The novel is about a young former wall street guy who goes through a journey of a lifetime in search of meaning and a sense of belonging. He ends up travelling to the Canary Islands and eventually finds himself in Morocco where he discovers new truths and realities that end up changing his life. Many events in the story intertwine fiction and reality in such a way that make it challenging for …

Parramore And The Interstate 4: A World Torn Asunder (1880-1980), Yuri K. Gama

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

The present project centers on how the African American community of Parramore in Orlando, Florida, became a low-income neighborhood. Based on a timeline from 1880 to 1980 and the construction of the Interstate 4, this thesis investigates Parramore’s decline grounded in the effects of urban sprawl and racial oppression. Among the effects that contributed to the neighborhood's decline in the postwar era were the closing of black schools and the migration of black residents to other places after the 1960s; the disruption of the neighborhood with the construction of highways and public housing; and the lack of investment in new …

The Literary Representations And Interpretations Of La Matanza, Roxana Zuniga

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines the literary representations and interpretations of La Matanza, a Salvadoran massacre that occurred in 1932. A peasant-led uprising resulted in the assassination of thousands of campesinos and indigenous people by General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez's repressive military regime. As a result of government repression and censorship, the events surrounding La Matanza were intentionally omitted from Salvadoran history for many decades. Despite these censorship efforts, writers like Roque Dalton, Claribel Alegría, Salarrué and Manlio Argueta defied authoritarian government repression and incorporated the events of La Matanza into their writing. The literary texts that this dissertation analyzes are: Salarrué's "Mi …

Adolescents' Characterization Of Their Neighborhood Through An Art-Based Community Project, Eileen Finnegan

Wayne State University Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to study adolescent participation in the development of a neighborhood mural as an art-based community project. I examined perceptions of the adolescents regarding the awareness of their community and neighborhoods. Additionally, I explored adolescents' perceptions of their own development in terms of building their self-confidence. To accomplish this, I facilitated the creation and design of a mural that depicts their perceptions of their neighborhoods, using art as a modality for expression. Fourteen seventh grade students attending a parochial school in a low socioeconomic area of a large metropolitan city participated in the study. They …

Code-Switching, Code-Mixing And Radical Bilingualism In U.S. Latino Texts, Roshawnda A. Derrick

Wayne State University Dissertations

My dissertation, Code-switching, Code-mixing and Radical Bilingualism in U.S. Latino texts investigates the nature and significance of Spanish-English code-switching in U.S. Latino texts. I analyze fiction, creative non-fiction, journalistic texts, songs, and social media messages and I carry out a grammatical and sociolinguistic analyses of these texts. Although many of these texts would fall into Torres’ (2007) Radical Bilingualism category, I point out that there are in fact different ways in which a text can be radically bilingual and I show that some of these texts are approaching Auer’s (1999) notion of a fused lect. From a sociolinguistic point of …

Personal Identity, Survival And What Matters, James Alexander Gromak

Wayne State University Dissertations

Since the entire discussion of personal identity revolves around the identity of a person it is difficult to address these issues without presupposing that identity is maintained. In this dissertation, I propose an alternative approach to discussing the topic of personal identity (at least initially). This alternative approach is from the perspective of what I call ‘continuance’. I use ‘continuance’ to refer to some kind of ‘continuing life’ that is embodied in some person or persons. The term will be used as a neutral term for discussing the continuity of a person without any implications of identity. That is, in …

A Recursive Service Learning Program: Empowering Students Of Color Traveling Within Community Borders, Cindy Lynn Mooty-Hoffmann

Wayne State University Dissertations

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The Experiences Of Black American Older Adults Managing Pain: A Nursing Ethnography, Sheria Grice Robinson

Wayne State University Dissertations

Introduction: Pain can negatively affect quality of life for Black elders. They are less likely to report pain concerns and have voiced pain needs adequately met. To better understand the pain management experiences and concerns of Black elders, an ethnographic study was completed within an urban, low-income, elder housing facility. Methods: 106 participants completed a questionnaire comprised of a demographic tool, the PROMIS Global Health Scale (PROMIS), the Brief Pain Inventory (BPI), and the Psychological Stress Measure (PSM-9). Additionally, participant observation, informal interviews, and 20 formal recorded interviews with individuals identified as having pain were completed. Qualitative and frequency analysis …

The Role Of Nostalgia In The Literature Of The Caribbean Diasporas – Linking Memory, Globalization And Homemaking, Lukasz Dominik Pawelek

Wayne State University Dissertations

My dissertation, The Role of Nostalgia in the Literature of the Caribbean Diasporas – Linking Memory, Globalization and Homemaking, investigates diverse manifestations of nostalgia in the literature of Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican diasporas. My study offers a comparative analysis of Esmeralda Santiago’s Cuando era puertorriqueña (1994), Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s Next Year in Cuba (1995), and Junot Díaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008).

