Saved, By Becoming a Slave to the Rhythm!, is a choreographic work that demonstrates how an individual finds purpose through a rite of passage filled with freedom, music, and movement of the House dancing scene. Saved, reveals how DJ Larry Levan gained recognition from the community of the Paradise Garage Club, as one of the best DJs of his time. The work is split into three sections community, individual, and movement. The community section highlights the universal love, freedom, and multiculturalism of Paradise Garage that was generated by the charismatic control of Larry Levan's DJ mastery. Levan's charismatic mastery is what moved the Paradise Garage community to deem him one of the best DJs in House music history. The community section transitions into the individual section. The individual section showcases the demons of Levan's life. A solo, performed to the words of Levan's best friend, Frankie Knuckles, displays how his excessive lifestyle of drugs and sex became the key to his demise. The third section is an homage to Larry Levan, and members of the Paradise Garage community whom have passed on. I title this section the movement section, because it unveils the progression and stability of the House dance community. In addition to this cultural stability, the movement terminology of House dance is solidified. I want the audience to leave Saved, By Becoming a Slave to the Rhythm!, inspired to search for their purpose in life, find it, and live it lovingly, joyfully, and peacefully.

Coffins, Closets, Kitchens, and Convents uses anthropologist Liz Kenyon's categories of home, Gaston Bachelard's theories on the importance of imagination and metaphor in home building, as well as literary criticism, sociology, and feminist theory to examine values of "home" in various literary works of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. This dissertation's focus on the struggles within traditional home spheres highlights the female characters' need of a protected space. Yet these characters realize they must allow for connections with various individuals to bring about such a safe space. Through the creative act of writing, Mary Leapor's Mira in the poem, "Crumble Hall," Samuel Richardson's title character in Clarissa, and Toni Morrison's Claudia MacTeer in The Bluest Eye and the convent women in Paradise, each oppressed within the home sphere, gain full access to all that the idealized home entails in constructing their individual homes; they rewrite space into a home of their own. The chapters herein are organized from lower-class to higher-class female characters beginning in the eighteenth century with Leapor's servant narrator and moving up to Richardson's higher-class character, followed by Morrison's twentieth century impoverished youth in The Bluest Eye and variety of women both impoverished and well-off residing together in a convent in Paradise.

The thesis has two parts. Part One surveys the debate on how to define Christian obedience and Milton�s prose contributions to that discourse. In the century leading up to Milton�s prose writings there was much debate in England over how to define spiritual obedience. Civil authorities argued that matters of religion fell within state jurisdiction and that an individual�s spiritual obedience should be subject to outward scrutiny and external control; but these definitions were contested by Protestant reformers. Chapter One traces the issue up to Milton�s contributions. Chapter Two traces Milton�s thinking about obedience, spiritual and secular, through his own prose writings: Milton defines obedience as a responsible freedom which requires continual critical assessment of authority. In reaction to the political and ecclesiastical developments of his own time, Milton places increasing emphasis on the role of the individual in defining and expressing obedience to God by means of scriptural study and open discussion. Milton argues that liberty is a necessary pre-condition for giving true obedience to God, and this idea comes to the fore in the later prose tracts, which respond to political and ecclesiastical developments that Milton interpreted as threatening the individual�s liberty of conscience. Part Two examines Paradise Regained (1671), in which Milton advances his interpretation of obedience through his characterisation of the Son of God. Chapter Three shows how Milton links those forms of Christian obedience which he rejects in his prose writing to either Satan or satanic influence. Through his depiction of the Son�s responses to Satan, Milton indicates that Satan�s versions of obedience are designed to distract the Son, and any other believer, from giving proper obedience to God. Chapter Four traces how Milton�s depiction of the Son of God demonstrates his understanding of the right reasons for, and ways of, giving proper obedience to God. The Son�s firm obedience is a state of mind and comprises knowledge of God through scriptural study, conversation and meditation. This exemplary obedience is motivated by an appreciation for and desire to participate in God�s glory (ie., Creation), and Milton indicates that it is this appreciation of divine glory that enables the Son of God to successfully resist Satan�s temptations. Chapter Five examines Milton�s final episode, the pinnacle temptation, in terms of the obedience which he has approved throughout the poem. This chapter addresses Milton�s handling of the reader�s expectations for this scene, and the symbolic language and setting of the pinnacle episode. Unlike any other writers on the temptations in the wilderness, Milton invests the Son�s victory (and Satan�s defeat) on the pinnacle with symbolic power by depicting the Son standing in firm obedience to God. Thus Milton presents his reader with the definitive expression of humanity�s obedience to God: the Son�s stand is a symbolic return to the "Godlike erect" stance ascribed to prelapsarian humanity in Paradise Lost (PL, IV.289), and with this firm, upright obedience Milton shows the rest of humanity how to regain Paradise.

