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 “SO HARD A STEPMOTHER” TO POESY: LEVERAGING THE TRADITIONAL BALLAD AS EPIDEICTIC RHETORIC AND SOCIAL ACTION(2020) Danielson, Kathy Anne; Valiavitcharska, Vessela; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Poetics are foundational to both social ideology and rational forms of argumentation. Highlighting a foundational role for rhetorical poetics, I suggest the traditional, third-person narrative ballad idiom as epideictic rhetoric and look at the agential intent of the ballad form from within the foundational elements of its construction/re-construction: its story selection, protagonist selection, narrative sequencing, authorial gaze, and narrative outcomes. The traditional ballad is most widely viewed as a folklore representative of cultural values and beliefs, yet the traditional ballad is also a site of social contest, a challenge to normative cultural ideology and harmful social structures. Despite its distanced wrappings, often we find the “traditional” ballad is a rhetoric narratively structured to apportion blame, an epideictic seeding conviction for the necessity of social change.Item Politique, poétique, philosophique: le récit de voyage de Simone de Beauvoir aux États-Unis(2018) Ruel, Cécile; Brami, Joseph; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Writer, philosopher and social activist, Simone de Beauvoir was also an avid traveller. While most of her travel accounts are encapsulated in her memoirs, two of them were published as stand alones. My dissertation looks at America Day by Day, the account of her 1947 travels through the United States, and focuses on three key aspects of the narrative: the political, poetic and philosophical. In the first part of my dissertation, I analyze Beauvoir’s encounter with the American “Other”, by specifically concentrating on three social groups: intellectuals, African-Americans, and women. This leads me to an investigation of the concept of “Americanism”, that is, the social and political system in which Americans evolve. In the second part of my dissertation, I examine how the writing of the American space serves as catalyst to a beauvoirian poetics of space. Focusing my analysis on three key places, New York City, the American West and the South, I show that Beauvoir’s writing of space anticipates notions developed later in the 20th century, such as the practice of space (Michel de Certeau) and the notion of simulacra (Jean Baudrillard); lastly, I analyze how the Southern Gothic pervades Beauvoir’s writing of the South. In the third part of my work, I question how Beauvoir inscribes herself in the narrative. I show that travel, by creating discontinuity from habitual life, allows Beauvoir to present her encounter with the world through a phenomenological perspective. I examine key instances in the narrative (her arrival in the United States, her experience of the Grand Canyon and her experience of racial segregation) when, as situated subject, Beauvoir applies hers and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to concrete life. This process allows me to investigate the philosophical impact of the travel narrative. My research suggest that the travel narrative, beyond its documentary and autobiographic purposes, offered Beauvoir the opportunity to veer from habitual modes of writings, such as the novel, the play and the philosophical essay. It gave her license to investigate a social structure other than her own, to create a poetics of space and to apply a phenomenological mode of being in the world.Item Charles Fowler and His Vision for Music Education: An Introduction and Selected Writings From 1964 to 1989(2008-06-01) Resta, Craig Michael; McCarthy, Marie F; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Charles Fowler, eminent advocate for arts education, devoted his career to the idea that music was critical to the development of young people and could positively impact schooling and society. During his 45-year career, he served in many roles: as teacher, supervisor, professor, scholar, author, editor, consultant, and advocate. Although his contributions are prolific, this research represents the first full-scale study that considers his work as an entire body. The purpose of this dissertation is to introduce Fowler as a significant figure in the field of music education, codify the major periods of his career, identify important writings, contextualize them within their times, and review them according to his vision for music education. Utilizing historical method and content analysis, several thousand documents were examined from the Charles Fowler Papers archived at the University of Maryland, College Park. Following an introduction to Fowler and his work, four periods of his career are presented, with the two middle periods, 1964 to 1973 and 1974 to 1989 serving as the focus of the study. Selected works were chosen based on their relevance to important events in Fowler's life and their relationship to his philosophy and viewpoint. The works were analyzed and contextualized by using primary source documents, foundational