* / Dissertation (MMus)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Music / MMus / Unrestricted

Every summer, Lily Dale, New York, a community founded on spiritualist beliefs and steeped in an eccentric explosive past, hosts thousands of visitors seeking to communicate with dead friends and relatives, while the residents lead ordinary lives in the midst of the supernatural hype permeating their town. Their stories are considered by most to be secondary to the illustrious trappings of the community in which they occurred. My research employs oral histories prompted by personal photographs to showcase the residents' everyday experiences amidst the town's infamy, illuminating the undervalued individual experience of those living in communities of such extraordinary repute. The attitudes of the residents displayed when sharing their memories is contextualized in the material behavior exhibited historically in the Spiritualist religion, spirit photography, and the formative years of Lily Dale's growth from a summer camp in the late 1800s to a town of permanent yearlong residents practicing unorthodox beliefs. Through the residents' sharing of images and memories, they reveal that their "ordinary" lives include a deep-rooted understanding of the Spiritualist lifestyle by unconsciously weaving spirit encounters and metaphysical events in and out of their conversation without making distinctions that they are in any way unusual. Spirit is not only in the air in Lily Dale--to the residents it is the air.

In pharaonic times, religion, magic and medicine had little distinction between each other due to the commonly held belief that all parts of life were influenced and even controlled by divinity and the supernatural. To navigate life easier, and in true Egyptian fashion, a large corpus of text was composed of magic, medicine and religion. The latter includes the arguably most well-known work, the Egyptian Book of the dead, the religious scripture that would help the deceased navigate the netherworld in the hopes for eternal life. The papyri depict numerous plants and remedies as well as spell and healing methods accompanied by magical incorporation such as incantation or invocation of a god or goddess. These can be considered a basis for the fundamental ideas of religion and daily life of ancient Egypt, always consisting of divine involvement. This essay will deal with a symbol that the ancient Egyptians saw as synonymous with life, and immortality: The narcotic blue water lily, Nymphaea Caerulea. The study will be a work on the human religious experience with a plant that I will theorize as having been used for an entheogenic effect in order to connect with the divine by asking some key questions: How and why was the lily used? How is the flowers depiction on art, in texts, and different iconography indicative to a usage in religious experience and through the mythology produced in the civilisation?

ABSTRACT SALT DRIVE IN THE BEAVER (Castor canadensis): AN EXPERIMENTAL ASSESSMENT WITH FIELD FEEDING TRIALS SEPTEMBER 2012 JENNIFER E. STRULES, B.M. BERKLEE COLLEGE OF MUSIC M.S., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Stephen DeStefano Salt drive is a seasonal phenomenon common to several classes of wild herbivores. Coincident with shifts of nutrient quality when plants resume growth in the spring, sodium is secondarily lost as surplus potassium is excreted. The beaver (Castor canadensis) is an herbivore whose dietary niche closely follows that of other herbivores that are subject to salt drive, but no published studies to date have assessed the likelihood of its occurrence. To quantify if beavers experience seasonal salt drive, we designed a field experiment to measure the foraging responses of beavers to sodium-enhanced foods. We used sodium-treated (salted) and control food items (aspen [Populus tremuloides] and pine [Pinus spp.] sticks) during monthly feeding trials at beaver-occupied wetlands where water lily (Nymphaea spp. and Nuphar spp.) was present and where water lily was absent. If conventional ontogeny of salt drive was operant, we expected to observe greater utility of sodium-treated food items by beavers in May and June. Further, if water lilies supplied beavers with sodium to meet dietary requirements as is widely speculated, we expected foraging responses to sodium-treated food items at wetlands where water lilies were absent to be greater than at wetlands where water lily was present. Aspen was selected by beavers in significantly greater amounts than pine. There was no difference between the mean percent consumed of salted and control aspen sticks by beavers at lily and non-lily wetlands, and no differences in temporal consumption associated with salted or control pine sticks at either wetland type. Salted pine was consumed in greater amounts than unsalted pine. We propose that the gastrointestinal or renal physiology of beavers may predispose them to low solute loss, thereby preventing salt drive.

