English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item GENRE AS RHETORICAL SITUATION: COMPETING RHETORICS IN THE SPECIAL EDUCATION PROCESS(2017) O'Brien, Daune Marie; Wible, Professor Scott; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines key genres within the Individualized Education Plan (IEP Process) as rhetorical processes that respond to, anticipate, enable, and in some cases, forecast and govern federally mandated parent participation within the IEP process. Specifically, I argue that the Notice of IEP team Meeting, IEP Meeting, and Prior Written Notice (PWN) are genres that technically meet legislative requirements but subvert the intended rhetorical context, challenging parent involvement rather than facilitating federally mandated parent participation.Item Electracy in Praxis: Pedagogical Relays for an Undergraduate Writing Curriculum(2016) Geary, Thomas Michael; Logan, Shirley W.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The paradigm shift from traditional print literacy to the postmodern fragmentation, nonlinearity, and multimodality of writing for the Internet is realized in Gregory L. Ulmer’s electracy theory. Ulmer’s open invitation to continually invent the theory has resulted in the proliferation of relays, or weak models, by electracy advocates for understanding and applying the theory. Most relays, however, remain theoretical rather than practical for the writing classroom, and electracy instruction remains rare, potentially hindering the theory’s development. In this dissertation, I address the gap in electracy praxis by adapting, developing, and remixing relays for a functional electracy curriculum with first-year writing students in the Virginia Community College System as the target audience. I review existing electracy relays, pedagogical applications, and assessment practices – Ulmer’s and those of electracy advocates – before introducing my own relays, which take the form of modules. My proposed relay modules are designed for adaptability with the goals of introducing digital natives to the logic of new media and guiding instructors to possible implementations of electracy. Each module contains a justification, core competencies and learning outcomes, optional readings, an assignment with supplemental exercises, and assessment criteria. My Playlist, Transduction, and (Sim)ulation relays follow sound backward curricular design principles and emphasize core hallmarks of electracy as juxtaposed alongside literacy. This dissertation encourages the instruction of new media in Ulmer’s postmodern apparatus in which student invention via the articulation of fragments from various semiotic modes stems from and results in new methodologies for and understandings of digital communication.Item Arguing over Texts: The Rhetoric of Interpretation(2014) Camper, Kenton Martin; Fahnestock, Jeanne; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the nature of arguments over the meaning of texts. People often disagree about the meaning of texts, with arguments ranging from disagreements over individual words to disagreements over the text's overall sense. Over two thousand years ago, rhetoricians in ancient Greece and Rome classified recurring types of disagreement over the meaning of texts. This classification, known as the legal stases, served as a tool for inventing arguments in favor of the arguer's preferred interpretation. My dissertation recovers and adapts the legal stases as a modern rhetorical method for generating and analyzing arguments over the meaning of texts. In the first chapter, I sketch the history of the legal stases from their origins in ancient Greco-Roman legal discourse to their slide into obscurity in the seventeenth century. I rename them the interpretive stases because scholars can use them to analyze debates revolving around texts from a variety of spheres, including not only law, but also politics, religion, literature, and history. I adopt six interpretive stases: letter versus spirit, contradictory passages, ambiguity, definition, assimilation, and jurisdiction. These six stases offer a reasonably grained slicing of disputes over textual meaning at their roots: from a single word to how a text is applied in novel ways. In the next six chapters, I examine each interpretive stasis in detail with case studies from debates over textual meaning in a variety of settings. Case studies range from a controversy in literary criticism over the racially subversive nature of Phillis Wheatley's poetry in the stasis of ambiguity to a debate in historical scholarship over Lincoln's sexuality as inferred from his correspondence with an alleged male lover in the stasis of assimilation. In my final chapter, I suggest ways that literature and composition teachers might use the interpretive stases to help students analyze and generate arguments about texts, and I discuss promising intersections between my research and contemporary language science. Thus, my dissertation advances the ability of scholars to analyze the rhetorical dynamics of interpreting texts, trace the evolution of textual meaning, and examine how communities ground their beliefs and behaviors in texts.Item Neutered Rhetoric: Representations of Orators in the Long Eighteenth Century(2013) Black, Andrew; Chico, Tita; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation tracks representations of orators in a constellation of British texts throughout the long eighteenth century, ranging from plays, novels, and poems to religious, scientific, and pedagogical texts. These colorful and persuasive orators are linked to the disruptive power of mass persuasion, the slipperiness of the spoken word, and the apparent failure of rhetoric as a discipline. From the order of the Restoration to its re-establishment