| This dissertation examines how the so-called "four master tropes" (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) operate within a set of twentieth-century written and cinematic texts on Tibet. The work focuses on what kind of rhetorical subjectivity or agency each rhetorical trope tends to reveal and accentuate; and what the possible connections are between the texts and their cultural contexts. A considerable amount of critical attention is devoted to understanding the moral language. The social discourse on Tibet over the course of a century has registered a shift from epistemological prescription to phenomenological description. There is a simultaneous transformation in stylistic features from the schematic, universal language of public rhetoric to individual, specific ways of inner speech. In the process, Tibet has been used as a heuristic signifier of various modes of moral values and social beliefs. |
