Browsing by Subject "metaphor"

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    Metaphors of Authorship: Eighteenth-Century Novelists’ Imaginations of the Reading Publics, 1740–1810
    (2021-08) Liu, Jen-chou
    This dissertation examines the complex ways eighteenth-century writers define authorship in relation to various actors in the scribal and print culture. In the works of a number of central British authors, I trace the construction of authorial identities in metaphors of cultivation and birthing, which compare the author-work relationship to those of farmer-land and parent-child respectively. Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne, informed by their different relationships with land as a landed bookseller (Richardson) and a pastor (Sterne), transpose the cultivation metaphor into the domains of garden and parish respectively. With the grafting metaphor, Richardson compares the parodies of his Pamela and the literary criticism on Shakespeare to sexual violations that depreciate a work's monetary and literary values. In Tristram Shandy, Sterne uses the settlement metaphor to defend his borrowings, and I demonstrate how his questioning of the Lockean labor theory of property leads him to imagine an authorship modeled on poor relief and parochial sociality. Frances Burney and Anna Letitia Barbauld contend, in different ways, with the patriarchal history of the birthing metaphor where male authors claim to birth works. By peeling off the meanings of “cipher” layered onto the text and paratexts of Evelina, we see how Burney uses the cipher metaphor to transpose the question of women's patriarchal affinities to a celebration of female authorship. Barbauld bypasses the patrilineal in her prefaces to women novelists in her anthology The British Novelists and identifies women with dissenters, a strategy, I argue, that emphatically associates women authors with the print culture.
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    Voice in Composition Theory and Practice: The Epideictic Function of Metaphor in Radical Writing Pedagogies
    (2017-01) Mussack, Brigitte
    In this dissertation, I develop a theoretical framework, based in understandings of epideictic theory, metaphor, and metonymy, to systematically investigate the metaphor of voice across representative expressivist, critical and feminist, and poststructuralist texts. This investigation focuses on the epideictic function that voice plays in such radical writing theory and demonstrates how voice celebrates and strengthens adherence to shared values in order to create communion with a reader and to move that reader toward the action of adopting a novel approach to understanding writing. In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, I identify the core value of power, which is celebrated across divergent theoretical texts and which is both strengthened and deconstructed through the use of the metaphor of voice. Although power is consistently celebrated, each major conversation conceptualizes power very differently, challenging various notions of individual agency and structural limitations to enacting power through writing. As voice works to celebrate and reconceptualize power across these conversations, it also displaces and introduces various other values, such as nature, authenticity, and multiplicity. At the same time, voice functions metonymically and, thus, various values attached to a written text are also attached to the writer. I argue that viewing voice through the lens of epideictic rhetoric can both shed light on the metaphor’s controversy and can provide a material, linguistic focus for a conversation about embedded values that inform theory and practice in the field of composition.