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A population of the rare Southern Appalachian endemic species Lilium grayi, (Gray’s lily) Roan Mountain, TN/NC was monitored for 2 years to determine the cause and impact of an early season collapse. High concentrations of the Lilium spp. host-specific fungal phytopathogen, Pseudocercosporella inconspicua (G. Winter) U. Braun were associated with 19/20 symptomatic and 0/30 asymptomatic plants. Strength of the association between pathogen and disease and the replication of disease symptoms in 4/4 healthy hosts showed that P. inconspicua was the causal agent of the disease referred to as lily leaf spot. Disease had a severe impact on the population with 59% of mature and 98% of adolescent plants undergoing early senescence. Only 32% of mature plants produced capsules and they were frequently diseased. A recurring spatiotemporal pattern typical of an infectious disease suggested that the lily leaf spot disease is capable of causing sequential annual epidemics of unknown long-term consequences to the stability of the host population.

In this essay I plan to show how Wharton, through Lily, criticised society, and more specifically its expectations of women. My thesis is that Wharton and her character Lily exposed the upper class society of New York, and its ruthlessness, by voicing a woman’s point of view. Therefore, the main purpose here is to reveal the complexity of the lives women led in order to fulfil society’s expectations and I thereby plan to explore what it was like living in a world governed by strict rules of conduct.

Abstract Until now, there has not been a performance history of The Merchant of Venice that focuses on Portia, the main character of the play. Although she has the most lines, the most stage time, and represents the nexus of the action, Portia has often been hidden in Shylock's shadow, and this dissertation seeks to bring her into the spotlight. The Portia Project is a contribution to literary and theatrical history; its primary goal is to provide a tool for scholars and teachers. Moreover, because of Merchant's notoriously problematic nature, the play invites different perspectives. By presenting the diverse ways that actors and directors have approached the play and resolved the cruxes associated with Portia, I aim to demonstrate that there are multiple valid ways in which to interpret the text. Chapter one explores the literary criticism of The Merchant of Venice, centering on the treatment of the play's female protagonist. The early twentieth century produced wide-ranging interpretations of Portia, and the last fifty years have seen her analyzed through the lenses of feminism, cultural materialism, psychoanalytic criticism, and queer theory. Having analyzed the literary criticism, I next concentrate on the performance history of The Merchant of Venice, with particular attention to Portia. I then turn to those who have performed the role in a wide-range of theatrical venues. Chapter three features the input of Seana McKenna--star of the Canadian stage and a mainstay of the Stratford Festival in Ontario--who played Portia in a 1989 production. Michael Langham directed in an atmosphere of trepidation over the play's reception and its portrayal of Shylock's forced conversion. For chapter four I interviewed Marni Penning, a veteran of the smaller repertory companies that are sprinkled about the United States. For chapter five I talked to Edward Hall, artistic director of the all-male Propeller Theatre Company, and Kelsey Brookfield, a young black actor who played Portia for the group's 2009 production. By dressing all of the "male" characters alike, Hall de-emphasized the differences between the Christians and the Jews, while Portia, Nerissa, and Jessica were presented not as women, but as men, who have feminized themselves to survive in their harsh environment. Lily Rabe played Portia for the 2010 production of Merchant in Central Park, opposite Al Pacino's Shylock. The production was so successful that it moved to Broadway in October of that year, and Rabe's intelligent portrayal won universal accolades. The Portia Project explores the perceptions of literary critics, theatrical reviewers, actors, and directors, in order to ascertain how representations and expectations of Shakespeare's most learned heroine have changed over the years and to rescue her from Shylock's shadow. By combining the disciplines of literary criticism, theatre, and film, an evolving picture of Portia emerges, revealing Portia's complexity and her centrality to The Merchant of Venice.

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