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.
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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 The Body in Pieces: Representations of Organ Trafficking in the Literatures and Film of the Americas(2007-04-24) Dix, Jennifer; Peres, Phyllis; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the use of the trope of organ trafficking to critique neoliberal globalization in the Americas. Each chapter addresses a different genre and analyzes texts articulated in response to conditions grounded in different locations. The texts studied include print media from Guatemala and Brazil, Mexican popular film and detective fiction from the U.S. (Tony Chiu's Positive Match and Linda Howard's Cry No More) and Mexico (Miriam Laurini's Morena en rojo, Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz's Loverboy, and Paco Ignacio Taibo II's La bicicleta de Leonardo). Comparative analyses also address Francisco Goldman's The Long Night of White Chickens, Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead. These analyses are linked by their critique of neoliberal globalization and their representation of the human body's commodification. Together, they outline the contradictions of a mobility-dependent regime and establish the inescapable scope of economic changes that alter the relationship between the nation-state and its inhabitants. Neoliberalism also causes changes in the representation of the body. Bodies are represented outside the social structures and institutions that previously gave them meaning. The body's economic value replaces socially ascribed identities. Representations of the commodified body in these texts selectively erase gender and race. This dissertation also explores the construction of a new set of identities grounded in the body. These competing identities of medical and corporeal citizenship demonstrate the problems of establishing identities in market-driven terms of production and consumption. This dissertation also engages in a investigation of the relation of literary genre to content. As my discussion of popular culture demonstrates, generic form partially constrains or shapes the content of these works. In contrast, when literary works are positioned outside of genre constraints, the scope of the meanings attributed to organ trafficking expands, accompanied by formal innovations. My dissertation produces an interrogation of American cultural spaces--understood in the broadest sense--that acknowledges the work of both spatial and cultural forces in the construction of this hemispheric imaginary.