Browsing by Author "Bell, David F"

The issue that this paper addresses is how the college coach has abandoned the roles of educator and liaison between athletics and academics. The current era of college was examined using academic analysis, interviews with college administrators and academics connected to college athletics, and literature regarding the topic. The conclusion reached is that the college coach is in dire need of reform both professionally and pedagogically and that for the college coach to justify an existence in academics that is not solely for entertainment, college coach must reform their profession with academics values.

This thesis investigates two episodic television shows, Arrested Development and Scrubs, and attempts to establish why one succeeded with audiences and the other failed. Following the work of genre theory, it is asserted that the two shows resonate with opposing narratives framing lived experience. The former presents the institutional (or restrictive) force of language to guide one's thoughts, mark disassociations between the self and others, and determine action. The latter appeals to the creative (or liberating) use of dialogue and narrative to inspire agency. In privileging the concrete situations in which interactions with others enable growth without restricting the will, and in which others are engaged in the same self-investigation, Scrubs calls for an acknowledgement of others. Arrested Development points to the metaphysical language and power systems that make such acknowledgements impossible. It is argued thereafter that both world-pictures have their place. The opposition between Arrested Development and Scrubs develops into a dual affirmation of how ordinary uses of language have the potential to create arbitrary limits between the self and others, but also how ordinary language in a state of emergence from the particular lives of a multiplicity of speakers enables us to meaningfully communicate in the first place and antagonizes the metaphysical pictures that hold us captive. This thesis concludes by exploring the way that fiction, as a series of propositions, occupies the middle space between an epistemological opening up and closing off of the self to others, allowing it to be used for either purpose, or for both at once.

This paper examines the social question: is 19th century women's identity socially determined or do 19th century women have the liberty to forge their own identities as they see fit? In order to answer this question, this paper treats Henry James as ethnographer and "Daisy Miller" and The Portrait of a Lady as ethnographies of American women in Victorian Europe. The primary focus of this paper is Isabel Archer and how she is constructed from Henry James's Daisy Miller and George Eliot's Gwendolen Harleth, in order to demonstrate that while 19th century women were victimized by the tyranny of Victorian patriarchy, 19th century women were also capable of resisting and subverting normative Victorian social expectations for women.

In this dissertation I argue that the movement of panoramic literature under the July Monarchy (1830-1848) and its influence on the nineteenth-century urban novel must be re-imagined in the context of the proto-sociological movement of positivism. Existing criticism on panoramic literature typically views this movement as emerging from early-nineteenth-century urban upheaval. I focus here instead on early pre-sociological theory. Published concurrently with these panoramic texts whose popularity peaked in the early 1840s, the progressive theories of Auguste Comte (collected, in particular, in his Cours de philosophie positive from 1830-1842) promulgated a scientific, observational approach to the study of society. Throughout the five chapters of this project, I will posit that authors of urban novels, including Balzac, Paul de Kock and Zola, grappled with these theories actively, if implicitly at times, and that we can see this engagement most clearly in the passages employing the typological descriptions known as the tableaux de Paris, so central to panoramic literature.

Ce travail porte sur les écritures périphériques françaises après les années 1990. Centré sur des oeuvres de Philippe Vasset, de Jean Rolin, d'Antoine Volodine, et de Yamina Benguigui, du côté du documentaire, il se propose de faire de la figuration de la précarité l'un des enjeux fondamentaux des écritures périphériques actuelles.