after the Glorious Revolution to the emergence of a Georgian polite culture characterized by its moderation, privileged stakeholders announced both a current and future stability that orators continually threaten. My chapters focus on four discourses in which real and fictional orators play a central role: experimental philosophy, attacks on Methodism, Alexander Pope's poetry, and Scottish Enlightenment rhetorical treatises. I locate an imperative to limit the potential power of the orator, which echoes a general cultural move to "neuter" rhetoric of its affective capabilities and to regulate the troubling instabilities of language. Neutered Rhetoric interrogates the traditional critical narrative of British rhetoric in the period by considering the resurgence of rhetorical theory in the 1750s as both a reaction to and a revision of the vexed cultural status of the orator as presented in literary texts. In charting literary representations of orators and their relationship to the shift in rhetoric from an oral to a written discipline, I present a new avenue for exploring the changing shape and influence of rhetorical theory during the period. I argue that representations of orators - whether real or fictional - can be read as theories about the nature of rhetoric, its inherent value and the problems of its effects. Whenever orators speak, they both represent and provoke cultural responses to rhetoric: its tradition, propriety, integrity, and future in a polite society.Item Erotic Language as Dramatic Action in Plays by Lyly and Shakespeare(2012) Knoll, Gillian; Leinwand, Theodore B; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study closely examines the language of desire in the dramatic works of John Lyly and William Shakespeare, and argues that contemplative and analytical speeches about desire function as modes of action in their plays. Erotic speeches do more than express desire in a purely descriptive or perlocutionary capacity distinct from the action of the play--they incite, circulate, and create eros for characters, exposing audiences to the inner workings of the desiring mind and body. For many of Lyly's and Shakespeare's characters, words come to constitute erotic experience. My approach to dramatic language draws from the work of cognitive linguists such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson who argue that our basic conceptual system, according to which we think, speak, and act, is metaphorical in nature. My focus on primary metaphors, which are based on sensorimotor experience, foregrounds the interdependence of erotic language and early modern notions of embodiment. Since language, thought, and action are all subject to this embodied metaphorical system, conceptual metaphors allow Lyly and Shakespeare to dramatize the often invisible, paradoxical, and potentially unknowable experience of erotic desire. My understanding of language as dramatic action derives from a theory about the attribution of human motives that Kenneth Burke, in The Grammar of Motives (1945), called dramatism. Burke uses five key terms to address human motivation--Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose--and I in turn use each of these terms to make sense of erotic desire on the early modern stage. I begin my study by exploring conceptual metaphors of physical motion that characterize desire as an action rather than a state of mind. In my second chapter, I investigate metaphors of permeability that dramatize erotic desire as a rupture between "agents" and their "scenes," between self and world. My third chapter analyzes "purpose" and "agency"--the ways characters make intimate relationships--by exploring metaphors in which eros is conceptualized as a dynamic process of creation.Item The Ethics of Allegory in /Paradise Lost/(2011) Vasileiou, Margaret Rice; Grossman, Marshall; Leinwand, Theodore; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation reframes the debate about whether Paradise Lost is an allegorical poem by focusing on Milton's assertion that all language is allegorical because it reflects the difference-from-Himself that God has inscribed into language and built into human ontology. Milton emphasizes this allegorical difference in two ways in Paradise Lost. First, he points out the difference between the logic of language and the landscape by which we try to describe and apprehend it, even ascribing the fall to Eve's decision to ignore this difference and to embrace the logic of language as if it captured truth. Second, he forces the allegorical figures of Sin and Death to contend with and participate in Christian history, thereby destabilizing their figurations as representations of abstract ideas, and displaying the impossibility of fusing word and thing (i.e., of collapsing allegorical difference) in the historical context of pre-apocalyptic time. This dissertation argues that Milton uses both of these strategies to oppose the universal language ideology of the late seventeenth century, whose proponents promised to speak the world exactly as it is, to fuse word and thing. From Milton's perspective, these proponents threatened to write over God's truth with a language that reflected their desire for intellectual domination of the world more than it reflected the natural world they supposedly sought to describe. Thus, Paradise Lost reminds us that word and thing cannot be fused, that other-speaking not only reflects human ontology--that is, humankind's suspension in a state of difference from and similarity to God--but also represents the only kind of speaking that refers to God. Language that does not admit its difference from truth, in contrast, writes over the sublime truth with a verbal idol that purports to embody what it can only allegorically represent.