From the late Victorian period to the early twentieth century, Arthur Machen's life and his writing provide what Deleuze and Guattari argue to be the value of the minor author: Contemporary historical streams combine in Machen's fiction and non-fiction. The concerns and anxieties in the writing reflect developments in their times, and exist amid the questions incited by positivist science, sexological studies, and the dissemination and popularity of Darwin's theories and the interpretations of Social Darwinism: What is the integrity of the human body, and what are the relevance and varieties of spiritual belief. The personal and the social issues of materiality and immateriality are present in the choice of Machen's themes and the manner in which he expresses them. More specifically, Machen's use of place and his interest in numinosity, which includes the negative numinous, are the twining forces where the local and the common, and the Ideal and the esoteric, meet. His interest in Western esotericism is important because of the Victorian occult revival and the ritual magic groups' role in the development of individual psychic explorations. Occultism and the formation of ritual magic groups are a response to deep-seated cultural concerns of industrialized, urban modernity. Within the esoteric traditions, the Gnostic outlook of a fractured creation corresponds to the cosmogony of a divided cosmos and the disjointed realities that are found in Machen's late-Victorian literary horror and supernatural fiction. The Gnostic microcosm, at the local level, and the mesocosm, at the intermediary position, are at a remove from the unified providence of the greater macrocosm. The content of the texts that I will analyze demonstrates Machen's interest in the divided self (with inspiration from Robert Louis Stevenson), and those texts consider the subject of non-normative sexuality and its uncanny representations, natural and urban, as a horror that is attractive and abject--a source of fascination and a cause of disgust. The view that I state is that Machen wrote late-Victorian, post-Romantic Gothic literature that is not dependent upon either the cares of Decadence for artificiality or the disavowal of Gnosticism of the worth of mortal life and experiences in the material world. Machen's outlook is similar to Hermeticism, and like the Hermeticists he enjoyed many of the pleasures available in the world and in the narratives of ecstatic wonder that he found: the power of archetypal myth and local lore; good food and drink; travel between country and city; and close associations with friends and family, modest in number and rich in quality. The Great God Pan, The Three Impostors, or, The Transmutations, "The White People," and the autobiographies Far Off Things and Things Near and Far are the primary sources in my study. The enchantment of place and the potential and active horrors of the countryside and the city of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods inform Arthur Machen's life and his literary world. The influence of Machen's childhood in his native county of Gwent, in South Wales, and his adult residency in everywhere from low-rent to more-desirable areas of London feature prominently in two volumes of his fiction, which appeared in the influential Keynotes Series published by John Lane's Bodley Head Press in the 1890s: The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light (1894), and The Three Impostors, or, The Transmutations (1895). Those works of fiction indicate a major pattern in Machen's outlook and imagination. For instance, the The Great God Pan presents Machen's late-Victorian re-invention of Pan, the classical rustic Arcadian god of Greek mythology. The Pan demon--or sinister Pan--evidences an aspect of threatening vitalistic nature that appears at the indefinite center of sexual concealment. Male characters act in secrecy by necessity due to the Labouchère Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Machen uses the more beneficent, affirming aspects of the Pan figure for the short story "The White People" (1899) in the long middle section titled The Green Book. However, threats to female adolescence and sexual sovereignty, and contending principles of female and male energies, unpredictably strike through the more sinister and in the more beneficent of Machen's tales, which include the prose poems of Ornaments in Jade. These factors sometime destroy life, and seldom conceive or sustain its creation. Yet the presence of esoteric concepts in those same narratives offers non-rational alternatives to the attainment of gnosis. The Three Impostors, the second of Machen's Keynotes volumes, with its plot of conspiracies and dark secrets not only suggests Machen's interest in the criminal underworld and involvement with the ritual magic groups of the late-nineteenth century, but also his caution about the dark attraction of that glamour and how those occult groups and leaders operated. The Horos case and trial of 1901 and the Charles Webster Leadbeater scandal of 1906 provide support for Machen's circumspection. However, as a skeptic of the occult in practice, but as a reader and writer who had a deep interest in the esoteric as a subject of study, Machen's literary writing presents a variety of tensions between belief in the idealism of spiritual realities and the necessity for clear and grounded reason in consideration of preternatural phenomena. The interest in the abnormal functioning of bodies, a convention of Gothic fiction, appears in Machen's work in correspondence to the status of Sexology and the proliferation of studies of human sexuality in the late Victorian period. Especially important is the concept of sexual inversion, a term for homosexuality that was popularized in the works of the scientific researchers Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), and Havelock Ellis, in Sexual Inversion (co-authored by John Addington Symonds), which is the first volume of Ellis's series Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897). The final chapters of Machen's The Great God Pan are set in 1888 in London, and there is a direct reference to the White Chapel murders (i.e., the Ripper crimes). Therefore, I analyze Machen's fiction for its gendered focus on abhuman qualities, abnormal behavior, and violence: the abhuman as understood by Kelly Hurley, and violence in London as a version of Walkowitz's London as City of Dreadful Delight. Another historical context exists because the year before Machen finished the first chapter, "The Experiment," the Cleveland Street affair and its scandal occurred and included a royal intervention from the Prince of Wales to halt any prosecutions (1889). In The Great God Pan, Helen Vaughan, who passes from salons in Mayfair to houses of assignation in Soho, represents a dynamic, unified force of being and becoming that draws from and revises the multiple but fractured personality of Stevenson's Jekyll. Likewise, The Green Book girl in the short fiction "The White People" experiences a communion of gnosis that separates her from the social life and conditions of her father, a lawyer, and his middle class world of the British Empire's materialist legal structures. The esoteric and otherworldly, and the physical and material, combine, fragment, and transcend in the local world and the greater cosmos imagined by Arthur Machen. / English