My approach to the notion of nostalgia as a syndrome of globalization offers a valuable contribution to the Caribbean diasporic narrative and by extension to the canon of the U.S. Latino/a Literature. The …

Sex, Labor, And The American Way: Detroit Aesthetic In Mid-Twentieth-Century Literature, Jenna F. Gerds

Wayne State University Dissertations

The essay analyzes Sinclair Lewis short fiction in If I Were Boss, U.S.A. by John Dos Passos, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, and Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr. The primary literature is juxtaposed with a study of visual texts and historic research with a locational and thematic basis in Detroit. Ford Times and early automobile advertisements, Diego Rivera's mural Detroit Industry, photographs of the Sojourner Truth housing project riots, and the accounts of gay union workers comprise a framework for each of the central texts. Detroit aesthetic is gritty, realist, …

Chivalric Lieux De Memoire: Nostalgia, Communal Memory, And The Burden Of Historical Consciousness In Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, Wilkie Collins

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation attempts to position Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur as a response to the anxieties of a turbulent social period. To start, I establish the political and social climate of fifteenth-century England, drawing on the work of historians to demonstrate the disequilibrium of communal institutions, particularly during the Wars of the Roses. Utilizing the work of Johan Huizinga I argue that the troubling political atmosphere of the period in question contributes to, and is reflected in, Malory's exploration of a narrative tradition that no longer maintains an authentic continuity to the past. Drawing on Pierre Nora's theoretical opposition between …

An Argument For A Neutral Free Logic, Daniel Yeakel

Wayne State University Dissertations

I argue for a neutral free logic is a logic wherein sentences containing non-referring terms do not have truth value. The primary support for this conclusion comes by way of criticism of the alternatives. If every sentence of the form `a = a' is a logical truth and is consequently knowable a priori then it will follow absurdly that `a exists' is knowable a priori. There are several alternatives for avoiding this intolerable conclusion and I argue that, with the exception of neutral free logic which holds that `a = a' can lack truth value, their successes are not sufficient …

Coelum Britannicum: Inigo Jones And Symbolic Geometry, Rumiko Handa

Architecture Program: Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity

Inigo Jones’s interpretation that Stonehenge was a Roman temple of Coelum, the god of the heavens, was published in 1655, 3 years after his death, in The most notable Antiquity of Great Britain, vulgarly called Stone-Heng, on Salisbury Plain, Restored.¹ King James I demanded an interpretation in 1620. The task most reasonably fell in the realm of Surveyor of the King’s Works, which Jones had been for the preceding 5 years. According to John Webb, Jones’s assistant since 1628 and executor of Jones’s will, it was Webb who wrote the book based on Jones’s “few indigested” notes, on …

The House Of Our Ancestors: New Research On The Prehistory Of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, A.D. 800–1200, Carrie Heitman

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

In a paper honoring the career of archaeologist Gwinn Vivian presented at the Society for American Archaeology 70th annual meeting, Toll and others (2005) discussed the still often-overlooked role of small house sites in Chacoan prehistory. They pointed out that many of the attributes we reserve for the category of “great house” are in fact present at some small house sites and that both the diversity and overlapping characteristics across this dichotomy require greater attention if we are to understand “how Chaco worked.” In this chapter, I present contextual data from 12 house assemblages through a comparative theoretical and ethnographic …

An Exhortation To Study God’S Two “Books”, Daniel C. Peterson

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

From the birth of modern science at the end of the sixteenth century, Galileo famously believed that God had written two books — the scriptures and the Book of Nature. The scriptures, he contended, should be interpreted by scholars and theologians, whereas the Book of Nature was the province of scientists:

Cracking The Book Of Mormon’S “Secret Combinations”?, Gregory L. Smith

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

The Book of Mormon has been explained by some as a product of Joseph Smith’s 19th century environment. Advocates of this thesis have argued that the phrase secret combinations is a reference to Freemasonry, and reflects Joseph’s preoccupation with this fraternity during the Book of Mormon’s composition in 1828 29. It is claimed that this phrase is rarely, if ever, used in a non Masonic context during 1828–29, and that a type of “semantic narrowing” occurred which restricted the term to Freemasonry. Past studies have found a few counter-examples, which are reviewed, but none from during the precise years of …