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- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
- Creators: Ball, Sally
- Resource Type: Text
- Status: Published
For my project, I delve into the relationships of Victor and the Monster as well as the relationships Victor shares with other characters that were underdeveloped within the original novel by Mary Shelley in the novel Franeknstein. I examine their relationships in two components. The first through my own interpretation of Victor and the Monster’s relationship within a creative writing piece that extends the novel as if Victor had lived rather than died in the arctic in order to explore the possibilities of a more complex set of relationships between Victor and the Monster than simply creator-creation. My writing focuses on the development of their relationship once all they have left is each other. The second part of my project focuses on an analytical component. I analyze and cite the reasoning for my creative take on Victor and the Monster as well as their relationship within the novel and Mary Shelley’s intentions.
Animal shelters are stressful environments for dogs and a plethora of research has been conducted on interventions aimed at improving the welfare of these animals. One type of intervention is social interaction, either between dogs and people or dogs and conspecifics. To investigate the types of social interaction dogs engage in and the impact of that contact on their welfare, 12 dogs were enrolled to participate in group sessions with other dogs, supervised by staff, in a shelter setting. There were three, 15-minute sessions per day across three days in which groups of two to four dogs were observed and recorded on video. These videos were then analyzed per dog for three types of interactions: dog-dog, dog-human, and dog-environment. It was found that the dogs spent significantly more time engaging with the staff members in the room than with conspecifics or the environment. Physiological measurements, including cortisol and S-IgA levels, were taken using urinary and fecal samples obtained both in the morning prior to these interaction sessions and after the final interaction of the day. No significant correlations were found between the amount of time that the dogs spent in each type of interaction and dogs’ cortisol or S-IgA levels. However, smaller statistical effects suggest that human interaction may correspond with decreased stress the day after interaction while conspecific interaction may be related to increases in stress the following day. Overall, these findings suggest that social interaction, particularly with people, may be beneficial, and should be further explored as a method to enhance the well-being of shelter dogs.
Delusions of Grandeur: A Collection of Emotionally Revealing and Probably Not Funny Comedy Vignettes
In “Playing the Changes,” we meet two men stranded in a small desert town in 1972, a time when their attraction to each other is still dangerous. Nile Walker is a jazz musician, running from a spurned lover and the law. Benji Garza is a once-devout Catholic, fixing cars and caring for his orphaned nephew, Hector. Walker and Garza’s affair will spin both lives and their heredity into sweeping tragedies that characters battle with lust and melody. Walker has a son he never meets, a drifter who finds connection with another lost soul at an airport in “La Petite Mort.” Hector is forced into early adulthood in “The Words,” when his ailing uncle’s health fails due to a mysterious disease not yet called AIDS. Later Tre—a young man struggling with the weight of his own lineage—meets him in “PHX.” These stories examine questions of death’s causes and its myriad effects, and offer this solution: Knowing that we cannot know everything, and living, loving, and singing anyway.