The status of bilingual education in Texas has been examined in this paper in order to explore the nature of bilingual education and bilingual education programs, to ascertain whether the implementation of bilingual education programs has been successful in Texas, and to determine if there is sufficient justification for the continuation of such programs.

The main body of the thesis concerns itself with the beliefs and characteristics of Southern Protestantism as they appear in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor.

The new elements in "The Ancient Mariner" were partly responsible for the unfavorable early reviews which vary much from the high praise the poem receives today. The purpose of this study is to record critical opinion of the poem from the contemporary reviews of 1798 to the intensive critical analysis of the 1960's.

The philosophy of Henry Fielding turns more upon a study of human nature than upon any stated adherence to a system of beliefs. The thesis of this paper is that he was a moderate law-and-order Anglican of his time, but strongly influenced by the deist Shaftesbury's studies of the psychological characteristics of men. These inquiries into motivations and Shaftesbury's advocacy of the social virtue of desiring good for others seem to have helped determine Fielding's philosophy.

John Keats is a mythopoeic poet who created his own mythical substructure, often adapting traditional figures from mythology to give a special meaning to the entire canon of his major work. The early poems are hesitant, imitative, and groping, but the mature poems receive a large part of heir symbolic meaning from the substructure of Keats's myth of the poet on which they rest. In the works of John Keats, then, the reader finds a touchstone of experiences common to all humanity, shaped into Keats's central myth of the poet. He left the testament of a poet who could "see as a god sees, and take the depth/ Of things" recorded in his major poems and in some of the most sensitive letters ever written by a poet.

This thesis investigates the similarities in the study of time and space in literature and science during the modern period. Specifically, it focuses on the portrayal of time and space within Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1899-1900), and compares the ideas presented with those later scientifically formulated by Albert Einstein in his special and general theories of relativity (1905-1915). Although both novels precede Einstein’s theories, they reveal advanced complex ideas of time and space very similar to those later argued by the iconic physicist. These ideas follow a linear progression including a sense of temporal dissonance, the search for a communal sense of the present, the awareness and expansion of the individual’s sense of the present, and the effect of mass on surrounding space. This approach enhances readings of Dracula and Lord Jim, illuminating the fascination with highly refined notions of time and space within modern European culture.

The purpose of this study has been to analyze the language of the popular lyrics of the seventies to determine if sexism is used to communicate in various musical genres. Three manifestations of sexist language developed by the Sexism in Textbooks Committee of Women at Scott, Foresman have been used in this study. The lyrics analyzed include 100 lyrics selected from songwriter-singers noted as articulate musical artists of the seventies, 90 songs reaching the "Top Ten" charts (1970-1978), and the top 100 songs of 1978. Chapter I defines sexism and explains three manifestations of sexist language. Chapter II includes examples from seven talented lyricists which illustrate sexism. Chapter III presents an evaluation of sexism in the "Top Ten" lyrics (1970-1978). Chapter IV reveals changes in stereotypic language appearing in the 1978 top 100 lyrics. Chapter V offers summaries and reasons for the findings.

An episodic novel set in rural north Texas in the 1920s, this thesis concerns the life of Lizzie Brown and her son Luke. Suffering from a series of emotional shocks combined with a chronic hormonal imbalance, Lizzie is hospitalized shortly after Luke's fourth birthday. Just as she is to be discharged, he husband dies unexpectedly. Viewed by society as incompetent to care for Luke and operate her ranch alone, she finds herself homeless. She returns to her brother's home briefly, but eventually is declared NCM and institutionalized. The story also concerns Luke, his relationships with his father and other relatives who care for him in Lizzie's absence. As he matures, he must deal with society's attitudes regarding mental illness and orphans. The story ends with Lizzie's funeral when he is twenty.

Studies of the English Renaissance reveal a patriarchal structure that informed its politics and its literature; and the drama especially demonstrates a patriarchal response to what society perceived to be the problem of women's efforts to grow beyond the traditional medieval view of "good" women as chaste, silent, and obedient. Thirteen comedies, whose creation spans roughly the same time frame as the pamphlet wars of the so-called "woman controversy," from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, feature women who have no public power, but who find opportunities for varying degrees of power in the private or domestic setting.

Although Garrison Keillor is perhaps best known as the creator and host of Minnesota Public Radio's A Prairie Home Companion (1974-1987), the focus of this study is his literary career. Keillor's literary accomplishments include a successful career as a writer for The New Yorker and two best-selling books about the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, entitled Lake Wobegon Days (1985) and Leaving Home (1987). His literary style incorporates elements from several traditions in American literature--the precise, sophisticated "New Yorker style" practiced by writers such as E. B. White and James Thurber; the oral tradition prominent in the works of Mark Twain and the nineteenth-century literary comedians; and the satiric realism associated with the small-town literature of writers such as Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis.

