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Title: "Am I my other's keeper?" : alterity, dialogic representation and polyphonic ethical discourse in later antebellum American fiction
Creator: Gaertner, Stephen Andrew
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Hayden White argues that to create a narrative is to “moralize.” As historicists assert, the moral content of a narrative reflects the social, cultural and political discourses in which it is constructed as well as the ethical value systems that such discourses contain. However, context does not reveal the entire story. Mikhail Bakhtin holds that narratives are polyphonic, that is, they contain multiple, competing discourses, at times represented through singular idiolects. But what are these...
Show moreHayden White argues that to create a narrative is to “moralize.” As historicists assert, the moral content of a narrative reflects the social, cultural and political discourses in which it is constructed as well as the ethical value systems that such discourses contain. However, context does not reveal the entire story. Mikhail Bakhtin holds that narratives are polyphonic, that is, they contain multiple, competing discourses, at times represented through singular idiolects. But what are these various voices talking about, and to whom? Polyphonic or “carnivalesque” narratives rehearse and contest contrasting ethical paradigms, exposing their discursive limits as well as their transcendent possibilities in a given milieu. Thus, the text manifests the emergence of a dialogic exchange between ethical discourses, the yield of which is a creative destabilization that that resists the archaeological confinement of time, place and ideology. Therefore, I engage an ethical formalist rereading of a selection of antebellum narrative fictions in order to probe the discursive possibilities latent within the texts’ moral imaginaries. In addition to deploying Bakhtin’s work on polyphonic narrative, I use Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical theory of alterity that stresses the moral agent’s duty to respond on behalf of an individualized subject otherwise totalized by an oppressive, thematizing discourse. Whereas Levinas describes the moment of this ethical demand as the face-to-face encounter, I argue that the responsive duty suggested by the instance of inter-subjective recognition is represented within fiction as dialogue, in addition to the more subtle discourses that the narrator adds. Beyond exposing the text’s ethical tensions, these dialogic moments reflect the discursive polyphony theorized by Bakhtin, multi-vocal eruptions often signaled by a perichoresis of distinct idiolects. The works I discuss—James Fenimore Cooper’s Littlepage Trilogy, Herman Melville’s Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno,” Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig—all contain ethical discourses elaborated through idiolectical dialogic structures and polyphony. Furthermore, the context of their production—the late-antebellum United States—situates them within ethical conversations on totalization and interpersonal duty for the Other in that the modernizing republic was struggling with the moral implications of Indian removal, African slavery, urban labor, poverty and gender oppression. Yet, a Levinasian reading of antebellum U.S. literature invites looking beyond ideological power discourses. In addition to reflecting how American republicanism and capitalism of the mid-1800’s totalized, confined and dehumanized disempowered Others, these texts evidence rhetorical ambivalence respecting the status of the differentiated Other and the moral subject’s duty to the Other in a capitalist republic obsessed with categorical ordering and uncomfortable with ambiguity. Despite their concerns with political, social and ethical regulation, though, these polyphonic works contain transcendent ethical counter-discourses on duty and Otherness that expose a symbiosis between radical Others, peoples otherwise divided by contrasting ethical, political, cultural, racial or socioeconomic alignments.
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Title: "And they lynched him on a tree" : a critical analysis
Creator: Williams, Brandon (College teacher)
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The end of the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment freeing the slaves meant, at least in theory, that these newly freed individuals could begin to make the transition toward integration into American society as full citizens. White citizens opposed to the abolition of slavery were determined to assert their dominance and control and did so through a series of violent measures and discriminatory laws. Lynching was a primary way to demonstrate power and incite fear in...
Show moreThe end of the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment freeing the slaves meant, at least in theory, that these newly freed individuals could begin to make the transition toward integration into American society as full citizens. White citizens opposed to the abolition of slavery were determined to assert their dominance and control and did so through a series of violent measures and discriminatory laws. Lynching was a primary way to demonstrate power and incite fear in Black communities. Anti-lynching campaigns supported by both Black and White citizens took root in response to the violence. While literary and visual protest art that protested lynching seemed to flourish, there were surprisingly few musical counterparts. Despite years of what seemed like no hope for the resolution of racial turmoil and no models on which to base such a piece, William Grant Still and Catharine Garrison Chapin broke new ground by creating And They Lynched Him On A Tree, the first piece of concert music that protests lynching. This dramatic choral work for orchestra and racially divided choirs was well-received at its premiere, but the provocative title, intense subject matter, and atypical vocal forces have rendered it a less than desirable piece for performance. Its message is evermore resonant in today’s sensitive climate of race relations, social injustice, and perceived police brutality. And They Lynched Him On A Tree deserves to be performed not as a “token” work by an African American, but as a well-crafted American masterpiece and a plea for justice and peace. This study will present the historical and social context in which the work was composed; explore prominent artistic contributions to the anti-lynching campaign of the 1920s and 1930s; discuss the creative forces that merged to create this groundbreaking work; give a structural overview of the text and musical ideas; and provide suggestions that address some inherent performance and programming challenges.
