Browsing by Subject "Metaphor"
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Item Gender, timbre, and metaphor in the music of Wendy Carlos(2017-05) Schoonhoven, Sarah Marie; Drott, Eric, 1972-The music of Wendy Carlos has been examined in many arenas, her soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange being no exception. The polarizing film has been analyzed and dissected by numerous film critics, film scholars, music scholars, and journalists, with reviews ranging from glorifying to damning. Yet the musical compositions of Wendy Carlos often seem to be accompanied by another topic of discussion, a topic not often deemed necessary in discussions of Kubrick: Carlos’s gender identity. Simply put, Carlos’s gender has been a major part of the discourse surrounding her works in a manner unlike that of most composers. The critical response to which Carlos has been subject since publicly coming out in 1979 has largely revolved around ideological assumptions about her identity, as well as misconceptions and conflations of identity terms and nuances. As a result, her works are often not only (mis)gendered, but (mis)sexualized. This thesis draws on critical and scholarly reception of synthesized works by Carlos ranging from the 1969 release of “Switched-On Bach” through the present day to explore and unpack the gendered implications of the timbral metaphors used to describe her works. My analysis builds on the work of Tara Rodgers surrounding timbral metaphor and its use in electronic musics. Similarities in the metaphors used to describe her music over the past half century provide insight into not only the “tone color” of the sound but also the music’s cultural implications and the audience’s perceptions of the music’s creator. This paper will examine, compare, and analyze metaphors to characterize Carlos’s “March from Clockwork Orange” in order to analyze the ways that perceptions of Carlos and her perceived gender identity have fed into interpretations of her music. By way of contrast, this paper will then compare some of the critical reception of another influential electronic outfit, Kraftwerk, and the differences in critical reception relating to Kraftwerk’s masculine and male identities. The extensive body of literature on Kraftwerk and their inclusion in both the academic electroacoustic and popular electronic canons will allow for discussion centering on the gendering of electronic timbres across multiple artists and continents.Item In xochitl, in cuicatl (the flower, the song) : analysis of colonial cultural-social transformations through Nahuatl metaphor(2013-05) Farias, Arnold; Wade, Maria de Fat́ima, 1948-; Menchaca, MarthaI pursue a study of the semantic couplet in xochitl, in cuicatl (the flower, the song) grounded in the examination of Nahuatl written sources in order to explore its cultural and historical trajectory as it was produced and reproduced from the pre-colonial to the colonial period. I begin my analysis by examining Nahuatl songs of pre-colonial origin to demonstrate how in xochitl, in cuicatl was an epistemological practice embedded in a Nahuatl ontology conceived of philosophical, religious, and social practices that were interwoven in the cultural habitus of Nahua warriors. I argue that the semantic couplet and the Nahuatl ontology associated with warriors are reflected and play a central role in songs from the Xochicuicatl (Flowery Songs) genre. Then, I explore colonial practices for religious conversion in order to discuss the colonial habitus or pre-dispositions influencing the indigenous scholar Antonio Valeriano to utilize the Nahuatl epistemology of in xochitl, in cuicatl and the Nahuatl ontology associated with warriors as an interpretive frame of reference in the Nican Mopohua, the apparition story of the Virgin of Guadalupe. With this organization, I identify pre-colonial Nahuatl practices in their original context and then I reveal why and how they became accommodated in a colonial and Christian context. Therefore, I utilize in xochitl, in cuicatl as a vehicle for exploring a major cultural-social transformation among the Nahua people of central Mexico.Item Lucretian stillness and motion as political metaphors in Ovid’s Metamorphoses(2022-05-31) Kahane, Rebecca; Ebbeler, Jennifer; Hubbard, Thomas K; Farrell, Joseph; Taylor, Rabun; Chaudhuri, Pramit; Haimson-Lushkov, AyeletMy dissertation examines the contrast between stillness and motion in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as well as its connection to two other polarities in the poem: silence–sound and stagnation–fluidity. I argue that Ovid treats these three polarities as analogous and gives them political meaning, with stillness representing political sleepiness and suppression, and motion representing political freedom. Moreover, Ovid accomplishes this by politicizing Lucretius’s naturalistic treatment of stillness and motion. In Chapter 1, I demonstrate that Ovid inserts Lucretian conceptions of stillness and motion into his Houses of Sleep and Fama in Met. 1 and Met. 12 to generate political meanings in addition to traditional metapoetic ones. In my second chapter, I show that Ovid’s House of Sleep has three similarities with his still pool episodes in Met. 3-5: extreme stillness, a