Browsing by Subject "Authenticity"
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Item Children's and adults' conceptions of authentic objects and the role of authenticity in learning(2016-08) Miller, Brooke Jessica; Woolley, Jacqueline D.; Bigler, Rebecca; Echols, Catherine; Reeves, Lauretta; Owen, Pamela; Seales, ChadQuestions concerning the level of authenticity of an object are of primary importance in many fields. For historians, archeologists, and museum workers, such questions go hand in hand with the way objects are usually found: broken, discolored, and of unknown origin. Even so, psychological research on authenticity tends to ignore the idea that authenticity is not a ‘perfect’ feature within an object, instead presenting a false dichotomy between completely authentic and completely inauthentic objects. In a series of studies the following questions were addressed: (1) How do children compare and contrast objects with different kinds of authenticity, (2) What qualities must an object have in order for children and adults to consider it to be authentic, and (3) What role might authenticity play in learning as it relates to exposure to authentic versus inauthentic objects? These questions were addressed in three studies that make up this dissertation.Item Children’s reasoning about violations of authenticity(2012-12) Schepp, Brooke Jessica; Woolley, Jacqueline D.; Bigler, Rebecca; Markman, ArtWhen do children begin to realize that the authenticity of an object is not inherent to an object itself, but instead depends on the information one has about the object in question? In two studies I investigated elementary school children’s reasoning about authenticity violations. How we reason about authenticity violations, or cases in which the purported history of an item is shown to be false, is important in that it provides an example of how people can reason about the underlying, non-obvious features of objects. Participants (N= 64, ages 7-9) were first asked to rate the value of a series of everyday objects using a Likert scale (one to ten). Next, information about the individual history of these objects was presented and participants were asked to re-rate them and provide explanations for their ratings. Using a between-subjects design, participants were then informed that the information they had been given about the objects’ histories was the result of intentional deception (Study One) or a mistake (Study Two) and were again asked to re-rate the objects and provide explanations for their ratings. Results from value ratings and explanations from both studies indicate that elementary school children are sensitive to the authentic nature of objects as well as intentional and accidental violations of authenticity. I propose that reasoning about associative essences, a novel term described in this paper, can be productively examined using violation of authenticity paradigms, providing insight into the development of reasoning about authenticity.Item Costume and “the copy” : defining authenticity in the analogue original, the reproduction, and the digital garment within the museum and archive(2013-08) Morena, Jill Kristine; Galloway, Patricia KayA comparative examination of the original and reproduction Gone With the Wind costumes at the Harry Ransom Center is at the heart of this study, which proposes to trace the relationship between the analogue original costume, the replica garment, and the digital image reproduction. A discussion of definitions of authenticity and “the original” within such areas as conservation, film studies, and audience perception explores the questions: what is the role of the reproduction, and can it challenge the authority and “aura” of the original? This inquiry illustrates that authenticity is negotiated; it is not always fixed in a clear line ranging from “the real thing” on one side to “the copy” on the other. The study concludes with examining digital image reproductions of costume. The online digital database record can potentially reveal more than a face-to-face encounter with the object in a gallery space, illuminating the biography and history of the garment, changes in curatorial decisions and exhibition practice, and the experience of tactility and embodiment.Item Enduring character : the problem with authenticity and the persistence of ethos(2013-12) Dieter, Eric Matthew, 1976-; Roberts-Miller, Patricia, 1959-This dissertation is interested in how people talk about character in a variety of public spheres. Specifically, it explores the tangled relationship between authenticity and ethos, or what is taken as the distinction between intrinsic and constructed character. While this dissertation does not presume to settle the question of authenticity’s actuality, it does discuss the ways authenticity cues in rhetorical acts continue to influence how “sincere character” in those acts is understood, even as audiences exhibit shrewdness in recognizing that character is a purposeful manifestation of the rhetor. The fundamental phenomenon this dissertation seeks to describe is how people, with better and worse success, negotiate the dissonance between valuing character as authentic and as presentation and representation. Character in this view is a much richer and more paradoxical concept than many discussions of the term admit. A too-diluted study of ethos limited strictly to pinpointing credibility in an argument makes it difficult to articulate why an exhibition of character sometimes works and sometimes flops. Ethos in its fullest complexity is, and is not, constructed by any single act; it is the consequence of narratives, both of those narratives, and also what we say about those narratives; it is something we know about a rhetor, at the same time that