White Snake:A Representative Story Of The West Lake, Zhiying Chen

Theses - ALL

As one of the Four Classic Folktales of China, The Legend of the White Snake, which happened in Hangzhou, is a representative folktale of Chinese culture. The story has been developed for thousands of years and we see it as a reflection of Chinese history and culture.

The first part of the thesis is going to trace the development of this story back to its origin and analyze the changes in the content of each story version of The Legend of the White Snake with respect to its cultural, religious, and social backgrounds. Secondly, it will focus on contemporary writer …

The Heartman: The Impact Of Its Evolution On The Barbadian Cultural Landscape, Kelsia Kellman

Theses - ALL

The Heartman: The Impact of its Evolution on the Barbadian Cultural Landscape, examines the impact of cultural evolution on the Barbadian cultural landscape, using the folkloric belief of the Heartman as the point of focus. This thesis seeks through the analysis of newspaper articles, novels, graphic novels, short stories, and informal interviews to provide the historical and cultural backgrounds of Barbados, and to provide insight into the evolution that has taken place within society and how it is reflected within the minds of the Barbadian populace. In other words, how has the evolution of the Heartman affected the ways in …

Between Homeland And Hostland: Imagining Diasporic Indigeneity With The Center For Babaylan Studies, Elizabeth Rae Herrick

Theses - ALL

This thesis proposes "diasporic indigeneity" as a new heuristic tool for Religious Studies to capture how diasporic subjects evoke indigeneity through processes of religious/spiritual (re)indigenization. By reconnecting to lost homeland heritages while learning new hostland responsibilities, diasporic indigeneity begins to articulate how diasporic people can "belong to place(s)." Through textual analysis and ethnographic methods, the Center for Babaylan Studies (CfBS) serves as my case study. They represent an organization for Filipinx-Americans who grapple with colonial mentality from the historical colonization of the Philippines and their imbrication in ongoing Turtle Island settler colonialism. To heal from these intergenerational wounds, the CfBS …

Saint Jude's, May 15, 2022

Saint Jude's

A newsletter published for Deaf Catholics in Waltham, MA

Saint Jude's Finding Aid

St. Benedict Parish For The Deaf Church Bulletin, May 15, 2022

Saint Benedict Parish for the Deaf Church Bulletin

A newsletter published for Deaf Catholics in San Francisco, CA

Saint Benedict Parish for the Deaf Church Bulletin Finding Aid

An Exploration Of Self-Identity Experiences Within The Lives Of Afro-Caribbean Women Undergraduate College Students: A Feminist Phenomenological Study, Shana J. Gelin

Dissertations - ALL

The purpose of this feminist phenomenological dissertation was to explore the self-identity experiences of Afro-Caribbean women undergraduate college students. In doing so, self-identity experiences, ethnic marginalization, and counseling experiences were explored for six participants. Data was collected and analyzed using Simone De Beauvoir's feminist framework of self-discovery/ rediscovery where two semi-structured interviews were conducted for each participant. This study resulted in six individual profiles illuminating the voices of each participant as well as collective themes. Findings from this study show that Afro-Caribbean women undergraduate college students filter their self-identity experiences through their ethnicity; meaning that participants understand other pieces of …

Metaphysical Coherentism, Jan Swiderski

Dissertations - ALL

I defend metaphysical coherentism, according to which reality is an interdependent network, system, or web, held together by a relation philosophers call "metaphysical explanation" or "grounding". If coherentism is true, nothing is ungrounded, things ground each other, and understanding what it is to be any given thing – a tree, a house, or a person – is grasping how it fits in: how it grounds and is grounded by its environment.

Coherentism is inconsistent with a widely-accepted, orthodox view of grounding, according to which certain fundamental facts about reality asymmetrically determine everything else. In Chapter 1, I argue that this …

Receiving A Queen: A Queer And Trans Feminist Classical Reception Rhetorical Historiography Of Elagabalus, Thomas William Passwater

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation studies representations of Elagabalus, the sovereign of Rome who ruled between 218–222ce, after her assassination to examine how depictions and historical accounts of Elagabalus's life make rhetorical decisions about Elagabalus's identity and being that can foreground the composer's relationship to history and the function of history as a rhetorical force. Thus, this project, through studying Elagabalus's composers, raises questions about the nature of figure studies and history. The project draws on trans, queer, and feminist theories and rhetorics which help highlight the contingent and conflicting nature of Elagabalus's identities across representations without settling them into a singular narrative …

Fragmented Landscapes: An Archaeology Of Transformations In The Pra River Basin, Southern Ghana, Sean Hamilton Reid

