<p>Self-referentiality plays an important, but often overlooked, role in the works of Richard Strauss. The broad category of self-reference includes works of metafiction, which literary critic Patricia Waugh has defined as fiction that &ldquo;self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality&rdquo; and &ldquo;explores the <i>theory </i> of writing fiction through the <i>practice</i> of writing fiction.&rdquo;¹ Additionally, Werner Wolf has conceptualized self-reference to include not only &ldquo;intra-systemic relationship(s),&rdquo; but also intertextual and intermedial references.² The relationships and references included in Wolf&rsquo;s conception of self-reference allow Strauss, his collaborators, and later interpreters to insert their own voices into operas and, arguably, even give themselves agency in the drama. This thesis examines this voice and agency in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of Strauss&rsquo;s aesthetics and those of his librettists and later interpreters with particular attention to three operas: <i>Ariadne auf Naxos</i> (the 1912 and 1916 versions), <i>Intermezzo</i> (1924), and <i> Capriccio</i> (1942). Additionally, I examine Christof Loy&rsquo;s 2011 production of <i>Die Frau ohne Schatten</i> (1919) as an example of complex layers self-reference added to a work by a later interpreter and as a suggestion for future avenues of research regarding operatic self-referentiality. </p><p> ¹Patricia Waugh, <i>Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction</i> (London: Methuen &amp; Company, 1984), 2. ²Werner Wolf, preface to <i>Self-Reference in Literature and Music</i>, ed. Walter Bernhart and Werner Wolf (Amsterdam: Rudopi, 2010), vii.</p>

<p> By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Great Britain led the European contest for imperial dominion and successfully extended its influence throughout Africa, the Americas, South East Asia, and the Pacific. National pride in the world's leading empire, however, was laced with an increasing anxiety regarding the unbridled frontier and the hybridization of Englishness and the socio-ethnic and cultural Other. H. Rider Haggard's <i> She,</i> Bram Stoker's <i>Dracula,</i> and Richard Marsh's <i> The Beetle,</i> three Imperial Gothic novels, personify the monstrosity of hybridity in antagonists who embody multiple races and cultures. Moreover, as representatives of various ancient empires, these characters reveal the fragile nature of imperial power that is anchored in the conception of human and cultural evolution. </p><p> Hybridity works to disrupt the fragile web of power structures that maintain imperial dominance and create a fissure in the construct of Britain's national identity. Yet, the novels ultimately contain the invasion narrative by circulating power back to the English characters through the hybrid, polyglot, and metamorphosing English language by which the enemy is disoriented and re-rendered as Other. Using New Historicist and Postcolonial theories, this work examines the aporia of linguistic hybridity used to overcome the threat of racial and cultural hybridity as it is treated in Haggard, Stoker, and Marsh's novels.</p>

<p> <i>Queer Creatures, Queer Times</i> makes a critical intervention in queer theory and queer poetics through a combination of critical and creative approaches to explore how posthumanist thought and animal studies might correct a blindspot in current critical work on queer experience and texts. Queer theory tends to neglect non/human subjects, yet an ecological and posthumanist critique helps to trouble its humanist bias as well as its overly neat ties to constructivist and performative notions of selfhood. I argue that modern lyric poetry, in emergence during the cultural transmission of Darwinian precepts and the social invention of the homosexual, is uniquely situated to challenge the exclusivist principles that underlie specieisim, Social Darwinism, and heterosexism. While queer theory tends to overlook evolution in the construction of subjectivity and sexuality, I posit that such tendencies diminish opportunities for thinking through non-coherent selfhood and the radical contingency of beings upon other life forms. Accompanying my critical essays on three modernist queer poets, Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore, are my poetics essay entitled "Towards a Poetics of the Animal" and my poetry manuscript <i> Queer Fish.</i> Both poetic texts explore non-dominant forms of queer relation between animals and humans.</p>

<p> Historic Preservation is a continuous movement. Preservationists are responsible for the expansion of the National Register of Historic Places, as well as the care of historic buildings already listed on the National Register. This thesis explores historic preservation in Lafayette, Louisiana. The thesis is a two-part process. First, the individually listed properties on the National Register were re-evaluated to ensure that their condition is current in the nomination. Secondly, historic preservation involves discovering potential new historic properties. This process involved surveying a historic neighborhood or property. For this thesis, the survey included the historic neighborhood known locally as Freetown. The process of re-evaluation led to the discovery that certain historic buildings were altered or moved, and others are endangered. The surveys revealed an intact historic neighborhood with a sense of community that could one day be a National Historic District.</p>

