Digital Commons Network^™

Cherry Red Greenwashing: The Rhetoric Behind Corporate Recycling Narratives, Jessica Wallace Haws

Theses and Dissertations

As the public becomes more aware of environmental issues, corporations are pressed to consider and address the sustainability of their practices. Unwilling to drastically change business models, many corporations turn to greenwashing in an attempt to construct an environmentally friendly image while doing little to nothing to address sustainability issues. Using Kenneth Burke's work on identification and terministic screens, I analyze The Coca-Cola Company's "2020 World Without Waste Report" to illuminate how consumers come to believe in and identify with corporate greenwashing tactics. In line with Burke's theories related to identification, I argue that Coca-Cola's greenwashing strategies can be categorized …

From Trump Tower To Trump White House: The Rhetoric Of Donald Trump's 'Winning' Brand, Benjamin Metcalf

Theses and Dissertations

Donald Trump's rhetoric of winners and losers has prompted dangerous division in the United States. It is well understood that Trump's divisive discourse appealed to white, blue-collar Americans who had become disillusioned with the political establishment. This study explores how Trump persuaded this audience by transitioning business communication principles, highlighted by his signature 'winners and losers' theme, into politics. Trump's use of the reality television show, The Apprentice, as a branding platform had the rhetorical effect that catapulted Trump's unique 'winning' brand back into the public's consciousness. While the principles of business rhetoric Trump used in The Apprentice were clearly …

Mystic Identifications: Reading Kenneth Burke And “Non-Identification” Through Asian American Rhetoric, Nathan D. Wood

Theses and Dissertations

Krista Ratcliffe’s term “non-identification” offers a version of identification that assumes identity is not always identifiable. As an attitude that fosters cross-cultural listening, non-identification asks us to listen to others from a place of “neutrality,” with “hesitancy,” “humility,” and “pause” in order to consider identity’s fluid nature (73). This thesis first argues that this term might also describe speaking strategies premised on non-identifiability. As I’ll show, an inventive non-identification would articulate some rhetorical strategies that neither “identification” nor “disidentification” currently articulate. However, rhetorical scholars need more theoretical and practical guidance for what this kind of speech looks like. So, this …

Schools Of Identity: Rhetorical Experience In The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Rachel Elizabeth Winkel

Theses and Dissertations

In the following pages I assert that important rhetorical work is being carried out by aesthetic means in museums and memorials in order to facilitate experiences of identification. I describe in rhetorical terms how that work is done, especially within my primary artifact of study, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Specifically, this paper explores concepts developed in studies of epideictic rhetoric, the rhetoric of place, and museology. The theoretical framework of this paper is founded on the ideas of John Dewey and Kenneth Burke. Deweys theories discuss how we learn from experience and the role of the aesthetic in …

Livestrong Or Lie Hard: A Pentadic Analysis Of Deception And Reputation Management In 'The Armstrong Lie', Harper D. Anderson

Theses and Dissertations

Kenneth Burke's pentadic analysis has been a staple within the context of rhetorical criticism since the early days of critical communication studies. Throughout the years it has evolved from a heavy text criticism to application to film and documentary. The Armstrong Lie is another documentary that highlights the controversial actions of former seven-time Tour de France champion, Lance Armstrong. This film provides an opportunity in which the pentadic analysis can be applied in order to really dissect the message that is being told. Through application of the pentadic analysis to The Armstrong Lie it is possible to identify the true …

Persuasive Performance: Articulating A Space Between The Disciplines Of Rhetoric And Performance Studies, Joshua Evans Mckinney

Theses and Dissertations

This work explores persuasive performances, or performances which are wrought in order to affect changes in the thoughts, attitudes, emotions, ideas, beliefs, and opinions of others. Such performances are located in a space between the disciplines of performance studies and rhetoric. This work offers one way in which such performances might be better understood by proposing a model of negotiation comprised of the techniques of rhetorical dramatism and performance studies. A political debate and parts of Shakespeare's The Tempest are analyzed as examples using the model. This work represents an invitation to scholars of the disciplines of rhetoric and performance …

"Making Ourselves Over In The Image Of The Imagery": Overcoming Alienation Through Poetic Expressions Of Experience, Jacqueline Aquino Teusch

Theses and Dissertations

My focus for this essay is on understanding the rhetorical process that occurs when people come together despite their differences—that is what rhetoric is all about. Kenneth Burke argues that this process, for alienated people especially, happens poetically, more than semantically because there are too many differences to overcome semantically between alienated people and the dominant community. This essay is about how the rhetorical process of identification as described by Burke helps us to explain how we cross barriers that divide people who are different to create moments of mutual understanding—identification. In this essay, I look at the experience of …

A Theory Of Text As Action:Why Delivery Through Publication Improves Student Writers And Their Writing, Lisa Kae Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

