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This qualitative study examines how five preservice teachers use multiple forms of representation (photography, spoken discourse, and written reflection) to interpret literacy. Eisner (1994) defines multiple forms of representations as "the devices that humans use to make public, conceptions that are privately held"(39). By better understanding preservice teachers' interpretations of literacy through multiple forms, teacher educators can promote a more holistic view of the literate qualities that define students as literate beings. Data included: individual and group interview transcripts, photographs, literacy autobiographies, literacy portfolios, journal entries, and other written reflections. Five collective themes emerged across the data: self and self esteem, literacy as a social act, the environment, and growth. From these themes creative inquiry, a framework for literacy inquiry evolved. Creative inquiry is a circular or spiral process of interpretation, hermeneutic in form, whereby interpretations return us to a new self. Although collective themes were revealed, the participants engaged with the multiple forms in undividual ways throughout the process of creative inquiry helping shape personal interpretations of literacy. / Ph. D.

Most professional turf in Virginia is comprised of bermudagrass (Cynodon dactylon L.) or (Cynodon dactylon x C. transvaalensis Burtt Davy) as a monoculture in summer and overseeded with perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne L.) (PR) in winter, during bermudagrass dormancy. Two transitions are required in an overseeding program, fall establishment of PR and spring control of PR. During each transition, turf quality suffers as one grass dies or enters dormancy while another grass is promoted to fill voided areas. Field studies at various locations in Virginia were conducted to investigate methods of improving spring and fall transition. Bermudagrass green cover in August was influenced by duration of PR competition variably between three bermudagrass cultivars. For example, "Midiron", "Patriot", and "Riviera" bermudagrass required 218, 139, and 327 cumulative growing degree days at base 18.3 C (GDD) to reach 95% cover. Bermudagrass biomass was also positively correlated with increasing duration of noncompetitive GDD. Total nonstructural carbohydrates were not correlated to duration of PR competition. Novel application methods were invented and tested at Virginia Tech. Drip, sponge, and strip application methods were used to create patterns of PR control using selective herbicides. Controlling a portion of PR with these methods maintained acceptable turfgrass quality throughout the spring transition and improved bermudagrass cover 12 to 20%, speeding transition by 20 or more days. Efforts to improve PR establishment in dense bermudagrass suggest chemicals that injure existing bermudagrass can improve PR establishment, but cause unacceptable turf discoloration. Mechanical methods to disrupt the bermudagrass canopy had less effect on PR establishment than chemical treatments. / Master of Science

This thesis begins a dialogue between Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics and Chinese academic aesthetics. We identify a tension between aesthetics and religion in Chinese academic aesthetics, and argue that a dialogue with von Balthasar’s work has the potential to contribute to the development of Chinese academic aesthetics with regard to overcoming that tension. In order to set a ground for the dialogue, von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics is examined in Part I. His theological aesthetics reveals that genuine beauty can never be fully accounted for by a perspective based in modern aesthetics, an aesthetics that limits itself to worldly categories. Rather, genuine beauty comes only from the beauty of the Christ form, in which religion and aesthetics converge. In Part II, we examine the tension between religion and aesthetics in Chinese academic aesthetics. The origin and influence of Chinese academic aesthetics stems from Cai Yuan-pei’s proclamation calling for the “substitution of aesthetics for religion”. For Cai, with a perspective based in modern aesthetics, aesthetics and religion occupied opposed and incompatible positions. Social and historical factors, for example government backed Marxist ideology, also contribute to hostility towards Christianity. We argue that due to the lack of the transcendental dimension, a result of rejecting the divine and so divine beauty, the further development of Chinese academic aesthetics may be stunted. Finally, in Part III, we outline the beginning of a dialogue between von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics and Chinese academic aesthetics. We argue that by dialoguing with von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, Chinese academic aesthetics may potentially obtain a transcendental dimension in coming to recognise genuine beauty, divine beauty. In coming to recognise genuine beauty, we argue that true progress in Chinese academic aesthetics may be made.

