Matching Items (5)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: history
- All Subjects: Children's Literature
Description
In September 1974, a guerrilla organization called the Montoneros captured Juan and Jorge Born, two Argentinean heirs to a massive food processing conglomerate, and held them for ransom. After months of negotiations between this radical political group and the brothers' family, the Montoneros received $61.5 million dollars for the brothers' re- lease. Other kidnappings followed, netting the revolutionaries close to $100 million dol- lars. Although their tactics initially brought them recognition, they also unleashed a vio- lent response. Through a military coup, General Jorge Videla assumed power and used counterinsurgency tactics against the radical left wing of the Peronist party members. The coming years of military repression put an end to the revolutionary efforts of the Mon- toneros and gave the military leaders a reputation of violators of human rights. Even the Argentine people called the repression the "Dirty War," and investigations estimate that 30,000 people, the Montoneros among them, disappeared.
ContributorsScarvie, Matthew (Author) / Stoner, Kathryn (Thesis director) / Hinojosa, Magda (Committee member) / Mitchell, Michael (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2012-12
Description
Children's literature is a comparatively new concept that has changed as the view of children and childhood has changed. The idea that books written for children are more than just amusement and that these books instill values and pride in one's culture has been approached very differently in the United States and Russia. While there are universal morals and common themes in children's literature, there are just as many culturally-dependent ideals that make children's literature and its translation an enlightening way to study the culture of a people or nation and ease the tensions between emerging global and traditional national lessons in children's literature.
ContributorsZubiate, Rachel (Author) / Moldabekova, Saule (Thesis director) / Hoogenboom, Hilde (Committee member) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2012-12
Description
In the sixty-seven years following the end of World War II, West Germany and Japan underwent a remarkable series of economic and social changes that irrevocably altered their respective ways of life. Formerly xenophobic, militaristic and highly socially stratified societies, both emerged from the 20th Century as liberal, prosperous and free. Both made great strides well beyond the expectations of their occupiers, and rebounded from the overwhelming destruction of their national economies within a few short decades. While these changes have yielded dramatic results, the wartime period still looms large in their respective collective memories. Therefore, an ongoing and diverse dialectical process would engage the considerable popular, official, and intellectual energy of their post-war generations. In West Germany, the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung (VGB) emerged to describe a process of coming to terms with the past, while the Japanese chose kako no kokufuku to describe their similar historical sojourns. Although intellectuals of widely varying backgrounds in both nations made great strides toward making Japanese and German citizens cognizant of the roles that their militaries played in gruesome atrocities, popular cinematic productions served to reiterate older, discredited assertions of the fundamental honor and innocence of the average soldier, thereby nurturing a historically revisionist line of reasoning that continues to compete for public attention. All forms of media would play an important role in sustaining this “apologetic narrative,” and cinema, among the most popular and visible of these mediums, was not excluded from this. Indeed, films would play a unique recurring role, like rhetorical time capsules, in offering a sanitized historical image of Japanese and German soldiers that continues to endure in modern times. Nevertheless, even as West Germany and Japan regained their sovereignty and re-examined their pasts with ever greater resolution and insight, their respective film industries continued to “reset” the clock, and accentuated the visibility and relevancy of apologetic forces still in existence within both societies. However, it is important to note that, when speaking of “Germans” and “Japanese,” that they are not meant to be thought of as being uniformly of one mind or another. Rather, the use of these words is meant as convenient shorthand to refer to the dominant forces in Japanese and German civil society at any given time over the course of their respective post- war histories. Furthermore, references to “Germany” during the Cold War period are to be understood to mean the Federal Republic of Germany, rather than their socialist counterpart, the German Democratic Republic, a nation that undertook its own coming to terms with the past in an entirely distinct fashion.