Students in required writing courses often fail to see the purpose of their writing and invest themselves in their writing. Many composition pedagogues have noticed that one solution to this problem is to help students publish their writing, and have reported the positive outcomes of their publication-focused courses. However, this practice has not been grounded in theory. My project connects the practice of publishing student writing to theory. I draw on Kenneth Burke's and other's ideas of text as action and show how the ancient cannon of delivery is a necessary means of experiencing and understanding text as action with …

From Plato To Ipads: Dialogical Opportunities In Twenty-First Century Secondary English Classrooms, Emily Ensign

Theses and Dissertations

Technology offers students and educators an uncharted digital landscape of possibilities. Some educators feel strongly that technology enhances the classroom; others feel that it doesn't necessarily improve traditional teaching methods, and some even feel that it is detrimental to students' ability to focus or engage in face-to-face conversations. My project focuses on critical dialogue as defined by various theorists, and explores whether or not secondary English classrooms that use iPads continue to use the dialogical methods as outlined by these theorists (most of which could not have foreseen today's technological advancements). By relying on these theorists and scholars to provide …

Kenneth Burke As Educator: What His Theories Of Aesthetic Form And (Non-Symbolic) Motion/(Symbolic) Action Suggest For Teachers In The Literature Classroom, Tara Brock Boyce

Theses and Dissertations

Burke scholars oftentimes overlook Burke's fundamental role as educator and how his work can and should be applied to the classroom. This paper explores Burke's theoretical works and centers on two concepts important to developing rhetorical skills necessary for functioning and participating in a democratic society: his theory of aesthetic form and his distinction between motion and action. Specifically, this paper (1) clarifies these concepts and explains how they relate to each other and the emotional experience of literature, and (2) demonstrates how these concepts work together to imply a new method of practicing rhetorical criticism in the literature classroom …

Mommy Blogs And Rhetoric: Reading Experiences That Shape Maternal Identities, Brighton Joan Capua

Theses and Dissertations

The transition to motherhood is difficult and jarring for many women. Not only does this transition demand life-altering changes to a woman's life, but especially in more recent times, this transition offers nothing but uncertainty. As the role and understanding of women continues to change, what motherhood means becomes increasingly difficult to define; additionally, the traditional narratives of stay-at-home mothers who are always happy to do housework and nurture their children no longer apply for many 21st-century women, leaving new mothers feeling uncertain about who they are and who they want to become. Since the turn of the century, mothers …

Towards A Consummated Life: Kenneth Burke's Concept Of Consummation As Critical Conversation And Catharsis, Cherise Marie Bacalski

Theses and Dissertations

Consummation was the one term about which Kenneth Burke wasn't particularly long-winded - odd considering his claim that it was the apex of his theory of form. Perhaps Burke never explained exactly what consummation was because he himself was never clear on the subject, as he told John Woodcock in an interview toward the end of his career. Burke began conceptualizing his theory of form early on - in his 20s - and published it in his first critical book, Counter-Statement, in 1931. At that time, Burke's theory of form had already taken one evolutionary step - from self-expression, with …

Identification Through Inhabitation In Literature, Film, And Video Games, Charlotte Palfreyman Smith

Theses and Dissertations

In real life we each experience the world separately through our individual bodies, which necessitates what Kenneth Burke calls "identification." In this paper, I assert that as artistic media have structured our aesthetic experience in a way that increasingly resembles our lived, embodied experiences, our identification with fictional characters requires less imaginative effort and is more automatic and powerful. I will show this by analyzing how we inhabit characters through sensory engagement, point of view, and narrative form in literature, film, and video games (specifically action/adventure games, RPGs, and MMORPGs). I will then build off of Burke's foundational theory to …

Seeing (The Other) Through A Terministic Screen Of Spirituality: Emotional Integrity As A Strategy For Facilitating Identification, Jarron Benjamin Slater

Theses and Dissertations

Although philosopher Robert Solomon and rhetorician Kenneth Burke wrote in isolation from one another, they discuss similar concepts and ideas. Since its introduction in Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives, identification has always been important to rhetorical theory, and recent studies in emotion, such as Solomon's, provide new insight into modes of identification—that human beings can identify with one another on an emotional level. This paper places Solomon and Burke in conversation with one another, arguing that both terministic screens and emotions are ways of seeing, acting, engaging, and judging. Hence, terministic screens and emotions affect ethos, or character, both …

Composing 'An Experience': Experiential Aesthetics In First-Year Writing, Aimee E. Blau

Theses and Dissertations

Students often struggle to understand why the required writing course is important in their academic and non academic life. My project seeks to bring these two parts of students' lives together by urging writing teachers and students to consider a richer concept of the term "composition," one that includes the fundamental work of composing meaningful knowledge by assembling and reflecting on raw experiences. Dewey's term "an experience" clarifies how students constitute knowledge from their experiences, and Burke's methodological concept of form offers students a model for writing that accommodates that Deweyian sort of learning. Building off of these aesthetic …

Indexing And Dialectical Transcendence: Kenneth Burke's Critical Method, David Erland Isaksen

