Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
10 results
Search Results
Item "How can you love a work, if you don't know it?": Critical code and design towards participatory digital editions(2015) Visconti, Amanda; Kirschenbaum, Matthew; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Scholarly editors are integral to the continuum that keeps the stories of the past available to and understood by the present--but that public of readers beyond the academy whose interest keeps the humanities alive and relevant is just as important. What if we build a digital edition and invite everyone? What if millions of scholars, first-time readers, book clubs, teachers and their students show up and annotate a text with their "infinite" interpretations, questions, and contextualizations? My dissertation pursues this speculative experiment through the creation of the Infinite Ulysses digital edition; I've studied how to improve the design and functionality of a key artifact of the digital humanities--the digital edition--through this unlikely hypothetical. First, I designed, coded, and publicly released an actual digital edition of James Joyce's Ulysses with various experimental interface features. Second, I conducted user testing and analyzed site analytic data with real readers and researchers. Third, I used the results of the experiment to build on knowledge from fields with a stake in digital social reading: literary studies, textual scholarship, information science, and visual design rhetoric. I'm using this speculative experiment to dream big about the public humanities, produce something practically useful, and capture data to support critical responses to the challenges of a more public digital humanities. Three research areas were explored through these methodologies: 1. How can we design digital editions that are not just public, but invite and assist participation in the scholarly love for the nuances of a text's materiality, history, and meaning? Are there ways to design for meaningful participation that don't necessarily scaffold critical participation? 2. How can we design participatory digital editions to handle an influx of readers and annotations? What might we learn about digital editions and their texts from the accompanying influx of site use data? 3. Can we separate the values of textual scholarship from the physical manifestations of these values? How might this clarification help us imagine new types of digital edition that hold true to those values? A whitepaper serves as a report on the dissertation's process and products.Item "When all the World is but a Martial Stage": Representations of Warriors in Early American Literature, 1624-1827(2013) Lazarides, Tasos; Bauer, Ralph; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the literary history of the soldier in early American literature by bringing texts such as travel accounts, sermons, expedition accounts, and novels in conversation with military treatises and military manuals. I argue that colonial soldier-writers employed rhetorical models developed in European and American technical military literature in order to challenge the authority of non-military colonial writers. In particular, I show that soldier-writers and writers of texts about warfare represented warriors in colonial and U.S. American literature by emulating the emphasis on practical knowledge and on the body developed in European military texts. The rhetorical models found in technical military literature allowed these writers to privilege the authority of the figure of the soldier. My introduction describes the historical moment that produced the military literature examined in this dissertation and the influence of the figure of the warrior on early seventeenth-century literary forms. Chapter 1 examines how John Smith in The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624) emulates the rhetorical model of the &ldquoperfect soldier,&rdquo the soldier who possesses both empirical and theoretical knowledge. Smith emphasizes his physical presence in Virginia and links that presence with the value of the information he includes in his account. Chapter 2 considers how Samuel Nowell in his sermon Abraham in Arms (1678) privileges the figure of the temporal soldier over the spiritual soldier in order to challenge strictly typological explanations of King Philip's War. Chapter 3 examines representations of soldiers in John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition in Surinam (1796) and argues that Stedman privileges the authority of the colonial soldier-writer by emphasizing that the immediacy of soldiers' observations produces more accurate and truthful information about Surinam's nature than the accounts by enlightened travelers. Chapter 4 considers how James Fenimore Cooper in The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Prairie (1827) fashions the figures of the militia and the professional soldier in response to political debates regarding what kind of military the U.S. should have. The conclusion examines the continuing influence in contemporary culture of the figures of the militia warrior and the professional soldier.Item TIME WARPS AND ALTER-NARRATIVES: GAY AND LESBIAN ENGAGEMENTS WITH HISTORY IN BRITISH FICTION SINCE WORLD WAR II(2013) Clark, Damion