Division of Liberal Arts

employs multilevel modeling to test a conceptual framework of graduate school choice derived from the work of Perna, drawing significantly from human capital theory and incorporating the salient concepts of cultural and social capital. Dependent students who obtained high undergraduate grade point averages, majored in the humanities, social or behavioral sciences, mathematics, or life and physical sciences, and attended a master's or doctoral institution were most likely to aspire to, apply for, and enroll in graduate school. This study also found that, when controlling for all other variables in the models, African-America and Hispanic students are more likely to engage in the graduate school choice process than white students. A key variable of interest, undergraduate indebtedness, does not affect graduate school choice, when accounting for all other variables in the model.

I was first introduced to semiotics while working toward an MFA in lighting design. My initial reaction was to dismiss it as needlessly complicated. I thought,“Yeah, I got it. Things mean things. Why do I need to learn a new language to talk about that?” But slowly the ideas, vocabulary, and insights afforded by semiotics began to unlock previously unseen ways of analyzing and discussing performances.

In an age when the American media landscape is clogged with politicians and religious fanatics scrambling to identify the root cause of our current malaise, it is imperative for live performance artists like Karen Finley to point out what is really to blame—politics and religion. In her most recent performance piece, The American Chestnut, Finley rails against religious hypocrisy, political oppression, male aggression, her own classification as a" source for raising money for candidates," 2 and the depressed state of the arts.

In the fall of 1993, I had the pleasure of interviewing the world-renowned Czech scenographer Josef Svoboda. We spent some time talking about his career and his longevity as a designer, but it was his response to a question about a specific production that prompted further investigation. When asked about his first full-scale U.S. design for The Opera Company of Boston's 1965 production of Luigi Nono's Intolleranza, the already animated Svoboda exploded. His eyes sparkled as he recalled “the biggest, most complicated and best production I have ever done. It has not been surpassed since.” This was an intriguing comment from a man with over 700 designs to his credit in a career that has spanned six decades, and who has worked in virtually every major opera house and theatre in both Europe and America.

It is at this intersection of concepts and percepts that the temporality of our dynamic world is located. Spoken and written languages 1 extend over time, as does vision, but have the ability to fix our shifting reality. As the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty has pointed out, "We never cease living in the world of perception, but we go beyond it in critical thought-almost to the point of forgetting the contribution of perception to our idea of truth." 2 There is a tension that exists between these two worlds. Verbal language is a classification tool, used to segment and categorize the waves of perception that bombard us in our daily lives. We apply names to things and classify them under specific linguistic headings. Table, chair, dog, cat, springtime, joy... denote certain fixed categories, or concepts, that help order our seemingly disordered environment. They are labels used to qualify an ever changing world of perception. A rock may look like a fairly stable entity, but does it look the same in moonlight as it does at noon? These verbal tags merely classify like objects, and must be transcended to capture the uniqueness of perception. While it may be possible to describe the appearance of the object under different circumstances, no amount of verbal information will replace simply looking at it. Verbal language is predicated on the fact that it is composed of units of meaning that are discrete in their usage. If each of the words that I have put 1 While there are certain differences in their usage, one being sound oriented, the other sight oriented, both are governed by a similar set of rules. For the purpose of this visually oriented discussion I will hereafter refer to both systems under the general term "verbal language."

It is at this intersection of concepts and percepts that the temporality of our dynamic world is located. Spoken and written languages 1 extend over time, as does vision, but have the ability to fix our shifting reality. As the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty has pointed out, "We never cease living in the world of perception, but we go beyond it in critical thought-almost to the point of forgetting the contribution of perception to our idea of truth." 2 There is a tension that exists between these two worlds. Verbal language is a classification tool, used to segment and categorize the waves of perception that bombard us in our daily lives. We apply names to things and classify them under specific linguistic headings. Table, chair, dog, cat, springtime, joy... denote certain fixed categories, or concepts, that help order our seemingly disordered environment. They are labels used to qualify an ever changing world of perception. A rock may look like a fairly stable entity, but does it look the same in moonlight as it does at noon? These verbal tags merely classify like objects, and must be transcended to capture the uniqueness of perception. While it may be possible to describe the appearance of the object under different circumstances, no amount of verbal information will replace simply looking at it. Verbal language is predicated on the fact that it is composed of units of meaning that are discrete in their usage. If each of the words that I have put 1 While there are certain differences in their usage, one being sound oriented, the other sight oriented, both are governed by a similar set of rules. For the purpose of this visually oriented discussion I will hereafter refer to both systems under the general term "verbal language."

It is a rare opportunity to see a forty-year-old masterpiece under the direction of its originator. Rarer still is the chance to witness a production seen by such luminaries as Barrault, Brook, Mnouchkine, and Grotowski. Such is the case with Tadashi Suzuki's The Trojan Women, first performed in 1974 and recently presented as part of a symposium on Suzuki's work titled "Transformation through Training" in honor of the SITI Company's twentyfifth anniversary. Performed before an audience that included Suzuki devotees as well as the merely curious, the production was, without question, a timeless and timely event. Centering on the static nature of Euripides' drama, it offered powerful commentary on the aftermath of warfare-a situation we persistently need to address.

Drama on topics such as the intersection of semiotics and phenomenology, Josef Svoboda's multimedia design for Intolleranza, the convergence of chaos theory and performance, Karen Finley's deconstructive technique, and ambient space in twentieth-century theatre.

In an age when the American media landscape is clogged with politicians and religious fanatics scrambling to identify the root cause of our current malaise, it is imperative for live performance artists like Karen Finley to point out what is really to blame—politics and religion. In her most recent performance piece, The American Chestnut, Finley rails against religious hypocrisy, political oppression, male aggression, her own classification as a" source for raising money for candidates," 2 and the depressed state of the arts. Certainly, ...

Aesthetes have long imagined that all of the arts aspire to the condition of music. Paige McGinley, who is leading a wave of performance scholarship that might be characterized as music studies without the musicologists, sees this old question in a new light. For her, the blues aspires to the condition of theatre. Her ambitious aim is "to shift an understanding of blues performance and its histories by treating its relationship to theatrical practice as central, rather than secondary" (7). In four deeply researched and compellingly written chapters, she makes a powerful case that theatricality was indeed central not only to the birth of the blues, but also to its fundamental meaning as a performance practice. Staging the Blues begins at the turn of the 20th century with tent-show variety acts in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and other crossroad sites in the Delta region. It ends at the turn of the 21st century with international blues tourism, also in Clarksdale. In between, exploring venues as geographically diverse as the Apollo Theater in Harlem and the retrofitted Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester (UK), McGinley renovates some widely held presumptions about the blues as an American "folk" art. Sophisticated professional show people put on all the performances she treats. Her argument unfolds step by step through her patient dismantling of an anti-theatrical master narrative of blues' direct-from-the-cotton-patch authenticity.