This study challenges Charles Lamb's 1811 essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation," which argues that Shakespeare's plays are better suited for reading than stage production. Each of the four chapters considers a specific argument Lamb raises against the theatre and the particular Shakespearean tragedy used to illustrate his point. The Hamlet chapter examines the supposed concessions involved in the actor/audience relationship. The Macbeth chapter challenges Lamb's Platonic view of Shakespearean characterization. The Othello chapter considers whether some characters and images, while acceptable to the reader's imagination, are improper on stage. Finally, the King Lear chapter considers the portrayal of the mind in the theatre, employing semiotic principles to examine the actor's expressive resources.

This paper examines the metaphoric structures that underlie Chopin's major novel, The Awakening, as well as those underlying selected short stories. Drawing on the modern theory of metaphor described by Mark Turner, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson, the author argues that conceptual metaphors are the structural elements that underlie our experiences, thoughts, and words, and that their presence is revealed through our everyday language. Since these conceptual structures are representative of human thought and language, they are also present in literary texts, and specifically in Chopin's texts. Conceptual metaphors and the linguistic forms that result from them are so basic a part of our thinking that we automatically construct our utterances by means of them. Accordingly, conceptual metaphor mirrors human thought processes, as demonstrated by the way we describe our experiences.

Fantasies about warrior women circulated in many forms of writing in early modern England: travel narratives such as Sir Walter Ralegh's The Discoverie of Guiana (1595) portray Amazon encounters in the New World; poems like Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1596) depict women's skill with a spear; and the plays of Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and others stage the adventurous feats of women on the battlefield. In this dissertation, I analyze the social anxieties that emerge when warrior women threaten gender hierarchies in the patriarchal society of early modern England. The battlefield has traditionally been a site for men to prove their masculinity against other men, so when male characters find themselves submitting to a sword-wielding woman, they are forced to reimagine their own masculine identities as they become the objects acted upon by women. In their experience of subjectivity, these literary warrior women often allude to the historical Queen Elizabeth I, whose reign destabilized ideas about gender and power in the period. Negative evaluations of warrior women often indicate anxiety about Elizabeth as an Amazon-like queen. Thus, portrayals of warrior women often end with a celebration of patriarchal dominance once the male characters have successfully contained the threat of the …

Alfred Lord Tennyson's The Princess: A Medley has posed interpretative difficulties for readers since its 1847 debut. Critics, editors, and artists contemporary with Tennyson as well as in this century have puzzled over the poem's stance on the issue of the so-called Woman Question. Treating Tennyson as the first reader of the poem yields an understanding of the title character, Princess Ida, as an ambassador of Tennyson's optimistic and evolutionary views of human development and links his work to that of visionary educators of nineteenth-century England. Later artists, however, produced adaptations of the poem that twisted its hopefulness into satirical commentary, reduced its complexities to ease the task of reading, and put it to work in various causes, many ranged against the improvement of women's condition. In particular, a series of editions carried The Princess into various nations, classrooms, and homes, promoting interpretations that often obscure Tennyson's cautious optimism.

Very little of the huge corpus of Beowulf criticism has been directed at discovering the function and meaning of myth in the poem. Scholars have noted many mythological elements, but there has never been a satisfactory explanation of the poet's use of this material. A close analysis of Beowulf reveals that myth does, in fact, inform its structure, plot, characters and even imagery. More significant than the poet's use of myth, however, is the way he interlaces the historical and Christian elements with the mythological story to reflect his understanding of the cyclic nature of human existence. The examination in Chapter II of the religious component in eighth-century Anglo-Saxon culture demonstrates that the traditional Germanic religion or mythology was still very much alive. Thus the Beowulf poet was certainly aware of pre-Christian beliefs. Furthermore, he seems to have perceived basic similarities between the old and new religions, and this understanding is reflected in the poem. Chapter III discusses the way in which the characterization of the monsters is enriched by their mythological connotations. Chapter IV demonstrates that the poet also imbued the hero Beowulf with mythological significance. The discussion in Chapter V of themes and type-scenes reveals the origins of …

Though scholars have discussed postmodernism in Islam and South Asia before, they tend to (i) assume Muslims as a monolithic group, bypassing the diversity of different cultures and the interaction of these cultures with indigenous practices of Islam; (ii) study postmodernity synchronically, thereby eliding histor(ies) and the possibility of multiple temporalities; and (iii) compare postmodernity in non-Western countries with Western standards, and when these countries fail this test, declare them not-yet-postmodern, or even modern. Negligible and scant discussions of postmodernity that do take place inside Pakistan, most of which are published in newspaper articles, tend to focus on Western postmodernity and its evolution and contemporary position. There is no book-length discussion of postmodernity and postmodernist literary texts from Pakistan and its curious sociopolitical blend of Indo-Muslim and Anglo-Indian influences and interaction with the Islamic political foundations of the country. This project discusses postmodernity and postmodern literature in Pakistan. I argue that, because of a different political, cultural, and literary climate, postmodernity and postmodern literature in Pakistan are distinct from their Western counterparts. Because of technological advancement and neoliberal globalization, Pakistan experiences a different kind of postmodernity resulting in the production of a different kind of postmodern literature. I trace the …