Ray; Cohen, William A; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Contemporary British gay and lesbian authors engage with history through two distinct methods I call fixed moment/cultural critique and abstract moment/fantasy space. The fixed moment/cultural critique model focuses on a fixed historical moment, usually from the recent past. By focusing on this fixed moment, authors explicitly engage in critiques of the present that question society's homophobia and gay and lesbian people's participation in their own oppression. The abstract moment/fantasy space model uses moments from the distant past, often collapsing historical and narrative time and space to create a fantasy space for lesbians and gay men to reflect on their own cultures and identities and to create links with their literary and historical ancestries. Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953) and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2004), both demonstrate the vein of historical engagement in gay and lesbian British fiction that builds a political argument challenging heterosexual cultural and political definitions of homosexuality and detailing the effects of such definitions on gay people. They do this while rooting this discussion in a specific near past iconic historical British moment: World War II for Renault, and the height of Margaret Thatcher's rule in the 1980s for Hollinghurst. The second vein of historical engagement is one that holds as its purpose gay and lesbian cultural fantasy. Neil Bartlett's Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (1990) and Who Was That Man?: A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (1988) and the Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet (1998) explore authorial engagement with the more distant past as a means of examining the present and creating possible futures. The past in these works is not one sharply defined locus; rather it is broadly defined periods that the authors seek to collapse with the present. In the Coda, I turn to the films of Derek Jarman and Isaac Julien, and the plays of Alexi Kaye Campbell and Jackie Kay to see how the fixed moment/cultural critique and abstract moment/fantasy space models apply to contemporary British art mediums outside of narrative fiction.Item Worlds Trodden and Untrodden: Political Disillusionment, Literary Displacement, and the Conflicted Publicity of British Romanticism(2013) Byrne, Joseph E.; Fraistat, Neil; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study focuses on four first-generation British Romantic writers and their misadventures in the highly-politicized public sphere of the 1790s, which was riven by class conflict and media war. I argue that as a result of their negative experiences with publicity, these writers--William Wordsworth, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Blake--recoiled from the pressures of public engagement and developed in reaction a depoliticized aesthetic program aligned with various forms of privacy. However, a "spectral" form of publicity haunts the subsequent works of these writers, which troubles and complicates the traditional identification of Romanticism with privacy. All were forced, in different ways, to negotiate the discursive space between privacy and publicity, and this effort inflected their ideas concerning literature. Thus, in sociological terms, British Romantic literature emerged not from the private sphere but rather from the inchoate space between privacy and publicity. My understanding of both privacy and publicity is informed by Jürgen Habermas's well-known model of the British public sphere in the eighteenth century. However, I broaden the discussion to include other models of publicity, such as those elaborated by feminist and Marxist critics. In my discussion of class conflict in late-eighteenth-century Britain, I make use of the tools of class analysis, hegemony theory, and ideology critique, as used by new historicist literary critics. To explain media war in the 1790s, I utilize the media theory of Raymond Williams, particularly his conception of media as "material social practice." All the writers in this study were profoundly engaged in the class conflict, media war, and politicized publicity of the British 1790s. They were similar in that they were negatively impacted by these phenomena, but different in their responses, depending on their discrete experiences and concerns. The various results were new conceptions of sensibility and the Gothic, new attitudes towards solitude and obscurity, all eventually incorporated into a new kind of literature now called "Romantic."Item British Modernist Narrative Middles(2013) Rosenberg, Michael Eli; Richardson, Brian; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Middles play a key role in shaping narrative form. However, while Edward Said has shown how beginnings shape the novel and a wide range of intellectual endeavors in Beginnings: Intention and Method, and Frank Kermode has explored the pull of the ending on Western narrative in The Sense of an Ending, there has been no comparable study of the middle. Defining the narrative middle as a central piece of text that has a transitional or transformational function, British Modernist Narrative Middles draws