Them’s Flyting Words: The Boundaries of Acceptable Affronts in Medieval Poetry

The boundaries between verbal arguments and physical retribution are complicated and difficult to directly identify. This paper examines the points at which verbal sparring, conventionally dubbed “flyting,” turns to physical altercations. In identifying these points in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, I find that rhetoric turns to violence after affronts to particular morality-based identities. In my reading of Sir Gawain, I posit that the eponyms’ flyte and subsequent fight in the fourth fitt represent an attack on both the institution of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table and on Sir Gawain’s personhood. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath,” I suggest a reading wherein the violence between Allison and Janekin represents a fight against the rhetoric of oppression. Throughout the essay, I show how physical retribution is, in these texts, an excusable method of defense against language, particularly when personal and political senses of honor are verbally attacked.Faculty Sponsor: Elizabeth E. Tavare

A Precision Pointing System for Shuttle Experiment Pay loads

This paper describes the Annular Suspension and Pointing System (ASPS) being developed to support NASA Shuttle payloads in the 1980s. The ASPS employs a unique magnetic suspension system to isolate Shuttle payloads from Orbiter disturbances and provide vernier control of the payload\u27s attitude, thereby allowing extremely accurate and stable pointing. A description of the system design, configurations, and performance goals is given. Component and system development testing of the full-size ASPS Engineering Development Model is described, and hardware photographs and test configurations are presented

The Effect of Penalty upon Frequency of Stuttering Spasms

One of the features with which the psychologist must constantly deal when investigating stuttering is the great amount of variation in the frequency of stuttering blocks or spasms. Steer 1 has shown that frequency of stuttering spasms is, at least to a certain degree, a function of the type of speech situation. Van Riper and Hull2 showed a progressive decrease in frequency of spasms as the stutterer adapted to any given speech situation. However, little knowledge was gained from these experiments as to what factors in the situations were responsible for the variations in frequency

A Study of Handedness

Simultaneous writing of both hands on a variable angle board showed large differences in performance between thoroughly right and left handed groups, the non-dominant hand producing mirror-script or mirror-patterning. A measure of amount of laterality by means of the angle at which mirroring occurred was shown. A recheck of Jasper\u27s work on the phi-phenomenon as a measure of laterality gave corroborative results. The use of the Japanese Illusion as an indication of laterality was shown to be invalid. Failure of the non-dominant hand to reverse at a sound signal when both were describing opposite circles was demonstrated

If There Wasn’t Farming, Somebody Wouldn’t Eat: Small Scale Agriculture, Community Autonomy, And Food Sovereignty In Mississippi

This thesis examines the historical context of small scale farming and grassroots social movements in Mississippi’s history, and investigates the ways small farmers and community advocates are drawing upon their land-based heritage and local knowledge systems to create community-controlled food systems in dialogue with broader national and global conversations about sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty. Employing a multi-scalar method of analysis, the research studies issues from the perspective of individuals, communities, institutions, as well as national and transnational systems. The work draws from previous scholarship in environmental studies, agroecology, critical race studies, rural sociology, critical historiography, agrifood studies, and regional studies to further a person-centered critique of industrial agriculture. It uses the scalar model to connect Mississippi’s history of small scale farming, black land loss, and grassroots social movements to global human rights struggles and the food sovereignty movement. The original research suggests that individuals with strong senses of place and commitments to community are integral to sustainability in local food systems. It forwards the conclusion that these individuals can be powerful agents of change on a global scale when they join together in solidarity and resistance to global institutional policies which systematically undermine local environments, local people, and local knowledge practices