Dissertations - ALL

This doctoral archaeological research examines the Pra River Basin in southern Ghana through lenses of landscape, temporality, and transformation. Drawing on the Annales school and the writings of Tim Ingold, this study moves away from binary constructions of natural and cultural landscape features toward a more integrated view of the landscape's long human history. The primary temporal focus of this research is the past three millennia but evidence recovered of even more ancient eras is also examined. The artifacts and features documented while surveying this landscape allow us to glimpse pre-Atlantic (pre-1450 CE) settlement patterns, subsistence, and technology, as well …

The Problem Of The "Virtual": Virtual Reality, Digital Dualism, And Religious Experience, Jordan Brady Loewen

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation uses resources from religious studies to critique the problem of digital dualism haunting notions of the "virtual" in the discourse of contemporary virtual reality technologies (VR). Digital dualism is the idea that digital or "virtual" worlds are fundamentally distinct from the "real" or physical world. Digital dualism is a problem because it mischaracterizes how we experience the spatial and temporal connections to our body in digital-virtual worlds and contributes to a false sense of subjective singularity rather than multiplicity that destabilizes how we relate to ourselves and others. Using the study of religion, philosophy, and aesthetics, we can …

Saving Salt City: Fighting Inequality Through Policy And Activism In Syracuse, Ny, 1955-1975, Scarlett Nicole Rebman

Dissertations - ALL

"Saving Salt City: Fighting Inequality through Policy and Activism in Syracuse, NY, 1955-1975" offers an in-depth exploration of civil rights and antipoverty struggles in the Salt City between 1955 and 1975. It centers the agency of activists who built interracial and cross-class organizations through which they contested the marginalization and segregation of Black Syracusans. By examining the struggles around major issues including education, housing, police brutality, employment, and a broader vision of economic justice, "Saving Salt City" documents the alternative visions and unrealized agendas for change generated by citizens in Northern urban spaces. This project recovers Syracuse's legacy as a …

An Overheated Debate: The Influence Of Premillennial Apocalyptic Rhetoric On Climate Reform Discourse In The United States, David Charles Gall-Maynard

Dissertations - ALL

Despite decades of scientific research and increased civil and governmental calls for reform, the United States continues to spiral toward climate catastrophe. Apocalyptic rhetoric helps us understand how even the most pressing environmental and societal threats are perceived differently according to audiences' rhetorical and ideological frameworks. Drawing on the work of Barry Brummett and Kenneth Burke, I argue that the premillennial sub-genre of apocalyptic rhetoric constitutes a rhetorical frame through which many secular climate reformers and evangelical Christians make sense of the environmental and societal impacts of climate change. In chapters that analyze secular and Christian climate reform discourse and …

Lawrence T. Odom: Techniques And Commentary On Arranging For The Wind Band, Clinton L. Williams

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Orchestral works transcribed for wind and percussion ensembles have been a standard component of the performance literature throughout the twentieth century to the present. Though an increasing number of composers were beginning to write original works of merit for wind bands during the mid-twentieth century, selections from the orchestral canon remained a staple of secondary school, college, community, and military wind and percussion ensembles.

This study analyzes the textural, rhythmic, and harmonic elements of Lawrence T. Odom’s transcription techniques used arranging masterworks for the United States Air Force Band from 1958 to present day. He transcribed over three hundred orchestral …

Enter Homo Oeconomicus: Civic Motivation And Civic Education In Aristophanic Comedy, Konstantinos Karathanasis

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

By the mid-fifth century BCE, the Athenian polis had introduced payments for the performance ofan array of civic duties, and Aristotle suggests in his Politics that the effectiveness of monetary incentives in greasing the wheels of a state’s apparatus was widely recognized. In Aristophanic comedy, these incentives are systematically presented as the strongest motivational factor for everyday citizens who participated in judge-panels or the Assembly. In three Aristophanic plays, incentives and the behavioral problems surrounding them area major component of the plot. In Knights, old Demos is a self-serving individual who takes advantage of equally self-serving rhētores for the sake …

Victimhood And Its Perversion: Masochistic Narratives And Cultural Identity In Cold War Central Europe, Katja Perat

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers an analysis of the recurring trope of female masochism in Central European literary postmodernism. It investigates five foundational novels, from both sides of the Iron Curtain, written between 1961 and 1986: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and Repetition, and Stanisław Lem’s Solaris. The dissertation argues that these texts deploy representations of female masochism in order to frame the relationship between culture and subject-building, against the background of the region’s borderland status within the cognitive map created by the Cold War. Despite the fact that …