<p>This master’s thesis presents experiences from an evaluation of AdApt, a multi- modal, conversational dialogue system, using PARADISE, PARAdigm for Dialogue System Evaluation, a general framework for evaluation. The purpose of this master’s thesis was to assess PARADISE as an evaluation tool for such a system. An experimental study with 26 subjects was performed. The subjects were asked to interact with one of three different system versions of AdApt. Data was collected through questionnaires, hand tagging of the dialogues and automatic logging of the interaction. Analysis of the results suggests that further research is needed to develop a general framework for evaluation which is easy to apply and can be used for varying kinds of spoken dialogue systems. The data collected in this study can be used as starting point for further research.</p>

In Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald retells the story of the Fall from Genesis through psychologist Dick Diver and his wife and patient Nicole, drawing poetic and thematic inspiration from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. This essay traces the progression of the Divers’ fall and ultimate separation through the novel’s three books and considers how the highly autobiographical foundation of the novel, which has drawn considerable critical attention, may in fact allow Fitzgerald to craft a work that aligns with and simultaneously expands upon Milton’s interpretation of the Fall.

Realityshower och dokusåpor tar allt större plats i våra tv-tablåer och är under ständig debatt. Programmen sänds numera på prime time och finns hela tiden tillgängliga via internet. Just nu är dokusåpan Paradise Hotel mest aktuell och har fått utstå mycket kritik. Detta på grund av de stora mängder alkohol som deltagarna dricker samt programmets inslag av sexuell karaktär.     Genrens namn, reality-tv, ger sken av att det är verkligheten som speglas i programmen, men hur verkligt är egentligen det vi får se? Hur stor makt har produktionsbolaget över deltagarna och hur redigeras det filmade materialet för att locka tittarna? Det är frågor som den här uppsatsen syftar till att försöka besvara. Vi ville, utifrån deltagarnas synvinkel, undersöka hur verklig reality-tv verkligen är.     För att göra detta har vi valt att göra semistrukturerade intervjuer med sex deltagare från dokusåpan Paradise Hotel. Dessa har vi sedan analyserat med hjälp av en hermeneutisk analysmetod. De teoretiska perspektiv vi främst använt oss av är individualism, voyeurism och narcissism.     Det är svårt att ge några exakta svar på de frågeställningar som ligger till grund för studien då deltagarnas åsikter ofta går isär. Vi har dock kunnat konstatera att de flesta av dem vi intervjuat inte sökte till programmet själva, utan blev handplockade av produktionsbolaget. Det är också tydligt att deltagarna tilldelas roller i efterhand när det filmade materialet redigeras. Dessa roller är vissa av deltagarna nöjda med, medan andra är upprörda över hur de framställts i tv. / Realityshows and docusoaps gets more and more space in our TV-guides and are under constant debate. It is more usual nowadays that the shows are being aired on prime time than before, and the shows are constantly available on internet. Right now the show Paradise Hotel is most current and has endured a lot of criticism because of the amount of alcohol and sex it contains.     The name of the genre, reality-TV, makes it sound like it is the reality that is reflected in the shows, but how real is actually reality-TV? How much power does the production company have over the participants and how much is the filmed material edited afterwards to attract the audience? It is questions like this we will try to give answers to in this study. Our purpose is to examine how real reality-TV is, from the participants' point of view.     To do this we have chosen to do semi structured interviews with six participants from the reality show Paradise Hotel. This has been analyzed through a hermeneutic point of view.     It's hard to give any exact answers to the questions that the study is based on because of the different opinions of the participants. Though, we found that most of the persons that we have interviewed did not apply for the show themselves, they got handpicked from the production company. Also, it is obvious that the participants have been assigned characters afterwards when the shot material has been edited. It is also clear that some of the participants are pleased with the character they have been assigned, while others are upset with how they have been changed into someone they are not.

The pursuit of the perfect language intrigued and obsessed the literary circle of the seventeenth century, as political turmoil and chaos initiated the desire for the stable even in the aspect of language. As the perfect language is self-explicative, it indicates a perfect correspondence between the signifier and the signified in order to guarantee the purity and singleness of the meanings to avoid confusion and ambiguity inevitably occurring, for instance, in postlapsarian language. The concept of the perfect language, nevertheless, finds evidence in Milton¡¦s prelapsarian world, where unfallen Adam is endowed with divine insights to discern the nature of the animals and translate his comprehension into perfect matching names. However, the presumption of the perfect language in the prelapsarian Eden is challenged by critics as the preconditioned absoluteness could not possibly exist for it would have preempted any possibilities of inferring, implying, and guessing from the context. In my thesis, I argue that languages marked by gender as masculine and feminine dominate in the characterization and narratives of Adam and Eve, for gender is the sole mark distinguishing the first couple along with their hierarchical roles as man and man¡¦s helper. I examine Eve¡¦s gendered discourse in particular as Eve as a lesser vessel turns out to be the main target of Satan¡¦s verbal temptations and sophistries. I analyze the traits of gendered discourses and discuss how they render Eve more vulnerable, disadvantaged, and disempowered in face of Satan¡¦s rhetoric and eloquence. Also scrutinized are the critics¡¦ viewpoints concerning Eve¡¦s gendered discourse, which significantly reveals certain ingrained biases attached to stereotypical expectations for women shown in the critics¡¦ word choices and arguments in regard of Eve.

