Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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
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Item GENRES OF MEMORY AND ASIAN/AMERICAN WOMEN’S ACTIVISM(2022) Bramlett, Katie; Enoch, Jessica; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As human rights and racial inequality dominate public discourse, it has become increasingly clear that Americans are invested in conversations of public memory. The removal of confederate monuments and demands for equity in memorialization for people of color underscore the point that who is remembered and how they are honored is important. Further, the growing awareness of violence against Asian/Americans and the hate crime against Asian/American women in Atlanta has emphasized the need to understand the history of violence against Asian/Americans, Asian/American gendered stereotypes, and the Asian/American activists who fight for equal rights. This dissertation examines three distinct memorial genres—a statue, a traveling exhibit, and a documentary—created by Asian/Americans about Asian/American women activists. My interdisciplinary research engages feminist memory studies, Asian/American studies, and cultural rhetorics to investigate how public memory activists leverage the affordances of different memorial genres to recover Asian/American women’s activism. I consider the ways Asian/American women’s memorials contest the past and navigate the politics of memorialization to influence the present. Each chapter considers how memorials not only remember past activism, but also work to reframe current conversations about Asian/American women in more just and equitable frameworks. I claim that my chosen memorials are created by memorial activists and each seek to expand U.S. memory beyond traditional gendered stereotypes that are pervasive in the United States.Item The Crisis of Scale in Contemporary Fiction(2020) Kason, Daniel Joshua; Konstantinou, Lee; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Crisis of Scale in Contemporary Fiction studies how globalization has transformed our relationship with scale and creates a problem of representation in fiction. After the Second World War, new geopolitical, economic, cultural, and technological developments radically changed the form of existing spaces such as the nation-state, while producing new ones like the global city. By the late twentieth century, with the end of the Cold War, the spread of free trade policies like NAFTA, and the start of the Internet Age, these historical developments led to what I term the crisis of scale; that is, humanity’s growing awareness of the planet’s complexity and interconnectedness has called into question established narratives about the spaces we inhabit, necessitating the development of new representational strategies. Analyzing depictions of the global city, nation-state, world, and galaxy in novels by China Miéville, Karen Tei Yamashita, Nalo Hopkinson, and Samuel R. Delany respectively, I uncover the set of narrative strategies they use to account for the way globalization shapes daily life. Turning to popular genre fiction to describe the disorienting and dislocating effects of the crisis of scale, these novelists join a tradition of writers of literary fiction interested in advancing generic traditions such as science fiction and detective fiction. While most critics read the generic turn starting at the end of the twentieth century as a response to the decline of postmodernism, I interpret the literary movement as a formal solution to the problem of representation under the crisis of scale. By self-reflexively and intertextually engaging with their own generic histories, popular genres develop a language for the perspectival experience of the crisis of scale. This dissertation contends that tracking literary developments in genre provides us with a theoretical toolkit not only for articulating and understanding new globalizing conditions, but for developing new subjectivities capable of contending with them.Item Faithful Genres: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting(2016) Miller, Elizabeth Ellis; Enoch, Jessica; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Faithful Genres” examines how African Americans adapted the genres of the black church during the civil rights movement. Civil rights mass meetings, as the movement’s so-called “energy machine” and “heartbeat,” serve as the project’s central site of inquiry for these meetings were themselves adaptations of the genre of the black church service. The mass meetings served as the space to draw people into the movement, encourage people toward further activism, and testify to anyone watching that the African American community was working toward desegregation, voting rights, and racial equality. In Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “Through these meetings we were able to generate the power and depth which finally galvanized the entire Negro community.” In these weekly or sometimes even nightly meetings, participants inhabited the familiar genres of the black church, song, prayer, and testimony. As they did, they remade these genres to respond directly to white supremacy and to enact the changes they sought to create. While scholars have studied the speeches men and women such as King, Ralph Abernathy, and Fannie Lou Hamer delivered at meetings (Wilson; Selby; Holmes; Brooks), scholars have yet to examine how civil rights mass meetings functioned through a range of genres and rhetors. My study addresses this absence and invigorates this discussion to demonstrate how the other meeting genres beyond the speech—song, prayer, and testimony—functioned to create energy, sustenance, and motivation for activists. Examining these collectively enacted genres, I show how rhetors adapted song, prayer, and testimony toward strategic interventions. I also examine how activists took these same genres up outside the meetings to circulate them in broader contexts for new audiences. By recovering and defining the mass meeting as a flexible repertoire of genres and then examining the redeployment of meeting genres outside the meeting, “Faithful Genres” contributes to histories of civil rights and African American rhetorics, genre studies, and histories of religious rhetorics.Item The Effects of Prompt Condition and Genre on the Writing Performance of Students in 3rd and 5th Grade(2014) Worland Piantedosi, Kelly; De La Paz, Susan; Special Education; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Research on writing at the elementary level has shown that prior knowledge and task environment can have a significant effect on writing performance. In addition, there is preliminary evidence that suggests that children's development in writing may vary by genre favoring the narrative over expository genres (e.g., Olinghouse & Wilson, 2011; and Camp, 1993). One way to mitigate the effects of prior knowledge on topic and genre is through varying prompting conditions. The new Common Core writing assessment context requires students to write in response to texts read. To date, however, there are no studies that simultaneously examine the effects of genre and prompt condition in the elementary grades. This study examines the effect of two prompting conditions (supported and unsupported) on students' writing performance in multiple genres (narrative, persuasive and informational report) in order to assess the potential impact of the read aloud accommodation on these new types of writing assessments along with the effect of genre simultaneously. Findings show that at the 3rd grade level, students write best in the informational report genre over the narrative and persuasive genre, and that the read aloud accommodation positively affects writing quality. At the 5th grade level, the read aloud accommodation does not have a significant effect on writing quality. Based on the findings above, there are a number of implications for current testing policy and instruction. First, features of the prompt condition such as providing a common text, and audience and genre cues resulted in higher style, organization, conventions and mechanic scores for the informational report genre in the younger grades. This contradicts earlier findings that suggest at the elementary level, the narrative genre is more accessible. Accordingly, an effort should be made by test-makers and educators to provide students with these beneficial supports when designing tests and assignments particularly for expository genres. Second, given the observed benefit of the read aloud accommodation for students in the younger grades, test makers should consider designing tests that vary the degree of supports students are provided on the read and write response tasks as they progress through the grade levels.Item Chaotic Topography in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature(2010) Wittrock, Mary Cobb; Eades, Caroline; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Chaos theory proposed by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers illuminates new conclusions about narrative structures in contemporary French and Francophone literature. Espousing an order-out-of-chaos paradigm, my tutor texts by Annie Ernaux, Frankétienne, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint demonstrate how the contemporary notions of identity, gender and genre are innately chaotic but simultaneously offer innovative insights into how these entities are being (re)conceived and (re)presented. Scientific, philosophical, and cultural models of chaos described by Prigogine, Deleuze and Glissant respectively, offer a means to understand the world in order to frame a contemporary cultural topography. Liberated limits of the novel, poetry, and diary genre, viewed through the concept of chaotic "noise", represent richness of information rather than a dearth in order. With Prigogine's Arrow of Time, identity is found in the future not in the past suggesting a non-linear development that is plagued with uncertainty but possibilities. Consequently, identity in contemporary literature is located in others and not in the self challenging traditional notions of this concept. Bifurcation points serve as nodes of "textual instability" revealing themes and trends questioning the function of language, identity and generic transitions in contemporary literature. Through the concept of strange attractors, women, men, language and places within these chaotic tutor texts serve as points of order to which chaotic narratives consistently return advocating the creative force of non-gendered chaos. Accordingly not only can the notion of identity, love and language be viewed as fractal within their own textual space, but the texts themselves transcend generic boundaries. Finally, the contemporary cultural topography is expanding to include electronic literature as an area of critical study. Due to the medium of transmission, i.e., the computer code, electronic literature presents chaotic form and content and challenges traditional notions of `reading' a text. Consequently, the reader interacts with the computer code causing the `narrative' to bifurcate resulting in multiple, unpredictable reading experiences. Chaos theory thus offers a pertinent tool through which to read and interpret this genre. Electronic literature's literariness, viewed through chaos theory, is defined as what changes instead of what remains constant.Item AN ANALYSIS OF THE QUALITY AND QUANTITY OF PARENT/CHILD READING UTTERANCES WHILE READING DIFFERENT GENRES(2010) Becker, Cynthia Ann; Slater, Wayne H.; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this study was to investigate how different genres affect the quality and quantity of parent/child reading utterances. I analyzed the reading utterances of parent/child dyads with preschool aged child while reading informational and narrative books contributing to this line of research by systematically selecting books based on scholarly criteria to minimize variability within and between genres. I invited families whose children attended preschool at a private school to participate in this study. On a weekly basis, over a six week period, participating families selected an informational book and a narrative book to be read. Each newly selected book was read at least once during that week. Each reading was audio-taped and tapes were transcribed, coded, and analyzed. Results indicate that genre affects both the quality and quantity of parents' and children's reading utterances. Both parents and children generated more total utterances and comprehension related utterances when reading informational books than when reading narrative books. Two parents demonstrated a marked increase in their use of comprehension related utterances while reading informational books than when reading narrative books. Four of the six children demonstrated a marked increase in their use of comprehension related utterances while being read informational books compared to narrative books. I then conducted a more fine-grained analysis to examine the parents' and children's reading utterances while reading specific informational books and specific narrative books. Regardless of genre, the type of book being read affected the number of utterances generated by the parents and children differently. The children demonstrated a preference for narrative books over informational books. Finally, I found that three themes, supported with vignettes, emerged from the data: Lost Opportunities, Grasped Opportunities, and Influences on Reading Behaviors. All three emergent themes addressed parent/child interactions and the affect they had on the reading sessions.