ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3
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- All Subjects: Gender Studies
- Creators: Thompson, Victoria
Description
This thesis addresses the concept of "silence" in Vercors' 1943 novel on resistance in occupied France, The Silence of the Sea, contesting the arguments of scholars who designate silent resistance as expressly "female" and applicable only to women. Although women in France were supposed to be apolitical and removed from activities such as public debates and direct warfare, an examination of allegorical and historical female figures, together with male and female interpretations of those figures, suggests that men and women in France understood patriotism, and especially female patriotism, through a conceptual framework that was informed by and manifested itself in female images of the French Republic. My study on the gendered applications of female images focuses upon the French use of female allegorical figures, and resistance symbols such as the Lorraine Cross, to denote opposition to the Prussian/German acquisition of lands that the French people perceived as French, exploring commonalities between images from the Franco-Prussian War and World War II. Utilizing images relating to the republican values of liberty, equality, and fraternity, including Marianne, the female allegory of the people's Republic, and Joan of Arc, a historical character who became a female allegorical figure, this thesis argues that female allegories of republican resistance to tyranny were combined with resistance to Prussia (Germany) during the "Terrible Year" of 1870-1871. Furthermore, these images combined masculine militant elements, with perceived feminine qualities such as purity and saintly endurance, giving rise to divergent interpretations of female imagery among men and women, and a perceived association between women and silent, indirect resistance. Bourgeois men applied the militant aspects of female images to real women in abstract form. However, with the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, resistance techniques and symbols that had been gendered feminine gained precedence and became associated with men as well as women. Recent scholars have utilized the masculine/feminine dichotomy in French female allegories to classify World War II-era resistance as either "active" or "passive," failing to consider the conflation of the masculine/temporal and feminine/spiritual spheres in Vercors' novel and in documents such as "Advice to the Occupied."
ContributorsStevenson, Julia (Author) / Thompson, Victoria (Thesis advisor) / Fuchs, Rachel (Committee member) / Wright, Kent (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
This dissertation examines the history of urban nightlife in New York City and San Francisco from 1890 to 1930 and charts the manifestation of modernity within these cities. While some urbanites tepidly embraced this new modern world, others resisted. Chafing at this seemingly unmoored world, some Americans fretted about one of the most visible effects of modernity on the city—the encroachment of sex onto the street and in commercial amusements—and sought to wield the power of the state to suppress it. Even those Americans who reveled in the new modern world grappled with what this shifting culture ultimately meant for their lives, seeking familiarity where they could find it. Thus, this dissertation details how both Americans who embraced the modern world and those who perceived it as a threatening menace similarly sought a mediated modernity, seeking out and organizing spaces within modern amusements that ultimately reinforced existing cultural hierarchies.
Using the lens of spatial analysis, this dissertation examines how different groups of Americans used the spaces of nighttime amusement to interrogate how nightlife culture reflected and reinforced dynamics of power in a historical moment when social movements seemed to be upending existing power structures of race, class, and gender. Pioneering works in the field of the history of popular amusements tend to frame the experience of commercial amusements—and by extension modern life—as a liberating force lifting Americans from the staid traditions of the nineteenth century. But this dissertation charts the way Americans sought to moderate the effects of modern life, even as they delighted in it. Even as the modern world seemed on the cusp of overturning social hierarchy, Americans found comfort in amusements that structured space to reaffirm the status quo; while so much of the modern world appeared to break with the past, existing structures of social power remained very much the same.
Using the lens of spatial analysis, this dissertation examines how different groups of Americans used the spaces of nighttime amusement to interrogate how nightlife culture reflected and reinforced dynamics of power in a historical moment when social movements seemed to be upending existing power structures of race, class, and gender. Pioneering works in the field of the history of popular amusements tend to frame the experience of commercial amusements—and by extension modern life—as a liberating force lifting Americans from the staid traditions of the nineteenth century. But this dissertation charts the way Americans sought to moderate the effects of modern life, even as they delighted in it. Even as the modern world seemed on the cusp of overturning social hierarchy, Americans found comfort in amusements that structured space to reaffirm the status quo; while so much of the modern world appeared to break with the past, existing structures of social power remained very much the same.
ContributorsHoodenpyle, Morgan (Author) / Gullett, Gayle (Thesis advisor) / Gray, Susan (Committee member) / Thompson, Victoria (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This thesis is concerned with literary representations of the passions in a selection of eighteenth-century French epistolary fiction. In close readings of Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu’s 1721 Persian Letters, Francoise de Graffigny’s 1747 Letters of a Peruvian Woman and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1761 Julie, or the New Heloise, I consider how the passions serve, in the context of narrative, to ground claims about human nature and sexual difference, and to speculate on the social and political apologetics at work within each text. The importance of sensibility in the culture and literature of the eighteenth century has to some extent eclipsed the role of the passions in literary representations of human nature and sexual difference. However central sensibility became to eighteenth-century imaginations, it did not eclipse but rather complemented developing moral and natural philosophical conceptions of the passions. As each of novels explored here attest, the passions remained central to literary and philosophical claims about human nature and sexual difference in the eighteenth century, providing a common vocabulary for making claims about the state of the social and political order. Entrenched, polysemous, and changing, discourses of the passions in Early Modern Europe served multiple and divergent ends. The goal of this thesis is to contextualize their representations in the narratives of three eighteenth-century novels as interventions in moral philosophy, shaped not only by epistemological philosophy but also the imperatives of a French literary tradition of gallantry.
ContributorsLindsay, Ruth (Author) / Thompson, Victoria (Thesis advisor) / Barnes, Andrew (Committee member) / Wright, J K (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022