it comes from what the rhetor claims to know; it is, most important, an appeal to authenticity, even when we know ethos is discursively, kairotically, and socially constructed. This dissertation offers an expanded definition of ethos as rhetorical transactions that rhetors and audiences mutually negotiate in order to determine the extent to which all sides will have their rhetorical needs met, and the extent to which all sides can assent to the those needs. The dissertation, using the works of Wayne Booth, Kenneth Burke, and Chaïm Perelman as its primary theoretical structures, offers pedagogic implications for these mutual negotiations.Item A game of confidence : literary dialect, linguistics, and authenticity(2011-08) Leigh, Philip John; Barrish, PhillipA Game of Confidence: Literary Dialect, Linguistics, and Authenticity builds a bridge between literary-critical and linguistic approaches to representations of nonstandard speech in literature. Important scholarship both in linguistics and in literary criticism has sought to develop rigorous inquiry into deviations from standard written language to represent features of nonstandard spoken language in literature. I argue that neither field, however, has fully embraced the idea that, by definition, 'literary dialect' necessitates an interdisciplinary approach. Furthermore, neither has successfully integrated the other's very different theories and methods. As a result, 'literary dialect' provides an exciting opportunity for new scholarship connecting recent developments in literary history, sociolinguistics, and digital humanities. The goals of my project are two-fold: First, to analyze within their own cultural and historical contexts previous attempts by authors, readers, and scholars to fix the supposedly empirical accuracy of literary dialect representations; second, to model what I take to be an empirically more valid use of linguistics for analyzing literary artists' representations of nonstandard speech. My work provides a necessary intervention for literary dialect criticism, particularly for the many arguments that have sought a degree of objectivity for assertions about the artistic or socio-political merits of a dialect text based on vague linguistic generalizations. My dissertation's primary focus is on the period that has served historically as the locus classicus for scholarship on American dialect literature: The second half of the nineteenth century when local colorists, regionalists, and realists used 'real' American voices as the foundation for a realistic American literature. By analyzing the production and historical reception of literary dialect texts from this period I show how assessments of 'authenticity' have been a constant in the critical response to these texts for nearly a century and a half. Having underscored the critical problems inherent in linking artistic and political evaluations of dialect texts to the 'authenticity' of their literary dialects, I then draw on recent developments in the digital humanities, computational linguistics, and sociolinguistics to employ a methodology for generating and interpreting literary-linguistic data on literary dialects.Item How perceptions impact real estate decisions : an analysis of residential demand in Austin, Texas(2015-12) Fulmer, Kristen Alyse; Atkinson, Simon, Ph. D.; Wegmann, JacobThis thesis examines how social media trends create perceptions, which influence real estate decision-making within the Millennial generation, ultimately affecting their long-term investment and longevity in the city of Austin, Texas. To investigate the residential real estate market in Austin, specifically within the Millennial generation, I discuss decision factors with the residents and developers, known as stakeholders. By completing a mixed-methods analysis, I determine how Internet-based tendencies affect perceptions and economic realities of specific neighborhoods or the city, thereby affecting the residential real estate market as a whole. Approaching this research as a post-positivist, I hypothesize that the Millennial cohort is currently creating short-term demand for residential development with no long-term intentions of staying in the city. By discovering this future instability of sectors within the Millennial generation, especially in newcomers to the city, I question Austin’s plans, which seem to lack amenities to provide for this cohort’s residential longevity.Item I thought we weren't in Spain : the emergence of authenticity in a foreign language classroom(2014-05) Whitehead, Sarah Jey; Palmer, Deborah K.; Callahan, Rebecca M; De Lissovoy, Noah; Horwitz, Elaine K; Urlaub, PerThis study is based upon the idea that foreign language (FL) classrooms exist apart from their target language communities. While historically, this has been a geographic truth, divides between FL learners and native speakers may also reflect symbolic social distance. Given the symbolic, if not geographic, isolation of the FL classroom from the real world, this study presumes that a challenge inherent to the endeavor of FL education is that the authentic, real-world language and culture under study are, by definition, not naturally present in the FL classroom. This study considers how this challenge, referred to as the challenge of authenticity, is managed in one FL classroom. Seven eighth-grade students and their teacher comprise Classroom 204, a beginning Spanish FL classroom at a private school in the southwest U.S. This qualitative case study uses classroom observations, audio-recordings, classroom artifacts, and participant interviews as data to consider not only how authenticity is imported, imagined, and conjured by participants in Classroom 204, but how authenticity is assigned value therein. Data