Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Cli-Fi Cinema: An Epideictic Rhetoric Of Blame, Chloe Louise Powell

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis analyzes the symbolic mechanisms of guilt-redemption as developed by Kenneth Burke within two climate fiction (cli-fi) films: The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), and Interstellar (2014). In doing so, this thesis offers an account of: (1) each film’s role in providing their audience temporary assuagement of climate change related guilt, and (2) each film’s role in transmitting values and “attitudes” to build and strengthen communities. Because cli-fi films begin from a dystopic vision of a possible future, it fulfills the "blame" function of epideictic discourse to provoke and inspire the "ecological imagination." Through this provocation, the audience …

Launching Conservative Resistance: A Rhetorical Criticism Of The Young Americans For Freedom, Tyler John Snelling

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

At the end of the 1940s, conservatives faced internal divisions, an elitist image, and people supporting government post Great Depression. Liberalism seemed entrenched throughout society. Yet, the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), the first national, conservative movement, formed in 1960. This thesis investigates YAF’s earliest “publicity” in National Review, an influential magazine, to understand part of what preceded conservatism’s evolution. Publishing “The Ivory Tower: Young Americans for Freedom” by William F. Buckley and the “Sharon Statement,” YAF’s manifesto, side-by-side formed a new identity—young conservative—that empowered activists. From Maurice Charland’s “constitutive rhetoric,” chapter two investigates Buckley’s telling of the past as …

President Barack Obama Responds To Gun Violence: A Rhetoric Of Transformation., Gabriela Tscholl

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Over the course of his presidency Barack Obama responded to 15 incidents of gun violence. Moments of tragedy serve as one of the greatest tests of presidential leadership as they require the chief executive to articulate a definition of tragedy that enables citizens both to understand and to work through the experience. It is through the act of definition that presidents increase their rhetorical power, thereby allowing them to advocate or advance specific policy proposals. This thesis examines seven of President Obama’s memorial speeches: Fort Hood, TX (2009); Tucson, AZ (2011); Newtown, CT (2012); Washington, D.C. Navy Yard (2013); Fort …

Fashion, Communication, And Consumerism, Jodi Robbins

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The fashion industry is a 1.2 trillion dollar global market, with more than 250 billion dollars spent each year in the United States alone. With over 4 million individuals employed in the United States it takes a village to distribute, sell, and communicate apparel across the world. A large portion of the fashion industry functions with the help of sales associates. Businesses would not be able to function without design, manufacturing, distribution, marketing, advertising, communication, buying, planning, and consulting. In a global market where communication, social media, and image are quickly changing, the retail environment is promoting functionality of fashion …

The Communication Of Cheating: A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Communication Major League Baseball Players Use When Accused Of Taking Performance Enhancing Drugs., Andrew Mallon

Honors Capstone Projects - All

There has always been a strong bond between baseball and controversy. Most recently, this connection has manifested itself in the form of the steroid era in baseball. While that chapter in baseball history has closed, there are lingering effects. Each season, players are receiving suspensions for performance enhancing drug (PED) use by Major League Baseball.

Through different methods of rhetorical analysis, four players will be looked at and critiqued on their statements regarding PED accusations. Reading and analyzing the communication through the lens of these players shapes the strategies that each player chose to implement. In a post-steroid era league, …

Black Voices Matter, Shenika Hankerson

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

This article examines the role of voice in the writing of African American students from the African American Language (AAL)-speaking culture. Drawing on data from a qualitative study, this article presents empirical evidence that is likely to inform existing and new initiatives to support the voice and writing practices of AAL-speaking students, and by extension, all culturally and linguistically diverse students. This rarely considered insight, I argue, is important as in recent decades there have been a growing number of calls for instructional material that meets the language and literacy development needs of second language speakers and writers. By generating …

