MA, Kent State University, 2020, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Philosophy

Meliorism is the belief in the possibility of progress—a possibility whose actualization is dependent on, but not guaranteed by, both our efforts and our belief regarding the possibility of the success of those efforts. In this thesis, I have two joint goals: first, to explicate the philosophy of meliorism and its justifications; and second, through this elucidation, to demonstrate why and how one is to become a meliorist. To this end, I undertake the development of the intellectual, moral, and existential organization of meliorism. In the first chapter, concerning meliorism's intellectual organization, I develop and justify the definition of meliorism as the belief in progress. In the second chapter, I extend this to meliorism's moral organization—the issue of what counts as “progress” or “betterment”—by expounding John Dewey's ethics. In the third chapter, in regard to meliorism's existential organization, I attempt to estimate what I call the existential weight of meliorism and sketch out ways in which meliorists can go about managing this weight. Throughout this undertaking I relate the various aspects of meliorism to the issues of our contemporary society to establish a concrete sense of the ways in which I believe this philosophy can help us in our lives as we grapple with challenges such as climate change, corruption in politics, and navigating competing ideals and values in political discourse.

Committee: Frank Ryan (Advisor) Subjects: Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Educational Studies

Enriching teacher-student relationships is timely considering the increase in school violence, the changing demographics in schools, and the fact that educational aims focused on high-stakes testing often ignore relationships. When applying philosophy to teacher-student relationships, we must ask both whose voices are missing from our current conversation and how we can apply their insights to improve education. While philosophers such as John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Nel Noddings have all contributed to that conversation, William James's philosophy and pedagogy provide a unique perspective on teacher-student relationships that is largely absent within the field of philosophy of education. In this dissertation, I explore the relationship between the philosophy of James, his personality, and the productive relationships he had with students. I suggest that there is a link between his pragmatism, pluralism, and psychology, and the way he interacted with students. His philosophy can be evaluated from its actual effects in the world and by how it changes us as individuals. I suggest that the cash value, or impact in real life, of James's philosophy in the context of education, plays out in particular forms of relationships of openness, experimentation, curiosity about others, spontaneity, and communication.

Committee: Bryan Warnick (Advisor); Jackie Blount (Committee Member); Antoinette Errante (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Education History; Education Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, English

Feeling Real: Emotion in the Novels of William Dean Howells and Henry James argues that emotion is an important aspect of American literary realism, revising received wisdom in American literary studies that locates emotion in sentimentalism. As canonical examples of American literary realism, William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors offer compelling evidence of how realist authors deployed emotion in their narrative progressions. This project demonstrates—through rhetorical narrative readings of these novels—that the emotional dimension of their narratives has remained under-examined and under-theorized. The long-established scholarly view that American literary realism emerged in large part as a reaction to sentimentalism has nevertheless obscured realism's own significant investment in the representation and evocation of emotion. This dissertation adds to recent work on emotion in American literary realism, complicating the conventional narrative that realism is anti-emotional or unconcerned with emotion, by suggesting that emotion in these novels is portrayed as complex, uncertain, and difficult and by arguing that character emotion affects the authorial audience in ways that can lead to ambivalence and frustration but also pleasure. This project contributes to the growing scholarly interest in the emotions represented and provoked by American realist novels by demonstrating the importance of emotion as a crucial component of the rhetorical narrative experience. The novels of Howells and James offer particularly rich examples of the complications of portraying and evoking emotion as a part of their respective projects to create narrative realism. Close narrative readings demonstrate that James's and Howells's well-known disdain for sentimentalism offers a paradoxical clue to their own commitment to examining and evoking emotion in the novel, albeit in a variety of un (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: James Phelan (Advisor); Steven Fink (Committee Member); Robyn Warhol (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American Literature; Gender Studies; Literature; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, History

