The Garden as Machine: The Plantation Myth, the Pastoral Veil, and the Great Depression

Knepper, Steven Edward University of Virginia 2012 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation examines how Depression-era literature and social thought critique pastoral oppositions at the heart of American culture—country versus city, farm versus factory, agriculture versus industry. These oppositions draw a veil over the problems of the countryside, and they obscure its increasing dominance by industrial agriculture. The environmental degradation and rural poverty of the Great Depression—an era called the "dirty thirties" because of the Dust Bowl—called for a more critical conception of the countryside and its relationship to the global economy. This dissertation especially focuses on critiques of the plantation myth and its inimical version of the pastoral veil. This myth idealizes the Old South, imagining the plantation as aristocratic, rooted, paternalistic, and stately. In presenting the plantation as a bastion of cultured leisure, it veils slave labor, soil mining, and the plantation's foundational role in industrial modernity. Many Depression-era works attempt to draw back this veil by focusing on the South's impoverished sharecroppers and eroded fields as historical legacies of the plantation. Countering pastoral with anti-pastoral, they probe the human and environmental costs of an economic fixation on cotton. They move past the plantation myth's pastoral opposition of a beneficent Agrarian South and an insidious Industrial North, exploring the industrial nature of the plantation and its cash crop monocultures. This neglected re-conceptualization provides insight into how American studies can better theorize the countryside, an important task given contemporary debates about farming, food, and environmental justice.

The impact of the mindful method youth empowerment seminar (YES!) on students' self-efficacy, self-regulation, and academic performance for becoming college-and career-ready

Knepper, Jeffrey Mark University of Southern California 2015 해외박사(DDOD)

Because self-regulation has been documented as the main cause of K-12 students' lack of college and career readiness, mindfulness interventions that augment self-regulation, self-efficacy and academic performance may offer support. This study evaluated the effects of the Youth Empowerment Seminar (YES!), a biophysical workshop for adolescents that teaches breathing practices, meditation and other mindful practices to regulate stress, emotions, and attentional focus on self-regulation, self-efficacy and academic performance. Approximately 339 Middle school students (11-14 years of age) in the United States participated in YES! during their physical education classes and continued weekly follow-ups over a two month period. Students in a control group attended their usual curriculum and were tested in parallel. ANOVA and MANCOVA analysis was used to determine significant growth in the variables. The causal role of YES! on students' self-efficacy, self-regulation, and academic performance was studied using path analysis procedures. Additionally four open-ended questions were used to gather rich data for explaining the phenomena. ANOVA analysis determined that the YES! program had a significant impact on mindfulness and self-regulation from post to 1-month follow-up after appropriate cultivation of mindfulness. A SEM causal path best-fit analysis found a direct effect of mindfulness on academic performance was significant only when the mediators, self-regulation and self-efficacy, are absent but when the mediators are present the direct effect becomes insignificant and the indirect effect from mindfulness through the mediators to academic performance becomes significant. The results suggest that YES! can promote mindfulness, self-regulation, self-efficacy, and academic performance that increased directly with longevity of practices and subsequent increased cultivation of mindfulness.

Misogyny, subjectivity, and crisis in English romance and allegory, 1350--1600

Knepper, Janet Kay University of Pennsylvania 2000 해외박사(DDOD)

Misogyny was always present in Medieval Culture, but in the late Middle Ages, it became more virulent, the result, according to scholars, of the many crises of the fourteenth century: plague, revolt, schism, war. In addition, the late fourteenth century, I argue, saw the development of the interiorized subject, which occurred in part as a result of these crises. This dissertation examines how misogyny is used to articulate sociocultural crises and the problematics of interiorized subjectivity. In this study of how women are made scapegoats for social ills, fears, and crises, I employ contemporary feminist and psychoanalytic theory, historical documents, the work of historians, and literary texts read as both ‘literature’ and as cultural documents. I acknowledge some of the larger ideologies that inform culture so that I can discuss the problems and crises that I see the literary texts as enacting. Accordingly, I study late medieval criminal law, the political crises of the late fourteenth century, and early humanist theories on educational reform. In the literary texts I examine, a female figure's representation is produced, or at least haunted by, the discourses of misogyny that formed the dominant ideology on gender in the Middle Ages. I show that misogynist representations of women are used to articulate the threat of the interiorized subject in the <italic> Stanzaic Morte Arthur</italic>, of cultural and economic change in <italic> Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</italic>, and of misuse of law in <italic> Piers Plowman</italic>. I then examine how misogynist representations of women articulate the problems of leisure and desire in the Tudor ‘Wit’ plays, in a culture that increasingly values work and social advancement. I conclude that the discourse of misogyny not only articulates social problems, but also underwrites a subjectivity-effect for the female characters that threatens male hegemonic security.

On the Fundamental Relationships Among Path Planning Alternatives

Knepper, Ross A Carnegie Mellon University 2011 해외박사(DDOD)

Robotic motion planning aspires to match the ease and efficiency with which humans move through and interact with their environment. Yet state of the art robotic planners fall short of human abilities; they are slower in computation, and the results are often of lower quality. One stumbling block in traditional motion planning is that points and paths are often considered in isolation. Many planners fail to recognize that substantial shared information exists among path alternatives. Exploitation of the geometric and topological relationships among path alternatives can therefore lead to increased efficiency and competency. These benefits include: better-informed path sampling, dramatically faster collision checking, and a deeper understanding of the trade-offs in path selection. In path sampling, the principle of locality is introduced as a basis for constructing an adaptive, probabilistic, geometric model to influence the selection of paths for collision test. Recognizing that collision testing consumes a sizable majority of planning time and that only collision-free paths provide value in selecting a path to execute on the robot, this model provides a significant increase in efficiency by circumventing collision testing paths that can be predicted to collide with obstacles. In the area of collision testing, an equivalence relation termed local path equivalence, is employed to discover when the work of testing a path has been previously performed. The swept volumes of adjoining path alternatives frequently overlap, implying that a continuum of intermediate paths exists as well. By recognizing such neighboring paths with related shapes and outcomes, up to 90% of paths may be tested implicitly in experiments, bypassing the traditional, expensive collision test and delivering a net 300% boost in collision test performance. Local path equivalence may also be applied to the path selection problem in order to recognize higher-level navigation options and make smarter choices. This thesis presents theoretical and experimental results in each of these three areas, as well as inspiration on the connections to how humans reason about moving through spaces.

Does Racial/Ethnic Diversity, Racist Ideology, and Economic Hardship Shape Social Trust and Civic Engagement?: A Critique and Extension of Putnam's "Hunkering Down" Thesis

Knepper, Peter North Carolina State University ProQuest Dissertat 2021 해외박사(DDOD)