Stories At Work : Restorying Narratives Of New Teachers' Identity Learning In Writing Studies., Rachel Gramer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Rhetoric and composition has a long, robust history of studying how we train new writing teachers in our graduate/writing programs; yet we lack in-depth inquiries that foreground how new writing teachers learn. This dissertation traces five graduate students learning how to be and become writing teachers, using narrative as an object and means of analysis to study the tacitly internalized process of newcomer professional identity learning. In this project, I enact narrative as a feminist, interdisciplinary methodology to restory new writing teacher research narratives away from implicit deficit or explicit resistance and toward a more generative focus on newcomers’ motivated …

Hard To See Through The Smoke : Remembering The 1912 Hillsville, Virginia Courthouse Shootout., Travis A. Rountree

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines rhetorical rememberings of the 1912 Hillsville, Virginia courthouse shootout. It begins with an overview of the historical event, then through four chapters focuses on different rememberings that take up the event. Using Burke’s terministic screens, the study presents several lenses through which to view these rememberings. Chapter One presents the national and local newspaper constructions of the shootout in three terministic screens: the violent mountaineer, the gangster, and the uncolonized other. These three screens predate what is now the hillbilly image of the mountaineer. Chapter Two analyzes performative actions of the shootout. The ballads about the event …

Color-Blind Stancetaking In Racialized Discourse, Abigail Christine Tobias-Lauerman

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I examine how language constructs and constrains racialized discourse in post-Jim Crow contemporary America. Drawing on rhetorical and sociolinguistic work set forth by Booth, Shotwell, Bonilla-Silva, Omi and Winant, and others, it is apparent that racial organization— and racial identities and categorization— in the US is reliant upon specific markers that signify racial meaning. Such markers are assimilated into wider, unconscious discourse through what Shotwell and Booth describe as seemingly inherent— yet ultimately constructed— matters of “common sense,” and are expressed through evaluative stance acts. I explore the origins and construction of these markers and the relationship …

Naming What Bothers Us: Measuring Moral Rhetoric In The 2016 Presidential Debates, Skyler James Meeks

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

For centuries, Aristotle’s ethos has been a crucial component of persuasive rhetoric, with flagrant violations of character extinguishing the credibility of speakers and rendering their messages ineffective. However, the 2016 US presidential election challenged the rhetorical value of good character and left voters unable to articulate feelings about perceived moral transgressions. In some ways, this inability to express what bothered many is tied to the various constraints of the first-year writing classroom, where instructors often oversimplify definitions of ethos in a way that removes a facet known as aretê—a concept defined as moral virtue and one especially beneficial for …

New Genres And New Challenges : Five Interdisciplinary Case Studies Of Master's Student Writers., Meghan Lynne Hancock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the area of graduate writing research, Rhetoric and Composition scholarship has focused mainly on students of English and their experiences as novice writing teachers, or on students who are nearing the end of their graduate experience and are in the writing stage of their culminating projects, like dissertations. Few case studies in Rhetoric and Composition have been conducted on graduate student writers, particularly graduate students from multiple disciplines. This dissertation sets out to address this gap in conducting five interdisciplinary case studies of new master’s student writers as they navigate their first semester of graduate school and learn how …

Aspirations Into Action : Navigating Structures For Community Engagement At The University Of Louisville., Megan Faver Hartline

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the affordances of university structures based on how they value and support community engagement, focusing on common issues for community-engaged scholars. In this case study of the University of Louisville as an institution developing stronger structures for community engagement, I show that current efforts represent important starting points for how institutions support engagement, but I argue that they, and scholarly discussion about them, need to be deepened to meet the needs of engaged scholars. Toward that end, utilizing an institutional critique methodology informed by scholarship in institutional ethnography, I combine analysis of university policies and documents with …

A Curriculum Of Civic Responsibility : Transitioning Black American Students To College-Level Writing., Jamila M. Kareem

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation considers how racialized differences educational experience transition with Black students as they perform the expectations of college writing curriculum. I address the question: in what ways can a first-year writing curriculum centered on civic responsibility aid in smoother transitions from secondary to postsecondary academic writing for Black students at predominantly White institutions? My study applies racial and critical race methodologies framed within the tenets of critical race theory, institutional whiteness, and the absent presence of race in composition studies. I apply the methodologies in three key ways: analyzing transition practices through racialized perspectives; evaluating general education writing curriculum …

