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This qualitative collective case study explored how four female Latina teachers in the Central San Joaquin Valley acquired and developed the noncognitive trait of grit. Additionally, this study explored how the manifestation of this noncognitive trait of grit is demonstrated by these teachers with students in their classrooms. Through a series of interviews, and classroom observations with annotated field notes, I examined the life experiences and professional educational background of participants in order to highlight factors that are contributory and fundamental in the underpinnings of how grit developed in each of their lives. I examined and analyzed distinctive traits, specific influences, and behaviors. The theoretical framework developed by Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews and Kelly (2007) provided the background structure to help in understanding the noncognitive trait of grit. This exploration extended current scholarship on grit by exploring one specific cultural and gendered-subset of teachers to aid in the understanding of how grit emerges in teachers deemed exceptional. This qualitative case study addresses the following questions: 1. From the perspective of four female Latina teachers, what is grit? 2. From the perspectives of four female Latina teachers, in what ways has grit been acquired, developed and demonstrated? 3. From the perspective of four female Latina teachers, how has gender and race shaped their experiences in grit? 4. From the perspectives of four female Latina teachers, and as evidenced by student outcomes, how does the trait of grit impact teacher effectiveness?

This dissertation examines the role of stage properties-props, slangily-in the construction and expression of characters' identities. Through readings of both canonical and non-canonical drama written between 1600 and 1707-for example, Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), Edward Ravenscroft's adaptation of Titus Andronicus (1678), Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677), and William Wycherley's The Plain Dealer (1677)-I demonstrate how props mediate relationships between people. The control of a character's props often accords a person control of the character to whom the props belong. Props consequently make visual the relationships of power and subjugation that exist among characters. The severed body parts, bodies, miniature portraits, and containers of these plays are the mechanisms by which characters attempt to differentiate themselves from others. The characters deploy objects as proof of their identities-for example, when the women in Behn's Rover circulate miniatures of themselves-yet other characters must also interpret these objects. The props, and therefore the characters' identities, are at all times vulnerable to misinterpretation. Much as the props' meanings are often disputed, so too are characters' private identities often at odds with their public personae. The boundaries of selfhood that the characters wish to protect are made vulnerable by the objects that they use to shore up those boundaries. When read in relation to the characters who move them, props reveal the negotiated process of individuation. In doing so, they emphasize the correlation between extrinsic and intrinsic worth. They are a measure of how well characters perform gender and class rolls, thereby demonstrating the importance of external signifiers in the legitimation of England's subjects, even as they expose "legitimacy" as a social construction.

The purpose of this thesis was to determine if the Value Systems (Tribalistic, Egocentric, Absolutistic, Achievist, Sociocentric, and Individualistic) based on the "Levels of Psychological Existence" developed by Clare W. Graves, could be applied to analysis of a role in a play script. Characters in four scripts were analyzed: The -Rainmaker, by N. Richard Nash; The Lark, by Jean Anouilh, adapted by Lillian Hellman; Fiddler on the Roof, book by Joseph Stein, music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick; and The Taming off the Shrew, by Shakespeare. The results showed that the system could be applied practically and effectively.

The genre of the "picaresque" (romances of roguery), which were popular in sixteenth-century Spain, contain the literary type of the "picaro" or rogue, which can appear at times as a "student." The current work presents the historical context of the Spanish university and of the student's life as well as the representation of the "student" in several picaresque novels, namely, Mateo Aleman's El Guzman de Alfarache, Vicente Espinel's Marcos de Obregâon, Jerâonimo de Alcalâa y Yâanez's El donoso hablador, and Francisco de Quevedo's El Buscâon, in order to contrast the social reality of the student and its literary representation. The literary character of the "student" does not depart only from its reality. Its characteristics are based on the student stories from the oral medieval tradition, a residual cultural elements, as described by Maxime Chevalier, as well as the emerging picaresque narratives. / by Javier Fernândez del Pâramo. / Abstract in Engllsh. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2008. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This dissertation reconsiders the relationship between fiction and slavery in American literary culture. “Prisoners of Style” shows how writers from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, including Hannah Crafts, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and William Faulkner, wrestled with enslavement. They found it not only a subject to be written about, but also a problem of characterization. Slavery and the ontological sorcery through which it produced a new kind of individual—the individual who is also a thing—led these authors to rethink basic formal assumptions about realist fiction, especially about what constitutes a literary character. The writers I discuss did not set out to argue for the slave’s humanity or to render her interiority, but instead sought to represent the systematic unmaking of black personhood perpetrated by the laws and institutions that governed chattel slavery in the US. They set out to reveal the ideological violence perpetrated against enslaved blacks, and they did so by writing characters who embodied the categorical uncertainty of the slave, characters who were not allegories for real, full people. The tradition of writing I describe does not represent the fullness of enslaved “persons”; instead it renders something far more abstract: the epistemology that undergirded enslavement—those patterns of thought that preconditioned slavery itself. The authors I study understood fictionality as a thorny ethical, epistemological, and political problem. In my chapter on Crafts, for example, I look at The Bondwoman’s Narrative alongside a set of non-fiction texts about Jane Johnson, the slave who preceded her in John Hill Wheeler’s household. Reading the novel against legal documents, pamphlets, and histories about Johnson and her escape from Wheeler, the chapter explores what fiction could do that these other modes of writing could not. In moments of sleep, amnesia, and daydreaming, Crafts resists the normative logic of subjecthood and individual rights that underpins the representations of Johnson. In the second half of the project, I demonstrate the significance of fictionality to American literary realism’s evolution into modernism. The final chapter, on Faulkner, places two of his Yoknapatawpha novels within the context of his interest in modernist painting and sculpture. Work by Picasso, Matisse, and other visual artists inspired his concern with surfaces and flatness, leading to a meditation on artifice that runs throughout his major novels. I argue that his flatness—his insistence on the non-referential quality of fiction—is crucial for understanding his characterization and philosophy of history history, in particular the history of Southern plantation slavery.

Thèse (M.A.)--Université Laval, 1999. / Comprend des réf. bibliogr.

Thèse (M.E.L..) -- Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 2006. / Bibliogr.: f. 103-105. Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Thesis--Université de Provence. / Includes indexes. Bibliography: p. 973-1005.