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The college commencement address is traditionally regarded as the low point of an otherwise auspicious occasion. An ephemeral form of ceremonial oratory, the commencement speech is reviled for its conventional platitudes, its easy piety, and its abstractions on the well-lived life, the sunny future, and the ethics of adulthood. The South may differ, however, in its approach to the commencement speech genre, especially in the years between World War II and the millennium, when one of the South’s most significant assets became the southern writer. Throughout this dissertation, I have tried to situate eight commencement addresses given by such prominent and dissimilar writers as W.J. Cash, William Faulkner, Wendell Berry, Will D. Campbell, Lee Smith, Clyde Edgerton, Maya Angelou, and Fred Chappell, within the context of the times in which they were delivered and within the speakers' written works. Through my analysis of these graduation talks, I discovered that southern writers typically abandon those repetitious conventions that render the commencement address forgettable in favor of the innovative techniques that were already at work in their written works.

Analyzing novels by Sheri Reynolds, Lee Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Sue Monk Kidd, I argue that these authors challenge religious structures by dramatizing the struggle between love and resentment that brings many women to the point of crisis but also inspires imaginative and generative processes of appropriation and revision, emphasizing not destination but process. Employing first-person narration in coming-of-age stories, Smith, Reynolds, and Kingsolver highlight the various narratives that govern the experiences of children born into religious cultures, including narratives of sexual development, gender identity, and religious conversion, to portray the difficulty of articulating female experience within the limited lexicon of Christian fundamentalism. As they mature into adulthood, the girl characters in these novels break from tradition to develop new consciousness by altering and adapting religious language, understood as open and malleable rather than authoritative and fixed. Smith, Kidd, and Naylor incorporate the Virgin Mary and divine maternal figures from non-Christian traditions to restore the mother-daughter relationship that is eclipsed by the Father and Son in Christian tradition. Identifying the female body as a site of spiritual knowledge, these authors present a metaphorical return to the womb that empowers their characters to embrace divine maternal love that transgresses the masculine symbolic order, displacing (but not necessarily destroying) the authority of God the Father and His human representatives. Reynolds and Walker portray physical pain, central to the Christian image of crucifixion, as destroying the ability of women to speak, denying them subjectivity. Through transgressive sexual relationships infused with religious significance, these authors disrupt the Christian moral paradigm by presenting bodily pleasure as an alternative to the Christian valorization of sacrifice. The replacement of pain with pleasure inspires imaginative work that makes private spirituality shareable through artistic creation. The novels I study present themes that also concern Christian and non-Christian feminist theologians: the development of feminine images of the divine, emphasis on immanence over transcendence, the apprehension of the divine in nature, and the necessity of challenging the reification of religious images and dualisms that undermine female subjectivity. I show the reciprocal relationship between fiction and theology, as theologians treat women's literature as sacred texts and fiction writers give life to abstract religious concepts through narrative.

<p>This thesis will show how authoritarian governments rest legitimacy on their ability to create socio-economic development. It will point to some methods used to consolidate power by authoritarian leaders in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. An authoritarian regime that successfully creates development is strengthened and does not call for democratic change in the short run. It is suggested that the widely endorsed Lipset hypothesis, that development will eventually bring democratic transition, is true only when further socio-economic development requires that the economy transfers from being based on industrial manufacturing to knowledge and creativity – not on lower levels of development. Malaysia and Singapore have reached – or try to reach – this level of development today, but restrictions on their civil societies have still not been lifted.</p><p>This thesis describes modern political history in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia in a Machiavellian tradition. The historical perspective will give a more or less plausible idea of how authoritarian regimes consolidated au-thority and what role development policies played in the leaders’ claims for authority. The conclusion will give a suggestion on how the political future in these three countries might evolve. It will point to the importance of an active and free civil society as a means to develop the nations further, rather than oppression.</p><p>This thesis will try to point to the dos and don’ts for authoritarian regimes. The ideas of Plato, Machiavelli and Hobbes provide the structures and methods that authoritarian regimes apply. It will be shown that a regime will disintegrate when it fails to comply with Plato’s and Machiavelli’s ideas. Although ancient, Plato and Machiavelli provide methods and structures that seem to carry relevance to the modern history of Southeast Asia.</p><p>I will point to how authoritarian rule can be maintained in the long run. What is required from the political leadership, what are their strategies and methods? What makes people to tolerate or topple authoritarian regimes? Why do some authoritarian regimes successfully create development while others do not? These are some of the questions this thesis will try to answer.</p>

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The early twentieth century marked a period of intense efforts toward reform of the American educational system. Rural education was not excluded from these efforts. The most dramatic change in rural education during the period was the closure and consolidation of "ungraded," one-room schools into consolidated high schools. These efforts met with intense resistance, often with the fear that rural communities would be destroyed by such educational reforms. Scholars have written very little on this subject, and what they have written has viewed the reform efforts quite negatively. One Indiana county, Randolph County, was generally regarded as the model rural school system during the period. Lee L. Driver, the county superintendent of schools, led the consolidation efforts in Randolph County. In many ways a typical Indiana county superintendent, Driver helped to transform his county and eventually became regarded as one of the national experts in the rural school reform movement. As evidenced by the number of visitors to its schools and by the attention it received from both the popular press and the academic press, Randolph County was a national model for more than a decade. Consolidation's impact on minorities and women was uneven in this county. As other locations made similar progress, Randolph County's exceptionalism waned, though there is an enduring legacy both for Lee L. Driver and the county's system of schools in the present educational system of the area. / Department of Educational Leadership

In this essay I analyse the constructions of gender in the series The Phantom by Lee Falk. I apply David Tjeders readings of the bourgouise masculinity, its sensitive character and great risk of falling into unmanliness, when discussing The Phantom’s masculine development. I have analysed three adventures of The Phantom from the years 1937, 1977 and 1996, all authored by original creator Lee Falk. I argue that The Phantom increases his use of violence, therefore risking a loss of character. The stories re-establishes his masculinity by portraying the villains more monstrously. My thesis is that The Phantom's need  to maintain a bourgeouis masculinity ceases as the popular culture has developed new masculine ideals.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University, Dept. of Art. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-115).