English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item The Unhealed Wound: Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature and the Continuing Memory of the Duvalier Dictatorship(2019) Edwards, Norrell F; Orlando, Valerie K; Mallios, Peter; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the 1990s, as Haiti continued to withstand the aftershocks of the end of a 29 year father-son dictatorship, the United States and France hovered in the periphery to “help” Haiti’s transition to democracy. World systems theory dictates that a country like Haiti would be relegated to the periphery while countries like the United States and France inhabit the core. The Unhealed Wound: Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature and the Continuing Memory of the Duvalier Dictatorship inverts this dynamic. This work places Port-au-Prince at the core, while New York and Paris—secondary homes to Haitian exiles and emigres—becomes the periphery. Traversing national borders, politics and disciplines, this study investigates how memory, history and literature shape the physical and imagined cityscapes of New York, Port-au-Prince and Paris. Bringing together authors such as Edwidge Danticat, Lyonel Trouillot and Shay Youngblood, Edwards questions and explores dynamics of the Black immigrant body and Haitian body in these cities in the 1980’s, 1990’s and early 2000’sItem The Feeling of Persuasion: A Cognitive Rhetorical Account of the Emotional Appeal(2019) Mozafari, Cameron; Israel, Michael; Valiavitcharska, Vessela; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Emotion often takes the back seat in contemporary rhetorical investigation, as emotions are treated as subjective reactions rather than the result of deliberate forms of argumentation. In classical antiquity, rhetorical training for emotional persuasion required students not only to learn what sorts of arguments could move their audiences but, more importantly, how that movement was composed linguistically and psychologically. Yet as history progressed and disciplines branched, the formal study of language and cognition separated from the study of rhetoric, resulting in a conceptually stunted understanding of the emotional appeal. This dissertation returns to classical questions and theories of emotional persuasion but does so with insights from contemporary emotion science and cognitive linguistics. Emotion is understood as neither purely physiological nor purely conceptual but rather as embodied conceptualizations grounded in culture-specific scripts. The dissertation lays out a model for understanding how non-emotive language links up to emotion activation through the introduction of the theater of the mind model, an expansion on the stage model of Cognitive Grammar. It then traces three strategies for arousing and controlling audiences’ emotions from classical rhetorical theory: the enthymematic activation of emotion concepts, the enargeiac amplification of emotion events, and the mitigation of potential threats so as not to excite emotions. Analyzing discourse from politics, fundraising letters, and college student writing, this project argues, contrary to popular opinion, that emotional appeals are not antithetical to reason but instead very much dependent on reason, in that they act as grounds for arousing and guiding inferences in predictable ways for rhetorical purposes.Item Immigrant Literacies: Language and Learning in the African Diaspora Novel by Twenty-First Century Anglophone African Writers(2019) Okereke-Beshel, Uchechi Ada; Nunes, Zita C; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Immigrant Literacies: Language and Learning in the African Diaspora Novel by Twenty-First Century Anglophone African Writers” examines the fiction of contemporary African Diaspora writers that introduces new tropes of reading and writing in narrating the experiences of African migrants to Europe and the United States. The writers who are the focus of this dissertation—Teju Cole, Chimamanda Adichie, Brian Chikwava and NoViolet Bulawayo— grapple with the difficulties of migration and its impact on preconceived notions of the self and the world. Each writer links the different pathways that their immigrant characters must take to multiple forms of teaching and learning, demonstrating that literacy is a contextual cultural practice that fosters social connections across the African Diaspora, even as it takes power relations into account. Using the work of Brian Street and other New Literacy theorists, I explore four versions of literacy as a socially embedded cultural practice in novels mainly about Nigerian and Zimbabwean immigrants in the United States and Britain. These theorists are key to my understanding of how revised attitudes to self in an expanded community are being developed in the contemporary African novel because they enable a shift in attention from learning to read and write in order to master a stable and transferrable set of skills to teaching and learning to read and write using a range of codes that characterize hybrid environments. Early criticisms of the African novel focused on the integration of written and oral forms in literature that would nurture a nationalist and postcolonial agenda. Twenty-first century African Diaspora literature expands these goals in demonstrating the transnational and transcultural evolution of both writing and orality. My dissertation organizes each chapter around an exemplary novel to argue that contemporary African novelists writing in English and living in and outside of Africa address the defining question of literacy they have inherited from previous generations by suggesting that multiple and fluid forms of literacy characterize the experience of Africans in the context of migration in the Diaspora.Item Embodied Ethos: Negotiations of Authority, Credibility, and