In this thesis I argue that legal punishment is far from perfect, and that the most common defenses used to justify it prove to be unsuccessful when examined closely. I propose that if there exists an alternative, non-punitive, practice capable of achieving the same benefits, then that practice should be preferred over punishment. I then proceed to introduce one such alternative, the theory of pure restitution, and resolve some problems raised by its critics. I ultimately demonstrate not only that pure restitution is capable of achieving the same benefits as punishment, but that it is capable of achieving even further benefits. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the problem of dropouts or withdrawals among the pupils of the secondary schools of Port Arthur, Texas. It was hoped that some significant information could be compiled as to the reasons why such students in this particular city leave school before high-school graduation, and that academic, environmental, and personal factors might be identified in their relationship to the causation of dropouts or withdrawals.

The purpose of this study is to determine pertinent contents for a bulletin for beginning teachers in the public schools of Port Arthur, Texas. An effort is made to evaluate the findings and to make specific recommendations regarding the contents of such a bulletin.

This dissertation concerns nineteenth-century British novelists’ representations of unachieved aspirations. Through a blend of affect theory, materialist literary criticism, and formalist analysis, I examine a particularly frustrating problem addressed by these writers: the gap between a dream of social mobility and a reality of class paralysis for many working-class people. I am interested in the tropes of imprisonment, constraint, and confinement through which Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Morrison pondered this problem. I take into account these writers’ own limitations and imperfect social-progress ideology of melioration. These metaphors highlight the exploitation of impoverished people by the very institutions purportedly meant to encourage and mobilize them. In this project, I draw on Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism, Carolyn Lesjak’s study of the depleasurization of work in the Victorian novel, and Bruce Robbins’s theory of mobility and welfare as frameworks for interpreting what Victorian middle-class fiction writers do with the lived experience of poverty.

This historical study of Arthur S. Flemming described the changes in his activities and views of federal education and training programs relating to aging. Flemming's public administration career included service as Chief of the Office of Defense Mobilization, Secretary of DHEW, and chairman of many presidential advisory boards and commissions. A career-long thread of concern for older Americans extended from his opposition to mandatory retirement as Civil Service Commissioner to his outstanding efforts as Commissioner on Aging to provide education and training programs for service personnel and practitioners in aging. At the end of his tenure as Commissioner on Aging, a national aging network existed that involved hundreds of thousands of paid and volunteer persons who served the needs cf the aging, and education and training related to aging had an organizational foundation at the federal level, in institutions of higher education, in the private sector, and in voluntary organizations. / Ed. D.

Québec Université Laval, Bibliothèque 2015

Québec Université Laval, Bibliothèque 2015

Ce mémoire vise à comparer le concept schopenhauerien de « volonté de vivre » au concept nietzschéen de « volonté de puissance ». En les analysant sous différents angles, nous cherchons à montrer que le rapport entre les deux est complexe, qu’il change selon les perspectives et qu’il ne se résume pas à un problème particulier, notamment celui de la chose en soi. La volonté de vivre et la volonté de puissance, montrons-nous, se distinguent l’une de l’autre sous bien des aspects, mais elles ne conservent pas moins un visage extrêmement similaire sur plusieurs sujets et sont les interprétations d’une seule et même réalité, celle du corps comme passion et comme instinct. Il en ressortira que malgré toutes ses critiques et prises de distance, parfois très fortes, Nietzsche, sur le problème de la volonté, est toujours demeuré un hériter de Schopenhauer – un héritier, cependant, qui ne voulait pas l’être.

L'objectif général de ce travail est de présenter le concept de soi dans le cadre de la théorie de la personnalité propre au behaviorisme social de Staats. Le concept de soi est considéré comme un élément central de la personnalité tout en étant l'objet de controverses importantes. Ces oppositions viennent d'une conception générale différente de la personnalité où les théories traditionnelles ont considéré la personnalité comme une structure interne, cause du comportement de la personne et le behaviorisme élémentaliste comme un comportement appris. Les raisons particulières qui ont inspiré cette étude sont de deux ordres. D'une part un intérêt marqué pour une approche conceptuelle qui tente d'intégrer dans une théorie de la personnalité tout particulièrement pour ce qui a trait au concept de soi des éléments à la fois reconnus comme valables et opposés. D'autre part, le désir de mener ultérieurement une expérience efficace sur la possibilité de changer le concept de soi dans le cadre d'une théorie de la personnalité qui en considérant le concept de soi comme une cause du comportement et comme un effet d'apprentissage permet à la fois de l'expliquer et de le modifier. Le rapport de recherche que constitue cette thèse comprend trois chapitres. Le premier expose la théorie propre au behaviorisme social de Staats qui en considérant la personnalité comme une cause et comme un effet tente d'être un rapprochement entre la conception des théories traditionnelles de la personnalité et celle du behaviorisme élémentaliste. Le deuxième décrit dans le cadre de la théorie présentée au premier chapitre le concept de soi comme un effet de quatre variables: les principes d'apprentissage, les comportements de la personne, ses caractéristiques physiques et les situations. Le troisième chapitre traite du concept de soi comme une cause du comportement de la personne et comme une cause du comportement des autres à son égard. / Québec Université Laval, Bibliothèque 2014