While many riddles exist in the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book containing female characters, both as actual human females and personified objects and aspects of nature, few scholars have discussed how the anthropomorphized “females” of the riddles challenge and broaden more conventional portrayals of what it meant to be “female” in Anglo-Saxon literature. True understanding of these riddles, however, comes only with this broader view of female, a view including a mixture of ferocity and nobility of purpose and character very reminiscent of the valkyrie (OE wælcyrige), a figure mentioned only slightly in Anglo-Saxon literature, but one who deserves more prominence, particularly when evaluating the riddles of the Exeter Book and two poems textually close to the riddles, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, the only two poems with a female voice in the entire Old English corpus. Riddles represent culture from a unique angle. Because of their heavy dependence upon metaphor as a vehicle or disguise for the true subject of the riddle, the poet must employ a metaphor with similar characteristics to the true riddle subject, or the tenor of the riddle. As the riddle progresses, similarities between the vehicle and the tenor are listed for the reader. Within …

This dissertation examines the role of aesthetic activity in the pursuit of political agency in readings of several of Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet (1600), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), The Tempest (1610), the history plays of the second tetralogy (1595-9), Julius Caesar (1599), and Coriolanus (1605). I demonstrate how Shakespeare models political subjectivity—the capacity for individuals to participate meaningfully in the political realm—as necessitating active aesthetic agency. This aesthetic agency entails the fashioning of artistically conceived public personae that potential political subjects enact in the public sphere and the critical engagement of the aesthetic and political discourses of the subjects’ culture in a self-reflective and appropriative manner. Furthermore, these subjects should be wary auditors of the texts and personae they encounter within the public sphere in order to avoid internalizing constraining ideologies that reify their identities into forms less conducive to the pursuit of liberty and social mobility. Early modern audiences could discover several models for doing so in Shakespeare’s works. For example, Hamlet posits a model of Machiavellian theatricality that masks the Prince's interiority as he resists the biopolitical force and disciplinary discourses of Claudius's Denmark. Julius Caesar and Coriolanus advance a model of citizenship through the plays’ nameless …

Critical reactions to the religious experiences contained in William Faulkner's fiction have tended to fall within the context of traditional Christian belief systems. In most instances, the characters' beliefs have been judged by the tenets of belief systems or religions that are not necessarily those on which the characters base their lives. There has been no effort to understand the characters' spirituality as the basis of an independent religious belief system. Mircea Eliade's methods and models in the study of comparative religion, in particular his explanation of the interaction of the sacred and the profane during a hierophany (the manifestation of the sacred), can be applied to the belief systems of Faulkner's characters to reveal the theologies of the characters' religions, the nature of the belief systems on which they base their lives. Identification of those stories associated with hierophanies in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction enables the isolation and analysis of the sacred stories and sacraments of Yoknapatawpha County's civil religion. The storytellings examined appear in Flags in the Dust, "A Justice," and Absalom, Absalom!. The storytellers and the audiences are all a part of the Yoknapatawpha community, and the stories are drawn from a common history. The sacralization and use …

Among the most important characters in contemporary writer Anne Tyler's nine novels of modern American life are her skillfully-drawn managing women who choose the family circle as the arena in which to use their skills and exert their influence. Strong, competent, independent, capable of caring for themselves, their husbands, their children, and others, too, as well as holding outside jobs, these women are the linchpins of their families. Among their most outstanding qualities are their abilities to endure hardships with heads high and skills unhampered. Within this broad category of managing women, Tyler clearly delineates two types of managers: the regenerative managing woman and the rigid managing woman. A major character in every novel, the regenerative managing woman not only endures, she also adapts. The key to her development and her strength is her capacity for trying again, renewing herself, and her family relationships. The evolution of a vital regenerative woman from a lonely childhood through the beginning of her vibrant womanhood is a key element in every Tyler novel. This development always includes an escape from her original family? an attempt to establish her own family; at least one major hardship that often sends her reeling home; and finally, …

The purpose of this study was to identify and investigate the specific superintendent leadership type and underlying factors that support significant student achievement gains in communities where misalignment with the McCarty-Ramsey model exists. Utilizing a mixedmethod research strategy, contributing school districts were identified through a survey developed by McCarty and Ramsey. This survey indicated that districts could show positive student achievement gains while exhibiting misalignment among these factors. While all four types of superintendent leadership style were revealed in the survey, a prevalent superintendent leadership types was associated with the misaligned districts showing significant academic growth. This study indicated the professional advisor or the professional advisor/decision maker superintendent had the greatest achievement results in misaligned districts. The second investigation phase involved school districts that met two criteria: misalignment with the McCarty-Ramsey model, and three years of significant student achievement gains, as measured by the California Academic Performance Indicator. Interviews were conducted with identified school board presidents and superintendents to reveal practices or initiatives promoting these results. The interview protocol consisted of a series of open-ended questions regarding effective leadership and programs. The second finding revealed the effective superintendent focuses efforts on five specific district leadership actions identified by researchers such …