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Literary Treatments of Blindness from Sophocles to Saramago
No full textEnglish Department Honors Thesis.Blindness plays a prominent role in literature and is frequently turned into a metaphor associated with wisdom or divinity. There are certainly other ways to interpret blindness, but literature consistently links blindness and insight in one way or another. In this project I hope to trace blindness through several important works of literature spanning various time periods and genres, observing how the literary understanding of blindness has developed. Early works establish the connection between blindness and wisdom primarily through the blind prophet figure. The short stories of the twentieth century never completely abandon the metaphor of blindness as wisdom, but the symbolism becomes more sophisticated, and the depictions of blindness become more realistic. Each of the short stories expands the theme of blindness by complicating the blind prophet figure and posing questions that anticipate the work of the of disability studies. Finally, José Saramago’s novel Blindness deconstructs the glorification of blindness and explores the blind identity and its interaction with competing identities.Vanderbilt UniversityEnglish DepartmentCollege of Arts and Scienc
Becoming Jane: Subject and Narrative Formation through the Language of Suicide and Marriage in Charlotte Brontë’s *Jane Eyre*
No full textEnglish Department Honors Thesis.Scholars have understood Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a quintessential female Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel, as ultimately a conservative work, since the marriage at the end of the novel appears to subsume and domesticate the rebellious, feminist actions of the eponymous protagonist. As both a Bildungsroman and a fictional autobiography, the novel, published in 1847, tracks the psychological development and maturation of Jane that allows her to become a productive citizen and the author of her own story. From the beginning of the novel, Jane is aware that she must actively cultivate herself as a subject to establish her place in society. This awareness complicates the conservative understandings of the novel, because it compels Jane to develop her narrative abilities so that she can determine her own fate and suggests that Victorian women can do the same. Both as the narrator and the protagonist, Jane uses language to differentiate herself from the “other” and to redefine what constitutes success and failure in her life. More specifically, she uses the language of suicide and marriage to describe failed and successful processes of development for herself and other characters throughout the novel, demonstrating her awareness of these developmental processes. Jane’s self-conscious development as both a subject and a narrator parallels Brontë’s blending of the Bildungsroman and autobiography. By tracking Jane’s development as both a subject and a narrator and demonstrating Jane’s awareness of this process through the narration of her own story, Brontë provides a model for Victorian women to assert themselves by becoming the authors of their own lives.Vanderbilt UniversityEnglish DepartmentCollege of Arts and Scienc
Multisensory Processing and Anomalous Self Experiences in Schizophrenia
No full textmultisensory processing and bodily aberrations in schizophrenia
PSY-PC-2990-01 Honors Research
Megan M. SaylorAbnormal multisensory integration is thought to play an important role in anomalous dissociative experiences of the body and self, including out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and feelings-of-presence. Aspects of OBEs including malleable self-boundaries and impaired judgments about self-location overlap with the phenomenology of schizophrenia. We sought to examine the performance of patients with schizophrenia (SZ) and healthy participants on a battery of visuo-tactile tasks designed to tap the underlying multisensory processes that may be abnormal in the schizophrenia spectrum.
Methods: 7 patients with schizophrenia and 9 healthy controls participated in a battery of tasks that were designed to probe aspects of self and body integrity. The Mental Rotation Task assessed participants’ abilities to perform mental transformations (perspective taking). The Graphesthesia Task measured participants’ abilities to transform tactile stimuli to visuospatial representation. The Hand Reversal Task measured participants’ abilities to integrate conflicting visuospatial and proprioceptive information. The Pinocchio Illusion task gauged susceptibility to perceive loosened self-boundaries and ambiguous spatial location of the body. The Shape After Effect Illusion measured the tendency to experience tactile illusion. The Two Point Discrimination Task measured the tactile sensitivity and discriminability of the participants. In addition to these behavioral tasks we developed and administered a new self-report questionnaire designed to probe anomalous bodily experiences (BODI). In patients, symptoms were assessed with clinical interviews. In healthy controls, schizotypal personality questionnaire was given to assess schizotypal traits.
Results: We found that reported incidence of anomalous phenomenological experience was associated with decreased tactile sensitivity and that SZs were more likely to have reduced tactile sensitivity. Furthermore, higher schizotypal traits in controls were associated with susceptibility to abnormal self-experiences.