This dissertation examines the dynamics of political violence in the Revolutionary South from 1774 to 1776 as manifested in the rebels' strategy to overthrow the royal provincial governments in that region. It connects the failure of the British to recapture the southern provinces beginning in 1779 to this strategy implemented early in the war. It also offers a logic to the violence of the war in the South, which is often depicted as random and lacking any broader purpose but annihilation of the American Loyalists. British strategy for the southern colonies throughout the war was heavily reliant on the support of Loyalists, a reality that the rebels understood even before the war began. Most historians who have written on the British southern strategy have argued that the British failure was due to exaggerated reports of Loyalist strength in the South, usually the result of misleading reports from self-interested Loyalist officials or officials in London who had no better solution and grasped desperately for any proposal that looked promising. These historians have often drawn their evidence from the letters of General Charles, Lord Cornwallis, who had similar complaints about the Loyalists, who he believed were to blame for his lack of success. Recently historians have started to question this historiographical argument, suggesting that those of Loyalist sentiment were more numerous and willing to act than previously assumed. As with their earlier counterparts, however, these historians suggest the rebels undertook an indiscriminate and brutal campaign of violence aimed at simply eradicating Loyalists in a process reminiscent of The Terror to come in the French Revolution. The rebels' strategy instead emphasized control more than indiscriminate destruction. They were not attempting to eradicate an irreconcilable population or “purify” their society, the actions typically associated with revolutionary violence. The real threat for the rebels was the British (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Peter Mansoor (Advisor); John Brooke (Committee Member); Mark Grimsley (Committee Member); Andrew O'Shaughnessy (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; History; Military History

Master of Music (MM), Ohio University, 2014, Music Theory (Fine Arts)

This thesis compares formal analyses by various authors of each movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 and relates these scholars' analyses to James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory and William Caplin's Classical Form. The thesis focuses on how aspects of inherited formal structures such as sonata form and scherzo/trio form have been used and/or adapted within Symphony No. 5.

Committee: Elizabeth Sayrs (Advisor) Subjects: Fine Arts; Music

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2013, History

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the transformation of U.S.-Mexican relations throughout the nineteenth century and its impact on the border during the administrations of James K. Polk and Rutherford B. Hayes. This transformation is exemplified by the movement away from hostile interactions during Polk's presidency to the cooperative nature that arose between Hayes and, then President of Mexico, Porfirio Diaz. In addition, another aim was to place the importance of the public sphere in framing the policy making of the United States and Mexican governments. The thesis focused upon the research surrounding Polk, Hayes, and their interactions with Mexico during their terms as president. The secondary materials were supplemented with corresponding primary source material from the presidents as well as their close advisors such as newspaper articles, correspondences, and speeches from both the United States and Mexico. The conclusion of the work demonstrates that the transformation in the border, first, the United States to become the dominant power on the continent, ending its rivalry with Mexico. Second, the ability of Porfirio Diaz to bring some stability to the Mexican political structure that permitted him to work in conjunction with the United States to control the border in exchange for recognition. Third, the increase in economic ties of the United States and Mexico that made war an unprofitable and dangerous outcome for both countries. Last, the difference in the president's personalities, Polk being ambitious, while Hayes following a cautious policy, as well as the fading of American expansionism and the concept of "manifest destiny."

Committee: Amilcar Challu Dr. (Advisor); Scott Martin Dr. (Committee Member); Rebecca Mancuso Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: History; Latin American History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, English

This dissertation argues that during the reign of Charles I (1625-42), a powerful and long-lasting nationalist discourse emerged that embodied a conflicted nostalgia and located a primary source of English national identity in the Elizabethan era, rooted in the works of William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, John Lyly, and Ben Jonson. This Elizabethanism attempted to reconcile increasingly hostile conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, court and country, and elite and commoners. Remarkably, as I show by examining several Caroline texts in which Elizabethan ghosts appear, Caroline authors often resurrect long-dead Elizabethan figures to articulate not only Puritan views but also Arminian and Catholic ones. This tendency to complicate associations between the Elizabethan era and militant Protestantism also appears in Caroline plays by Thomas Heywood, Philip Massinger, and William Sampson that figure Queen Elizabeth as both ideally Protestant and dangerously ambiguous. Furthermore, Caroline Elizabethanism included reprintings and adaptations of Elizabethan literature that reshape the ideological significance of the Elizabethan era. The 1630s quarto editions of Shakespeare's Elizabethan comedies The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Taming of the Shrew, and Love's Labour's Lost represent the Elizabethan era as the source of a native English wit that bridges social divides and negotiates the roles of powerful women (a renewed concern as Queen Henrietta Maria became more conspicuous at court). Similarly, poetic and dramatic adaptations of Sidney's Arcadia by Francis Quarles, Henry Glapthorne, and James Shirley rewrite the romance's politics to engage with contemporary debates about foreign policy. This dissertation ultimately contributes to early modern literary studies in three ways: first, it reclaims and nuances the literary and political sophistication of Caroline literature; second, it contests the narrative that casts the Elizabethan era as perennially opposed to t (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Richard Dutton PhD (Committee Chair); Christopher Highley PhD (Committee Member); Alan B. Farmer PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

