Inaug.-diss.--Greifswald. / Lebenslauf. At head of title: Geschichte. "Literatur": p. [5]-7.

Thesis (D.M.A.)--University of California, San Diego, 2001. / Vita. Includes reproduction of Ferneyhough's score of Cassandra's dream song as Appendix C. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-85).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 1973-1092). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (M.A.P.S.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 60).

Thesis--School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., 1993-94. / Title from title screen (viewed Nov. 7, 2003). "April 1995." Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong. / Type-written copy.

Thesis (D.M.A.)--University of North Texas, 2002. / Accompanied by recitals, recorded Apr. 13, 1992 and Sept. 27, 1993. Includes bibliographical references (p. 37-39) and discography (p. 40).

ABSTRACT A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF DIVINE ACTION METHODOLOGIES IN THE WORKS OF ROBERT JOHN RUSSELL AND ALVIN PLANTINGA John Paul Wilkinson, Ph.D. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015 Chair: Theodore James Cabal This dissertation explores the relationship of epistemology to special divine action theory. Chapter 1 sets the goals, parameters, and outline of the research program. Attention is given to why Robert John Russell and Alvin Plantinga were ideal candidates for this analysis. Chapter 2 gives a brief biography of each thinker. Chapter 3 highlights those theological beliefs common to Russell and Plantinga which have a direct relationship to divine action theory. Each scholar's view of God's aseity, God's general action, and God's specific action in the historical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is presented. Chapter 4 describes each scholar's philosophy of science. Their understanding of natural law, Newtonian and quantum mechanics, methodological naturalism, interventionism, and the general relationship of theology to science are presented. Chapter 5 demonstrates the general epistemology of each thinker with special emphasis given to whether theological beliefs constrain scientific beliefs or if scientific beliefs constrain theological beliefs. This chapter also describes each thinker's understanding of basic beliefs and how they relate to theology and science. Chapter 6 sets forth the divine action theory of Russell and Plantinga. Included in the chapter are their reasoning for locating divine action in quantum theory and their responses to various problems with their models. John Saunders provides the critique for both Russell and Plantinga. Chapter 7 is the comparative analysis between Russell and Plantinga. After showing that they have a similar theology and philosophy of science, the chapter presents their epistemological decisions which directly affect their divine action theory. Chapter 8 is a brief conclusion of the work with suggestions for further research. The research demonstrates that because of Russell's epistemological understanding of science constraining theology and Plantinga's understanding of theology constraining science derived from their understanding of basic beliefs, methodological naturalism, and their goal for the science/theology relationship, they diverged when choosing which particular quantum collapse theory to follow.

This dissertation argues that Robert De Niro's performances in the 1970s mark him as pivotal a figure in the history of American film acting as Stella Adler, Elia Kazan, and Marlon Brando. De Niro's transformations into Vito Corleone, Travis Bickle, and Jake La Motta take the Method to the extreme, permanently changing our understanding of screen performance while revealing the relationships among authorship, agency, and acting. Utilizing rare artifacts from De Niro's recently donated materials to the Harry Ransom Center, I provide hitherto unseen evidence of his meticulous research, his conversations with directors, and his extreme bodily transformations that I argue constitute a truly unique iteration of the Method. Though certainly a student of Adler, De Niro's efforts to reshape productions around his characterizations and exercise his growing power to do whatever it takes - including rewriting dialogue to reflect vernacular speech, improvising scenes for spontaneity, and finding his own costumes – demonstrate a particular commitment to artistic truth, historical accuracy, and verisimilitude that mark him as inimitable within the diverse world of Method theorists, pedagogues, and practitioners. There is nothing, I argue, that appears in a De Niro film that has not been deliberated, discussed, or fought for by the actor, and I consider here how his filmography – including pivotal '70s films such as MEAN STREETS, TAXI DRIVER, THE DEER HUNTER, and RAGING BULL – speaks to a Method performance that extends beyond the screen and behind the scenes. Demystifying De Niro's "Method" therefore allows us to revisit key cinematic contributions to 1970s US film culture and significantly deepens our understanding of actor agency by troubling dominant historical narratives of production and confounding assumptions about on-set hierarchies. / text

The four poets in this dissertation--Hester Pulter, Anne Bradstreet, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Frost--write poems that resist domestic confinement. In these poems, houses become prisons from which the poet must enact an escape. Pulter, Bradstreet, Hardy and Frost--writers drawn from two sides of the Atlantic and two different centuries--are nevertheless linked by the urge to create poems that will provide doorways to less confined states of existence. They are also linked by the formal strategies they use for the attainment of such poetic release, and by the scale of their rebellion against enclosing structures. All four poets make claustrophobic domestic spaces the topic of their poetry, but rather than writing their objections into the unbounded space of free verse, they mimic the confinement of small rooms in the restrained dimensions of their poems. Rather than discard the enclosure of poetry, they accept its confinement. Their forms of release, then, are more pointed; they emerge at brief instances, as opposed to making wholesale departures. Instead of using their poems to create boundless spaces, unrestricted by walls and ceilings and floors, they use their poems to create rooms similar to those occupied by their personae. In poems such as these, poetic freedom is less absolute than relative to the extent of confinement, and it is made sweeter by the awareness of inescapable limits. / text