English Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766

Browse

Subject: search.filters.subject.Language, Linguistics

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Literary Joint Attention: Social Cognition and the Puzzles of Modernism
    (2008-04-07) Tobin, Vera; Turner, Mark; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The fundamental claim of this project is that the mechanics of social cognition--how we think intersubjectively and process social information--are highly relevant to the study of literature. Specifically, it presents a theory of literary discourse as the emergent product of a network of joint activities and joint attention. Research on joint attention frequently focuses on contexts in which this aspect of social cognition is not fully developed, such as in early childhood, or for autistic people. The study of literature, on the other hand, is continually engaged with circumstances in which joint attention is relevant, highly developed, and complex. Here, linguistics and cognitive science provide the basis for specific and particularizing claims about literature, while literary texts are used to support broader theoretical work about language and the mind. The focus is on modern literature in English and its reception. Many of these texts exploit systematic egocentric biases in social cognition and communication to produce effective ironies and narrative surprises. Further, both detective fiction and experimental Modernist fiction frequently dramatize problems of joint attention that can be traced to the ultimate relation between author, reader, and text. Extended analysis, with special attention to Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, demonstrates the importance of this joint attentional trope. In these texts, the external and perceptible serve not only as triggers for the events of a single consciousness, but as a locus for the potential for intersubjective experience, both inside and outside the text. A case study of the publication and reception history of Marianne Moore's "Poetry," finally, demonstrates the utility of a cognitively realistic approach to textual criticism. These literary activities also serve as an important proving ground for the claims of cognitive science, demonstrating complexities of and constraints on shared viewpoint phenomena.
  • Thumbnail Image
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    METAPHORS WE KILL BY: RHETORIC AND CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE IN U.S. ARMY DOCTRINE
    (2005-04-20) Brenner, Nannette Valencia Manalo; Turner, Mark; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Analogical thought, thinking of one domain of experience in terms of another, helps us understand new ideas in relation to preexisting knowledge. This dissertation examines five parallel examples of analogical thought in United States Army doctrine in which various target domains are conceptualized in terms of traditional warfare. The first chapter examines the way in which "information" is explained in terms of a construct called "the cognitive hierarchy," which is a blend of folk models of thought and the military command structure. Here, "information" is conceived of as a raw material to be refined to a useable state as it is processed by successively higher levels in the hierarchy. The second chapter analyzes the inclusion of "information" into the elements of combat power, a heuristic that staff officers use to plan operations. Unlike the first four elements, firepower, maneuver, leadership, and protection, which have independent but interrelated capabilities, "information" is characterized exclusively in terms of its ability to coordinate the effects of the other four. The third chapter explores the term "information operations," a blend of the domains of cognition and communication, and of combat, that "weaponizes" information. Chapter Four analyzes a startling metaphor that represents persuasion as a form of lethal firepower. Finally, the last chapter examines the difficulty of portraying success in peace operations, which comprise both peace enforcement and peacekeeping. Because the event shape of a successful peace operation involves reducing forces, relinquishing power, and withdrawal by the peacekeepers, it conforms to the event shape of a failed attack. All five chapters share a rich and highly developed source domain, warfare that is used to explain the workings of relatively impoverished target domains, communication and thought. The result is that the target domains are distorted to the point that key elements in them are elided or altered beyond recognition. This dissertation is unique in that it analyzes not only analogical thought, but also the corporate thought of a large institution that uses it to solve problems in the real world. The resulting actions have far-reaching impacts on both international security and countless lives across the world.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Simple Regrets: Counterfactuals and the Dialogic Mind
    (2004-04-30) Harding, Jennifer Riddle; Turner, Mark; English Language and Literature
    Counterfactuals, or unrealized scenarios, have been a focus of research in an array of disciplines, though their rhetorical implications have gone largely unexplored. This interdisciplinary study uses a cognitive methodology in taking a fresh look at counterfactual scenarios in discourse. The study argues that when counterfactual scenarios are introduced into discourse and paired with an evaluative stance, the result is a creative and persuasive scenario that allows a speaker to communicate a perspective that a listener may reinforce, revise, or reject. Counterfactuals thus have the ability to convey an evaluation, to convey emotion, to provide a window for disagreement, or to foster solidarity. In literature, counterfactual scenarios additionally serve as an embedded element of discourse that may convey the perspective of characters and/or the implied author. The reader juggles the counterfactual scenarios, and the perspectives they convey, with other textual elements to grasp the meaning of the story. This study furthers previous research on counterfactuality by considering the phenomenon from a cognitive rhetorical perspective. Rather than focusing on counterfactual thinking, as psychologists have done, or on linguistic forms, as linguists have done, this study considers both the cognitive and discursive dimensions of counterfactuals in a fully integrated analysis. Furthermore, this study places counterfactuals within a communicative paradigm that considers the role of both speaker and listener, or author and reader, in developing and interpreting counterfactual scenarios. This study thus demonstrates the largely unrecognized rhetorical dimensions of counterfactual scenarios in both ordinary and literary discourse.