The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the perception of parents as Loving-Rejecting(L-R) on the basis of the Roe-Siegleman Parent-Child Relations Questionnaire (PCR), scholastic achievement, as measured by the grade point average (GPA), and scholastic aptitude, as measured by the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

If There’s Anything I Can Do is a collection of nine connected short stories. Each story takes place in the fictional River City, and explores the lives of characters that frequent Cellar Door, a divey, basement bar in the heart of downtown. Bartenders, musicians, regulars, neighbors, fathers, brothers, and lovers make up the crowd at Cellar Door, and each story shows the importance of place within a community.

M.A. (Communication & Media Studies) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

Unrealistic representations of love have rarely been studied across popular music genres. The lyrics of the top songs in five of the most popular genres (Country, Hip Hop/R&B, Pop, Rap, and Rock) during the periods of 1991-1995 and 2011-2015 were coded for specific love myths. The results of the study show that the overall average of love myths found in popular music genres remain consistent over time. More specifically, based on the amount of myths per song, there was an average of .7056 myths per song in the 1990s and an average of .7504 myths per song in the 2010s. However, there are significant changes in mythical content over time and genre. This research should serve as a foundation to further study the prevalence and influence of love myths of popular music throughout both time and genre.

In Works of Love (Kjerlighedens Gjerninger) Søren Kierkegaard contrasts two seemingly opposing forms of love. One, "preferential" love, primarily includes the love found in friendships and romances. The other, "non-preferential" or "neighbor love," is associated with Christian agape love. Some interpreters believe Kierkegaard's clear support of neighbor love as the "higher" form of love reveals an incompatibility between preferential relationships, like friendship, and universal Christian love. This reading imagines an "either/or" in which a person is forced to choose between Christian faith on one hand, and friendship/erotic love on the other. The objective of this paper is to argue against such an interpretation and to demonstrate that preferential love understood in the context of neighbor love is endorsed by Kierkegaard himself. A comparison of his thought to that of Robert O. Johann and an analysis both the social and religious context in which Works of Love was written will shed light on the rhetorical strategies at work and reveal the nature of the love that Kierkegaard promotes.

This study used a qualitative research design incorporating principles of social constructionism, hermeneutic dialectic method, Neo-Socratic dialogue and philosophy for reporting the tacit and social knowledge constructions underlying particular ways of knowing that inform the experiential reality of love in the practice of nursing and midwifery. The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, that culminated in his magnum opus of the ‘metaphysics of otherness’, provided the theoretical underpinning for the interpretation of the experiences nurses and midwives believed were examples of love in their clinical practice in Australia, Singapore and Bhutan. What is love in nursing and midwifery? The answer is moral responsibility. The relational context has a nurse and midwife constantly exposed to patient situations that give rise to expressions of love as moral responsibility. It is a form of love that centres on the ability of our being, or at least the possibility of our being, to transcend its everyday form to a metaphysical state of being moral. It enables a nurse and midwife to transcend the isolation associated with their personal being as a self-project, to be ‘for’ the patient as a first priority. But while the ‘Goodness’ of the ‘Good’ assigns the nurse and midwife responsible and is expressed to their personal being in the form of the ‘urge to do’, ‘what to do’ in caring for the patient is a matter of living out the command to be responsible and will be different for each nurse and midwife. However, no matter the outcome, love as moral responsibility will always leave a nurse and midwife feeling there is still more to be done in being responsible.

The overarching theme of these stories is the relationship between love and hate, especially the connection between kindness and violence. In this fictional world, love often begets hate, and hate, love: a man's capacity for empathy serves as the catalyst for an act of brutality; a character's loneliness, his desire for love, causes him to chivvy members of his church congregation, while the same character's unambiguous overtures of friendship produce revulsion in the narrator; the victim of a man's complicity coaxes him to take a beating that, in effect, heals him; and a sexual encounter, violent in its impersonality, its objectification of a woman, gives rise to a comment that awakens the abuser's conscience as well as his regard for his victim. One may undermine the other: in the story involving sexual abuse, the woman treats the men lovingly, like people, and in so doing erodes their ability to treat her as something less than human; a character's habitual spite finds its way into his marriage, damaging the most important (and the only loving) relationship in his life. And they sometimes exchange clothes: a man's attacks on his neighbor and the neighbor's quest for revenge mimic a courtship, are the beginnings of a relationship; the character who hurts his wife does it by perverting an act of love; friends and coworkers express affection by insulting one another and by pretending to fight. What is the point of this juxtaposition and mingling of supposed opposites? To be honest, I'm not sure I know. I wrote these stories without conscious intent, and gathered them into the same collection accidentally: there were others that didn't quite work, and which had nothing much to do with amity and strife, that might have been included, too, had they been better or more finished. Still, I, like any other reader, can divine a few meanings. With their frequent inversion and mingling of love and hate, these stories might serve as one piece of evidence that all things contain the kernel of their opposite. Given the right circumstances--enough time, a narrative--they will demonstrate affinity. This Hegelian interdependence of opposites implies a correlary--narratives procede by dialectic: love heads into hate, or hate into love, and the synthesis of these two spawns a hybrid possessing bits of its progenitors. "Angel of Tough Love" provides an example of this sublation: boy's complicitous response to a beating alienates him from himself--thesis; he accepts an invitation to enter a crucible of hate and love, to do the opposite of remaining a bystander--antithesis; he emerges whole and yet changed, at peace for the first time--synthesis. Another conclusion, one that does not contradict the first: if love may lead to hate and hate to love, then the value of each impulse and action depends on context. Fine motives, however pure, might produce ghastly results if a full understanding of circumstances, a broad and informed point of view, is not present, too: perspective, point of view, is seminal. And yet--with the possible exception of those with mystical gifts, who may rely on Dionysian rapture or its equivalent to grant them views of entire causal chains--our points of view are limited; we cannot know all the ramifications of our actions. (And, at least in one sense, it seems that we aren't supposed to know: a story hatched whole is bound to be boring and, well, predictable.) So we are left to examine our motives and anticipate what consequences we can. It's not much, but it will have to do. Love conquers all, sometimes. A kind word--or just an honestly felt one--may change a mind or an afternoon, now and then. We're all in the same dirt boat, heading somewhere, so we might as well use the oars provided and hope that our imaginations, incrementally, will point us in the right direction. Some of the time, we may row in concert. / Graduation date: 2001

Thesis--Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 220-233).

The present thesis deals with the intended abandonment of traditional notions of Romantic love in some manifestations of Western literature. The novel analyzed is José Luis Sampedro’s El Amante Lesbiano, where concepts such as gender roles, marriage, and sexuality have been removed from their conventionalities in favour of love. The thesis provides two points of analysis concerning El Amante Lesbiano. One, the use of little narratives that deconstruct gender and the Romantic notions of love; the second, an analysis on Sampedro’s strategies to demythify Romantic love, namely the modulation of typical mythical images depicting romance. Such analysis answers to the raised research questions by this thesis: why are little narratives used by Sampedro to deconstruct gender and Romantic Love? And what results from the demythification of such notion in El Amante Lesbiano?

Raphael is leading a hedonistic life when he has a traumatic realization that the world is indifferent about who lives and who dies, and Raphael is no exception. This is a story, written by Raphael, about seeking to reconcile the fleeting world he and everyone else has been subjected to.