ContributorsPiscopo, Michael (Author) / Benkert, Volker (Thesis director) / Moore, Aaron (Committee member) / Machander, Sina (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2012-12
Description
Capstone project, I began developing an animated series called Legends of Gaia. The show follows a small group of people of mixed ages and backgrounds, as they travel across the world trying to stop the Galliean Empire, a technologically booming western power that has begun fighting a war for world domination. The purpose of this paper is to better explain the origins and inspirations of the mythology of my series, as well as the major two supernatural characters of my series, and the general geography (both physical and metaphysical) of the series. When first developing this series, I looked into the works of Joseph Campbell, as he wrote the book(s) on mythology in many ways. His most famous writings are probably the Hero's Journey and the Monomyth, the basic outline of the journey that most heroes go through, from the call ordinary world, to the call of the adventure, all the way to the hero returning (Campbell 211). Many classic examples of story telling follow the pattern Campbell outlined, and my work is no exception. However, I did not want my series to be a beat for beat retread of the Hero's Journey, and so some parts, such as the Refusal of the Call, when the hero rejects the adventure and befalls a tragedy, were skipped, while others, such as the resurrection, were realized in different ways. Using the Resurrection as an example, in my series the main female character, Diana is reborn twice throughout the series. Once in the final battle with the main villain into her true, goddess form, and the other when her battles are over, and she is reborn in her mortal form permanently.
ContributorsLopez, Richard (Author) / Collis, Adam (Thesis director) / Valenti, F. Miguel (Committee member) / Barzso, Tain (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts (Contributor) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2012-12
Description
The front cover of Uncle What-Is-It is Coming to Visit, a 1993 children’s book by Michael-Willhoite, features two white children frightened by the hairy arm and upturned wrist of an unseen adult. The arm is clad in a frilly pink and orange sleeve, and gaudy bracelets hang from the wrist. The plot hinges on the children’s uncertainty about an uncle they have yet to meet; they know he is gay but are unsure of what it means. Before their mother can explain, she is distracted by a kitchen mishap and the siblings turn to other neighborhood children for answers. They encounter a host of descriptions that terrify them: one neighbor describes gay people as “fags [and] queers [who] really want to be women.” He shows the children a newspaper clipping photo of “a large man dressed in a frilly dress [with] a turban piled high with fruit on his head,” an implicitly racialized caricature reminiscent of Latina style icon Carmen Miranda. Another neighbor describes gay people as “dressed up in black leather. Zippers and chains all over...Dark glasses [and] chaps” (Willhoite, 1993). After having nightmares of men with sinister expressions in tropical-themed drag and leather, the children are overjoyed to discover that their uncle seems “normal.” Relative to depictions of other gay people in the book, Uncle Brett is normal because he is nonthreatening—he is white with short, straight, brown hair; he wears a plain, blue, collared shirt and brown dress pants; he carries a brown briefcase; and he enjoys and excels at activities appropriate for his gender, like catch. Although the book seems to have an affirming message about accepting queer people, it sends a clear message about which queer people are to be feared by children and which are nonthreatening. Nonthreatening queers are those who seem most like people mainstream western society considers normal: people who conform to expected gender roles, who have a vested interest parenting, and who are white and middle-upper class. These nonthreatening queers are by far the most represented in queer-themed literature for children. Based on a survey of 68 children’s books with queer characters, this paper argues that the representation of queer identities in children’s literature upholds more than challenges heteronormativity. I will first address ways many of the books perpetuate gender normativity by problematizing young male characters’ gender-transgressing behavior, portraying queer adults with less threatening gender presentations, and upholding gender binarism; next, I will address how the majority of the books promote repro-narrativity by focusing on monogamous couples’ strong desires and concerted efforts to have/raise children; I will then address race and class and the way white and upper-middle class queer characters are overrepresented while non-white and lower-class queer characters are underrepresented or not represented at all.
ContributorsLester, Jasmine (Author) / Danielson, Marivel (Thesis director) / Blasingame, James (Committee member) / Kuo, Karen (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2012-12