Discussion: Although there were no statistical differences between patients and controls on most of the illusion tasks, there were trends showing reduced tactile sensitivity in SZ. SZ had preserved perspective-taking abilities in the mental rotation task, which suggests that they are able to perform self-other transformations. Future research should recruit larger, age-matched participant pools and examine neural underpinnings of anomalous self-experiences in schizophrenia.Vanderbilt UniversityPsychologyArts and ScienceThesis completed in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Honors Program in Psychological Science
Thirty-fifth annual report of the American Colonization Society, with the proceedings of the Board of Directors and of the Society, and the addresses delivered at the annual meeting, January 20, 1852 : to which is added an appendix, containing information about going to Liberia ; things which every emigrant ought to know ; Messrs. Fuller and Janifer's report; and a table of emigrants
No full textThe arrest of William Walker. Speech of Hon. John Slidell, of Louisiana, on the neutrality laws. Delivered in the United States Senate, April 8, 1858
No full textTwo speeches published together
Leveling Up: Evaluating Theoretical Underpinnings and Applications of Gamification in the Classroom
No full textTeaching and Learning Department Capstone Project“Gamification” has become quite the buzz word in the last few years. After all, children love games so why not use that advantage in the classroom? But there seems to be a great deal of confusion as to what gamification actually is and how it can be implemented in the classroom. Through judicious literary review, arguments will assert a strong case for gamification having robust theoretical underpinnings that can be used to inform teaching practices. This capstone will delve into the importance of informed choices concerning physical spaces and of the use of intelligent tools to promote learning. Also, gamification’s assertion that learning should be done in “communities of participation” with students have the right to make meaningful choices that affects not only how they learn but also how they demonstrate that learning, will be explored. These gamification principles are clarified by showing how skilled game developers have used them within the gaming environment and, by investigating these examples, connections are made for how these principles can be utilized within the educational context: like incorporating project-based learning. Finally, these gamification principles will then be contrasted with some of the limited ways that gamification has been incorporated within the school. Through illuminating the disparities, future implementations will be explored about how academia could gain a more developed understanding of gamification.Department of Teaching and LearningPeabody College of Education and Human Developmen
Jaco Hamman on Becoming a Pastor
No full textIn this podcast, Chris Benda, theological librarian at the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, interviews Vanderbilt Professor Jaco Hamman about the second edition of his book Becoming a Pastor: Forming Self and Soul for Ministry
Shareholder Voting in an Age of Intermediary Capitalism
No full textarticle published in law reviewShareholder voting is a key part of contemporary American corporate governance. As numerous contemporary battles between corporate management and shareholders illustrate, voting has never been more important. Yet, traditional theory about shareholder voting, rooted in concepts of residual ownership and a principal/agent relationship, does not reflect recent fundamental changes as to who shareholders are and their incentives to vote (or not vote). In the first section of the article, we address this deficiency directly by developing a new theory of corporate voting that offers three strong and complementary reasons for shareholder voting. In the middle section, we apply our theory to a world where most shares are held by institutional investment intermediaries (and mostly within retirement plans). We show that intermediaries’ business plans give them little reason to vote those shares and even create conflicts of interest that may distort their votes. Yet several key developments have countered that reality and opened the way for voting’s new prominence. First, government regulations now require many institutions to vote their stock in the best interests of their beneficiaries. Second, subsequent market innovations led to the birth of third party voting advisors, including Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), which help address the costs of voting and the collective action problems inherent in coordinated institutional shareholder action. Third, building on these developments, hedge funds have aggressively intervened in corporate governance at firms seen as undervalued, regularly using the ballot box to pressure targeted firms to create shareholder value, thereby giving institutional shareholders a good reason to care about voting. But there is more to the corporate franchise than hedge fund inspired voting. Say on Pay proposals, Rule 14a-8 corporate governance proposals, and majority vote requirements for the election of directors, are all important, recurrent topics involving shareholder votes. We must also explain why these lower value votes should be held. In our concluding section, we apply our theory to examine when shareholder voting is justified. We examine hedge fund activism as an example of high value voting situation and Say on Pay votes as an illustration of lower value cases where there are still good reasons to have shareholder votes
Testing the Value of Eminent Domain
No full textarticle published in law reviewIn their article (Guarding the Subjective Premium), Sebastien Gay and Nadia Nasser-Ghodsi add some empirical evidence to the ongoing debate over compensation for eminent domain.' Their model raises a number of interesting questions, some of which are identified below, but their principal contribution is actually conceptual. They identify countervailing pressures on property values resulting from the possibility of eminent domain. On the one hand, they hypothesize that property buyers will discount the value of property at risk of eminent domain. On the other, they identify the offsetting premium that buyers should pay for a community's economically beneficial use of eminent domain, an effect too often ignored by courts, scholars, and politicians. Gay and Nasser-Ghodsi perform an important service by drawing attention to these potential benefits of eminent domain