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 LEGITIMIZING THE CULTURE OF BIG TIME SPORT: RHETORIC AND THE MYTH OF THE STUDENT-ATHLETE(2019) Alt, Rebecca A.; Murray Yang, Michelle; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Legitimizing the Culture of Big-Time Sport: Rhetoric and the Myth of the Student Athlete analyzes and evaluates organizational rhetoric in the context of “big-time” sport, or universities with high-profile, revenue generating [men’s] athletics. I analyze the macro organizational rhetoric of the NCAA, rhetoric at the institutional level (in my project, the University of Maryland), and rhetoric of resistance from two college athlete advocacy organizations. I engage organizational discourse ranging from handbooks, strategic plans, and mission statements to promotional materials, press releases and public addresses. My texts were acquired from archival sources, news sources, and online. I also articulate my analysis in terms of the broader cultural and ideological formations at play, such as corporatized higher education, neoliberalism, and hegemonic masculinity. My purpose is to explore discourse that legitimizes the culture of big-time sport. I argue that the myth of the student-athlete, which hinges on three axiological-ideological topoi – purity, welfare, and excellence – is the primary legitimizing discourse of big-time sport culture – both the good and the bad. This project holds both disciplinary and social significance. Whereas important research has been conducted on sports from mass media or public relations perspectives (i.e., crisis communication during scandal), this dissertation expands the scholarly view to consider the networked and interdependent rhetorical culture of sport and higher education as illuminated through competing organizational discourse. Further, this project is interdisciplinary; it aims to join scholarship in critical/cultural studies disciplines with scholarship in communication. As a result, this project contributes to both the academic and public debates surrounding big-time sport and intervenes with practical recommendations for organizations, leaders, fans, and critics of big-time sport. The issues my dissertation explores are urgent in nature given the issues big-time sport fosters, especially as they implicate the health and well-being of college athletes and the quality of higher education. Aside from shedding light on current issues in big-time sport from a rhetorical perspective, this dissertation makes the following contributions to rhetoric and communication scholarship: First, it explains the ideological and axiological topoi of the myth of the student-athlete; second, it provides an extended critical framework to understand and analyze discourse of and about big-time college sport; and third, it bridges disciplinary and interdisciplinary divides in scholarship to contribute practical interventions for the problems in big-time sport.Item IN SEARCH OF A USEABLE PAST: POLITICS OF HISTORY IN THE POST-COMMUNIST CZECH REPUBLIC AND SLOVAKIA FROM A COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE(2010) Jelokova, Zuzana; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dissertation examines the puzzle of the divergent post-communist discourses and rituals of collective memory in the Czech republic and Slovakia - in particular, the difference in (1) the two countries' attitudes toward de-communization, (2) their interpretations of their common Czechoslovak past, and (3) the overall content and style of official memory discourses employed in the two countries after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993. Taking a comparative historical perspective, the dissertation traces the transformation of the Czech and Slovak historical narratives over time and finds the roots of the divergent Czech and Slovak post-communist paths in the legacies of the Czechoslovak communist and interwar regimes. On a conceptual level, the dissertation presents a culturalist critique of the dominant institutionalist literature on democratization and an argument on how we might think of post-communist transitions outside of the strictly institutional framework. It conceptualizes democratization as a dynamic and a highly contentious process of meaning creation in which various actors struggle to legitimize themselves and their visions of the present and the future by making references to the past and highlights the special role of political myths in this process. Rather than a straightforward adoption of some ready-made institutions and processes, in other words, democratization is presented as an activity of sensemaking - of searching for useable pasts and new legitimizing mythologies. The Czech and Slovak post-communist search for useable pasts represents neither an unprecedented "return of history" nor some cynical sinister power play of elites acting on some well-constituted interests but rather a new phase of an ongoing, dynamic project of identity and meaning-creation - of sense-making through time.Item Myth and the Maternal Voice: Mediation in the Poetry of Vénus Khoury-Ghata(2009) Braswell, Margaret Anne; Brami, Joseph; Modern French Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Born under the French Mandate in Lebanon, Paris-based Francophone poet and novelist Vénus Khoury-Ghata represents a generation of Lebanese writers who have witnessed Lebanon's evolution from a newly independent state to a twenty-first century nation struggling to survive the devastation of civil war and regional conflict. Like many of her compatriots who have chosen exile and whose mother tongue is Arabic, Khoury-Ghata's negotiation between two languages and cultures nurtures an oeuvre that reflects the tensions and provocations of a dual Franco-Lebanese identity. An examination of her poetry represents an opportunity to direct more attention to a poet whose passionate representation of her native country and the pathos of the human figure memorializes in verse personal and collective tragedy. Khoury-Ghata's narrative-driven poems reveal the dynamics of accommodating differences by promoting encounter and integration, while recognizing that confrontation is not entirely unavoidable. Seeking to reconcile the distance and the passage of time that separate the poet from her origins, as well as linguistic and cultural differences that divide self and society, her approach evokes the contemporary poet's quest for a rapprochement, however ephemeral, with the Other, often in the context of an autobiographical project that merges History and myth. Her consistent evocation in writing and interviews of her dual identity invites an examination of her verse in the framework of theoretical notions based on binary structures. Informed by surrealist and magical realist strategies, as well as French and Arab poetic legacies, Khoury-Ghata's verse expresses a paradigm of inversion that renders the common narrative fantastic, transforms the ordinary housewife into a supernatural heroine, and sanctifies the abject. Evocations of language and myth affiliated with this subversive dynamic encourage the investigation of their significance in the framework of binary structures that privilege the negative and the nocturnal. Julia Kristeva's theory of poetic language provides one method for the analysis of Khoury-Ghata's portrayal of the maternal figure and maternal language as negative and subversive feminine forces. This study will underscore how the poet's integration into her text of signifiers of Arabic, orality, and pre-verbal impulses, weaves the maternal voice and gestures into a mythical narrative. In addition, French myth critics such as Gilbert Durand and Pierre Brunel propose various reflections on the development of mythical structures, archetypes, and themes, whose evocations in Khoury-Ghata's verse underscore a poetic strategy of the recovery and revival of her Lebanese origins linked to a broader Mediterranean culture. Durand's isotopic classification of images according to a dichotomous paradigm of the diurnal and nocturnal throws into relief the archetype of the nocturnal Grande déesse whose enigmatic (re)productive power suggests correspondences with the maternal dynamic in Kristeva's semiotic theory, as well as the surrealist médiatrice, and Wendy Faris' conception of the mystical feminine in magical realist strategies. The theme of mediation persists in the poet's mythico-poetic approach that promotes the contact and fusion of contrary forces in diverse "narratives in verse" representing cosmogonic myth, the myth of the primitive Other, biomythography, folktale and fable, and the interaction of myth and memoir. This inquiry demonstrates the durability and plasticity of binary structures of myth and language that mediate personal and collective identities challenged by the potential polarization of languages, cultures, and genders.