Abstract not available

Thesis (Ph. D)--Ohio State University, 2002. / Includes abstract and vita. Advisor: Terry Barrett, Dept. of Art Education. Includes bibliographical references (p. 305-315).

I am a woman who writes. I am a writer who is a woman. In the Words of a Woman is an exploration of how these two facts of my life merge and influence each other. It is a work written to mediate between the supposed dichotomies of creative and critical, personal and academic, imaginative and scholarly. My desire is that this text will serve as autobiography, critical inquiry, creative response, and credo. The form of this thesis dances between prose and poetry. I have thoughts that need to be expressed sometimes in one form, sometimes in the other, and sometimes in the interplay of the two. As a collection of essays, I have brought together works that are primarily concerned with my story as a woman and a writer with essays that articulate my engagement in other women's writing. Within and between the prose pieces, I have included poems that touch on the same topics, giving different shadings to these themes. This text is a May Day dance, a joyous enactment of a performance long in the creating and rehearsing, not without struggles and challenges, but I hope for the reader a pleasure to participate in. / Graduation date: 1998

The classroom practices discussed in this thesis come slowly and at a "slant" to feminism through critical reading of texts, a practice that I call a (re)presentation of the silent women in texts. Given our patriarchal western culture, making meaning, and especially making sense, of the role and representations of females offers a special challenge. Often, we readers discover that women are represented by "silence" or rendered according to the patriarchal value system, with little or no thought given to their actual cultural roles. My analysis and construction of a "point of perspective" for the silent or silenced females in male-authored canonical texts offers students a way to enrich their experience with a text and to enrich their abilities as critical readers. Creating a fiction with the intent of having it appear transparently neutral may have been a common motive for both Geoffrey Chaucer and J.M. Coetzee as they created their silent women with their use of what Wayne Booth refers to as a distant narrator-agent. By distancing themselves as authors from their tales, Chaucer and Coetzee create the appearance that they are merely recording the words of others, but both authors make representations and speak for females. Kenneth Burke's dramatistic approach to rhetorical analysis, including the analysis of literary discourse, anticipates the much later critical stance that writing never emerges completely unscathed by authorial motive and purpose. / Graduation date: 1997

This thesis examines the rhetoric (persuasive discourse) of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet. The analysis of this thesis provides an historical foundation of understanding for the international campaign of rhetoric which the Dalai Lama has been leading for the past forty years, culminating with his Nobel Peace Prize award in 1989. The thesis provides an overview of the Dalai Lama's persuasive tactics spanning his time spent campaigning in exile, from 1959 to the present time (1995). The Dalai Lama has been a strong leader in the movement to raise support and international awareness for Tibetans in Chinese controlled Tibet. Specifically, this thesis presents an analysis of two of the Dalai Lama's most well known speeches: the Five Point Peace Plan, presented to members of the United States Congress on September 27, 1987, and the Strasbourg Proposal, presented to members of the European Parliament on June 15, 1988. The Dalai Lama's discourse is examined from the perspective of rhetorical criticism, using the theories of Kenneth Burke as the framework for understanding the texts. This analysis incorporates Burke's theories on mortification, scapegoating, victimage, and transcendence, as well as the tragic and comic frames for presenting a vision of dramatic conflict. The Dalai Lama's rhetoric is also analyzed for its cross cultural implications according to Geert Hofstede's dimensions of cultural variability. This thesis includes a discussion of the Dalai Lama's role as a social movement leader with a charismatic persona and a strong ability to organize and manage a diverse international following while working to preserve the Tibetan diaspora in exile. Lastly, the ethical groundings of the Dalai Lama's rhetoric are taken into consideration. The purpose of this thesis is to introduce to communication students the significance of the Dalai Lama's body of work, and to indicate potential directions for future research. The rationale behind the thesis is this: in rhetorical theory and social movement theory, there exist numerous studies of the nonviolent rhetoric and social movement leadership of both Dr. Martin Luther King of the United States and Mahatma Gandhi of India; yet the Dalai Lama, whose work I show to be comparable in many ways to that of King and Gandhi, has remained unexamined by scholars in many disciplines, most notably rhetorical criticism and social movement theory. The intent of this thesis is to focus upon the Dalai Lama's rhetoric and communication skills in order to stimulate an enduring interest in him as a remarkable orator and leader, from whom we may gain insight into improving our ability to communicate and to manage conflict in a nonviolent manner. / Graduation date: 1996

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

<p>C. Louis Leipoldt is known as a canonical figure in the history of Afrikaans poetry, He is customarily included in the pantheon of writers such as C.J. Langenhoven who not only established Afrikaans as a standardized national language in the early twentieth century, but also contributed to the idea of the Afrikaner Volk as a distinct nation within South Africa. The recent publication of Leipoldt's Valley Trilogy, three novels written in English in the 1930's now reveals Leipoldt in a very different light. Today, in a time of national transformation, Leipoldt's liberal ideas deserve to be given the broader scope he had intended for them.</p>

