Literary Reality: Rhetoricizing Literature and English Studies
Issue Date
2011-05-31Author
Williams, Erin Ann
Publisher
University of Kansas
Format
211 pages
Type
Dissertation
Degree Level
Ph.D.
Discipline
English
Rights
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory and John Bender and David E. Wellbery's description of rhetoricality, I offer a reconceptualization of literature as a conceptual metaphorization of the experience of the cognitive concept of LIFE. I demonstrate the value of such a rhetoricized reconceptualization of literature and literary study by applying them to four American autobiographies written after 1970: Bill Clinton's My Life, James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, Audre Lorde's Zami, and Walter Dean Myers' Autobiography of my Dead Brother. I also speculate about what a rhetoricized English studies in contemporary American higher education - one that sees (what Pierre Bourdieu describes as) heteronomy rather than autonomy as its primary organizing principle - might entail.
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- Dissertations [4660]
- English Dissertations and Theses [449]
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