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
2 results
Search Results
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 Americans in the Golden State: The Rhetoric of Identity in Four California Social Protest Novels(2006-04-19) Warford, Elisa Leigh; Fahnestock, Jeanne; Wyatt, David; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the rhetorical strategies of four California social protest novels of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: Helen Hunt Jackson's <em>Ramona</em> (1884), María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's <em>The Squatter and the Don</em> (1885), Frank Norris's <em>The Octopus</em> (1901), and John Steinbeck's <em>The Grapes of Wrath</em> (1939). I argue that among these four texts, those that succeeded rhetorically--Ruiz de Burton's and Steinbeck's--did so by making it possible for their mostly white, middle-class audiences to identify with their characters along class, race, and other demographic lines. The rhetorical theories of Kenneth Burke help explain the complex ways these novels invite audience identification with some characters while creating distance with others. I also examine the roles of sentiment and naturalism in each text's rhetorical success or failure. Although these novels were all written or read as social protest fiction, there exists no full-length analysis of the rhetorical strategies these writers employ. In their arguments over California land ownership and the land's potential wealth, the novels reveal much about how American identity was constructed during this period. Chapter One argues that in <em>The Squatter and the Don</em>, Ruiz de Burton encourages identification by blurring racial lines and emphasizing her characters' social class, presenting the Alamar family as entrepreneurial Americans who can pass for white and who blend easily with upper-crust New York society. Chapter Two focuses on the ways Jackson creates Native American characters in <em>Ramona</em> who possess some traits of "American" identity such as whiteness, domesticity, and work skills. Jackson's characters, however, remain too exotic for the reader to identify with them, and thus her novel has been read as romance rather than protest. Chapter Three argues that <em>The Octopus</em> is too deterministic to succeed as social protest against the railroad monopoly, but that Norris is arguing instead for a global expansion of U.S. capitalism. Chapter Four demonstrates how <em>The Grapes of Wrath</em> aligns the migrants with America's white middle class. Steinbeck enables identification by emphasizing the Okies' Anglo heritage and their willingness to work; like Ruiz de Burton, he also employs an effective balance between sentiment and naturalism.