attention to the ways narrative middles have been used to construct distinctly modernist narratives through transformations of narrative form and technique. The various techniques employed in modernist narrative middles are demonstrated through close readings of three canonical modernist texts: Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, Henry James's The Golden Bowl, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; as well as three British neo-modernist texts: Rayner Heppenstall's Saturnine, B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, and Brigid Brophy's In Transit. While not all modernist texts employ prominent narrative middles, when they do, these middles can be crucial to our understanding both of these novels' narrative form and how they grapple with the major thematic and poetic concerns of modernism.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 Making Meaning Together: Information, Rumor, and Propaganda in British Literature of the First World War(2012) Borden, Rebecca; Mallios, Peter L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Through an examination of fiction by H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and John Buchan, this dissertation examines information as a category as it exists under conditions of modernity, and how the contours of and changes in definitions and understandings of modern information become more visible, and are likely accelerated by, the complex information challenges brought about by the disruptions of the First World War. Given that "information" is a key building-block in understanding systems of knowledge in modernity, this dissertation incorporates theoretical constructs describing information drawn from a variety of disciplines, all of which circle around the problems and concerns of the increasingly saturated, complex, and untethered nature of information as experienced by an individual in modern life. This project also highlights the role that rumor plays in modernity. The war years bring an expansion of government-directed information control, both in the form of actively produced propaganda and in the form of censorship, disrupting the conduits along which information travels under normal conditions. Rumor, generally considered a pre-modern form of communication, remains a part of modern information systems and provides a mechanism for making meaning when other sources of information begin to fail. This dissertation also considers how "wartime" fiction, as a category distinct from pre-war and post-war fiction, is a revealing domain of literature in its own right, and one that has been overlooked in scholarship on literature of the First World War. This project focuses on once popular but long understudied wartime fiction by Wells, Conrad, and Buchan. It also compares the wartime fiction of these authors to their own pre-war fiction in order to trace how the category of information was a concern for these writers from the beginning of their careers. Further, this project explores how wartime texts contain significant elements that can be understood as pre-modern, as modern (and modernist), and as incipiently post-modern, which highlights the existence of both residual and of emerging forms and ideas during the war years, disrupting a dominant understanding of the First World War as a period of cultural and intellectual rupture.Item Private Scandal in the Public Sphere: Sexual Scandal as Early Eighteenth-Century Polemics(2012) Roby, Joanne W.; Rosenthal, Laura J; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Changes in literary strategies and polemical contest in the early eighteenth century legitimized the use of sexual scandal as a means of attack in the mainstream commercial press. Authors embraced scandal to obscure and temper partisan conflicts that motivated animosities, and in doing so they sanctioned inquiry into the private lives of public figures. This strategic use of scandal emerged as a reaction against the political–religious polemics of the English civil war of the mid 1600s. The discourse of scandal developed as an alternative to the discourse of politeness, which similarly evaded explicitly partisan exchanges. Instead of using politeness to cultivate decorous public debate, some authors turned to scandalous (often calumnious) exposés because it allowed them to veil troubling conflicts while still venting animosities. Chapter One examines how early modern sexual libels were transformed after the civil war. I show how in The Rehearsal Transpros’d Andrew Marvell adapted these precedents into his religious polemics; he redirected them against a quasi–public target, the Anglican cleric Samuel Parker, in order to ridicule Parker as an individual. Chapter Two demonstrates how Delarivier Manley perfected this strategy of obfuscation in The New Atalantis. At moments of political crisis throughout the text, Manley’s political narrative pivots towards amatory encounters to distract readers from the crisis at hand. By casting her political tract as a sexual allegory, she legitimized the personalization, privatization and sexualization of political discourse. As Chapter Three illustrates, in the Tatler and Spectator Joseph Addison and Richard Steele repudiated the public’s appetite for scandal, but their very censures