Trust in Roman Republican Coinage and Renaissance Texts(2019) Vlahovici-Jones, Gabriela A.; Valiavitcharska, Vessela; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Embodied Ethos” explores how coins negotiate rhetors’ ethos in antiquity and how Renaissance texts illustrated with coin images reconstruct and appropriate the ethos of ancient coins. With a methodological framework that puts in conversation ancient rhetorical theories, modern theories in visual and material rhetoric, and cognitive linguistics, the project approaches ethos as an interweaving of authority, credibility, and trust, as well as a form of inter-subjectivity between rhetors and audiences. Applied to a discussion of early Greek and Roman coinage, this framework reveals that the negotiation of ethos occurs in relation to transcendental, social, or individual systems of power, truths, and values. An analysis of Roman Republican coins minted at the onset of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey suggests that the warrying factions use coin iconography and inscriptions to negotiate the leaders’ ethos and to mount responses to political crises. While Pompeian coinage invokes Rome’s past and elevates Pompey to transcendental status, Caesarean coinage invokes Rome’s future and encourages allegiance to Caesar as an individual. In the Renaissance, coin images import the ethos of ancient coins into printed texts. Guillaume Rouillé’s Promptuaire des medalles integrates coin images into literacy-based contexts and appropriates the ethos of ancient coins in order to energize the life of the text, to advance a form of literacy that balances oral and visual reading, and to help audiences negotiate their own ethos as readers. Madeleine de Scudéry’s Les Femmes illustres appropriates the ethos of ancient coins to support the ethos of women as marginalized rhetors. In this text, coin images invoke the public roles of famous women of antiquity, draw attention to the female orators as a community of speakers, and encourage audiences to accept and read a rhetorical text about women. Overall, the transmission of coin ethos from antiquity into the Renaissance suggests that, as objects of cultural significance, coins participate in complex networks of objects and texts and carry persuasive messages across cultures and time periods.Item Insurrection in Black: Reading Race and Revolt in the Long Nineteenth Century(2019) Bruno, Timothy William; Levine, Robert S; Wong, Edlie L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Insurrection in Black: Reading Race and Revolt in the Long Nineteenth Century” examines depictions of black rebellion in American and African American literature spanning from the 1830s to the early 1900s. From enslaved uprisings and black armies to worker strikes and insurgent plots, black rebellion appeared as a recurring image across the antebellum and postbellum periods. “Insurrection in Black” argues that these images of rebellious violence functioned speculatively, imagining for readers new identities, social movements, and communities. The dissertation explores black rebellion’s cultural work in novels, speeches, newspapers, autobiographies, and polemics by Robert Montgomery Bird, Richard Hildreth, Jabez Delano Hammond, Gerrit Smith, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucy Parsons, Sutton E. Griggs, Thomas Dixon, and Pauline Hopkins. A comparative approach to these texts reveals that, far from representing a stable or straightforward politics, black rebellion in print often served competing ends not necessarily aligned with black freedom struggles. Ultimately, this dissertation does more than reveal the speculative power inhering in depictions of rebellious violence: “Insurrection in Black” brings black militancy to the center of the long nineteenth century’s literary and cultural life.Item A View of Earth from Distant Suns(2019) Smith, Jason; Norman, Howard; Mitchell, Emily; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In keeping with the title, this collection of nine stories trains its lens on a broad range of human experience. What has resulted from this perspective is a cocktail of divergent genres, geographies, voices, and emotional registers. In spite of their differences, these stories come together to create a somewhat novelistic arc by following a basic trajectory of human life. The trajectory navigates certain representative stages of human development, focusing on late childhood and adolescence in Part One of the collection, early and middle adulthood in Part Two, and finally, advanced adulthood and confrontations with death in Part Three. The collection hopes to suggest ways in which we ourselves, in all our irreducible complexity, are nonetheless unified by similar psychosocial needs, by yearnings to connect with and bring order to our environments, by our failures at the precipitous edges of language, and by our common alienation.Item EIGHTY-SEVEN(2019) Polek, Nicolette; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)EIGHTY-SEVEN is a collection of stories that captures desire through compression and brevity. It draws the curtains on small windows that look into enormous, shifting houses. Characters are caught in moments where they are stuck. EIGHTY-SEVEN is about willfulness and escapes.Item School, State, and Nation: Educational Rhetorics at a Korean Women's College During and After Japanese Colonization, 1918–1965(2019) Tillman, Nathan Wil; Enoch, Jessica; Valiavitcharska, Vessela; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“School, State, and Nation” examines how the leaders and students of Ewha College, founded by American missionaries in 1910 as Korea’s first college for women, used rhetorical strategies to negotiate Japanese colonial power and Korean patriarchal objectives as they pursued their educational goals during and after the