English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Communicating Disease: Medical Knowledge and Literary Forms in Colonial British America(2009) Wisecup, Kelly; Bauer, Ralph; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the literary repercussions of encounters between European, Native American, and African medical philosophies throughout the British American colonies. In particular, I examine the formation and transformation of colonial literary forms in an intercultural and a transatlantic context, by investigating the ways in which colonists incorporated Native and African knowledge to produce various literary forms. I employ anthropological and ethnohistorical studies to show that colonists displaced competing rhetorical practices by incorporating non-European knowledge to present firsthand descriptions of New World medicines and illnesses. Additionally, colonists transformed their literary strategies to subordinate Native and African knowledge as witchcraft and to distance themselves from colonial encounters. Early Americans' incorporation and subordination of non-European medical philosophies authorized colonial medical knowledge as empirical and rational and facilitated conceptions of cultural differences between colonists, Native Americans, and Africans. My introduction examines medical encounters in the context of early modern medical philosophies and rhetorical practices. Chapter one examines how Thomas Hariot mixed Algonquian theories that disease originated in "invisible bullets" with Paracelsian medical philosophies, connecting seeing and knowing in his true report. Chapter two examines Pilgrim Edward Winslow's appropriation and subordination of shamans' medical practices to provide firsthand accounts of New World wonders in his providence tale. Chapter three examines the 1721 inoculation controversy in the context of Africans' testimony about inoculation, which minister Cotton Mather transcribed to connect words and things in his plain style, and which physician William Douglass satirized to reveal the gap between slaves' words and the true, dangerous nature of inoculation. Chapter four examines how James Grainger incorporated obeah, Africans' medico-religious practices, into his georgic poem to produce images of productive slaves and to construct new conceptions of obeah as witchcraft. Finally, the conclusion examines the ways in which colonists' disavowal of Native and African knowledge as magical continued to haunt U.S. Americans' literary practices, as seen in Arthur Mervyn's gothic tale of his encounter with a healthy black hearse driver during a yellow fever epidemic and Richard Allen and Absalom Jones' argument that blacks possessed superior knowledge of the epidemic.Item Chaos and the Microcosm: Literary Ecology in the Nineteenth-Century(2009) Scott, Heidi; Fraistat, Neil; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates literary responses to environmental change in nineteenth-century England. Two tropes, chaos in narrative and the microcosm in lyric poetry, suggest how literary works may have been precursors of ecological science. I argue that literary epistemology in the long nineteenth-century developed precocious theories of the way nature operates based on contingent narrative and microcosm systems. These ideas were adopted as empirical strategies once scientific ecology emerged in the twentieth-century, and both tropes are prominent in twenty-first century ecological science. Ecology appeared late among scientific disciplines partly because it relies on cooperation between reduction and holism: climate change theory, for example, uses microcosm models to develop narratives of environmental contingency. Five chapters consider these two tropes from historical, literary, and scientific perspectives. The first chapter is a historical introduction to nineteenth-century science that traces the development of environmental awareness from industrial pollution and early studies of nature in microcosm, especially in the work of Charles Darwin and Stephen Forbes. Chapter two investigates four narratives of environmental chaos spanning the long nineteenth-century: Gilbert White, Mary Shelley, Richard Jefferies and H.G. Wells emplot the radical new notion of a post-apocalypse environment in narratives that rely on chaotic discontinuity, rather than the coherent gradualism that marked evolutionary theories of the time. Chapter three examines microcosmic imagery in the work of several important poets, including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, John Clare, Percy Shelley, and Matthew Arnold. I argue that the imagination and close observation of nineteenth-century poets helped the nascent sciences conceive of ways to simplify nature without dismembering its complex structures. Chapter four, devoted to the ecological thinking of John Keats, traces his abandonment of teleological narrative in Hyperion in preference for the microcosmic Odes. Finally, chapter five reconciles the two tropes with an excursion into modern ecosystem science, paying particular attention to our contemporary strategies for investigating climate change. This chapter serves as a summation of the dissertation by complicating the dichotomy between chaotic narrative and model-microcosm, and it brings the study into concerns of the present day.Item Instrument to Evidence to Argument: Visual Mediation of Invisible Phenomena in Scientific Discourse(2008-07-15) Buehl, Jonathan; Fahnestock, Jeanne; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how scientists and scientific editors have approached specific problems related to visualization and visual argumentation in scientific texts. These problems are related to the following research questions: (1) How are new visualization practices established as scientifically credible? (2) How do scientists modify existing instrument output to make new visual arguments? (3) How do scientists use verbal and visual means to transform problematic data into acceptable support for novel claims? (4) What are the practical and ethical boundaries of modifying visual artifacts for scientific arguments? (5) How do scientists refute established (but incorrect) visualizations that have been widely accepted as accurate representations of reality? This project considers these issues rhetorically by examining a number of recent and historical cases. The first three case studies explore how scientists created both compelling and uncompelling visual arguments by mediating the visual output of instruments with rhetorical strategies. These case studies focus on visualizations from physical science: x-ray diffraction photographs, graphics establishing the theory of plate tectonics, and visualizations of atmospheric phenomena. In each case, visualizations articulated invisible phenomena in new ways, transforming unclear or seemingly unremarkable data into convincing knowledge claims. My analysis of these cases explores how scientists integrate visuals into the analogical, causal, transitive, symmetrical, and dissociation arguments that are so essential to the practice of science. The later case studies examine broader concerns regarding ethics, persuasion, and modern scientific visualization. I examine recent issues related to the digital generation and manipulation of scientific images and rhetorical issues related to scientists' increasing dependence on complicated computer algorithms for creating visual arguments.Item Life's Rich Pattern: The Role of Statistics and Probability in Nineteenth Century Argumentation for Theories of Evolution, Variation, and Heredity(2006-04-26) Wynn, James; Fahnestock, Jeanne; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Though modern philosophers of science recognize the inappropriateness of the reduction of all scientific investigations to mathematics, mathematics and science share a long history with one another during which mathematics has been employed as a major component of scientific argumentation. Over the last twenty years, rhetoricians have done substantial work studying the role of argumentation in science (Bazerman 1988; Gross 1990, 2002; Myers 1990; Fahnestock 1999); however, despite the importance of mathematics in making scientific arguments, little effort has been made to understand the role mathematics has played in making these arguments. This dissertation represents a move to resolve this shortcoming by investigating the role of mathematics in arguments in evolutionary biology from the middle of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. In the first part of the nineteenth century, the mass collection and mathematical assessment of data for scientific purposes provides the context for understanding some of the rhetorical choices of an important group of natural philosophers and biologists who developed arguments in the second half of the century about the nature of variation, evolution, and heredity. In the works of Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Francis Galton, and Karl Pearson, arguments from probability and statistics play important roles as support for their arguments and as a source of invention for their claims. This investigation of the rhetorical situations of these four biologists, their arguments, and the role of the principles, operations, and formulae of probability and statistics supports the position that mathematization had a major impact on the nature of scientific evidence in the nineteenth century. What it also suggests is that, though mathematized arguments may have had a great deal of credibility within the scientific community in general, factors such as the stature of the rhetor and of their biological theory within their specific discourse communities played an equally important role in the persuasiveness of their arguments.