Adjusting To Change: Learning American Sign Language Online During A Global Pandemic, Kara Gournaris

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

Second language acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) requires opportunities for engagement with native language models (Krashen, 1988). The shift to online instruction due to the impact of COVID-19 presented unique challenges for ASL programs across the United States. With little time to redesign courses, instructors and students had to navigate the experience of online learning together. The students who participated in this 2020 study at Western Oregon University (WOU) shared their raw experiences related to this transition, and unfortunately, one year later, many of the same barriers reported by students persist. The purpose of this article is to share …

How To Survive The Apocalypse: Using Film, Television, And Video Games As Gateways To Self-Analysis, Braeden Raymer

Theses - ALL

This thesis serves as an investigation on the use of film, television, and video games as access points for personal analysis in imagined scenarios. When creating a fictional world, characters' motivations and behaviors are often based on real-life experiences. In the apocalypse genre, understanding how a character might behave in such an extreme circumstance can be difficult to predict, considering few have lived through comparable conditions. To supplement personal experiences and observations, a creator might use other stories as gateways to self-examination. The investigation begins in film, exploring how stories provide a viewer with new experiences that they can then …

The Wailing Of The Streets: Novelistic Form And The Everyday In Voyage In The Dark And Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit, Tutkunur Vatansever

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

In 1911, before the increased attention to everyday life in critical theory, György Lukács contemplated the concept of trivial life and its relation to literary form. The recent theories of everyday life like that of Blanchot – emphasizing its formlessness and defiance of subjectivity – invite us to address the variance in the modernist novelistic form in the framework that Lukács outlined. In Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys and Voyage au bout de la nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, both published in the 1930s, the pain and suffering of everyday life on the streets diffuse into the form of …

American Transcendentalism Contra Contemporary Political Philosophy: Applications Of Thomas Carlyle And Ralph Waldo Emerson To Liberal Democratic Capitalism, Platonism, Islamism, Technology, And The "End Of History", Brian Wolfel

Dissertations - ALL

I construct Thomas Carlyle's political philosophy in the contexts of twentieth-century and contemporary political philosophy by dialoging and contrasting Carlyle with the work of John Rawls, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jacques Ellul, and Sayyid Qutb, among others. I also focus my attention on Carlyle as a philosopher who is an intermediary between ancient Platonism and nineteenth-century American Transcendentalism. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus is a Platonic text that provided a foundational inspiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and American Transcendentalism writ-large. Despite Carlyle being a chief source of inspiration for American Transcendentalism, his political theory did not inspire the development of a …

The Benefits Of Reading For Pleasure, And How To Instill A Lifelong Love Of Reading In Students, Anna-Catherine Kueng

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Representations Of The Cuban Revolution In The American Gaze: The Case Of African-American Activists, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

For more than six decades, the Cuban Revolution has been the object of representation by foreign authors―historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and also poets and writers. After the triumph of Fidel Castro on January 1, 1959, his revolution captured the imagination of U.S. intellectuals and activists. Many of them traveled to Cuba to become witnesses of the radical transformations that were taking place there. In my dissertation, I suggest that visiting Cuba was important for them to authenticate their views. Writing from Castro’s Cuba lent legitimacy to their narratives, with which they hoped to influence U.S. public opinion.My focus is …

Not Like Other Girls: Feminist Modernisms, Domestic Labor, And The Trouble With Conventional Women, Ana Elizabeth Quiring

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation demonstrates the centrality of conventional womanhood to feminist literary history. As women gained access to voting rights, universities, and professions in the early years of the twentieth century, some writers sought to distinguish themselves from old-fashioned, domestic women in order to fashion themselves as uniquely modern. Not like Other Girls argues that this gesture of contradistinction has formed a core component of the feminist modernist ethos, both for early century writers and their scholarly reception. In response to this rift between the modern and the conventional, the dissertation gives an account of conventionality’s presence in modern feminist life. …

Riding The Bahn, Reading Berlin: Berlin In Transit(Ion) From Reichshauptstadt To Weltstadt (1871-1930), Mikael Olsson Berggren

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Riding the Bahn, Reading Berlin: Berlin in Transit(ion) from Reichshauptstadt to Weltstadt (1871-1930) is a study of the relationship between Berlin’s public transit network and representations of the city in literature and film. The ride within the confines of the city differs from journeys with the national railway, and the passenger’s encounter with urban space diverges from the perambulating flâneur. Although Berlin’s intra-urban transit system relied on horse-drawn carriages and busses until the construction of the Stadtbahn in the 1880s, the number of passengers commuting and traveling in and around Berlin grew exponentially each year between the 1870s to the …

