College of Arts & Humanities

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1611

The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.

Browse

Subject: search.filters.subject.philosophy

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    On Being Simple Minded
    (University of Illinois Press, 2004-07) Carruthers, Peter
    How simple minded can you be? Many philosophers would answer: no more simple than a language-using human being. Many other philosophers, and most cognitive scientists, would allow that mammals, and perhaps birds, possess minds. But few have gone to the extreme of believing that very simple organisms, such as insects, can be genuinely minded. This is the ground that the present paper proposes to occupy and defend. It will argue that ants and bees, in particular, possess minds. So it will be claiming that minds can be very simple indeed.
  • Thumbnail Image
    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.