texts in music education, Fowler's own commentary, and interviews with established scholars and colleagues who knew him and respected his work. Finally, these writings traced the development of Fowler's vision which advocated music education can serve as an agent of social change. Findings reveal that Fowler's initial vision was based on the seven reconstructionist objectives he outlined in his 1964 dissertation. Based on these objectives, fifteen broad themes emerged in his writings during the period of 1964 to 1989. The themes elaborate on Fowler's vision for music education and its value to society, and relate to core concepts of reform, democracy, creativity, advocacy, and social change. It is hoped that this study will serve as a catalyst to encourage others to continue research into the life and career of Charles Fowler, along with further writing about reform and pragmatic change within the music education profession.Item A MODEL OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF EPISTEMIC AND ONTOLOGIC COGNITION(2007-05-29) Greene, Jeffrey Alan; Torney-Purta, Judith; Azevedo, Roger; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While its advocates trumpet personal epistemology research as an essential contribution to the understanding of student cognition, the field currently wrestles with four problems. There is a lack of consensus regarding construct definition, a disconnect between psychological investigations and personal epistemology's philosophical roots, a failure to integrate work from developmental psychology, and difficulties in measuring personal epistemology. This dissertation combines work from both philosophy and developmental psychology with personal epistemology research to put forth a conceptual model of epistemic and ontologic cognition that addresses these four problems while building on the strengths of past research. Development is described using four ordered positions, and is predicted to be probabilistically related to educational level. Domain-specificity is also tested in terms of ill and well-structured domains. Using both quantitative and qualitative data from a pilot study, an instrument to measure epistemic and ontologic cognition was developed. By assessing the construct validity and reliability of scores from the instrument the underlying conceptual model was tested. This instrument was administered to a sample of 662 students ranging in age from middle-school through graduate school. Results indicated that scores from the instrument had acceptable construct validity and reliability, and that a factor mixture model best represented the data, and provided mixed support for the underlying model. Educational level was probabilistically related to participants' epistemic and ontologic cognition.Item Memorable Moments: A Philosophy of Poetry(2006-08-07) Ribeiro, Anna Christina Soy; Levinson, Jerrold; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In my dissertation I give a philosophical account of poetry from an analytic perspective--one that is also informed by studies in linguistic communication (pragmatics) and cognitive psychology, and that takes into account the many varieties of poetic traditions around the world. In chapter one I argue that philosophically rigorous study of poetry is long overdue, and that it should focus not on what poetry has in common with the other literary arts, but rather on what is distinct to it. In chapter two I give a cross-cultural history of poetry, showing the many types of features that are typical of the art form. From this history it emerges that beneath the variety of poetic traditions all over the globe lies a remarkably consistent set of features--the use of recurrence patterns. In chapter three I argue for an intentional-historical formalist definition of poetry according to which a poem is either (1) a verbal art object relationally or intrinsically intended to belong in the poetic tradition, or (2) a verbal art object intrinsically intended to involve use of repetition schemes (naïve poetry-making). In my fourth chapter I investigate the psychological reasons for poetry to have begun as and remained an art that relies on repetition devices, focusing on two non-literate groups: the illiterate trovadores of Northeastern Brazil, and pre-literate children. Both cases suggest an innate predisposition to attend to and produce linguistic recurrence structures of various, sometimes highly intricate, sorts. In my fifth chapter I consider the Relevance theory claim in pragmatics that, as a rule, repetition incurs extra linguistic processing effort, and that this must be outweighed by an increase in contextual effects, given the assumption of relevance. I argue that although this picture of poetic understanding is largely correct, repetition can also be seen as a cognitive facilitator, helping us draw connections that might have gone unnoticed without it. I conclude by exploring the contributions my approach to poetry may offer to other topics in aesthetics and philosophy art, such as aesthetic experience, aesthetic properties, and theories of interpretation.