<p> <i>Kingdom in the Sky</i> is a collection of ten stories that expose the impact and residues of the regime of Apartheid in the southern hemisphere of Africa, Lesotho. The stories are threaded together by their narrator&mdash;Qenehelo&mdash;a boy who takes care of his ill parents, and loses them at age twelve. Qenehelo takes an <i>English Dictionary</i> and a <i>National Geographic Magazine</i>, and teaches himself English. Assisted by a good-hearted Peace Corps volunteer, Qenehelo is saved and educated. The stories center around the orphaned narrator&rsquo;s undertakings as he takes on adult responsibilities. This collection reveals the Boers&rsquo; oppression and duplicitous acts in the education systems, producing texts with rhetoric that repudiates native languages, undermines traditional epistemology, and misrepresents the theft of African land. With my stories, I hope to inspire struggling youth around the globe to remain strong and hopeful, and to transform their visions into reality. My intention is to help further the resistance against colonial western influence and all consequent oppression.</p><p>

<p> This study investigates how key Victorian novelists, such as Anne and Charlotte Bront&euml;, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, emphasize performativity in their critiques of marriage. Given the performative nature of wedding ceremonies, this project focuses on wedding descriptions in select novels by the aforementioned authors. Such a focus highlights an interesting dilemma. Although we often think of Victorian novels as overwhelmingly concerned with marriage, the few wedding descriptions found in Victorian fiction are aborted, unusually short or announced after the fact. Those Victorian novelists who do feature weddings often describe them as grotesquely theatrical to underscore the empty performativity associated with contemporaneous wedding rituals that privilege form over substance, and to stress deception and inauthentic play-acting in marriage. In these ways, the key Victorian novelists draw attention to a gap between the empty formalism of marriage as a legal, religious and social institution, and the reality of many Victorian marriages. </p><p> Nevertheless, many of the same novelists who show their general distaste for the empty performativity of weddings, acknowledge that theatricality itself plays a more complex role in their marriage plots, raising questions about authenticity, fraud and pious deceptions in marriage. For example, Wilkie Collins complicates the argument about theatrical weddings by stressing that quiet weddings, performed without much pomp and ceremony, may also signify deceptive marriages. Moreover, Thomas Hardy emphasizes the value of festive public weddings, which solidify the spouses&rsquo; connection to their community. Additionally, both the realist and sensation novelists discussed here, especially Anne Bront&euml;, Dickens, Braddon, and Collins, condone temporary play-acting and deception, which extend beyond weddings, if such performances allow their characters to circumvent inflexible and unjust marriage laws. </p><p> In sum, this dissertation analyzes how key Victorian novelists redefine courtship and marriage by focusing on the performative aspects of marriage as a legal and social institution. Those redefinitions are, at times, non-linear and contradictory. They also relate to the continual enmeshing of two primary modes of Victorian narrative, realism and sensationalism, which complicates the view of performativity in marriages as either artificial or authentic. </p><p>

<p> This dissertation examines hip-hop fatherhood narratives from 2010-2015 influenced by drug addiction, mass incarceration, underground economies, trauma, and dysfunctional co-parenting. Explicitly, the paper explores how marginalized, urban African American dads are imagined as protectors, providers, and/or surrogates in hiphop lyricism. Additionally, the research pays attention to hip-hop artists&rsquo; depiction of identity orchestration and identity formation of black adolescents and patriarchs by utilizing David Wall&rsquo;s theories on identity stasis. Moreover, the dissertation critically analyzes hip-hop lyrics that reflect different concepts of maleness such as hypermasculine, the complex cool, biblical, heroic, and hegemonic masculinities. In sum, the paper examines rap lyrics use of mimicry calling into question representative black male engagement with American patriarchy.</p><p>

<p> Good leadership is arguably important to the success of any organization, nation, or people. Research over the last 50 years indicates that transformational leaders are desirable and that such leaders can be developed. This research assessed whether and to what extent the protagonists in <i> Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire</i> and <i>Mockingjay: The Final Book of the Hunger Games,</i> Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen, respectively, demonstrate the four characteristics of transformational leadership: idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration.</p><p>

