The World Ends One Last Time

Two friends are reincarnated into alternate universes where they are destined to meet over and over again. Meanwhile, two otherworldly observers find themselves reflecting on their own bond with each other

Open Letters & Impersonal Forms: Diaries, Letters, and Self-Disclosure in Rilke’s Prose

This paper places Letters alongside two other works of prose by Rilke — The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) and Diaries of a Young Poet (1997). The first is Rilke’s only novel, in which a young man inscribes his thoughts, feelings, and activities in a series of journal entries; the second is a series of private journals which Rilke maintained between 1898 and 1900. Notebooks’ narrator resembles Rilke in several ways, but the novel’s fictiveness impedes upon readers’ instinct to treat the story as entirely autobiographical. In his actual diaries, published at the opposite end of the same century, Rilke drafts poetry, recounts his travels, marvels at art, pines after women, and records the minutia of everyday life, but he reveals little about his emotions or mental state. The posthumous publishing of Rilke’s Letters and Diaries is reactive, reflective of the poet’s lasting fame. Moreover, these books are a consequence of collective curiosity about the interior lives of larger-than-life writers. In each case — Letters, Notebooks, and Diaries — Rilke opts for a literary form that affords him the privacy, communication, or convenience most appropriate for a given subject matter or audience. In each case, writing is performative and a means of self-preservation. Yet a more scrutinizing examination of this trio of texts reveals that the real letters, fictionalized journal entries, and real journal entries each defy the parameters of their form. Under Rilke’s pen, they begin to resemble one another in unlikely and ironic ways. While his non-fiction prose eludes reader expectations, Rilke’s work of fiction skillfully generates the illusion of self-disclosure. This body of work forces readers to reconsider assumptions about the inheritances of form, the privacy of authors, and the intimacy of epistolary exchange and diary entries

The Powerful Union of Emily Dickinson and Aaron Copland: Creation of Musical Silence through Transcendent Negation

This capstone paper delves into the remarkable success of Aaron Copland\u27s art song settings of Emily Dickinson\u27s poetry. Through detailed poetic and musical analysis, the paper examines the synergy between Dickinson\u27s poetic genius and Copland\u27s compositional mastery. It reveals how Copland\u27s musical interpretations successfully capture and amplify the essence of Dickinson\u27s poetic style and vision

The Illuminating Power of Christmas: Stories of Community

Christmas is an almost universal experience in the Western world. Its symbolism as a moment of community and connection reveals the human need to be with one another and fight our greatest fear—loneliness. Christmas is one of many winter festivals around the globe that demonstrate this need for connection, but because of Western media and culture it has become a holiday celebrated within and outside of the Christian faith and thus reaches a wide audience. It is a time when people come together to perform the same rituals every year and reflect. Christmas is a dedicated time to celebrate the ways in which we have forged communities and honor these bonds. The study of Christmas allows readers to understand the ways in which humans create collectives because Christmas occurs during a time of year best known for death and darkness, Christmas stories remind readers that there is light everywhere, in each of us

Impact of the US-China Trade War to Chinese-Listed Companies\u27 Stock Returns

Since 2018, trade relations between the United States and China have become increasingly tense, with the United States attempting to restrict the development of Chinese companies through measures such as imposing tariffs and establishing entity lists. Chinese companies included in the entity list will lose opportunities to export products to the United States or import new technologies from the United States. This study employs the DID method, using Chinese A-share market-listed companies included in the entity list as samples, to examine the impact of Sino-US trade frictions on the stock returns of Chinese enterprises. The research findings indicate that this event has not had a significant effect on annual stock returns but has significantly negatively affected the annual high and low stock prices

Finding the Holy in Nature: Emily Brontë’s Revolutionary Conception of the Transcendental Religious Experience