reflect that scandalous discourse permeated public debate. Although known for shaping the public sphere, in denouncing scandal, they revealed skepticism of the public’s ability to engage in rational dialogue. Chapter Four shows that Alexander Pope and his literary rivals adapted scandal as a means of satiric attack against each other—that is, against private figures in the public eye—to undermine one another’s cultural standing. I reveal the buried political–religious conflicts that motivated these hostilities, and I demonstrate that Pope refined his use of scandal as a literary tool throughout his career.Item "Passion is Catching": Emotional Contagion and Affective Action in Select Works by Shakespeare(2011) Wheelock, Angelique Marie; Cartwright, Kent; Mack, Maynard; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Growing out of recent scholarship on humoral theory and emotions in early modern literary texts, this dissertation explores the idea that Shakespearean emotions are contagious. Tears, rage, compassion, fear, affection, horror, and laughter travel invisible pathways from character to character in his texts, reinforcing an implicit scheme of emotional transmission harkening back to Plato and Aristotle. Whether generated internally or imposed from the outside, these passions have the ability to wreak havoc on individuals, communities, and even countries, because passions can, and often do, lead to action. This work examines three of Shakespeare's tragic works, the poem Rape of Lucrece and two plays: Othello and Julius Caesar. In the chapter on Rape of Lucrece, beauty is the root of the violent, contagious action driving the tale. Tarquin himself is ravished by Lucrece's beauty. Overwhelmed by a “rage of lust,” the prince must exorcise his excess humors through rape to regain equilibrium. Lucrece is infected with his “load of lust” during the rape and then kills herself, passing on Tarquin's beauty–inspired violence to Collatine and the nobles in a mutated form—the lust for vengeance. Through her act of self–violence, Lucrece transforms the original contagion into a force which purges Rome of the Tarquins' rule. For Julius Caesar, I trace Shakespeare's descriptions of environmental events in Julian Rome and how these correspond to the emotional complexion of the agents in the play. I identify fear as the main emotional vector in this play and illustrate how the imagination takes on a crucial role in the misregulation of the humors, a situation that, in turn, creates the ideal environment for violent action. The chapter dedicated to Othello examines the false transmission of emotion perpetrated by Iago to destroy Othello. Iago develops false emotional paradigms, reframing his hatred for the general with trappings of love; successfully communicating the degree of his passion without the content, Iago is able to fool Othello into believing Desdemona is false. Despite his demand for “ocular proof,” the Moor becomes overwhelmed by the force of Iago's emotions and becomes an instrument of “honest” Iago's virulent hate.Item THE "OTHER" WOMAN: EARLY MODERN ENGLISH REPRESENTATIONS OF NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN, 1579-1690(2011) Lush, Rebecca Marie; Bauer, Ralph R.; Donawerth, Jane L.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how early modern writers deployed figures of similarity and arguments of similitude in textual and visual representations of Native American women in trans-Atlantic texts about the Americas. I explore the relationship between representations of English and Native women by investigating the ways English authors link the two figures through comparisons that reveal similarities. English writers asserted shared traits between Native and English women to cast indigenous peoples as potential subjects of the English crown. However, these writers did not describe processes of assimilation or acculturation: the English represent the Natives as already like them. English writers used similarity between Native and English to differentiate themselves from other European colonizers in the Americas, to provide rationales for possessing American land, and to reassure English investors and would-be colonists of the safety and stability of the relationship between Native and English. My introduction situates early modern arguments of similarity and similitude alongside contemporary notions of fluid racial and cultural identities. Chapter 1 examines the descriptions of the Native woman captive in George Best's travel narrative about the Frobisher voyages and the rhetoric of similarity between Native and English women employed in this description; this rhetoric enables Best increasingly to include England's own Elizabeth I as a central character in support of the voyages. Chapter 2 considers Sir Walter Ralegh's use of the figure of the Native woman to make an analogical rhetorical argument comparing Elizabeth I to Native women rulers and, thus, to argue for English claims to American land. Chapter 3 examines how Aphra Behn and Mary Rowlandson reflect changing attitudes about Native Americans through their use of similarity to convey colonial anxieties about safety and cultural degradation as opposed to earlier depictions of similarity to convey a reassuring statement of colonial peace.