Japanese colonial period (1918–1965). This project draws on a range of Korean- and English-language primary sources, including letters, reports, photographs, articles, emblems, and autobiographies, especially the work of Ewha’s last American president Alice Appenzeller (in office 1922–1939) and first Korean president Kim Hwallan (1939–1961). Analyzing these sources, I show how Ewha became a contested site for the competing agendas of the Japanese colonial state, Korean nationalists, and the school community. I argue that Appenzeller, Kim, and Ewha women generally crafted what I call “educational rhetorics,” or the rhetorical strategies leveraged to constantly re/define their school’s relationship with the Japanese state and Korean nation during and after the colonial period. I identify performance, debates about education’s utility, and confession as three categories of these educational rhetorics. “School, State, and Nation” analyzes these educational rhetorics and argues that Ewha women leveraged them during the colonial period 1) to cooperate with the Japanese state while resisting its assimilating and imperializing goals, and 2) to signal their support for Korea’s independence and welfare while insisting on women’s equality in this nationalist project, and, after Korea’s liberation in 1945, 3) to mitigate Korean criticisms of Kim’s wartime collaboration with Japan. Anglophone rhetoric scholars have increasingly diversified our understanding of how rhetoric works in environments outside the US and Europe, examined the role of schools in identify formation and promoting/stifling political activism, and studied the rhetorical power of performance, education, and confession to dis/empower marginalized groups and pursue social reform. “School, State, and Nation” builds on and complicates this rhetorical scholarship by extending it into post/colonial Korea, where the complex environment complicates national and cultural categories of rhetoric, diversifies our understanding of the rhetorical role of women’s colleges in colonial and postcolonial environments, and problematizes definitions of patriotism and collaboration.Item The Favor of Another: Labor and Precarity in Contemporary Fiction(2019) Macintosh, John A.; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Favor of Another: Labor and Precarity in Contemporary Fiction examines how fiction since 1980 responds to changes to the composition of labor and of work itself. In particular, it is interested in the representation of service sector work in the novels of Stephanie Danler, Don DeLillo, Helen DeWitt, Mohsin Hamid, Jamaica Kincaid, Chang-rae Lee, Imbolo Mbue, Dinaw Mengestu, Bharati Mukherjee, Stewart O’Nan, and Merritt Tierce. The dissertation argues that these novelists develop aesthetic strategies to respond to issues including globalization, immaterial labor, entrepreneurial subjectivity, and financialization. Novels about domestic work register a push-pull dynamic of labor migration from the Global South and in doing so ascribe alternately too much or too little agency to domestic worker characters. The challenge of representing restaurant work leads to a strategy of formal and affective repetition to mimic the routine of interactive service. Novels critical of entrepreneurship either expose cliché as the underlying trope of innovation or reflect the failure of entrepreneurial discourse to account for workers at the bottom of the labor market. Although literary criticism about finance tends to insist on abstraction, reading financial novels for labor reveals the contradiction between that representation and reality. While the labor novel seems to have waned, the dissertation reconceives the genre by examining a range of formal responses to work in novels not often read together. Its analysis concludes that reading for labor not only reveals how fiction registers changes in political economy, but also revises our understanding of the contemporary novel more broadly. The novels studied also provide insight into interdisciplinary debates about social and economic precarity since the mid-1970s. Often defined in terms of degraded work and the retrenchment of the welfare state, theorists emphasize a neoliberal restructuring of the economy as the cause of precarity. The dissertation argues instead that precarity is inherent in capitalist economies and its reemergence is symptomatic of prolonged economic stagnation. Taking seriously the etymological overtones of precarious—the dependence on the favor of another—it argues that the end of precarity requires not nostalgia for a previous arrangement of labor, but a challenge to the wage system itself.Item ‘THE LIFE YET OF HIS LINES SHALL NEVER OUT’: LINEATION AND POETIC AUTHORITY IN THE SHAKESPEAREAN CORPUS(2019) Lind, Sarah; Trudell, Scott A.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The “line” in early modern poetics was a confusing concept due to competing definitions of line length. “Length” could refer to classical, vernacular, or visual measurement. “Length” could figuratively refer to a poet’s “line of life” where a lasting reputation was a measure of a poet’s authority, conflated with the length and measure of his or her lines. Despite the cultural importance of the line, studies of lineation are rare, and few account for the line’s assembly of definitions and vital relationship to poetic authority. This thesis therefore offers an account of lineation and the poetic authority surrounding lineation in editorial and performance traditions. It examines changes to lines in playtexts, songs, and actors’ parts through the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Shakespearean tradition. It argues that changes in ideas about lineation are both signs and consequences of the continual struggle to adapt Shakespeare’s plays to different performative and textual purposes.