This study focused on Christopher Small's (b. 1927) perspectives on the inception, reception and application of his work since 1977 when his first book, Music Society Education was published. Small's perceptions and thoughts were recorded, transcribed and analyzed using oral history techniques based on qualitative research design. Grounded theory was employed in data analysis, and in the interpretation of Small's responses to interview questions. Implications for teachers, policy makers and curriculum designers suggest that musical activity within institutions ought to be examined further as to what end this activity serves, and as to where it places both teacher and learner. The author sought the extent to which Small's ideas have gained traction in current music education practice and findings revealed that Small's ideas are outside of foundational and current trends in music education based in the European classical tradition.

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Caroline Gordon's reputation is based in large part on misleading and inadequate portraits of her as a woman and writer, portraits resulting from Gordon's self-conscious posturing. Born in Kentucky in 1895, Gordon grew up in an extended family of strong women, yet in later life, she insisted that men had taught her everything. Although she wrote for newspapers in Tennessee and West Virginia between 1919 and 1924, Gordon later claimed that her education as a writer began when she married the poet Allen Tate and when she worked as a secretary for the novelist Ford Madox Ford. She also preferred to compare her writing to that of Henry James and other male artists. Over the years, scholars have accepted Gordon's perspective on her life and art. This dissertation is a biography revealing the private truth behind Gordon's posturing. Using unpublished manuscripts, letters, and interviews, I explore Gordon's early education as a storyteller, her work for the Chattanooga News and Wheeling Intelligencer, as well as her stormy marriage to Tate. I reveal how Gordon crafted a public myth in her life and art to obscure aspects of her personal history too unsettling for her to discuss, primarily Tate's infidelity and emotional instability. I explore how Gordon dramatized her family stories, especially the feud between the views of the Meriwethers, her maternal ancestors, and those of her father, J. M. Gordon. When Tate began to oppose the Meriwethers, demanding that Gordon abandon her family's stories to save their marriage, Gordon subsequently laced her fiction with situations explaining why she could not do so without destroying her marriage and herself. I also discuss Gordon's relationship to her female forebears, placing her fiction in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women's literature. I trace her debts to women writers such as George Eliot and Amelie Rives, as well as the undercurrent of images and concerns in Gordon's novels which subvert her allegedly conservative values and messages. And I suggest that Gordon creates strong images of women who, however silent, often have the insight and responsibility necessary to save their husbands and lovers.

This project will focus on four Latin American writers' autobiographies: Autobiography, by Alberto Gerchunoff; A cross and a Star. Memories of a Jewish Girl in Chile, by Marjorie Agosín; Memories, by Adolfo Bioy Casares; and Stories from Happy Times, by Osvaldo Soriano. The selection of these texts was based upon the underlying themes that they have in common. Three of them are texts written from the outskirts of the social fabric: Alberto Gerchunoff is a Jewish immigrant in Argentina at the turn of the century, struggling to find a place in which to create his own roots. Marjorie Agosín, daughter of European immigrants in Chile fleeing Russian pogroms first and Nazism later, and an immigrant herself to the United States, writes about the difficulties of finding roots in the Latin America she loves so much. Osvaldo Soriano, a native of Argentina, recreates his childhood by stressing the significance of belonging to a lower middle class family involved in the political and social struggles of the 40's and early 50's in his country. Finally, Adolfo Bioy Casares, also Argentine born, is the only one writing from the center: he belongs to one of the very few old, affluent landowner families in the Province of Buenos Aires, and represents the feelings and the political skepticism that characterize the members of his class. This study will attempt to explore the purposes that these writers set for themselves in the creation of their texts. My thesis is that autobiographies are a particular case of discourse in which the writer's feelings of belonging to a group, be it ethnic, national, ideological, gender or class related, set the stage for the elaboration of autobiographical texts. The personal story embodies others, and politics, history, and ideology come together and justify the very existence of writing itself. The personal becomes a literary strategy utilized to render the ideological background visible and to assure the text's impact on the reader. This study will show that autobiography as a genre questions the assumption by which there is a clear-cut difference between reality as opposed to fiction.

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