Emily Brontë’s infamous 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights, is a revolutionary text. While Brontë is deeply appreciated by contemporary scholars for the complexity of Wuthering Heights, this was not always the case. Her initial audience took her political and religious commentary as blind endorsement of harmful behavior, and found her themes nigh disturbing, despite the text’s placement in the gothic subgenre. However, by tracing her own religious education, and early poetic efforts alongside Wuthering Heights, clear thematic preoccupations on the part of the author can be observed as she passed through adolescence and her worldview solidified. These recurring themes, particularly in her novel, which portrays complicated and potentially unlikable characters who do not always make the “correct” decisions, showcase her intellectual concerns. When understood together, Brontë presents a uniquely imagined spirituality. In her only published novel, Brontë explores complex topics such as race, gender, and cycles of familial abuse with nuance. Underlining all else, she critiques Victorian culture and the Christianity that informed it in radical ways. Within her own body of work, Wuthering Heights demonstrates the culmination of subjects that possessed Brontë’s imagination and literary endeavors long before she published the novel. In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë develops most completely the literary themes that haunt her earlier work by depicting Christianity as a moralizing cultural force that creates and reinforces a strictly hierarchical, exploitative, and punitive society. She sets this in direct contrast with an alternative kind of spirituality–one more personal, freeing, and mystical, that she ties to the natural world rather than the human world of Victorian England, characterizing it as one that encompasses all, rather than imposing a rigid and “othering” binary

Weihnachten in Industrialized America: Christmas and the Making of German-American identity in Philadelphia, 1880-1920

Christmas in the United States has been heavily influenced by immigrant communities. German-immigrants specifically have had a major impact on Christmas in America, as they brought with them an extensive history with Christmas and its motifs, emotions, and traditions. Christmastime in America at the turn of the 20th century, reveals a larger story of German immigration, assimilation, and also resistance to the loss of cultural markers. The first section of the thesis examines the history of Christmas in “Germany,” followed by a section focused on the emotional ties German Americans and Germans have with Christmas. The thesis next demonstrates how the central American figure of Santa Claus became embedded in German-American Christmas, and the significance of his adoption into the cultural practices. What follows these establishing sections are two investigations into the practices of businessmen themselves, G.A. Schwarz and John Wanamaker. This exploration highlights how businessmen who were a part of the German community market this nostalgic Christmas and how those outside the community understand the needs and desires of their new German customers. Finally, the thesis investigates music and alcohol consumption two practices embraced by German households during Christmastime, and how they were both transformed and reinforced through American commercialization. Ultimately, by focusing on German Americans in Philadelphia at the turn of the 20th century, the thesis asks us to reconsider how the celebration of Christmas reflected the way in which identity itself was built during a time in which material culture allowed heritage to be commodified, bought, and sold

Good Girls Don\u27t

Set in the year 1980, Good Girls Don\u27t is a bracing coming-of-age story about Cathy, a young woman in Los Angeles who dreams of escaping the city yet feels intimately bound to it. Los Angeles as a terrifyingly beautiful place, in this specific time, figures prominently in this novella; even as Cathy enjoys smoking pot with her best friend Heather, rolls her eyes at her boss at Jack In the Box, and moons over sexy surfer boys, the threat of a serial murderer targeting young women hangs over her mind. On a date one night with Jim, an older boy she\u27s long admired, Cathy is faced with an unexpected interruption that will shake her to her core, changing everything she thought she knew about herself, ideas of right and wrong, and her friendship with Heathe

A Gender-Based UFC Demand Analysis

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) has grown rapidly since its inception in the early 1990s. An important aspect of understanding the explosion of Mixed Martial Arts into mainstream appeal is the relationship between consumer demand and specific attributes of the sport. The UFC first began featuring female events in 2013. A robust division of women’s UFC fighters has developed in the years since. In this study I will be using econometric methods to evaluate the degree to which specific gender related variables influence consumer demand for the UFC. The Pay-Per-View format of UFC events is of critical importance because it inherently informs the degree to which consumers are willing to spend their money on consuming the UFC. Specifically, I will be using linear econometric models in my analysis to determine how variables such as The Ultimate Fighter, weight class and star effect interact with gender to drive demand for the UFC