By looking at different conceptions of what it means to be human, this essay explores the question of the convergence of philosophical contemplation and the loving contemplation of God. Since the birth of philosophy as the love of wisdom, the simultaneous incommensurability and inseparability of philosophy as theory and philosophy as practice has become more and more problematic over the years; the insurmountable nature of this problem seems to have dissolved, in our present day and age, into a decidedly theoretical conception of philosophy--so much so, in fact, that the original aim of philosophy to affect our daily lives seems to have vanished altogether from the broad scope of contemporary academia, and indeed, from modern-day life as a whole. The present-day fixation upon absolute objective reality has grown into the dangerously superficial understanding of what it means to be human as ultimately reducible to rational explanation, and this is evident everywhere from the university classroom to the ostensible worthlessness of contemplative life. In forcing oneself to be reawakened to the original wonder that was the occasion for the inception of philosophy, one may discover that the wonder itself is not only concerned with rational explanation, but is rather the occasion that we have, even in the simplest and most basic of our everyday activities, to discover that what binds us all together as finite beings in a finite world is mystery, gratitude, and love. With respect to human nature, knowledge, the creative and poetic imagination, and our confrontations with death and suffering, it is only within the philosophical act, whereby we acknowledge the limits of our finitude and the boundlessness of our love, that we may ever hope to discover that which enables not just a theory well-formed, but a life well lived.

Psychoanalysis has always been based on the eclipse of the visual and on the primacy of speech: this is evident in any clinical experience where the patient lies on the couch and never looks the psychoanalyst in his/her eyes. The work of Jacques Lacan though, is strangely full of references on the visual field and on images: from the text on the “mirror stage” in the Forties to the elaboration of the visual dimension of objet petit a (gaze) in the Sixties. As a consequence, a long tradition of film studies made reference to Lacan and used psychoanalysis as a tool in order to explain the inclusion of the subject of the unconscious in the experience of vision. What is less known is how the late Lacanian reflection on the topic of analytic formalization opened up a further dimension of the visual that goes beyond the subjective experience of vision: not in the direction of a mystical ineffable (the Real-as-impossible) but rather toward a subtractive mathematization of space, as in non-Euclidean geometries. The outcome sounds paradoxical but it can have major impacts on the way we understand the visual field and we represent it in visual studies: sometimes abstract formalization can help us looking at the space even better than our eyes.

My dissertation, “Troubles in Representation: (Con)figuring Non-Binary Sex in 19th Century French Literature, Art, and Medicine” argues that to adequately grasp the stakes of sexual non-conformity in 19th c France, we must consider the complex interplay between aesthetics and medicine, where images function as a critical mechanism for contemplating non-binary bodies and identities. I analyze the construction, representation, and conceptual articulation of sex in nineteenth-century France, through the figure of the hermaphrodite and its analogs. Together their disruptive sexual excess and instability exposes the fragility of the framework of dimorphic sex.

The methodology I employ is an interdisciplinary, synthetic approach, integrating extensive archival research into the analysis of a diverse corpus of materials. These objects include medical treatises, novels, short stories, poetry, drawings, paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures, and films—ranging from the canonical to the obscure. My perspective is strongly inflected by the work of Michel Foucault, but places greater emphasis on the image and the materiality of the archive. This enables me to shed light on one of the major blind spots in his theorization of sex, the visible, which for him, was always subordinate to the enunciable. Though Foucault is my primary interlocutor, this project also builds on the work of contemporary scholars in art history, medical humanities, critical theory, and gender studies.

Chapter one investigates the progressive destruction and denial of the category of human hermaphroditism within dominant medico-legal discourse. I connect this phenomenon to the medical community’s paradoxical preoccupation with antiquity’s mythical hermaphrodite. Chapter two traces parallels between the hermaphrodite, the androgyne and the castrato, examining their artistic, literary, and scientific treatment. In particular, I explore specters of antiquity in the work of Balzac, Gautier, Cuisin, and Latouche. Chapter three studies the history of famous “hermaphrodite” Herculine Barbin. Here, I dig deep into the archives to propose an alternate genealogy to Foucault’s volume. Presenting the model of the palimpsest instead, I explore how Barbin’s narrative and identity became subject to a process of rewriting to accommodate different political agendas. Chapter four investigates Barbin’s legacy through a series of 19th-21st c adaptations in a variety of media: novels, poetry, opera, theater, and film. I explain the narrative’s enduring social relevance and what the reinterpretations owe to Foucault’s scholarship.