<p> West African Women writers are constantly looking for ways to maneuver the patriarchal system within their indigenous cultures. To say maneuvering implies the dilemma in consciously navigating patriarchal epistemology as West African women, which in reality is not exotic to other feminist struggles outside the continent. To deal with the dilemma of constantly maneuvering, this thesis suggest for an indigenous framework. It suggests <i>Osun </i>&ndash;a Nigerian goddess&ndash; as a response to the theoretical problems and as a methodology to navigating a postcolonial patriarchal worldview in order to express West African feminist discourse. The specificity of <i>Osun</i> is essential, but the fluidity of <i>Osun</i> across borders cannot be undermined as it paves the way for flexibility within feminist and gender discourse and draws upon various gender oppressed experiences. The idea of specificity and fluidity is fundamental to developing <i> Osun</i> as West African feminist discourse because of her ability to transcend space. The combination of specificity and fluidity are necessary within any feminist discourse as it allows for women from different regions to relate and align the tenets to their specific struggles found in the diversity of <i>Osun</i>.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation constructs a philosophy of perception that creates what I call a &ldquo;perceptive ontology of objects.&rdquo; This ontology emphasizes, not the subjective perspectivalism of human identity, but the dynamic emergence of objects into objecthood through impersonal modalities of space, time, light, and sound. Objecthood is an attempt to render perceptive experience as something neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective. Here objects are connected with subjectivity and yet still external. I argue that modernist authors present changeable, novelistic surfaces, which submit the novel&rsquo;s material objects to epistemological doubt. This creates radically interruptive moments of heightened perception, rupturing immediate experience from the more conventionally mimetic, referential, and social surfaces of the novel found within literary realism. These perceptive experiences create representational effects which I call &ldquo;the mimesis of sensation.&rdquo; This creates a sensory surface in the story world through which the reader aligns with the perceptive experiences of characters. This form of readerly connection is distinct from either Aristotelian empathy on the one hand, or Brechtian estrangement, on the other. &ldquo;The moment,&rdquo; a temporality distinct from the present, the modernist works of authors like Mallarm&eacute;, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka foreground perception itself, altering visions of time to construct discrete and static temporalities. These discontinuous moments create forms of abstract continuity. They thus create a dialectical relationship with narrative. </p><p> These event-like ruptures, occurring through encounters with the surface of objects, offer two distinct notions of time that could serve as alternatives to the post-structuralist critique of the materiality of the signifier as seen in theorists like Derrida and Barthes. First, the surface of the text becomes an expansive medium of perception: a collection of perpetual gestures, interruptions, reflections, and possibilities which arises, not through linguistic play, but through a composite surface of language and perception. A totality emerges through perceptive processes in relation to this medium, not through the infinite deferral of the signified, but through the ongoing logical recession of the object through epistemological immanence. Here I also take an important departure from the work of other theorists of modernity&mdash;Baudelaire, Bergson, Benjamin, and Deleuze, and others&mdash;who suggest an imagistic immediacy to the experience of non-chronological time. My notion of the modernist literary object is distinctively not a ready-to-point-to image. I critique the centrality of images in 20^th-century theories of temporality, arguing that modernism constructs moments of readerly critical alignment not through the satisfaction of visual desire, but by foregrounding processes of apprehension, perception, and inquiry: attempting to decipher an object which is never quite fully known. </p><p> Even as the modernist techniques I study draw attention to the artifice of representation and the difficulties of constructing knowledge, they also frame objects of perception, constructing scenes of aesthetic totality&mdash;available to the spectator so long as she acknowledges the mediated lens through which she looks. I see totality as the possibility that perception could be made whole, the possibility that there is a form of subjectless experience in which perceptive inquiry creates order (as forms of abstract continuity). These totalities, perceivable not in chronologies of external perceptible phenomena, but within impersonal faculties of apprehension, as they coincide with these forms of deeper time, also invoke pathos (through the acknowledgment of dimensions of fate). In four chapters, each devoted to a respective modernist author, the project shows how the works of Mallarm&eacute;, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka reveal relationships between what I call modernism&rsquo;s &ldquo;moments&rdquo; and the receding totality of the object. </p><p> Chapter 1 of the dissertation argues that a relationship exists between Mallarm&eacute;&rsquo;s reception of impressionism and the poet&rsquo;s linguistic theory. Here I examine Mallarm&eacute;&rsquo;s writings on the impressionist <i> plein air</i> technique in his essay, &ldquo;The Impressionists and &Eacute;douard Manet&rdquo; (1876). <i>Plein air</i> means more for Mallarm&eacute; than just painting outdoors. Air, in Mallarm&eacute;&rsquo;s eyes, is a full presence. Atmosphere is the key to a deep and abstract form of naturalism in his work. Other subjects in this chapter include atmospheric modalities like breath or respiration, speech and the sounds of words, or aspects of nature like weather. In Chapter 2, the novelistic objects of perceptive ontology in Woolfian impressionism create a temporal rupture from realism&rsquo;s more conventional referential representation. I argue that Woolf creates <i> another type of realism</i> through her experiments with time. Importantly, I break from the work of 20^th-century continental theorists of radical time influenced by Bergson (like Deleuze) in which the image plays a central, functional role. Woolf&rsquo;s moments challenge the idea of a Bergsonian image-form not subject to doubt in order to open the imaginative field of literature to what I call &ldquo;the mimesis of sensation.&rdquo; (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.) </p><p>