Iris Murdoch believes she writes in the English realist tradition and cites the creation of real characters as the main problem which confronts the modern novelist. Yet her own characterization, which this work explores (in relation to her aesthetics and moral philosophy) provides her greatest contribution to the development of the novel.An understanding of Murdoch's concept of characterization requires a knowledge of her philosophical heritage, its metaphysics, and consideration of the resulting theory of man with his capacity for reason, for communication, and for approaching truth. Accordingly, chapter I of this work introduces the critical writings which provide the theoretical background for Murdoch's characterization.Chapter II examines the factors which influence man's consciousness, thus establishing the difficulty which the change of consciousness proposed by Murdoch for moral development presents. These factors include the contingency of life, the loss of common religious background, man's historic past, and the inadequacy of language for communication.Chapter III considers the elements denoting man's moral status and development, as revealed through characterization, and concludes that Murdoch's characters reveal a degree of vision consistent with their moral status. Included here are characters from the twenty-one Murdoch novels who display six different levels of spiritual awareness: the Good, the nearly Good, the nice, the mediocre with knowledge, the fat egoists, and the black figures.Chapter IV considers the treatment of aesthetics and its relationship to moral philosophy within three novels which discuss writing, portrait painting, and the theatre at length: The Black Prince, The Sandcastle, and The Sea, The Sea.Finally, three appendices are intended to serve as useful sources for both Murdoch readers and scholars. Appendix A contains the bibliography of primary sources and some two hundred critical works about Murdoch's writing; Appendix B is a subject index for the topics common to the sources in the bibliography; Appendix C-is an annotated character index and guide for the twenty-one Murdoch novels to date.

My thesis is titled Modeling the Public Intellectual: The Case of Matthew Arnold. Matthew Arnold, arguably the most influential critic of his age (Trilling 190) has also proven to be an influential model for the public intellectual currently in Canada and elsewhere. The role and work of public intellectuals is complex and who or what they are is the topic of vigorous debate and sometimes extreme disagreement. Because Arnold is so influential and controversial as a literary and social critic, I want to develop and to communicate a better understanding of his achievements and to explore the connection between his work and the role of the public intellectual. To that end, I draw on three of his works, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864), Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Literature and Dogma (1873). In the course of a decade, Arnold asserts and expands the role of criticism in society and the kinds of issues a poet, critic, and inspector of schools feels competent to address while defining his own personal version of the Victorian Sage (Holloway). I also want to explore why criticism produced in the nineteenth century, particularly in Arnolds work, promotes the figure and activities of the public intellectual. Moreover, I will reaffirm, via Arnolds example, the importance of the relationship between literature and life and show how this connection nourishes the idea of the public intellectual in the English-speaking world.

The purpose of this study was to show five methods by which John Knoepfle effectively communicates aspects of place in his poetry. Analyses of many of Knoepfle's poems helped to reveal his techniques and vocabularies of place and to show how his uses of place are significant elements in the interpretations of his poems. He shows place through details of its physical properties; he repeats place terms in reference to the body; he gives a quality of time to dimensions of place; he uses nouns of place; and he puts place within the context of history.The first chapter of this study dealt with Knoepfle's uses of the details of physical place. It explored his method of enhancing each poem's portrayal of place through descriptions of the actual objects, landscapes, structures, and forms of the properties of locations. Knoepfle's definitions of places and portrayals of physical things which occupy these poetic locales were shown through the interpretation of phrases and words which were identified as keys to the reader's ability to view places as they are pictured in Knoepfle's poetry.The second chapter addressed Knoepfle's unique use of the body as a place. Not only the spirit but also the intellect and the flesh and blood are parts of the place which is the body, as Knoepfle describes by time. A place can be different to one's perception of it according to this concept in some of his poems. The body no longer is strictly outside of a place, but also is a place itself; and it is both an occupant of a place and a part of a place. This chapter investigated the paradox of the body's being both actor and spectator.Chapter Three reviewed the ways in which place is shown to be shaped the time of day or season of the year. A location during the early morning is not the same place as it is during the afternoon; nor is a midwinter location the same place as it is during the end of summer. This chapter demonstrated, through examinations of certain Knoepfle poems, that specific words used by Knoepfle actually portray and develop a sense of time for a reader of Knoepfle's temporally depicted poetry.The fourth chapter was concerned with Knoepfle's use of nouns to signify places and the qualities of places. In order to locate places and to make their existence more understandable, Knoepfle was shown as having used both proper and common nouns to define these locations. This chapter consisted of explications of many of Knoepfle's naming poems. Attention to nouns of place was emphasized. Various enhancing definitions of places achieved through the use of both concrete and abstract nouns were investigated.The fifth and final chapter was a study of Knoepfle's uses of histories of places in order to create more definite poetic renditions of them. As in the present, places also change with the passage of years, of centuries. Several Knoepfle poems were studied in this chapter to show how his uses of history are significant in representing places.A complement to this study was an extensive bibliography of Knoepfle's published works, plus writing about Knoepfle by critics, reviewers, editors, and other poets. This bibliography was added to serve as a checklist for persons who desire to pursue their own interests in John Knoepfle as a poet, essayist, and teacher.