published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Linguistics / Master / Master of Philosophy

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Discourses surrounding U.S. immigration reform and border security are embedded with instances of the new racism (subtle and covert forms of racism in spoken and written language). One anti-immigrant organization in particular, the Minuteman Project, has gained widespread attention of the political establishment and mainstream press through its rapid expansion, physical involvement on the U.S.-Mexican border, and outspoken views on current U.S. immigration policy. There is a need to examine critically the discourse of growing citizen groups such as this one, who draw on web media resources to maintain and reproduce negative depictions of minority groups by masking and legitimating racist discourse.The data set consists of textual selections from the Minuteman Project website. Print text data includes the organization's mission statement and a context-specific article and email response related to immigration protests, as well as 'disclaimers' or statements of tolerance toward immigrants and elected officials that assist in the Minuteman Project's positive representation of self. A critical discourse analysis approach with an emphasis on metaphor is employed to determine how lexical, semantic, and syntactic choices are employed in creation of 'us' and 'them' participant roles. This analysis includes examination of visual images in proximity to print postings as well as images employed on Minuteman Project merchandise such as T-shirts and hats. The images are analyzed in relation to their contextual role in supporting or subverting the Minuteman Project's rhetorical strategies. The pervasive role of metaphor in this verbal and visual context is examined in relation to self and other representation, identity construction, and in-group membership.The analysis reveals contradictory and shifting self and other representations. Extensive use of patriotic and war tropes located in participant roles assist the Minuteman Project in masking underlying racist ideologies while overtly distancing itself from self-identified nationalist and white supremacist groups. Disclaimers, statements of tolerance, and metaphors assist the organization in successfully forging public connections with members of the political establishment. This study has implications for critical analysis of web-based texts, for multimodal analysis, and for the relation between circulatory web discourses and public policy in general.

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.

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This thesis charts the shifts in metaphors of memory associated with the digitization of personal photography – from ‘archiving’ to ‘sharing’ – developing a strong account of the role of metaphor in shaping cultural conceptions and material technologies of memory making in relation to photography. Early discourse surrounding the emergence of photography heralded the camera as a medium capable of capturing the imprinted trace (light) of the real. By extension, photography has routinely been figured as an essential means through which ‘the social’ can be captured, framed, communicated, and distributed, with personal photographs historically positioned as visual ‘archives’ of the self. Underlying this are specific metaphorical conceptions of the relationships between human memory, reality and representation. This thesis considers how metaphors of the ‘memory-archive’ have naturalized historically specific ideas about human memory which have in turn come to serve as models for the design and ongoing use of photographic technologies. This thesis argues for a sociology of metaphor, which can account for the ideological potential of metaphor in constructing a specific paradigm of memory, while advancing the material consequences of metaphor as a constitutive agent that enables and constrains the possibilities for memory making. The thesis focuses upon the metaphoric shifts from analogue preservation or ‘archiving’ to online distribution or ‘sharing’ within digital landscapes. The central chapters of the thesis consider the ways in which particular metaphors of memory – as archive, as distributed, as shared – are materialized as technologies, in this case photographic media. By exploring three key technologies – the Kodak EasyShare Camera, Cloud Computing, and the Instagram Application – the thesis examines the ways in which new metaphors of memory and of the social are becoming materially embedded. The thesis further reveals residual anthropocentric ideas of memory and technology, which continue through metaphors of photo-sharing which further disguises the role of the ‘technological unconscious’ in shaping potential memories. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2011-10-03 11:45:10.155

Incorporation of a learning philosophy into an existing learning environment can be challenging to the point of abandoning the process or failing to realize any improvements. / Metaphor, a form of figurative language has the potential to clarify or increase the understanding of an unknown or unfamiliar concept. The metaphoric process accomplishes this through "comparative mapping," where the unknown is understood via an interaction with a known concept in a familiar domain. This can be extrapolated to include understanding a philosophy despite a lack of direct experience, rendering the previously unknown philosophy a known phenomenon. / This thesis promotes the use of metaphor and subsequent metaphoric process for improvement in education by bridging the gap between educational philosophy/theory and educational practice. Resources of the metaphor enable practitioners in education to understand the process of adopting a learning philosophy successfully. Suggestions for construction and incorporation of such a metaphor that will accomplish this are given.

The first contemporary approaches to moral education emphasize, moral reasoning skills and value analysis. The possible role of imagination in moral understanding is, by and large, neglected. More recent approaches suggest engaging the imagination can benefit moral education. The concept of imagination, however, remains elusive. As the capacity to consider the possible beyond the actual, imagination is a valued educational tool. It is offered that morality and the opportunity for meaningful interpretation of human experience may best be conveyed in symbolic terms. Metaphor, once viewed as an ornamental product of language, has been rediscovered; claiming a position in our comprehension of human understanding. This thesis proposes that engaging the imagination through metaphor is critical for moral education on the basis that our moral understanding is fundamentally imaginative and metaphoric in nature.

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