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Title: "As if by accident." Nurturing cognitive skills in the U.S. and Finland : an intercultural exploration of two televised learning environments
Creator: Jackson, Jacqueline L., II
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This study is an intercultural exploration of programming for early learners in the televised learning environments in America and Finland. It aims to demonstrate that what is observable in schools and classrooms – pedagogical philosophy, instructional strategy, cognitive target and underlying cultural allowances and provisions which forward learning – is also evident in the brief space of the televised learning program. My thesis adheres to the broader theory of opportunity to learn (OTL),...
Show moreThis study is an intercultural exploration of programming for early learners in the televised learning environments in America and Finland. It aims to demonstrate that what is observable in schools and classrooms – pedagogical philosophy, instructional strategy, cognitive target and underlying cultural allowances and provisions which forward learning – is also evident in the brief space of the televised learning program. My thesis adheres to the broader theory of opportunity to learn (OTL), which suggests that formal learning is contingent upon student engagement, which is constrained by limited classroom and content coverage time (Schmidt et al., 2001, 2011; Schmidt & Maier, 2009). My interpretive approach demonstrates how OTL operates through cultural and social systems by example of the televised programs selected for study; and shows how these programs provide multiple encounters with cognitive content that reinforce and reproduce culturally preferred cognitive capabilities. I derive the proposed cognitive targets through qualitative analysis of problem-solving scenarios in one episode of each of the selected programs. The two programs present the occasion to 1) identify the cognitive skills targeted in the episodes studied; 2) to characterize the instructional strategies applied to reinforce the dominant cognitive task; 3) and to consider the underlying sociocultural assumptions in these two national settings that inform the pedagogical approach to shaping naturally developing, cognitive proclivities distinctively targeted in the two episodes. Findings suggest that Finnish play-based instructional strategies support the dynamics of children’s play space and heighten self-awareness, a central component of metacognition, by example of the problem-solving scenarios of the early learning program, Sana-Arkku. I suggest that the play-based deductive teaching strategies in these scenarios employ a challenge course intended to strengthen learners’ self-control. In contrast, the lesson from the problem-solving scenarios of the U.S. early learning program, Between the Lions, is cooperative work and cooperative inquiry. The teamwork approach in the problem-solving strategies of the characters Click, Cliff Hanger and Opposite Bunny emphasizes group projects in a K12 public education which expects prosocial skills, in particular, benevolence. While this pedagogical approach may have a strategic advantage in promoting democratic goals, it may present a strategic weakness for achieving academic excellence. The American focus in this comparative analysis raises the following vital question; what – in terms of cognitive development – the costs and benefits of this prosocial emphasis on group work may be to the individual learner. The implications for both the classroom and the televised learning spaces are clear: first is the need to design and test the effectiveness of metacognitively enriched exercises for classroom instruction aimed at enhancing individual cognitive development and, based on positive outcomes, to design, produce and test the effectiveness of metacognitively enriched children’s educational television programs across early learning student demographics. Positive outcomes would warrant policy revision in the recommended pedagogical approach in K12 classrooms, and a re-visitation of key legislation governing the level and type of cognitive content required in children’s educational television programming. This research has sought to find the missing element in the U.S. televised children’s learning experience, which could be helpful, specifically, to the academic achievement of low-income early learners; I believe that missing element is the effective promotion of metacognitive development.
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Title: "As long as I get to be me" : the formative experiences of early career female jazz instrumentalists
Creator: Penno, Anna
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: With the goal of helping to create a more inclusive environment in which jazz education can flourish, the purpose of this research is to explore the experiences of female early career jazz instrumentalists. Four female jazz instrumentalists whose college experiences were based at the same large university in a Midwestern state served as the participants for this qualitative instrumental case study. Data sources included individual interviews, a focus group interview, and field notes based on...