<p> This Public History thesis examines the role that historic cemeteries play in preservation in urban southeast Louisiana by looking at their place on the National Register of Historic Places, analyzing three case studies of past preservation efforts, and narrating the history of a historic African American cemetery and nominating it for the National Register of Historic Places. In Chapters One and Two, I focus on the 1960s and 1970s National Register and specific preservation efforts for historic cemeteries. In Chapter Three I argue that historic cemeteries are important to local history, specifically the importance of Sweet Olive to the African American history of Baton Rouge, and I submitted a nomination for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. I collected newspapers, land records, and preservationist's papers to present a history of cemetery preservation in southeast Louisiana and prepared the nomination to be involved in its future.</p>

<p> <i>Limited Sight Distance</i> is a poetry collection, written primarily between August 2012 and March 2014, while I was enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at California State University, Long Beach. In addition to work produced during this time, it also includes poems I completed while a returning undergraduate, as well as others written outside the academic environment; all are intended to reflect both my experience and development as a poet. The subject matter of these narratives includes aging, betrayal, death, family, illness, loss, love, and work, as perceived from varying points of view. I have found that, in life, it is when we are unable to see beyond that which presents itself to us immediately, that our sight distance is limited.</p>

<p> This dissertation explores the main question, "What are the issues involved in the definition and translation of color terms in dictionaries?" To answer this question, I examined color term definitions in monolingual dictionaries of French and English, and color term translations in bilingual dictionaries of French paired with nine languages. From this data, I made several discoveries. First, I created a typology of strategies used to define color terms that includes three strategies: Defining with Reference to the Spectrum of Visible Light, Defining with Reference to Relationship with Other Colors, and Defining with Reference to Objects. Second, both color definitions and color translations suggest that there is a smaller difference between color words (which have non-scientific senses) and color terms (which have scientific senses) than between scientific and non-scientific senses of many other words/terms. In addition, color word translating often involves treating differences in the grammar, semantics, and division of color space between two languages. I took a closer look at the French translations of the color words brown and purple, two particularly difficult words to translate into French due to semantic restrictions. I found that, whereas the translation patterns of modern Quebec French match those of older hexagonal French dictionaries, hexagonal French dictionaries now display a different pattern. All of these discoveries lead to avenues for future research that may improve color term defining and translating. </p>

This thesis has been an overview of the state and direction of contemporary philosophy. Specifically, it has examined the methodology of contemporary philosophy and has presented specific alternatives to academic specialization. Furthermore, it has explicated the notions of "systems philosophy" and "systems theory", which according to this writer are extremely relevant and useful alternatives to the problems of contemporary philosophy.This thesis has also examined the isolated nature of in holistic approach to world problems.Within the framework philosophy, and has endeavored to "publicize" philosophy order to make philosophical inquiry more "practical". The methodology of systems philosophy has been presented as a of systems philosophy the notions of "order" and "integration" are examined.

The purpose of this study was to ascertain what historians view as being the best and/or most significant American history books written in the Nineteen Sixties. An instrument was constructed which included questions about specific books, demographic data about the respondent, and questions relating to the respondent's ideas about the source of his own judgments about the writing of American history.

<p> During the past couple of decades, the topic of food and identity has become the subject of increased academic inquiry and scholarly pursuit. However, despite this increased attention, it is still more common to find interpretations of the food that appears in fictional writings than to find critical examinations of creative nonfiction works whose entire thematic focus is food. First-person food writings, like other forms of literature, are not only aesthetically pleasing, they have the power to evoke emotional and psychological responses in their readers. More specifically, ethnic American food memoirs and essays explore important twenty-first century questions concerning identity and the navigation of hybridity. </p><p> This thesis considers some of these questions through an investigation of three specific food-related acts in five separate literary works: Remembering in "Cojimar, 1958," from Eduardo Machado's book, <i>Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile's Hunger for Home</i>, and "Kimchi Blues," by Grace M. Cho; eating in "Candy and Lebeneh," part of Diana Abu-Jaber's <i>The Language of Baklava</i>, and "Eating the Hyphen" by Lily Wong; and cooking in Shoba Narayan's "A Feast to Decide a Future" and "Honeymoon in America," part of her food memoir, <i>Monsoon Diary</i>.</p>