Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Evaluating The Prevalence And Dimensions Of Poetry Interventions To Enable Change And Transformation In Organizations, Elizabeth Kathleen Mcgraw

Theses and Dissertations

Today, organizations and their employees operate in times of increased complexity, ambiguity, and constant change. Traditional methods for enabling change and transformation are no longer sufficient to generate alignment and shared understanding to create adaptive ways of working. Organizations must identify new tools when engaged in change and transformation. Poetry, a time-honored practice, is an unconventional choice for organizational interventions. Still, it may be a solution for organizations seeking to unstick, reframe, and pivot quickly toward a new and shared reality. This study evaluated the practice and dimensions of poetry interventions used by change practitioners when enabling change and transformation …

Poetry And Possibilities In Contemporary Egypt, Reem Badr

Theses and Dissertations

Egyptian colloquial poetry has historically been conceived of, by practitioners and onlookers alike, as a politically committed, subversive, resistant practice. In this thesis I explore how this poetry, with its complex inheritance, inhabits the realities of post-revolutionary Egypt. Throughout the chapters of this work I trace colloquial poetry in its more traditional forms, as well as in its more novel ones like Egyptian rap/trap, as it grapples with the reduced possibilities in the present. As it reflects and spawns a wider disillusionment with and refusal of politics and claims a reinvention of itself as a private practice, the poetry cannot …

Poetics, Not Pragmatics: Understanding Metaphors In A Poetic Context, Savannah Marciezyk

Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this paper is to explain why the leading theories of metaphor fail when applied to metaphors which appear in poems. The ability to understand the true meaning of a metaphor in conversations relies on understanding speaker intention and extralinguistic context. This paper argues that because such material is not available to the reader of a poem, theories which rely heavily on pragmatics to explain metaphors cannot be successfully applied to metaphors which appear in poems. This paper makes use of the views on metaphor by John Searle and Paul Grice, and discusses how meaning is constructed in …

Structured Poetic Expressions For Emerging Adults Experiencing Bereavement, Kelcie D. Willis

Theses and Dissertations

Previous research has produced heterogeneous findings regarding the effectiveness of expressive writing in reducing grief symptomatology among the bereaved (e.g., Collison, 2016; Lichtenthal & Cruess, 2010; Stroebe et al., 2006). The purpose of this study was to address these mixed results by exploring the effects and linguistic characteristics of a novel writing task (i.e., the acrostic poem) among bereaved undergraduates, using an innovative data analysis technique (i.e., Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count). The current study recruited 68 undergraduates who had lost a loved one. Participants were randomly assigned to write over multiple days using the acrostic poem, emotional disclosure prompt, …

Ethnicity And Poetry: A Systems Theory Approach To Contemporary African American And Mexican American Poetry, Antonio Paniagua Guzman

Theses and Dissertations

Given the ongoing ethnic transformation of the current society of the United States, contemporary sociologists have extensively studied ethnic relations from diverse theoretical and methodological approaches. Despite the vast sociological research recently developed, the literary-based methodological approach remains partially uncultivated. This study explores motivations and patterns of minority groups’ ethnic performance in contemporary poetry by analyzing inter and intra-group similarities and differences of diverse linguistic and cultural traits. From secondary data analysis, this study examines four hundred poems authored by forty contemporary African American and Mexican American writers experientially connected to the state of Texas. Grounded in systems theory, this …

A Statistical Approach To Syllabic Alliteration In The Odyssean Aeneid, Cory S. Robinson

Theses and Dissertations

William Clarke (1976) and Nathan Greenberg (1980) offer an objective framework for the study of alliteration in Latin poetry. However, their definition of alliteration as word initial sound repetition in a verse is inconsistent with the syllabic nature both of the device itself and also of the metrical structure. The present study reconciles this disparity in the first half of the Aeneid by applying a similar method to syllable initial sound repetition. A chi-square test for goodness-of-fit reveals that the distributions of the voiceless obstruents [p], [t], [k], [k^w], [f], and [s] and the sonorants [m], [n], [l], and [r] …

Black Lazarus: Conjure Book, Melissa Anne Morrow

Theses and Dissertations

Black Lazarus: Conjure Book is a hybrid-genre collection of poems (including lyric, narrative, graphic, prose, and combinations of these four forms) uttered in the voices of fictitious personas based on the participants pictured in, the historical circumstances surrounding, and one inscribed artifact of a postcard depicting the lynching of Allen Brooks in Dallas, Texas on March 3, 1910. The theoretical scaffold for the manuscript is "triangulation," a method used by qualitative researchers to validate their studies by exploring research issues from multiple perspectives. Triangulation is also a mapmaking method used to verify the position of waypoints by measuring them against …

Foxfire: The Selected Poems Of Yosa Buson, A Translation, Allan Persinger

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation is a creative translation from Japanese into English of the poetry of Yosa Buson, an 18th century (1716 - 1783) poet. Buson is considered to be one of the most important of the Edo Era poets and is still influential in modern Japanese literature. By taking account of Japanese culture, identity and aesthetics the dissertation project bridges the gap between American and Japanese poetics, while at the same time revealing the complexity of thought in Buson's poetry and bringing the target audience closer to the text of a powerful and moving writer.

Currently, the only two books offering …

The Journey Home: A Root-Metaphor Analysis Of The 1840 Mormon Manchester Hymn Book, James N. Arrington

Theses and Dissertations

In 1840, apostle missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints compiled, printed, and began distributing a hymnbook that eventually would become the basis for all subsequent LDS hymnbooks published in English in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This thesis, as a contribution to the literature of communication, book history, and hymnology, as well as the intellectual and cultural history of the early years of the LDS Church, focuses on analyzing the poetry of the 1840 Mormon Manchester hymnbook. Using qualitative root-metaphor analysis, the author identified and analyzed expressions, supporting an emergent journey root-metaphor. He then divided the …