Show moreWith the goal of helping to create a more inclusive environment in which jazz education can flourish, the purpose of this research is to explore the experiences of female early career jazz instrumentalists. Four female jazz instrumentalists whose college experiences were based at the same large university in a Midwestern state served as the participants for this qualitative instrumental case study. Data sources included individual interviews, a focus group interview, and field notes based on observations of two participants' rehearsals and performances. Six major themes with sub-themes emerged from this study: (1) Perceptions of the influence of gender, (2) Influence of perceptions of place, (3) Influence of supportive relationships, (4) Resilience through personal characteristics, (5) Beneficial dispositions for improvisation, and (6) Salient improvisation teaching and learning approaches. Based on the findings, I recommended that music educators be cognizant of the overt and nuanced ways that gender can impact their students' experiences. This awareness could help educators recognize and minimize gendered preconceptions that could be perpetuated within their classrooms and facilitate an informed approach toward addressing gender-related challenges. Particular attention to the social dynamics among students may help to cultivate mutually respectful peer relationships. Students could benefit from both theoretical and aural approaches to improvisation learning as well as extensive opportunities to apply and enhance their abilities through performance.
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Title: "Being a good person in the system we already have will not save us" : interpreting how students embody and narrate the process of social change for sustainability using an agency/structure lens
Creator: Miller, Hannah K.
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: When undergraduates studying sustainability take action to make the change they want to see in their own lives, their communities, and the world, they often meet large, seemingly ossified systems that deflate their sense of efficacy. These students enter our classes and programs with a passion to effect change. The participants in this research, for example, dedicated a semester of their undergraduate careers to move to an ecological field station to study sustainability. During this semester...
Show moreWhen undergraduates studying sustainability take action to make the change they want to see in their own lives, their communities, and the world, they often meet large, seemingly ossified systems that deflate their sense of efficacy. These students enter our classes and programs with a passion to effect change. The participants in this research, for example, dedicated a semester of their undergraduate careers to move to an ecological field station to study sustainability. During this semester, participants worked to develop solutions to local environmental problems, but met various barriers to change during this process. How do students respond to these barriers? How do we, as educators, help construct opportunities for social transformation in the face of unsustainable, unjust, and inequitable systems? Using the agency/structure dialectic as a theoretical lens, this qualitative case study examined how students (a) narrate the process of social change for sustainability at various spatial scales, and (b) embody agency to work towards change for sustainability in their local contexts. Results suggest that students’ local experiences with sustainability work (e.g., classes, community problem-solving projects) are predictive of the way they then envision the process of social change for sustainability in abstract, leading to new and revised imagined futures. Results also suggest that not all students’ agency played a central role in shaping local systems, and therefore the ways they envision social change happening were constrained by their positionalities and experiences within their local communities.Implications for environmental and sustainability education programs include a call for long-term, collective action to (a) help our students examine their own narrated dialectics in time and space, (b) ensure our students have equitable opportunities to engage in local sustainability work, (c) develop a critical consciousness in predominantly White institutions about how local dialectics privilege White American narratives, (d) rethink what “local” means for racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students in rural American spaces, and (e) consider how our students’ local experiences with sustainability and working for social change impacts their learning.
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Title: "Being in the center of the projects" : urban education, structural inequities, and provisional resistance
Creator: Gaines, Leah Tonnette
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Public education in Baltimore City, Maryland faces many structural inequities, several of which are due to the lingering remnants of historical factors. Interviewing some of the educational staff members of Baltimore City Elementary School (BCES), I found that this specific school experiences health and environmental, socioeconomic, and educational inequalities. Conscious of these concerns, school leaders, teachers, and community members have resisted such injustices. Ultimately, the data...
Show morePublic education in Baltimore City, Maryland faces many structural inequities, several of which are due to the lingering remnants of historical factors. Interviewing some of the educational staff members of Baltimore City Elementary School (BCES), I found that this specific school experiences health and environmental, socioeconomic, and educational inequalities. Conscious of these concerns, school leaders, teachers, and community members have resisted such injustices. Ultimately, the data yielded patterns of provisional resistance. While this resistance is empowering and meaningful, it remains a short-term fix, and fails to create long-term solutions to structural inequities. Provisional resistance is limited in its abilities to actually solve oppressions, and instead works as a Band-Aid to mask or cover the problem as a means of momentary survival. This form of resistance does not remove agency or power from marginalized groups of people, but instead refocuses accountability on outside forces, and calls for the dismantling of structures.