BA, Oberlin College, 2012, History

Four American presidents have been assassinated: Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, and John F. Kennedy in 1963. As a traumatic event, presidential assassination has caused Americans to be introspective and reflect on their nation's political past, present, and future. These reflections, which are aggregated and perpetuated by the mass media, reveal a great deal about American political culture. This thesis looks at the New York Times coverage of each assassination. In doing so, it explores the changing discourse about republicanism between 1865 and 1963, how each assassination was mobilized to serve distinct political goals, and how Americans imagined the legacy of each assassinated president.

Committee: Renee Romano PhD (Advisor); Gary Kornblith PhD (Committee Member); Steven Volk PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American History

BA, Oberlin College, 2011, English

This project examines the boundaries and definitions of 19th-century American realism in relation to the critical and literary writings of Walt Whitman and Henry James.

Committee: Sandra Zagarell (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature; Literature

Bachelor of Arts, Miami University, 2007, College of Arts and Sciences - History

Historians studying the early contact period typically focus on the interaction of European newcomers with indigenous peoples on the North American continent. However, Europeans were not the only people to travel across the Atlantic, nor were they the only ones to experience the surprise and amazement of seeing a new world. Many Native American people voyaged to Europe, some as captives, some as emissaries for their people, and some as the spouses of Europeans. Pocahontas is the best-known of these trans-Atlantic individuals, and although she left no written record of her own, it is possible to reconstruct some of her experiences as an explorer of Europe. Despite the efforts of the Jamestown colonists to educate her in English mores, her own people's teachings and customs continued to effect how she saw the foreigners and the strange new world of seventeenth-century London. While attending a Guy Fawkes' Day celebration in England, she may have recalled her own people's use of fire to destroy enemies. Upon meeting King James I at the royal Twelfth Night masque, she perhaps compared his displays of wealth and power to those of her father. As she lay dying of a mysterious European illness, she may have wondered how English medical practices would compare to the healing traditions of the Powhatans. In order to make sense of all that she experienced in England, she drew upon the cultural knowledge of her people. Reconstructing Pocahontas's vision of England not only elucidates the experiences of a Native woman whose thoughts and feelings have been long-lost to time, but it also provides a new way of seeing English society and culture in the early seventeenth-century.

Committee: Daniel Cobb (Advisor) Subjects: History, United States

PHD, Kent State University, 2012, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Puritans cautiously appropriated and deployed classical rhetorical theory in their preaching and poetics, and both of these language practices register dialectical tensions between rhetorical propriety and the propriety of rhetoric, which suggests that Puritan preaching and poetics deals squarely with rhetorical propriety. Rhetoricians, however, have largely overlooked, diminished, or even dismissed the role rhetorical propriety plays in rhetorical situation generally and, more specifically, the role rhetorical propriety plays Puritan rhetoric. I argue that Puritan rhetoric offers a clear articulation of the sense of propriety that underwrites Christian ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics, from which we can draw conclusions about rhetorical propriety as a meaningful concept for studying rhetorical situation. I therefore argue that rhetorical propriety can be treated as a usable methodology for studying rhetorical situation. Modern rhetorical theorists have primarily studied rhetorical propriety by taking classical rhetorical tradition as their starting point, and so they have reached the same conclusions as the classical rhetoricians themselves that rhetorical propriety cannot be properly theorized to create a usable (or teachable) methodology. Puritan language practices offer a starting point for examining rhetorical propriety: Puritan sermon rhetoric offers a starting point for examining rhetorical propriety in rhetorical situation and Puritan poetry a starting point for examining rhetorical propriety in literary analysis. Finally, I argue that rhetorical propriety offers an analytical method that is dialectical in its movement. The concept comprises four different “moments” of analysis: stylistic propriety, rhetorical propriety, social propriety and economic propriety. Stylistic propriety concerns literary decorum—whether a language user's style suits its subject, genre, and purpose. Rhetorical propriety concerns the materials that compose rhetorical situation (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Raymond Craig PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Ronald Corthell PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Kevin Floyd PhD (Committee Member); Sara Newman PhD (Committee Member); David Odell-Scott PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; American Literature; Bible; British and Irish Literature; Ethics; Literature; Philosophy; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2011, English

