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 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 METAPHORS WE KILL BY: RHETORIC AND CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE IN U.S. ARMY DOCTRINE(2005-04-20) Brenner, Nannette Valencia Manalo; Turner, Mark; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Analogical thought, thinking of one domain of experience in terms of another, helps us understand new ideas in relation to preexisting knowledge. This dissertation examines five parallel examples of analogical thought in United States Army doctrine in which various target domains are conceptualized in terms of traditional warfare. The first chapter examines the way in which "information" is explained in terms of a construct called "the cognitive hierarchy," which is a blend of folk models of thought and the military command structure. Here, "information" is conceived of as a raw material to be refined to a useable state as it is processed by successively higher levels in the hierarchy. The second chapter analyzes the inclusion of "information" into the elements of combat power, a heuristic that staff officers use to plan operations. Unlike the first four elements, firepower, maneuver, leadership, and protection, which have independent but interrelated capabilities, "information" is characterized exclusively in terms of its ability to coordinate the effects of the other four. The third chapter explores the term "information operations," a blend of the domains of cognition and communication, and of combat, that "weaponizes" information. Chapter Four analyzes a startling metaphor that represents persuasion as a form of lethal firepower. Finally, the last chapter examines the difficulty of portraying success in peace operations, which comprise both peace enforcement and peacekeeping. Because the event shape of a successful peace operation involves reducing forces, relinquishing power, and withdrawal by the peacekeepers, it conforms to the event shape of a failed attack. All five chapters share a rich and highly developed source domain, warfare that is used to explain the workings of relatively impoverished target domains, communication and thought. The result is that the target domains are distorted to the point that key elements in them are elided or altered beyond recognition. This dissertation is unique in that it analyzes not only analogical thought, but also the corporate thought of a large institution that uses it to solve problems in the real world. The resulting actions have far-reaching impacts on both international security and countless lives across the world.