lethargic forcefield, and a Lucretian-inspired isolated flicker of motion. I argue that these combinations of stillness and lethargy symbolize political sleepiness and silencing. In Chapter 3, I demonstrate that Ovid’s House of Fama shares with his Pyramus and Thisbe story in Met. 4 the incorporation of Lucretian flows of sound. In the latter episode, I identify two Lucretian-style flows—one of words and one of water—which Ovid treats as corrosive to Augustan power and infrastructure respectively. In Chapter 4, I extrapolate from Ovid’s analogous treatment of stillness and silence to argue that he regarded the individual’s loss of motion, as well as of speech, as a metaphor for political silencing. In my final chapter, I show that Ovid links stillness and motion to power more directly in the first and last books of his poem. In Met. 1, he endows the Augustan Jupiter with extraordinary control over stillness, motion, silence, and sound. In Met. 15, Ovid’s Pythagoras uses the Heraclitean doctrine of flux to highlight the impermanence of all such political regimes. By combining the traditional poetic use of flowing water as a symbol of literary and political expression with the traditional philosophic use of flowing water as a symbol of change, Ovid suggests that, in time, political expression will cause regime change. His use of the stillness–motion binary and its analogues not only serves a political function, but also gives readers the opportunity to gambol in the playground of Ovid’s political imaginationItem Mental muscularity: shaping implicit theories of intelligence via metaphor(2009-08) Anderson, Scott Victor; McGlone, Matthew S., 1966-Motivating students is a central challenge for many teachers, particularly in subjects students commonly perceive as “impenetrable,” such as statistics. One line of motivation research by C.S. Dweck (2006) has found that when students believe their intelligence is malleable (i.e., a growth mindset) and that learning is a function of effort, they show greater motivation, accept more learning challenges, and have improved performance outcomes relative to students who believe their intelligence is fixed (e.g., “I’m not a math person”). This dissertation extends research regarding implicit theories of intelligence by examining how metaphors of the growth mindset (e.g., the mind is a muscle) can be integrated as feedback into a computer program to encourage students to implicitly adopt the growth mindset relevant to statistics. The present study manipulated framing conditions with metaphorical, literal, and no feedback about the growth mindset. Results show that framing feedback implicitly in terms of the “mind as muscle” metaphor increased non-math major undergraduates’ willingness to accept learning challenges and their overall score on testing items relevant to statistical literacy, as compared to students who received literal feedback or no feedback about the growth mindset. Also, overall, gender differences were noted, with males accepting more learning challenges, passing on fewer difficult items, and having higher scores on testing items than females. Findings also indicate that participants’ psychological reactance and interest in fitness and muscularity (metaphor resonance) did not meaningfully change participants’ learning outcomes.Item Metaphor as design inspiration(2004) Qian, YanYan; Not availableItem Pregnant poetics and gestational narratives in eighteenth-century English literature(2017-05) Gay, Lindsey Marlene Powers; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Bertelsen, Lance; Longaker, Mark; Baker, Samuel; Seaholm, MeganIn this project I examine eighteenth-century literary representations of the pregnant or birthing female body—the woman who herself straddles the line between subject and object, Self and Other, life and death—and what she signifies in the Enlightenment cultural imagination. Throughout the project, I examine how the overriding metaphors of gestation and birth inhabit the act of writing itself, as well as the structures underpinning these authors’ narrative and verse. The works I examine propose that reproductive women have a special relationship to metaphor—both in the specific representation of writing-as-birth, and the figurative function of metaphor in general. Combining affect theory, feminist psychoanalysis, medical and scientific history, and formal literary analysis, I investigate what the eighteenth century tells us about what it means to be human, and the Enlightenment encouraged us to perceive human subjectivity as intimately bound with feminine reproduction. In my first chapter, I discuss the Enlightenment’s embryological debates and the monstrous maternal imagination as they appear in The Dunciad and elsewhere in Alexander Pope’s life and works. In my second chapter, I consider how knowledge exclusive to reproductive women joins with narrative structures of concealment in Eliza Haywood’s 1720s short fiction. Her representations of pregnant women’s bodies and minds first convey, then challenge the abjection of pregnancy and parturition. My third chapter explores how Mary Wollstonecraft translates abject reproductive imagery into a affective scrutiny of the maternal mind in Maria and elsewhere. Wollstonecraft shows