No description available.

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.

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

This thesis looks at how Wideman takes advantage of the associative function of metaphor, creating a vast network, or web, or interconnected images. In deviating from linguistic norms, and growing steadily from page to page, this web causes the novel to appear symbolic. It also appears to have a symbolic meaning of its own, possibly representing the intricate social and spiritual connections that comprise the novel's fictional community of Homewood.

No description available.

This study explores Anne Michaels’s representation of the Second World War – with particular reference to the Holocaust – in her novel Fugitive Pieces. The study contends that Michaels demonstrates a way of remembering these traumatic and debilitating events which not only promotes physical, emotional and spiritual recuperation but is also capable of beneficially affecting the future. The first chapter contextualises the study by describing the literary debate that surrounds Holocaust representation in writing, a debate which furthermore entails an argument on the efficacy of literary techniques such as the use of metaphor. In the chapter, it is proposed that the novel ‘speaks out’ against silence, and privileges remembrance over disregard. The second chapter suggests that the novel is an example of the way in which metaphor can be used effectively to figure the Holocaust for survivors and victims, and for subsequent generations. Concomitantly, the chapter defends Michaels’s use of metaphor in its presentation of proposals, concerning her characters and their experience of the Holocaust, that display rare perspicacity and benevolence. The third and final chapter of this study comprises a four-section exploration of specific metaphors which the author uses in Fugitive Pieces to demonstrate that the horror characterising the Holocaust should not be the sum total of its effect, and that affirmations such as faith and hope can and did arise in the context of extreme physical and mental distress. This thesis is based on the proposition that Michaels’s layering of real-life testimony with imaginative intuition introduces her readers to a valuable way of dealing with the past and facing the future.

本論文探討兩種修辭法- 象徵和隱喻-在表達自我的概念上的能力。朱迪思萊特的詩賦有強烈的倫理感。查爾斯泰勒的哲學則強調道德在現代自我的形成上所扮演的固有角色。萊特的作品所表達關於自我的概念，可藉著泰勒的學說找到亮光。 / 萊特相信現代人濫用科學和他們對科學思維的重視。萊特對此濫用的回應，影響著她的詩詞創作。她認為現代人對理性和客觀性的依賴使他脫離了他創作力和想像力。語言需要被振興來向人揭示他所擁有的語言財富。詩辭可以為他敞開新的方式來表達和觀看世界。 / 萊特對澳洲的景觀存著一份複雜的關係。「[她]生命中的兩條線 -對國土本身的熱愛和對本土人下場的深切不安」，在她的作品裡編織在一起。生於一個使原居民流離失所而致富的牧民家族，她的詩反映著她所背負的歷史罪疚感。萊特的詩闡述了她的內疚，並重申了她對國土的歸屬感。 / 萊特也因著人類與大自然的斷絶而哀悼。她將此等的斷絶歸究於人類對大自然資源的濫用開發。在她而言，大自然是一股永恆的力量，是充滿著不可否定的屬靈意義的。原住民文化重視土地，以它為生命和靈性的源泉，這是萊特認為現代人應當仿效的。環境的退化成了她的終身關注的政治議題。 / 朱迪思萊特的生命有三條主線 - 詩辭，為原住民的公義和保育。這三條線編織在一起，一方面使她的詩呈現著強烈的道德評價，也同時界定著她的自我身份。明顯地，詩辭 - 象徵與隱喻的重生 - 持續了她的希望，表達了她的關切，並塑造了像她如此的人和詩人。 / This thesis examines the capacities of poetic language, symbol and metaphor, to articulate the self. Given the strong ethical direction of Judith Wright’s poetry, the notion of the self expressed in her work finds illumination in the philosophy of Charles Taylor whose writing on the modern self emphasizes the intrinsic role morality plays in its formation. / Underpinning Wright’s poetics is her response to what she believed was modern man’s misuse of science and his emphasis on scientific thinking. His reliance on rationality and objectivity had left him out of touch with his capacities for creativity and imagination. Language needed to be revitalized to reveal to man the wealth of language in his possession; poetry could open up for him new ways of expressing and seeing the world. / Wright’s relationship with the Australian landscape was complex. The “two threads of [her] life, the love of the land itself and the deep unease over the fate of its original people“, would “twine together in her work. Her poetry reflects the historical guilt she carried as a daughter of wealthy pastoralists who had displaced its original inhabitants. Poetry was Wright’s means of expiation of guilt and re-claiming her sense of belonging to the land. / Wright also mourned man’s loss of connection with nature which she attributed to his instrumental exploitation of its resources. Nature had always been for her an abiding force imbued with inescapable spiritual significance. The value Aboriginal culture placed in the land as a source of life and spirituality was, for Wright, a model for modern man to emulate. Environmental degradation remained for the poet a lifelong concern and political cause. / The three strands of Judith Wright’s life - poetry, justice for Aborigines, and conservation - are woven together to emerge as strong moral evaluations in her poetry and defining values in her identity. It is clear that poetic language - the re-constellating symbol and metaphor - sustained her with hope, enabled her to articulate her deep concerns and helped to shape the person and poet she became. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Lamb, Kirsten Emma Wai-Ling. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-119). / Abstracts also in Chinese. / Introduction / Chapter Chapter One --- : Wright and the Self / Chapter i. --- Poetry and the Re-constellation of Language / Chapter ii. --- Born of the Conquerors: Righting the Wrongs of Aboriginal Injustice / Chapter iii. --- “For Earth is Spirit“: Man’s Interconnectedness with Nature / Chapter iv. --- Charles Taylor / Chapter Chapter Two --- : The Self through Symbol / Chapter i. --- Symbols: “Powerful, efficacious, forceful“ / Chapter ii. --- Wright’s Approach to the Symbol / Chapter iii. --- The Child / Chapter iv. --- Darkness / Chapter v. --- Fire / Chapter Chapter Three --- : The Self through Metaphor / Chapter i. --- Metaphors: Innovations of Language / Chapter ii. --- ‘Lament for Passenger Pigeons’: Escaping Disillusion through Metaphor / Chapter iii. --- ‘The Slope’: Resisting Despair through Metaphor / Chapter iv. --- ‘Train Journey’: Epiphany and Renewal through Metaphor / Chapter v. --- ‘To Hafiz of Shiraz’: Encountering the World through Metaphor / Chapter Chapter Four --- : Articulating the Self through Symbol and Metaphor / Chapter i. --- Repeat-able Symbol, Deplete-able Metaphor / Chapter ii. --- Symbols and Bound, Metaphors are Free / Chapter iii. --- Symbols and Metaphors / Concluding Thoughts / Bibliography

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2007. / Title from title page screen, viewed on February 11, 2008. Dissertation Committee: John Shields (chair), Bruce Hawkins, Ronald Fortune. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 255-281) and abstract. Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2007. / Principal faculty advisor: Lois Potter, Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, May 2009. / Electronic version restricted until 11th May 2014.