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
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item The Feeling of Persuasion: A Cognitive Rhetorical Account of the Emotional Appeal(2019) Mozafari, Cameron; Israel, Michael; Valiavitcharska, Vessela; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Emotion often takes the back seat in contemporary rhetorical investigation, as emotions are treated as subjective reactions rather than the result of deliberate forms of argumentation. In classical antiquity, rhetorical training for emotional persuasion required students not only to learn what sorts of arguments could move their audiences but, more importantly, how that movement was composed linguistically and psychologically. Yet as history progressed and disciplines branched, the formal study of language and cognition separated from the study of rhetoric, resulting in a conceptually stunted understanding of the emotional appeal. This dissertation returns to classical questions and theories of emotional persuasion but does so with insights from contemporary emotion science and cognitive linguistics. Emotion is understood as neither purely physiological nor purely conceptual but rather as embodied conceptualizations grounded in culture-specific scripts. The dissertation lays out a model for understanding how non-emotive language links up to emotion activation through the introduction of the theater of the mind model, an expansion on the stage model of Cognitive Grammar. It then traces three strategies for arousing and controlling audiences’ emotions from classical rhetorical theory: the enthymematic activation of emotion concepts, the enargeiac amplification of emotion events, and the mitigation of potential threats so as not to excite emotions. Analyzing discourse from politics, fundraising letters, and college student writing, this project argues, contrary to popular opinion, that emotional appeals are not antithetical to reason but instead very much dependent on reason, in that they act as grounds for arousing and guiding inferences in predictable ways for rhetorical purposes.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 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.Item Searching for Meaning in Law, Literature, and Language(2006-05-03) DeSanctis, Christy Hallam; Israel, Michael; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This paper presents a preliminary analysis of the potential application of literary theory and cognitive language theory to the law, specifically to the judicial process of statutory interpretation. The process of interpreting statutory text has long been the subject of a polarized debate in the law and has produced competing approaches for carrying out the task of meaning construction. Equally as intriguing as the merits of the debate itself, however, is the staunch reticence among members of the legal community to employ insights from other disciplines that have long grappled with similar debates over ways in which a written text acquires or is assigned meaning. Observations from literary theory and cognitive linguistic theory can be instructive in revealing the legal community's interpretive assumptions and in enriching the vocabulary of the legal debate.