The purpose of this study was to determine if beauty was important to elementary age children when exploring and making aesthetic judgements about works of art and to determine the criteria elementary students used in judging beauty in works of art. This study also explored beauty as a concept that could be used as an organizing idea for designing a thematic unit with the purpose of introducing elementary students to postmodern art and issues. One hundred and sixty first grade and fourth grade students looked at 20 pairs of art reproductions and picked the artwork they considered the most beautiful. The criteria elementary students use for determining beauty in artworks was found to be color, realism, subject matter and physical appearance of the subject of the work of art.

This essay discusses the work of the Venetian composer Luigi Nono (29 January 1924 - 8 May 1990) in the context of Marxist aesthetics. Nono is the most explicitly political member of the Darmstadt generation. A card-carrying member of the Communist party whose titles and texts often directly refer to political personages and events, Nono bids the listener or critic to confront the problematic of political expression in instrumental music, a subject of inquiry at least as old as Plato (to whom Nono explicitly refers in Fragmente , his late string quartet that is the subject of examination here) and of crucial relevance since World War II, the cold war, and the rise of mass media. Yet the majority of literature devoted to his work has largely ignored the question of where his work and philosophical attitude locate themselves within the four major strands of Marxist aesthetics. The relationship between Nono's his work and his political perspective is either treated in an imprecise, undisciplined fashion, relying on cliches of existentialism, mysticism, or vaguely defined alternative modes of perception to stand in for the notion of opposition (Nono's fascination with Hölderlin is often invoked); or the element of ideology is ignored altogether, and the works are submitted to traditional post-serial analysis of compositional technique. Whereas both of these approaches do shed light on a challenging body of work, a brief examination of the four major models of a Marxist approach to art - the Marx/Engels, the Benjaminian, the Adorno,and the Bloch/Jameson - and the attempt to contextualize Nono's work within or against them situates this complex personality within the universe of the poltical talis qualis. A narratological take on Nono's late sting quartet Fragmente provides a demonstration of invoking literary theory to create a productive analogy between political readings of instrumental music and that of other artforms. Various analytic techniques employed by critical theory - techniques examining communication, culture, and political consciousness which themselves are drawn from linguistic and analytic philosophy, symbolic interactionism, structural linguistics, hermeneutics, semiology, poststructural psychoanalysis, and deconstruction - may not simply be borrowed by the musicologist. These strategies can be fruitfully transposed, in the mathematical sense, wherein a limited number of elements within the critical structure are exchanged provided that others are fixed. The essays explores one example of such an exchanged element: Nono's use of polyvalent quotations. Other elements are available to the musicologist via the classic Husserlian move of Einklammerung, the "phenomenological reduction." Jameson had no particular personal or professional association with Nono, and Jameson has no important writings on music. Nevertheless, Jameson was Nono's historical contemporary; Jameson was born only ten years after Nono; and Nono's work is much closer to the Bloch / Jameson model than that of Adorno, the passionate anti-bourgeois devotee of the Second Viennese School; or that of Benjamin, the passionate anti-bourgeois proponent of the "fragment," the thinker who plays the most superficially salient role in Nono's work. Jameson's 1981 book The Political Unconscious, written at the same time Nono wrote Fragmente, describes three non-dialectical analytical approaches, or "horizons," shared by the critic, the spectator, and the artist: the political, the social, and the historical. They form concentric circles. By situating Nono's work within Jameson's theory, Nono is revealed, far from the mystical/naive poet in the style of a Rothko or a Tarkovsky, as a wily, canny dramatist whose technique is conservative and neoromantic, if never regressive, always consciously bent against the postmodernity, properly speaking, of Cage.

This dissertation is comprised of a recent series of compositions, titled the Nightmare series, and this thesis. The three compositions are Nightmare for JACK (a ballet) (2013), Second Nightmare, for KIKU/2.5 Nightmares for Jessie (2014), and Child of Chimera (2015). The thesis describes the aesthetic impulse behind this series of works, and identifies sociological and technological elements in the work. The primary topic of investigation is the “Uncanny Valley,” a term used primarily in robotics and gaming in reference to empathy towards androids and digital humanoid characters. This thesis investigates the uncanny valley in film, gaming, and psychology; examines the potential of the concept for use in experimental art; and describes the methods I have used to incite the emotion in my compositions.