Literary Decadence And Critical Decay, Kevin David Beverage

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways in which literary decadence works against the tendency of literary history, scholarship, and literary institutions to make permanent—to monumentalize—certain styles, names, or movements. It does this through an examination of the role of criticism in decadent texts, and that criticism’s resistance to the “technologies of maintenance” working to guarantee permanence. After examining Oscar Wilde’s notion of criticism as conversational and that which comes before the work of art, thus breaking the permanency of the work of art, I shift to an analysis of two novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. Fitzgerald’s This Side …

African American Opera Singers, 1850-1950: Ambition, Uplift, And Performance, Elena Arredondo Farel

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores African American engagement with opera in the United States between the 1850s—when Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, dubbed the “Black Swan,” drew comparisons to white superstar Jenny Lind—and the 1940s, when Black singers began to access “white” stages such as the Metropolitan. I foreground how musicians who knew they would never receive a fair hearing acted not just as singers, but as entrepreneurs, managers, composers, and collaborators in order to create careers for themselves. In order to do so, these singers navigated a complex set of aspirations and realities. Black opera singers engaged with ideologies of racial uplift, contemporary …

Cripping Utopia: Revolutionary Psychocorporealities In Cuba And The Diaspora, Charlotte Emily Merrigan

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

As a utopian, anti-imperialist project, Cuba’s 1959 Revolution consolidated idealized performances of revolutionary citizenship, in the process regulating ideal forms of embodiment and/or cognition and narrowing the parameters of what good health and productive social reform meant. “Cripping Utopia” therefore challenges the putative able-bodiedness and able-mindedness of the archetypal revolutionary citizen. Throughout the project, I translate and adapt concepts from the historically Anglo-centric field of Critical Disability Studies to the context of the Cuban revolutionary process, from 1959 to the early 2000s. Unlike capitalist or neoliberal societies that make disability into a reason for exclusion or a source of profit, …

Energy Portraits For Flute, Clarinet In B-Flat, Violin, Cello, Piano, And Percussion, Luis Solis

Music Theses and Dissertations

Energy Portraits is a 25-minute work for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion based on the nine Enneagram personality types. The Enneagram system delves into underlying motivations and thought patterns of different people rather than only external behaviors, so this piece incorporates the typical overall energy of each number as a miniature portrait. The movements are not in the same order as the nine types from the Enneagram but are reordered and renamed for musical reasons. This allows the listeners who are not familiarized with the Enneagram to still understand the theme and energy of each movement.

Flourish is …

Has The Philosophical Case For Animal Liberation Been Proved? A Systematic And Narrative Review Of The Philosophical Literature 1975-2020., Michael Morris

Between the Species

I test the hypothesis proposed by Peter Singer that the philosophical case for animal liberation has been won, through a systematic review of papers published by philosophers between 1975 and 2020.

There was a slight but statistically significant correlation between support for an animal liberation vegan position, with year of publication. Support for a better treatment of animals than currently sanctioned by society increased significantly among papers discussing general principals of animal ethics.

Findings support a weaker version of Singer's hypothesis. Among the philosophical community there is greater support for animal liberation, but the debate has not been ‘won’.

The Modern Wesley Class Meeting - Bringing Accountability, Practical Faith, And Personal Connection Into Established Local Congregations, Roger Graham Clayton Jr

Doctor of Ministry Projects and Theses

This paper is an attempt to resurrect the Wesleyan class meeting in to the modern day congregation in order to build stronger and more vibrant communities. By examining the historical footprint of the class meeting in Wesley's Britain and the beginning of the American experiment, the core attributes of the class meeting are extracted to be accountability, vulnerability, and practical faith.

This paper also attempts to show that these core principles of the class meeting are still present in the modern world outside of the church to great success within the military, non-denominational faith groups, and in the battle against …

A Practical Guide For A New 21st Century Prison Outreach Ministry Model - Mass Incarceration, Criminal Reform And Reentry-The Role And Response Of Churches And Para-Church Organizations, Robert G. Danage, Robert G. Danage

Doctor of Ministry Projects and Theses

ABSTRACT

The numbers are staggering and shocking. The United States of America leads all nations in having more people incarcerated in its federal and state prisons, jails, and detention centers. This thesis project is the lived experience of having had a ringside seat of human depravity and the effects of mass incarceration. Over the past 30 years, I have been on the front lines serving the inside behind the impenetrable menacing walls of our nation’s federal prison system Department of Justice Federal Bureau Prison (DOJ-FBOP), State prison system in Texas (TDCJ) as well as inside of a Naval Brig doing …