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Title: "Better than they were before" : athletics and American military preparedness during the Great War
Creator: Clubine, Douglas Lincoln
Date: 1994
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Beur" culture as "metissage" in the works of Leila Sebbar
Creator: McCullough, Mary Elisabeth
Date: 2001
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Boil-off calorimetry" for determining food enthalpy
Creator: Groesbeck, Charles Wellington
Date: 1972
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Bold at the desk and the stove" : the re-imagining of American cuisine in the work of M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child
Creator: Parke, Michelle Kathleen
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Though often residing on the periphery of literary scholarship, the work of food studies and feminist scholars on the literatures of American domesticity and cookbooks, or collectively "domestic literacies," reveal a significant and too often ignored aspect of our nation's history--the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. While many of these scholars emphasize the intersection of labor, economics, and gender issues, culinary practice is an effective--and often overlooked--lens through which...
Show moreThough often residing on the periphery of literary scholarship, the work of food studies and feminist scholars on the literatures of American domesticity and cookbooks, or collectively "domestic literacies," reveal a significant and too often ignored aspect of our nation's history--the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. While many of these scholars emphasize the intersection of labor, economics, and gender issues, culinary practice is an effective--and often overlooked--lens through which we can examine how gender roles developed in a particular historical moment, how domesticity reflected the economic and sociopolitical discursive practices of the time, and how the nation's relationship to food evolved. Clearly arranging the multitude of discursive practices and domestic literacies involved in one historical period can be difficult; however, systems theory can serve as an effective method for organizing and comprehending how these discursive practices and texts are networked, how they inform and shape each other, how they co-evolve, and how they act recursively and reflexively.Examining domestic literacies from a specific historical moment, such as the immediate post-World War II era in which gender roles experienced scrutiny and American cuisine suffered an identity crisis, proves more productive than tackling a broad scope of texts. Authors M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child operate individually and collectively to create perturbations to the network of discursive practice systems that neighbor their texts. They work alongside and challenge texts, such as Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book that articulate problematic discourses about gender and domesticity, to reveal the complicated and multifarious relationship among domestic literacies, culinary practice, and this network. By examining these texts, we can further comprehend how the authors reshape the network of discursive practice systems and work to initiate the Good Food Movement that overhauls American cuisine and helps to construct the mid-century American national culinary identity.The iconic Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book serves as a representative text of the many domestic literacies in this period that functioned prescriptively and proffered conservative ideas of gender and domesticity. Though most often read simply as a cookbook, this text, when considered as part of the domestic literacies subsystem, reveals the multiple networked systems at work that shape the content of the text and how it is organized and structured. While Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book advocates a return to the kitchen for American women to serve their families, prolific food writer M.F.K. Fisher challenges such a linear and austere approach to culinary practice and gender in her text Map of Another Town. At the same time, in the early 1960s, Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking debuted and changed the American culinary landscape; it also operated alongside Fisher's work to change and shape American culinary practice. Decades later, Child's memoir, My Life in France, centering on the time leading up to the publication of her groundbreaking text sets the stage for the fundamental components of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and the broader culinary practice-as-art. Together, these texts, as a networked representative microcosm of the domestic literacies subsystem, function interdependently with the neighboring discursive practice systems, such as gender, labor, and economics, to alter American cuisine, culinary practice, and gender roles connected with the kitchen.
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Title: "Bring the boys home" : demobilization of the United States armed forces after World War II
Creator: Sharp, Bert Marvin, 1925-
Date: 1976
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Britain at its worst" : the fictional milieu of Patrick Hamilton
Creator: Johnsen, Rosemary Erickson
Date: 1997
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Building up a house of Israel in a land of Christ" : Jewish women in the antebellum and Civil War south
Creator: Stollman, Jennifer Ann
Date: 2001
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Busie head" liberalism
Creator: Smallpage, Steven Michael
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "Contemporary liberal theory has left us unable to generally understand and respond to the rise of political forces like populism, right-wing authoritarianism, and charismatic demagogues. I argue that the dangerousness of these movements is amplified by the inability of our liberal thinking to adequately grapple with messy "political" reality. My goal is to recast liberalism so as to tell us a more coherent story of our political life." -- Abstract.

Title: "But I'm not good at art" : preservice teachers' understanding of artistic response to children's and adolescent literature
Creator: Knezek, Suzanne M.
Date: 2007
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Can you help me?" : exploring the influence of a mentoring program on high school males' of color academic engagement and self-perception in school
Creator: Lewis, Curtis Levern
Date: 2011
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "The dissertation was guided by this major question: How do high school males of color describe and make sense of their academic engagement in school and self-perception while participating in an ecologically structured school-based mentoring program? For the ten high school males of color in this study I do an in-depth analysis using program observations, interviews, and data from journal writings to examine the meaning of their experiences in the program"--From abstract.