John Milton begins his Second Defence of the English People by stressing the universal importance of gratitude: "In the whole life and estate of man the first duty is to be grateful to God." Peter Medine has shown the prominence of gratitude in Paradise Lost, but scholars have not fully appreciated the role of this virtue elsewhere in Milton's writing. This thesis is an attempt to redress that oversight with reference to A Mask and Paradise Regained, while also answering a question that Medine raises but does not satisfactorily resolve: Why gratitude? Both texts have been read as responses to the early modern debate about the doctrine of things indifferent, or adiaphora, and I argue that this context helps explain Milton's interest in gratitude. The first section of this thesis accordingly reviews the historical and theological context of the adiaphora controversy, while the second examines Milton's more direct treatment of things indifferent and gratitude, primarily in De Doctrina Christiana. In the remaining sections, historical and literary analysis of A Mask and Paradise Regained illuminates how Milton addresses tensions in the doctrine of things indifferent by emphasizing gratitude. Of the commonly recognized criteria for directing the use of adiaphora—the rule of faith, the rule of charity, and the glorification of God, often through gratitude—gratitude toward God frequently receives less thorough attention, yet Milton gives it a prominent role in A Mask and allows it to overshadow the other guidelines in Paradise Regained. Although gratitude is itself sometimes subject to manipulation in these texts, both A Mask and Paradise Regained suggest that the requirement of God-ward gratitude can serve as a check against subtle distortions of the other guidelines. The effectiveness of this strategy stems from the fact that the vices gratitude guards against—self-indulgent ingratitude, stoical ingratitude, and idolatry—are the vices that underlie licentiousness and superstition, the primary abuses of the doctrine of things indifferent. Milton's privileging of gratitude thus provides a way of cross-checking appeals to the more contested criteria of faith and love, protecting the doctrine of things indifferent from perversions that would undermine Christian liberty.

In Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald retells the story of the Fall from Genesis through psychologist Dick Diver and his wife and patient Nicole, drawing poetic and thematic inspiration from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. This essay traces the progression of the Divers’ fall and ultimate separation through the novel’s three books and considers how the highly autobiographical foundation of the novel, which has drawn considerable critical attention, may in fact allow Fitzgerald to craft a work that aligns with and simultaneously expands upon Milton’s interpretation of the Fall.

In the grand invocation at the beginning of Book VII of his epic Paradise Lost, John Milton selects as his muse Urania, who is traditionally the Muse of Astronomy in classical texts. He immediately excludes that possible identification, however, when he writes that she is “Nor of the Muses nine.” By calling on her “meaning” rather than her “Name,” Milton relies on a multitude of precedents and traditions, repackaged for his own times and his own idiosyncratic purposes, that critics have consistently failed to recognize or investigate sufficiently. This dissertation looks diachronically at various occurrences of Uranian discourse in literature, historically both before and after Milton, to locate thematic similarities to his works and to help define his Urania accordingly. In spite of her explicit exclusion, the search begins with Urania as Muse of Astronomy because from her mythopoetic genesis in Ancient Greece, other myths are engrafted onto her, most notably Plato’s Uranian Aphrodite as defined in his Symposium. This transformed Urania appears in ancient and medieval cosmic journey and dream narratives and evolves by the Renaissance into an oddly Christianized muse. She becomes a vehicle for heavenly, divine truths that each devout Christian rightly senses in his conscience. In this capacity she promotes friendship and chastity, while she also opposes licentiousness, particularly the lusts of tyrants. In early myths, the Muses are victims of tyranny; but in later appearances, they often sell their patronage of the arts unscrupulously to wicked kings and the flattering poets who are paid by them. Urania’s patronage manages to distance itself from her sisters’ misallocations of inspiration, and parts of the Book VII invocation are clearly an indictment of royal excess. In conclusion, a small group of late-Victorian English poets, mainly from Oxford, call themselves the “Uranians.” Although they too draw from the same traditions as Milton and from Milton himself, they appropriate Urania to satisfy their own political and sexual agendas in a conscious and deliberate revision. / text