<p> Victorian culture was constantly engaging with nature and garden imagery. In this thesis, I argue that the literary gardens of Anne and Charlotte Bront&euml; function as a trope that enables an examination of nineteenth-century social concerns; these literary gardens are a natural space that serve as a &ldquo;middle ground&rdquo; between the defense of traditional social conventions and the utter disregard of them. In <i>Agnes Grey </i> (1847), <i>Jane Eyre</i> (1847), and <i>The Tenant of Wildfell Hall</i> (1848) the female characters have significant encounters within the gardens and outdoor spaces; Agnes, Jane, and Helen venture into these environments and emerge changed&mdash;whether by experiential knowledge or from the temptation of social and moral transgression. In AG, Anne Bront&euml; uses the image of the garden and natural landscapes, in order to explore Agnes&rsquo;s education within her governessing experience. In <i>JE</i>, the garden functions as a space that appears to offer Jane a reprieve from the Gothic terror of the house, yet it actually extends that influence. The entire estate is a literal boundary point for Jane in her life, but it also represents the metaphorical barrier between Jane and potential social transgression&mdash;one that she must navigate because of her romance with Rochester. In <i> Tenant</i>, the house, the garden, and the landscape symbolize Helen&rsquo;s identity, as the widowed artist Mrs. Graham, an identity that only exists during her time at Wildfell. Helen&rsquo;s identity as a professional female artist living in a wild landscape accentuates Gilbert&rsquo;s sexual desire towards her. Anne Bront&euml; critiques Victorian marriage and class expectations through Helen&rsquo;s final circumvention of social rules. In these novels, the scenes in the gardens and natural landscapes serve as a way for these authors to engage with the complexities of &ldquo;The Woman Question&rdquo; through the characterization of the governess and the artist.</p><p>

<p>This dissertation argues that the 'realist' ontology implicit in Renaissance allegory is both Aristotelian and neoplatonic, stemming from the need to talk about transcendence in material terms in order to make it comprehensible to fallen human intelligence. At the same time dramatists at the turn of the seventeenth century undermine 'realism' altogether, contributing to the emergence of a new meaning of 'realism' as mimesis, and with it a materialism without immanent forms. My theoretical framework is provided by Aristotle's Metaphysics, Physics and Categories rather than his Poetics, because these provide a better way of translating the concerns of postmodern critics back into premodern terms. I thus avoid reducing the religious culture of premodernity to 'ideology' or 'power' and show how premodern religion can be taken seriously as a critique of secular modernity. My conclusion from readings of Aristotle, Augustine, Hooker, Perkins, Spenser, Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson and Tourneur is that Hell is conflated with History during the transition to modernity, that sin is revalorized as individualism, and that the translatability of terms argues for the continuing need for a concept of 'substance' in this post-Aristotelian age. I end with a reading of The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous contemplative work from the fourteenth century that was still being read in the sixteenth century, which offers an alternative model of the sovereign individual, and helps me to argue against the view that philosophical idealism is inherently totalitarian.</p> / Dissertation

abstract: This paper contains an examination of the impact of the Vampire Hysteria in Europe during the 1700&rsquo;s on Lord Byron's &ldquo;The Giaour.&rdquo; Byron traveled to the continent in 1809 and wrote the poems that came to be known as his Oriental Romances after overhearing what would become &ldquo;The Giaour &rdquo; in &ldquo; one of the many coffee-houses that abound in the Levant.&rdquo; The main character, the Giaour, has characteristics typical of the Greek vampire, called vrykolakas. The vamping of characters, the cyclic imagery, and the juxtaposition of life and death as it is expressed within the poem are analyzed in comparison to vampiric folklore, especially that of Greece. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. English 2010

abstract: Tobias Smollett was an eighteenth-century surgeon, writer, novelist, and editor. He was a Scotsman who sought his fortune in south Briton. Throughout his life and career he experienced many of the cultural and political influences that helped to shape the British identity. His youth as a Lowland Scot, student and apprentice, and naval surgeon enabled him to embrace this new identity. His involvement in nearly every aspect of the publishing process in London enabled him to shape, define, and encourage this identity. His legacy, through his works and his life story, illustrates the different ways in which the United Kingdom and its inhabitants have been perceived throughout the centuries. As a prominent man of his time and an enduring literary figure to this day, Smollett offers an ideal prism through which to view the formation of the British identity. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. History 2011