how the reproductive woman is susceptible to socioeconomic, material, and emotional pressures that can make her an object without agency. I end by offering an overview of representations of reproduction in agrarian and industrial environments. The authors I examine participated in the emerging science of embryology and in the gendered discourses of sensibility and sentiment. Their works demonstrate the political uses of pregnancy and birth. I participate in the ongoing critical reclamation of feminist history by probing literary representations of one of the most ostensibly appreciated—but oft-derided—times in a woman’s life: the transformative, dangerous, confusing, contradictory, metaphor-rich events of pregnancy and childbirth.Item The price of admission: football players' sacrificial conceptions of career and health through metaphors of war, religion, and family(2014-05) Alekajbaf, Nicolette Lea; Ballard, Dawna I.With the recent discovery of traumatic brain injuries developing in retired professional football players, this study seeks to explore players’ perceptions of their careers in the sport, and how this may reflect notions of personal health over the long-term. Current and former football players, athletic staff, and other members of the football community were interviewed with the goal of learning about the full trajectory of a football career. Using grounded metaphorical analysis to examine the interview data, our study found the use of metaphor by participants to be integral in players’ descriptions of their careers. Participants likened aspects of their careers to enduring a war, having a religious experience, and being part of a family unit. Long-term, post-career health implications are discussed in relation to players’ conceiving of their experiences through these metaphors, along with limitations of the study and directions for future research.Item Research for liberation : an extension of pedagogical theory to research practice(2019-02-08) Harris, Eboneigh L.; Schallert, Diane L.As part of coursework from my first year of graduate school, I was tasked with developing a proposal for an education intervention. The central mechanism of my proposed intervention was to provide a professional development workshop to teachers. As the framework for retrospectively examining the existence of oppressive practices within my proposal, I draw on three works by Kevin Kumashiro (2004), Leslie Baxter (2005) and Fleckenstein, Spinuzzi, Rickly, and Papper (2008). As part of this examination, I also explore how metaphors are enacted in education research and the implications for using specific metaphors to position research subjects, specifically teachers, within this field. Finally, drawing from pedagogical theory, I consider how education research could be re-envisioned to be more sustainable and equitable in its relationship with participants and stakeholders.Item Seeing red : discourse, metaphor, and the implementation of red light cameras in Texas(2009-05) Hayden, Lance Alan, 1968-; Doty, PhilipThis study examines the deployment of automated red light camera systems in the state of Texas from 2003 through late 2007. The deployment of new technologies in general, and surveillance infrastructures in particular, can prove controversial and challenging for the formation of public policy. Red light camera surveillance during this period in Texas was increasingly discussed in a variety of public forums, creating a discourse involving many stakeholders and multiple opinions on the use and purpose of red light cameras. Public policy resulted when the Texas legislature, which had traditionally been viewed as hostile to the technology, regulated red light camera systems in 2007. My research examined the language choices made by various discourse communities in their discussion of red light camera systems, and their use of language structures in framing positions that either supported or opposed the cameras. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, I analyzed a corpus of texts that represented the public discussion of red light camera technology in Texas. By examining metaphor constructions used to describe the camera systems, I found that metaphors played an important role in framing arguments for or against the deployment of the cameras. My findings provide insight into the ways that language can be used to engage in a discursive and rhetorical conflict. This study has implications for understanding how technology and surveillance policy can be affected by language choices and rhetorical strategies, and how these choices can frame and influence public policy decisions.Item Semantic role alignment in metaphor : a frame semantic approach to metaphoric meaning(2015-05) Gemmell, Maggie Sue; Boas, Hans Christian, 1971-; Pierce, Marc; Urlaub, Per; Beavers, John; Streeck, JürgenMetaphor occurs when a word or phrase is used in a way that conflicts with its usual (literal) meaning, so that part of its meaning is applied to a different semantic domain. For example, time is construed as money in “This gadget will save you hours” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). There is a link between the concepts time and money that underlies many expressions in English; this is therefore considered a conceptual metaphor. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) has dominated metaphor research since Lakoff and Johnson (1980), but researchers (e.g. Croft 2009, Sullivan 2013) are turning to other cognitive linguistic theories such as Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1982) and Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987) to rectify the problems inherent in that approach. CMT does not provide tools for systematically defining metaphoric concepts and their components, which prevents the analysis of metaphor’s internal meaning. It views metaphor as a superimposition of meaning from one domain (e.g. money above) onto another (e.g. time). Corpus data has improved metaphor research methods, but sounder methodology is needed to choose which metaphors to study. This dissertation takes a novel approach to metaphor in that the data are taken from a semantically annotated corpus where their semantic domains are already assigned. The main dataset is comprised of a naturally occurring group of related metaphors that construe awareness as perception. Using the notion of frame from Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1982) as implemented in the lexicographic database FrameNet (Atkins et al. 2003) to define semantic domains and their internal components (frame elements; similar to semantic roles), this dissertation analyzes metaphors from the frame-semantically annotated database of German, SALSA (Burchardt et al. 2006, 2009), to investigate how meaning elements (semantic roles) from the metaphor’s two semantic domains align. I show that semantic roles align consistently, although not every semantic role has a counterpart in the other domain. I argue that the use of semantic and syntactic information that is associated with one domain but not the other allows emergent meaning to be created in metaphor. The analysis supports the view of metaphor as a blended space, independent of either semantic domain, as described by Fauconnier and Turner (2002).Item A semiotic approach to musical metaphor : theory and methodology(2010-12) Gerg, Ian Wyatt; Almén, Byron, 1968-; Buhler, JamesThe idea that music acts in part as a vehicle for meaning is a truism in both popular reception and music scholarship. The language used to speak and to write about music is replete with words that describe it metaphorically. Melodies descend; rhythms speed up; timbre is smooth. Certainly, we use these terms for communicative facility, yet by applying this language to music, we create metaphors that, according to Ludwig Wittgenstein, act as frames that direct interpretation. In the paper, I put forth a theory that views metaphor as the process of semantic transfer or substitution in which a non-musical concept stands in for a musical feature, effectively enabling us to hear music as more than simply sound. The use of certain metaphors receives inspiration from previously heard music, programs, a perceived similarity with non-musical phenomena, or a combination of these. The methodology that I propose coordinates these metaphors—places them within a single frame—and enables them to interact with one another and to create a more palpable musical experience for the listener. I use Chopin's E minor and A major preludes from Op. 28 as the primary models for expounding this hermeneutic.Item The virtual observing agent in music: a theory of agential perspective as implied by indexical gesture(2015-08) Gerg, Ian Wyatt; Hatten, Robert S.; Almén, Byron; Drott, Eric; Pearsall, Edward; Erk, KatrinThe human body is inseparable from our understanding of music. Through embodied cognition, listeners conceptualize music as performed action. We find evidence of this in our most fundamental musical language. “High” pitches resonate high in a singer’s head, while “fast” rhythms resemble fast bodily movement. Scholars have followed the entailments of these metaphors in recent decades, developing theories of bodily gesture (Hatten 2004, Lidov 2005) and physical mimesis (Cox 2011). These hold that the bodily movement that we hear in music can imitate the physical gestures that we use in everyday communication (e.g., waving, nodding, bowing, or sighing). This has its own entailments; most fundamentally, it implies the presence of a virtual, human-like agent within music that is similar to the “virtual persona” theorized by Edward T. Cone (1974). In other words, in perceiving musical sounds as imitative of physical movement and gesture, we infer the presence of a virtual agent who enacts them. This dissertation extends these theories, demonstrating that musical gestures can be mimetic of indexical somatic movements—that is, bodily movements of pointing, looking, striving, and reaching. These indexical gestures suggest the presence of a virtual observing agent. The virtual observing agent acts a lens through which we, the listener, can experience the interior world (diegesis) of a work. This leads us to embody a single and more individualized perspective on the musical representation. I explore the implications of indexical gesture and perspective with an examination of music from the common practice period. Moreover, I bring the theory of virtual observing agency together with theories of musical narrative and emotion.