English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item The Dialectical Theory of Art in Kenneth Burke's Essays and Book Reviews of the Early 1920s and its Combination of the Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss(2014) Clarkson, Bruce T.; Harrison, Regina; Lin, Jing; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)I argue that a dialectical theory of art is developed by Kenneth Burke in the first half of the 1920s that brings together through its own terms and principles two opposing philosophies that would not come into existence in themselves until the 1940s and 1950s respectively: the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. The development of this dialectical theory of art begins in 1920 with several of Burke's book reviews, including his first, "Axiomatics." It then continues with further book reviews and then essays, also including his first, through the middle of 1925, when it is completed by the twin essays "Psychology of Form" and "The Poetic Process." The dialectical theory of art that emerges from this series of works possesses four main parts. These are consciousness, intentionality, action, and true art. Each part, in turn, consists of two opposing subdivisions that are meant to be combined and transcended. They are, in line with the four parts above, creativity / form, originality / communication, art-emotion / artistry, and art's advancement / beauty. These divisions and subdivisions are highly integrated and function to explain Burke's major position on how true art is produced and why it possesses an absolute value for universal judgment. My goal in establishing this dialectical theory is fourfold: to provide a framework for better understanding the early essays and book reviews as a coherent and unified whole, to revalue the 1920s as Burke's first important theoretical period, to provide good reason for bringing existentialism and structuralism forward into studies about Burke, and to offer the dialectical theory itself as the foundation of Burke's later theoretical developments and, hence, as a theory and model that may be useful for acquiring a fuller understanding of his theories after the 1920s, which span over half-a-century and have become of interest to multiple fields of study.Item Chi-Thinking: Chiasmus and Cognition(2008-01-15) Lissner, Patricia Ann; Turner, Mark; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The treatise proposes chiasmus is a dominant instrument that conducts processes and products of human thought. The proposition grows out of work in cognitive semantics and cognitive rhetoric. These disciplines establish that conceptualization traces to embodied image schematic knowledge. The Introduction sets out how this knowledge gathers from perceptions, experiences, and memories of the body's commonplace engagements in space. With these ideas as suppositional foundation, the treatise contends that chiastic instrumentation is a function of a corporeal mind steeped in elementary, nonverbal spatial forms or gestalts. It shows that chiasmus is a space shape that lends itself to cognition via its simple, but unique architecture and critically that architecture's particular meaning affordances. We profile some chiastic meanings over others based on local conditions. Chiastic iconicity ('lending') devolves from LINE CROSSING in 2-D and PATH CROSSING in 3-D space and from other image schemas (e.g., BALANCE, PART-TO-WHOLE) that naturally syndicate with CROSSING. Profiling and iconicity are cognitive activities. The spatio-physical and the visual aspects of cross diagonalization are discussed under the Chapter Two heading 'X-ness.' Prior to this technical discussion, Chapter One surveys the exceptional versatility and universality of chiasmus across verbal spectra, from radio and television advertisements to the literary arts. The purposes of this opening section are to establish that chiasticity merits more that its customary status as mere rhetorical figure or dispensable stylistic device and to give a foretaste of the complexity, yet automaticity of chi-thinking. The treatise's first half describes the complexity, diversity, and structural inheritance of chiasmus. The second half treats individual chiasma, everything from the most mundane instantiations to the sublime and virtuosic. Chapter Three details the cognitive dimensions of the macro chiasm, which are appreciable in the micro. It builds on the argument that chiasmus secures two cognitive essentials: association and dissociation. Chapter Four, advantaged by Kenneth Burke's "psychology of form," elects chiasmus an instrument of inordinate form and then explores the issue of Betweenity, i.e., how chiasma, like crisscrosses, direct notice to an intermediate region. The study ends on the premise that chiasmus executes form-meaning pairings with which humans are highly fluent.