is analyzed largely with discourse analysis of transcripts of classroom talk about (and classroom talk that constituted) various facets of authenticity, value, and the real world. Ecology theory serves as a broad theoretical lens through which to understand (and accept) the complexity inherent to the social phenomena being researched. Benedict Anderson's (1991) theory of imagined communities is adopted to understand the boundaries that delineate the inside of the FL classroom from the outside, and Bourdieu's (1992) notion of symbolic capital is used to understand the ways by which authenticity becomes valuable (and, conversely, how that which is valuable becomes authentic). Findings suggest that, while participants are largely oriented to real-world manifestations of Spanish language and culture, authenticity is not most present in Classroom 204 in the form of stuff imported from elsewhere. Rather, authenticity emerges out of the highly local, socially-immediate interactions and value systems unique to Classroom 204. Suggestions for both pedagogy and future research focus on approaches that acknowledge and capitalize on the power of local authenticity in the FL classroom, as cultivated by local social actors.Item Serious leisure, participation and experience in tourism: authenticity and ritual in a renaissance festival(Texas A&M University, 2005-02-17) Kim, HyounggonThis study examined the Texas Renaissance Festival as perceived and experienced by (serious) visitors for whom this was a form of regular, repeated and highly meaningful participation. Specifically, the focus was to gain understanding of the notion of serious leisure as defined by Stebbins, in the context of festivals, and to understand the meanings associated with festival participation. Following a qualitative (constructivism paradigm) research frame, the data were collected through participant observation and 37 in-depth interviews for highly committed tourists to the Texas Renaissance Festival. The collected data were analyzed through Grounded Theory techniques specified by Glaser (1978). In regard to the characteristics of participation, the results indicated that their continuous participation in the Texas Renaissance Festival displays qualities of serious leisure: 1) identification; 2) long-term career; 3) unique ethos; 4) significant personal effort; 5) perseverance; and 6) durable personal benefits. As they become more seriously involved in the festival participation, they tend to be a part of a well-integrated subculture of which prominent values include personal freedom, hedonism, and anti-materialism. The experiences constructed through the serious festival participation were reminiscent of tourism existential authenticity specified by Wang (1999) as two levels: intrapersonal authenticity (gaining one?s true self) and interpersonal authenticity (gaining true human relationship). A search of such authentic experiences at the festival seems to be partly driven by the perceived alienation in everyday life. When these aspects were examined from an interpretive and meaning-based approach, attending the festival in a serious manner is not just a simple matter of escaping from the reality (e.g., alienation) of everyday life, but is an active quest for an ?alternative? to their lives at home as many indicated. Thus, the serious participation in a tourism activity such as the Texas Renaissance Festival could be best understood as a dynamic process of attaining existential state of Being in response to diverse sociocultural conditions. Several significant theoretical propositions were made based on the results derived from this study. Additionally, marketing and management implications associated with staging tourism events and festivals were discussed.Item The struggle for authenticity : blues, race, and rhetoric(2011-05) Gatchet, Roger Davis; Gunn, Joshua, 1973-; Brummett, Barry; Cloud, Dana; Fuller, Jennifer; Maxwell, MadelineThe concept of authenticity has been central to the human capacity to communicate for over two millennia, and it continues to enjoy wide usage throughout popular culture today. “Authenticity” typically conveys a sense that one has reached solid bedrock, the unchanging foundation of an object or inner-self that transcends the context of the moment. In this sense, the search or struggle for authenticity is a quest for VIP access to the ineffable “real” that language can only inadequately gesture toward. This study investigates the contemporary struggle for authenticity, or what can be described as the “rhetoric of authenticity,” by exploring the way authenticity is negotiated, constructed, and contested through various symbolic resources. More specifically, it focuses on how authenticity is negotiated in the U.S. blues community, a complex cultural site where the struggle over authenticity is especially salient and materializes in a variety of complex ways. Drawing on a number of philosophical perspectives and critical theories, the study employs the methods of rhetorical criticism and oral history as it seeks to answer three central questions: First, what are the major rhetorical dimensions of authenticity? Second, what does rhetorical analysis reveal about the relationship between authenticity and its various signifiers? And third, what does our desire for authenticity teach us about ourselves as symbol-using creatures? The study employs a case study approach that moves inductively in order to discover the larger rhetorical dimensions of authenticity. The case studies examine the relationship between authenticity and the blues’ larger historical trajectory; between aesthetics and authenticity in the oral history narratives of professional blues musicians in Austin, Texas, especially as they converge