Matching Items (2)
Description
Since their introduction into English in the mid-sixteenth Century, accommodations have registered weighty concepts in religious, economic, and political discourse: they represented the process by which divine principles could be adapted to human understanding, the non-interest property loans that were the bedrock of Christian neighborliness, and a political accord that would satisfy all warring factions. These important ideas, however, give way to misdirection, mutation, and suspicion that can all be traced back to the word accommodation in some way—the word itself suggests ambiguous or shared agency and constitutes a blank form that might be overwritten with questionable values or content. This dissertation examines the semantic range and rhetorical value of the word accommodation, which garnered attention for being a “perfumed term” (Jonson), a “good phrase” (Shakespeare), a stumbling block (Milton), and idolatry (anonymous author). The word itself is acknowledged to have an extra-lingual value, some kind of efficacious appeal or cultural capital that periodically interferes with its meaning. These tendencies align it with different modes of fetishism—idolatry, commodity fetishism, and factishism—which I will explicate and synthesize through an analysis of accommodation’s various careers and explicit commentary evidenced in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts.
ContributorsAckerman, Heather M (Author) / Hawkes, David (Thesis advisor) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Ryner, Bradley D. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
In the United States, we tend to understand linguistic systems as separate and autonomous, and by this understanding, bilinguals are people who speak two different languages and switch between them. This understanding of bilingualism, however, does not reflect the reality of the way many bilinguals use language. Rather than “code-switch” between two languages, sociolinguists posit that many bilinguals understand their language as a single linguistic system, and choose different elements of that system in different situations, a process termed, “translanguaging.” Translanguaging provides an alternative framework for examining bilingual language as an ideological system in plays, particularly plays which use translanguaged dialogue to describe the experiences of young people who dwell on and cross borders, a category of plays I term, “Border Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA).” This descriptive study utilizes grounded theory and close reading theoretically grounded in border studies and sociolinguistic theory to determine what roles Spanish and English play in Border TYA as autonomous systems, and as pieces of a new, translanguaged system. Playwrights of Border TYA u translanguaging as a structural metaphor for cultural negotiation to examine identity, belonging, and borders. Translanguaging provides subaltern characters a process for communicating their experiences, examining their identities, and describing encounters with borders in their own unique linguistic system. Border TYA, however, does not exclusively translanguage. Border TYA also incorporates monolingual dialogue and translation, and in these instances the languages, Spanish and English, function autonomously as tools for teaching audience members to recognize vocabulary and cultural experience.
ContributorsSchildkret, Elizabeth (Author) / Etheridge Woodson, Stephani (Thesis advisor) / Underiner, Tamara (Committee member) / Garcia, Lorenzo (Committee member) / Bernstein, Katherine (Committee member) / Hughes, Erika (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017