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The purpose of this study was to evaluate attachment of people to their pets as compared to their human relationships. Specifically, this research was meant to discover if pet attachment was a more secure attachment than human-human attachment. One hundred and ninety-four students from an Introductory Psychology class at the University of Central Florida completed a survey regarding pet and human attachment. The results are discussed.

“Valparaiso, Round The Horn”, a collection of short stories, contends with the following vital concerns: How are we transported? Why do we believe each other? What is our tendency towards legend? How do we immortalize one another? What is ritual to the avowed non-believer? How can we feel such heartbreak about someone who died before we were born? Will we ever understand each other? Is there grace in misunderstanding? Is there genius in it? A long time ago, could people run as fast as horses? What is the use in anything less than myth?

The first chapter consists of an overview of the southern plantation as it survives in cultural imagination, especially in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. The second chapter discusses A Streetcar Named Desire and how Williams reimagines the plantation in an urban setting through the New Orleans Marigny neighborhood. The third chapter examinesWilliams’s reinvention of the rural plantation in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The conclusion explores how Williams’s work is used as a blueprint in representing the plantation in postsouthern literature and culture.

This thesis attempts to answer the questions "What purposes do family pets and the narratives we tell about them serve in modern American society?" and "What do these stories tell us about what Americans value and about where we locate our ‘value center’?" In Chapter 1, I discuss how Americans define loyalty in our pets now that our animals generally no longer help us work. I conclude that since the shift from agricultural to suburban settings, animals prove their loyalty individually and in human-like ways, rather than as "good" members of their own species, but at the same time because of their "animalness" they also provide us with a small but critical connection to nature. In Chapter 2, I explore how Americans experience spirituality or a "sixth sense" through our pets, especially our cats. These narratives show that many Americans are somehow able to hold diametrically opposed folk beliefs about exactly the same animal: while personal family stories about cats are almost uniformly positive and feature an angelic cat hero,impersonal folktales and legends still persistently characterize cats as evil and demonic. In Chapter 3, I look at how we work out our very American obsession with bigness through telling stories about our dogs. These stories allow us opportunities to talk about the socially inappropriate issue of male body size expectations, by celebrating big dogs and "under"dogs and by ridiculing those with "little dog complex."

Let M_k^2 be the complete, simply connected, Riemannian 2-manifold of constant curvature k ± 0. Let E be a closed, simply connected subspace of M_k^2 with the property that every two points in E are connected by a rectifi able path in E. We show that E is CAT(k) under the induced path metric.

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