along a style/substance binary; between identity and authenticity in the editorial policy of Living Blues magazine; and finally, between imitation and authenticity in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers. The study concludes by exploring how authenticity is contextual, aesthetic, ideological, and political, and frames a rhetorical theory of authenticity that can be applied widely throughout popular culture.Item ?To be natural . . . is such a difficult pose to keep up?: Elocution?s Extended D?nouement, a Case for the Revival of Thomas Sheridan?s Sincere Performer in Contemporary English Studies(2012-07-16) Snodgrass, LindsayThis thesis analyzes elocutionary theory and practice on a national, literary, and individual level, placing emphasis on the ways in which the eighteenth century treatises of elocutionist Thomas Sheridan address, and ultimately promote, speaking as both a public (or performative) and private (or authentic) act. Moreover, the thesis extends a consideration of the impact of elocutionary theory on various historical moments throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, respectively. Beginning with the works of elocutionist Thomas Sheridan and concluding with an analysis of recent pedagogical theories and narratives within the field of composition studies, this thesis also defines the impact of Sheridan's theories on the construction of Irish national identity. It presents nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish theatre as a compelling case study in order to argue that performance?a key theoretical concept in elocutionary theory?remains essential to the study and investigation of voice in the contemporary English classroom. Focusing on the dramatic works of Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Brian Friel, this thesis contends that Irish drama, in addition to presenting a forceful illustration of the ways in which Sheridan's elocutionary theories have been adapted and challenged on the national and civic level, provides current scholars access to recent dramatic representations of authenticity and voice as well as the virtues/pitfalls of performativity. Wilde, Shaw and Friel specifically present linguistic performance as a process of negotiation and exchange, using the stage to reflect and construct Irish national and civic identity. Each playwright offers a lens through which to reevaluate ongoing debates over language acquisition, particularly as such debates arise within the context of composition studies. Through a careful examination of elocutionary theory and its various influences across a variety of historical moments, this study encourages contemporary composition scholars and pedagogues to reconsider the role of authenticity and performance within the writing classroom, prompting students and teachers to explore writing as an expression of both the public and private self. In doing so, this thesis argues that scholars and teachers will become better equipped to address discussions of voice, authenticity and performance in their writing classrooms.Item White bodies, black voices : the linguistic construction of racialized authenticity in US film(2012-05) Lopez, Qiuana La'teese; Hinrichs, Lars; Epps, Patience, 1973-; Beavers, John; Chun, Elaine; Crowhurst, Megan; Green, Lisa; Lanehart, SonjaBy examining the range of stances that white characters in Hollywood films are represented as taking in relation to blackness, this dissertation considers the question of how language becomes ideologically linked to categories of race through linguistic representations. Through an analysis of 59 films (1979-2008) from multiple genres, this study focuses on the linguistic practices of the characters that contribute to larger semiotic practices performed by discernible social types. The first linguistic practice, crossing, plays on the stereotype of the inauthentic, white male, who tries to gain coolness through linguistic representations of African Americans. The second practice, passing, conjures images of blackface because in addition to using linguistic representations of African Americans, the passing characters darken their skin. By demonstrating complex links between language and social meanings such as ideologies about authenticity, identity and racial and gendered stereotypes, these films use linguistic features along with other visual and physical semiotic displays to both construct and comment on black and white authenticity. Specifically, crossing was found to comment on disseminated images of the young, white male as lacking a particular type of masculinity and sexuality and overcompensating for them by imitating widely circulating images of the hypermasculine, hypersexual and hyperphysical black male. In addition, it commented on the tendency to read this linguistic practice as inauthentic. Therefore, the social meaning of the white linguistic representations of African Americans used when crossing was found to be related to authenticity or who had the right to use ethnically-marked linguistic features. On the other hand, passing was argued to communicate the ideologies that some whites may have of African Americans, particularly African American men. The linguistic resources utilized in these performances are not used to form identity, but for humor and to distance the character from being read as traditional minstrelsy. By highlighting some of the linguistic strategies that speakers in Hollywood use to (re)produce not only indexical links between linguistic forms and racialized stereotypes but also ideologies about racial authenticity, this dissertation provides an empirical study of some of the semiotic practices that involve the re-indexicalization of minority vernacular resources by members of the majority.