Abstract

The album phenomenon developed in France and Spain and lasted throughout the entire nineteenth century. Albums were books with blank pages in which the owner collected contributions in the form of poetry, drawings, and music scores. These works were created for album owners by friends, acquaintances, and sometimes even suitors, and were meant to pay tribute to them. It is possible to imagine the album as a space of intense social and economic rivalry, in which owners of the books competed with one another to obtain the most luxurious books, and to fill them with the greatest number of entries from renowned artists. Similarly, contributors implicitly competed with one another to create the highest quality entries and contribute to albums that advanced their status as artists. However, established writers did not need further publicity, and many complained about the hassle of the constant request for contributions. To highlight the scope of the album phenomenon, and the frustration it caused writers and artists, José Zorrilla denounced album entry requests, stating that he had been solicited for album contributions a total of 188,000 times in his life. Honoré de Balzac condemned the album fashion even more fervently, declaring: "To hell with all albums."

I study the album as a practice that provides important information regarding gender, economic, and artistic exchanges in the milieus in which it flourished. My approach is based on the study of different types of texts. First, I analyze three essays on social customs that present the album from a perspective that mixes journalism and satire: Victor-Joseph Etienne de Jouy's 1811 essays "Des Album" and "Recherches sur l'Album et sur le chiffonier sentimental," and Mariano José de Larra's 1835 essay "El album." I use these essays to formulate a contextual theory on the album. I also examine nineteenth-century albums that I consulted in archives in France and Spain. Studying both the material construction of the albums and the contributions included in them, I try to understand the social and economic determinants of this social custom. Through the album entries, I explore the artistic networks established through, and exploited by, the album phenomenon, which were essential for successfully collecting contributions. Finally, I analyze fictional texts in which the album serves as a pivotal plot element used to shape the development of the stories and the roles of the protagonists. In my analysis of literary texts that portray the album, I focus on the establishment of gender and economic exchanges in this practice. I explore the imposition of traditional gender roles in the album phenomenon, according to which women were exclusively album owners and men were contributors. In my analysis of fictional texts, I also examine the economic aspect of this practice, reflecting upon the social class of the fictional characters involved in it. The literary texts that I study are: Honoré de Balzac's La Muse du département (1837), Manuel Bretón de los Herreros' El poeta y la beneficiada. Comedia en dos actos (1838) and El cuarto de hora. Comedia en cinco actos (1848), Juan de Ariza's "Historia de un album" (1847), Henri de Meilhac's L'autographe. Comédie en un acte (1858), Antonio Flores' "Cuadro cincuenta y uno. Placeres de sobremesa" (1863), José María de Pereda's Pedro Sánchez (1883), Juan López Valdemoro's "El álbum" (1886), and Leopoldo Alas `Clarín''s "Album-abanico" (1898).

The nineteenth century saw the rise of consumer culture and the proliferation of objects, such as cardholders, parasols, fans, pocket watches, and other trinkets. The album is at once part of this plethora of nineteenth-century objects and yet it is also distinct, in that it was a special piece of material culture that promoted a particular type of personal communication and required the creation of textual production. The album was established as a unique cultural manifestation, the study of which allows for a reconstruction of different types of social dynamics in its milieu.

Due to the complexity and richness of this object-centered practice, and the ways in which it developed, the album offers multiple analytical possibilities, as a social, historical, and literary phenomenon. One of the most significant contributions of this project lies in its transnational perspective and in its comparative analysis of different types of texts: essays on social customs, literary texts, and personal collections that survive in archival albums. The study of the exchanges that were fostered, and capitalized upon, through the album fashion is essential for understanding notions of private and public and collection as a practice. My analysis of the album yields invaluable insights into gender and class dynamics, ideas of art, and visual and material culture in nineteenth-century France and Spain.