The fact that Victorians in general were keenly interested in the practices of self-control—from emotional restraint to diligent work habits—and in the relationships between self-control, self-culture, and economic self-determination—is a critical commonplace well supported by popular nineteenth-century advice literature. However, literary scholars have also noted that advances in the study of psychology in the period tended to emphasize the physiological basis of the mind, which increasingly undermined confidence in a rational, controlling ego. Through analysis of novels by Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot and Samuel Butler, in tandem with psychological literature by Alexander Bain, William James, George Henry Lewes, and Samuel Butler, this dissertation considers the parallel efforts of novelists and psychologists to reconcile this tension between highly valuing self-control and recognizing the physical and psychological obstacles to cultivating this control. Novelists and physiological psychologists alike responded to growing concerns about the scientific validity of traditional notions of self-control by creatively exploring alternative models of control enabled by energy, attention, emotion, and unconscious memory. This dissertation uncovers a dialogue between the realist novel and the emerging scientific field of psychology about the necessity of physiological energy for self-control and its potential to warp the mind, the power of attention to mediate the stream of consciousness and the mind-body relationship, the cognitive aspects of emotion and their role in psychological development, and the promise of unconscious memories to drive the evolution of both individuals and the species.  

Committee: Athena Vrettos PhD (Advisor); William Siebenschuh PhD (Committee Member); Christopher Flint PhD (Committee Member); Jonathan Sadowsky PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2012, English/Literature

Constructions of children and constructions of cyborgs in literature and other textual representations are very similar; both identities are liminal since they exist outside the realm of adult human experience and both identities also serve as vehicles through which adults can experiment with their own conscious or unconscious fantasies or fears. Because of these similarities, the figure of the child and the figure of the cyborg frequently become linked in popular culture. Although the figure of the cyborg offers many liberating opportunities for alternative hybrid identity formations (as posthumanist Donna Haraway has pointed out), linking the figure of the child with regressive constructions of the cyborg can have many harmful consequences. Often, the figure of the cyborg becomes a site for the fears and phobias of adults afraid of the future. And since children are already sometimes marginalized in adult texts, or get used as adults experiment with their own anxieties about the present or the future, linking the figure of the child with the figure of the cyborg in some situations can theoretically create a doubly-differentiated “other.” Arguing that the merging of the figure of the cyborg and the figure of the child has become much more popular in recent decades, this project will attempt to analyze the evolution of the child-cyborg from Romanticism to Modernism by discussing representations of the “child-animal cyborg,” the “preternatural child-cyborg,” and the “mechanized (or robotic) child-cyborg.” It will then conclude by interrogating from a sociological perspective how regressive representations of child-cyborgs may affect real child bodies, positing that more progressive constructions of child-cyborgs are both possible and desirable.

Committee: Erin Labbie (Committee Chair); Piya Pal Lapinski (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American Literature; Animals; Art History; British and Irish Literature; Early Childhood Education; Ethics; European History; Evolution and Development; Families and Family Life; Film Studies; Gender Studies; History; In; Individual and Family Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2008, English/Literature

As a premise for discussing the anticipation of post-modern theories of identity in Gertrude Stein's “Melanctha,” my project intervenes in the debates surrounding Stein's debt to William James's psychology. Though scholars such as Richard Bridgman, Lisa Ruddick, and Marianne DeKoven illustrate James's influence on Stein's work as well as the challenges Stein's aesthetics pose to the Jamesian model, few view Stein's aesthetic innovations in light of postmodernpsychoanalytic models. James argues that individuals construct their identities by selecting, amidst an onslaught of impressions, only those details that pertain to their interests. The Jamesian model, however, illustrates only a single subject's ability to think the world, whereas Stein's “Melanctha,” depicts the conflict between two subjects who exercise different habits of selection. I will argue that Stein's work not only provides new ways of constructing aesthetics but also new ways to consider the construction of identity. I will suggest that Stein tests the limits of the Jamesian model by depicting the engagement between two thinking subjects. Interpreting textual examples through Jessica Benjamin's and Judith Butler's theories of inter-subjectivity, I will illustrate how the construction of identity in “Melanctha,” depends not only on the characters' capacities to select objects of attention but also on 1) the recognition conferred on the characters by others and 2) the social forces that construct identities that precede the characters' processes of individuation.

Committee: Kimberly Coates Dr. (Advisor); Ellen Berry Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Gender; Philosophy