School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    (Re)defining recovery: exploring poetry as a therapeutic tool in recovery from severe mood episodes and associated suicide attempts in bipolar disorder
    Lacey, Felicity ( 2020)
    The critical component of this thesis explores the value of poetry as a therapeutic tool in recovery from severe mood episodes and associated suicide attempts in individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Through literary analysis of Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium and Jeanann Verlee’s Said the Manic to the Muse, I suggest that poetry allows a therapeutic space for dynamic reclamation of subjective narrative experiences of bipolar disorder from the medical discourse. Poetic devices such as personification and juxtaposition support the decentralisation of narrative in the subjective dialectic, thus creating scope for the productive tolerance of polarities, fragmentation and disorder. In doing so, poetry can facilitate emotional healing whilst eschewing redemptive narrative arcs. This provides valuable alternate readings and renderings of ‘recovery’ as part of an ongoing management of chronic mental illness which prioritises the experiential perspective, and thereby posits poetic process as a dynamic therapeutic tool in bipolar and attempted suicide contexts. The creative component of this thesis is a collection of poetry exploring my own recovery.
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    Conceptual metaphor for COVID-19 in Australian newspapers
    Almutairi, Hend ( 2020)
    It is important to understand how news sources communicate information about pandemics to the public, and a central aspect of news is the use of metaphors. This study analyses cognitive frames and conceptual domains that metaphorically characterise COVID-19 as a concrete reality for the masses. Data were drawn from a corpus of Australian newspapers in the online Coronavirus Corpus (n.d.). Data were filtered, edited, and classified into three cohorts of corpora, each targeting one of three keywords: coronavirus, COVID-19, and virus. Through the KWIC tool and concordances in the cohorts, metaphoric linguistic expressions (MLEs) were identified. The textual analysis showed spreading and moving were the most common MLEs, followed by impede, force, drive, fight, and battle. The contextual analysis of the MLEs helped identify conceptual metaphors, such as COVID AS A MOVING ENTITY, COVID AS A WAVE, and COVID AS A KILLER. Based on the conceptual coherence between conceptual metaphors, four cognitive domains were classified: COVID AS A LIVING BEING, COVID AS A TSUNAMI, COVID AS A CRIMINAL, and COVID AS AN ENEMY. The findings differ slightly from previous research that found the WAR domain was a dominant source domain for disease metaphors, and many framing options for COVID-19 were used in Australian newspaper discourse. More research is required to better understand the representation of COVID-19 in media discourse to improve the government and public response.