The Military Meets The University : Mapping Issues Of Literacy Sponsorship Across Military And Academic Settings., Ashley Ludewig

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is grounded in scholarship on communities of practice and literacy sponsorship and aims to contribute to a growing body of research about the literacy practices of student veterans. Rather than focusing on the impact of trauma or service-related injuries, this study demonstrates the influence that a military learning environment can have on a veteran’s subsequent experiences with college writing. Chapter 1 includes a brief history of the military’s impact on higher education and an overview of the existing scholarship on student veterans’ academic writing. I also review scholarship on communities of practice in literacy studies and literacy sponsorship …

Believing Mary Karr, Stephanie Rae Guedet

Theses and Dissertations

Believing Mary Karr examines how belief, represented in the memoirs of Mary Karr, works in our contemporary moment. This examination is supported by the argument that our identities and the stories we tell about them are always constructions of belief, and that these beliefs are ultimately relational, enacted in the intersubjective relationship between writers and readers of autobiography. This dissertation provides the fields of both rhetoric and life writing studies not only an awareness of how ideas about belief—how beliefs about belief—have already shaped our scholarly imagination but also the possibilities a rhetoric of belief can offer to future conversations …

Female Autonomy: An Analysis Of Privacy And Equality Doctrine For Reproductive Rights, Elizabeth Levi

Political Science Honors Projects

What is the constitutional basis for women’s equality? Recently, scholars have suggested that as the right to privacy has floundered against the political undoing of women's access to abortion, equal protection arguments have grown stronger. This thesis investigates the feminist utility and limits of the equality and privacy arguments. Taking liberal feminism and feminist legal theory as analytical lenses, I offer interpretations of gender discrimination, reproductive rights, and marriage equality case law. By this framework, I argue that while an equality argument is less inherently oppressive towards women than the privacy doctrine, equality doctrine has been constructed thus far to …

Reflections In Passion And Progress: Blending Vision, Resilience, And Evolution As A Writer And Scholar Of The English Language, Elizabeth Scoville

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

The following is a final master's degree portfolio of revised graduate work in English composition. Consisting of four projects, this portfolio highlights research, theory, and applications in multidisciplinary writing, visual argumentation, linguistics pedagogy, and professional editing. The pieces within reflect significant growth and adaptation in the field of English comprehension and writing, where successful compositions walk hand-in-hand with innovation, audience acknowledgement, and the willingness to change as language ebbs and flows with the passage of time.

Final Ma Portfolio, Mary O'Hara

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio contains four essays primarily focused upon composition and rhetoric.

Images, Speech Balloons, And Artful Representation: Comics As Visual Narratives Of Early Career Teachers, Julian Lawrence, Ching-Chiu Lin, Rita Irwin

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The ways in which teachers adjust to challenges in the process of becoming professionals are complicated. Teacher mentorship, however, is an important step to creating and sustaining a strong professional career. This article discusses new understandings from a Canadian research project: Pedagogical Assemblage: Building and Sustaining Teacher Capacity through Mentoring Programs in British Columbia. Through our use of an a/r/tography informed methodology in teacher mentorship, we have come to understand how the use of comics permits an unfolding of visual narratives as a unique way of contextualizing the complex stories of teaching and learning. Our motivation in employing comics as …

Teaching Critical Looking: Pedagogical Approaches To Using Comics As Queer Theory, Ashley Manchester

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Given the challenging depth of queer theoretical concepts, this article argues that one of the most effective ways to teach the complexities of queer theory is by utilizing comics in the classroom. I focus on how college-level instructors can use the content, form, and history of comics to teach students how to enact and do queer theory. By reading and making comics, students learn concrete and theoretical tools for combatting oppressive discourses and modes of meaning making. Teaching comics as queer theory promotes both innovative critical thinking and critical looking skills by centralizing both the rich history of queer comics …