Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Louisville, 2009. / Department of English. Vita. "August 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 229-240).

Thesis (M. Div.)--Emmanuel School of Religion, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-99).

Thesis (M.T.S.)--Catholic Theological Union, 1986. / Vita. Bibliography: leaf 67.

Thesis--Freiburg. / Vita.

Currently, there are over 2.2 million people incarcerated in the United States. The growing epidemic of the prison industrial complex creates a critical situation; performance studies offers significant ways to address the increasing problems of incarceration. The purpose of this study is to contribute to the intersection of academic literature connecting penal studies, food studies, and performance studies. I argue that an analysis of food as a performance medium serves as an alternative means for understanding how prisoners negotiate prison life. Food as a performance medium also exposes the operation of the prison industrial complex.

This thesis is concerned with the communication of information using auditory techniques. In particular, a music-based interface has been used to communicate the operation of a number of sorting algorithms to users. This auditory interface has been further enhanced by the creation of an auditory scene including a sound wall, which enables the auditory interface to utilise music parameters in conjunction with 2D/3D spatial distribution to communicate the essential processes in the algorithms. The sound wall has been constructed from a grid of measurements using a human head to create a spatial distribution. The algorithm designer can therefore communicate events using pitch, rhythm and timbre and associate these with particular positions in space. A number of experiments have been carried out to investigate the usefulness of music and the sound wall in communicating information relevant to the algorithms. Further, user understanding of the six algorithms has been tested. In all experiments the effects of previous musical experience has been allowed for. The results show that users can utilise musical parameters in understanding algorithms and that in all cases improvements have been observed using the sound wall. Different user performance was observed with different algorithms and it is concluded that certain types of information lend themselves more readily to communication through auditory interfaces than others. As a result of the experimental analysis, recommendations are given on how to improve the sound wall and user understanding by improved choice of the musical mappings.

This study investigated the effects of metaphor on children's comprehension of expository text. Forty-six seventh-grade students read either the metaphorical or the literal versions of two texts each containing eight targets, that is, metaphors or their equivalent literal phrases. One text, "Polar Bears," described a topic familiar to the students while the other, "Wombats," described an unfamiliar topic. After reading each text, students orally recalled as much information as possible, and then answered oral probe questions. Students who read the metaphoric versions of the texts also completed a written recognition-of-meaning test as an additional measure of metaphor comprehension. There was no difference between students' comprehension of the metaphoric texts and their comprehension of the literal texts. There was, however, a facilitative effect for metaphor on students' comprehension of target information when the topic of the text was unfamiliar. Students were able to recall the information conveyed by the metaphors and to recognize the correct interpretations of the metaphors better from the unfamiliar text than from the familiar metaphoric text. Students' ability to answer factual questions based on the metaphors, however, was no different from the familiar text than it was from the unfamiliar text. This finding was interpreted as demonstrating an effect of a kind, for topic significantly affected the other measures of probed recall in favour of the familiar topic. The different findings of the free recall and recognition of meaning measures, and the probe recall measures regarding target comprehension were likely due to the different task constraints of these sets of measures. It was noted that there is a need for further research on the relationship and nature of these widely-used measures of comprehension. It was concluded that although metaphors appear with some frequency in basal readers, metaphor is not a troublesome aspect of language which children need to be taught to analyze and to interpret. If children are experiencing difficulties comprehending texts containing metaphors, they will likely benefit from curriculum activities designed to develop their vocabulary, their experience with language and literature, and their knowledge of the world. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

Narratives of life with illness, disability or trauma occupy a rapidly growing field in literary studies, and increasingly so over the last thirty years. Among the illnesses, cancer is the one most often addressed. It is obviously an experience that is enormously difficult to put into language: how should the suffering, the uncertainty, and the fear of dying be stated? Many patients, some of whom were writers before the fact, struggle to find a language that can represent their experience adequately. To them, cancer is not only a biomedical story, but their lived experience. For some, pain and changes in the body that accompany cancer may escape communication through words altogether. Along with other life-threatening diseases, cancer can make one face the very limits of linguistic expression. Therefore, cancer discourse abounds with imaginative tropes such as metaphors. In fact, as Anatole Broyard has noted in "Intoxicated by my Illness" (1992), his autobiographical narrative about life with cancer, "the sick man sees everything as metaphor" (7). Broyard's text, replete with metaphors, is itself a metaphor of his experience. Given the pervasiveness of metaphor in cancer discourse, it is important to examine how these tropes are used in the struggle for meaning. Which metaphors can give expression to, or help people deal with such crises? Cancer is evidently an extreme experience that puts every theory of language developed over the last thirty years to the test. Despite these challenges, cancer narratives have undergone a remarkable explosion, covering the full narrative spectrum from self-help books to highly aestheticized works of art. The language and organization of the writing depend on a variety of factors, including, in addition to writerly skill: the individual's type of illness, its stage, its prognosis, progression and treatment, and the resources at the person's disposal, including support from family and the community. The texts as metaphor and the metaphors in the texts can reveal a writer's general orientation towards the body and self, illness, life and death. As such factors and orientations differ, often radically, from person to person, each cancer narrative tells a unique story. Moreover, the language of each narrative reveals an astonishing variety of attributed or assumed meanings that appear particularly crucial in cancer. Metaphors that may seem constructive and therapeutic to one patient, or writer (or to his/her readers) can be entirely destructive and further traumatizing for others. The language that patients use reveals an ambiguity in meaning whose range is so perplexing that writers—indeed, most people—are only now beginning to come to terms with it. Those who do not have cancer and live in relative certainty may, in fact, enjoy the excess of meaning that metaphor can present. However, when faced with overwhelming existential uncertainty, and longing for more stable ground, the ambiguity of language can become problematic. Despite all these difficulties, many people with cancer struggle to make meaning of their experience and tell or write their story. This ambivalence, between the impossibility of adequately narrativizing radical illness experiences and a fundamental need to try, is the central structuring principle of my study, and constitutes the core problem I will be investigating. The purpose of this thesis is to establish the crucial importance of metaphor in cancer discourse and to analyze its resources, ambiguities and ambivalences in narratives of life with cancer, written in English and German. Primarily a comparative literary analysis, it involves a "synthetic" methodological approach. I examine not only the literary, but also the psychological and therapeutic properties of metaphors, drawing upon my literary training, my skills as a social scientist, and my practice as a nurse. This "therapeutic psychopoetics," as it were, is based on an empirical, cross-cultural study of metaphors in cancer discourse. Metaphors shape our ability to frame our experience. Because our meanings vary so radically, we need to analyze the range of metaphoricity in cancer discourse and map the resources of language for conceptualizing cancer. Elaine Scarry (1985) has described the move from unspeakable pain to speech as the birth of language. In cancer, metaphor can help to make this birth of language possible. Appropriating the unknown, conveying the unspeakable through the known, metaphor provides the building blocks of language and narratives. A fuller awareness of this resource and its ambiguities can help us find patterns of narrative forms and language used to give voice to the experience of life with cancer and improve our sense of the complexity of problems involved in cancer therapy. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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