College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Defining Places: Literary Nonfiction and the National Park Movement, 1864-present(2014) Jacoby, Lindsay Dunne; Fahnestock, Jeanne; Wible, Scott; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The canon of American "Nature writing" has long been recognized for its influence on environmental policy, but the role of specific works in shaping environmental discourse and altering material circumstances has yet to be fully understood, especially from a rhetorical perspective. In response, this dissertation explores how works of Nature writing have functioned as persuasive arguments of definition within the National Park movement. It analyzes how literary nonfiction texts promoted a public understanding of specific landscapes and redefined them as worthy of preservation. The idea of rhetorical ecology underlies this analysis: rather than relying on the commonplace idea that a single author writing a single text can influence an environmental policy, the dissertation traces how a work of literary nonfiction operates within a complex system of texts, writers, readers, institutions, objects, and history. The four main case studies demonstrate how new definitions of place have emerged through works of literary nonfiction, each acting in relationship to a larger campaign that led to the preservation of an American landscape as a National Park: Yosemite, Great Smoky Mountains, Everglades, and Voyageurs. In these landmark campaigns, a prominent work of Nature writing, by a prominent author like John Muir, Horace Kephart, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Sigurd Olson, built upon and contributed to a definitional discourse that enabled people to see a specific landscape differently than it had been seen before. These cases also indicate that, as a landscape changes, the available means of persuasion change, too. Each chapter explores the lines of argument that can be emphasized by rhetors when the place in question defies traditional notions of beauty, grandeur, and purity. Campaigners can rely more or less on aesthetic, economic, scientific, historical, or recreational arguments, depending on the nature of the landscape itself and the rhetorical situation of the campaign. Finally, the last chapter explores the ongoing campaign for a Buffalo Commons National Park on the Great Plains. It follows a recent park debate as it evolves into a discourse of sustainability, and demonstrates how contemporary discussions about sustainable actions are inflected with the discourse of historical campaigns for preservation.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.