Theses and Dissertations

Kenneth Burke has been described as arguably the most important rhetorician and critical theorist of the twentieth century, and yet an important part of his scholarship has been generally overlooked by the academic community. The pentad has become the most prominent "Burkean" framework for analyzing texts, yet Kenneth Burke himself preferred "a more direct" way of approaching texts which he named "indexing." This thesis recreates this method from the pieces found in his scholarly writing, personal correspondence, and the papers his students produced for the class he taught at Bennington College. Kenneth Burke believed indexing could uncover the "pattern of …

Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, And The Rhetoric Of Aesthetics, Meridith Reed

Theses and Dissertations

Kenneth Burke and John Dewey each published books on aesthetics in the 1930s. These texts present parallel conceptions of aesthetics as holding a distinctly rhetorical role in society. My project is to line up these theories, focusing particularly on two key terms in each theory: Burke's eloquence and Dewey's expression. Together, these two terms explain what constitutes an aesthetic experience and explain how an aesthetic experience can open up individuals in a society to a variety of perspectives and identifications. As individuals are allowed to inhabit the experiences of others through their interactions with art, they are poised to …

Burke, Dewey, And The Experience Of Aristotle's Epideictic: An Examination Of Rhetorical Elements Found In The Funerals Of Lincoln, Kennedy, And Reagan, Xanthe Kristine Allen Farnworth

Theses and Dissertations

This article examines the role of epideictic rhetoric as a tool for promoting civic virtue in the public realm through the application of Kenneth Burke's theory of identification and John Dewey's explanation of an aesthetic experience. Long the jurisdiction of Aristotle's logical arguments, civic discussion usually works within the realm of forensic or deliberative persuasion. However, scholarship in the last fifty years suggests there is an unexplored dimension of Aristotle's discussion of epideictic and emotion that needs to be examined in an attempt to identify its usefulness as a tool for examining human experience and practical behavior in the political …

National Identity Transnational Identification: The City And The Child As Evidence Of Identification Among The Poetic Elite, Mary L. Hedengren

Theses and Dissertations

While poetry has historically been connected with rhetoric, few rhetoricians have studied contemporary poetry. Jeffery Walker suggests that this is because contemporary poetry, unlike classical poetry, no longer addresses all socio-economic levels of society but has become insular and self-referential (329). He criticizes that poetry no longer cuts vertically across one culture's hierarchy. I agree that poetry no longer addresses all segments of society, but I argue that this doesn't mean poetry is no longer rhetorical. Contemporary poetry now operates horizontally to unite the cultural elite of many national and ethnic groups by appealing to their identity as poetry readers. …

Negotiating Identity: Culturally Situated Epideictic In The Victorian Travel Narratives Of Isabella Bird, Katherine Reilly Robinson

Theses and Dissertations

Epideictic rhetoric, one of the classical modes of persuasion described by Aristotle, has faced some criticism concerning its value in the realm of rhetoric. Though attitudes have been shifting over the last several decades, there is still a tendency to undervalue epideictic, falling back on the Aristotelian system of ceremonial oratory. However, its “praise and blame” style of persuasion employs of the type of rhetor / audience identification described by Kenneth Burke. Epideictic rhetoric is a major component of virtually any communication, as the speaker or writer seeks to create a bond with that audience so as to persuade them …

Shootin Up The Past: Terministic Frontiers In Angle Of Repose And High Noon, James C. Dalrymple

Theses and Dissertations

The West has long been an important geographic and symbolic space for the United States. In the 19th and 20th centuries that space became the subject of numerous popular works of fiction, first in print and later in the cinema. These texts eventually formed a specialized genre, the Western, which had its own conventions, styles, and themes. Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose and Fred Zinnemann's High Noon, both seminal western texts from the mid-twentieth century, seek to reinterpret those conventions. While the Western is often characterized as a genre of violent masculinity and rugged individualism, these two texts employ conventional …

The Rhetoric Of Violence, James Christiansen Gunter

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to understand how we read and understand the use of depictions of violence by examining its rhetorical presentation. Although the media gives us a mixed understanding of the way that experiencing violence secondarily (that is, through all types of media) affects us, scholarship in this area has proved clear connections between viewing/experiencing depictions of violence and raised levels of aggression. On the other hand, there is a clear difference between gratuitous depictions of violence and socially useful depictions of violence (i.e., the difference between a slasher movie and a holocaust movie) that that area of scholarship does …

Dialectic, Perspective, And Drama, Ethan Mckay Sproat

Theses and Dissertations

This project is by and large a project of elucidation: it may add something to studies of Kenneth Burke, but I doubt it adds much to Kenneth Burke's studies. This thesis begins and ends with analyses of Burke's famous motto Ad Bellum Purificandum (or Toward the Purification of War). The Introduction focuses on "war" while the Conclusion focuses on "purification." In short, purified war is a dialectical activity which actively and perpetually pits divergent perspectives against each other. Such an activity keeps the conflictual nature of divergent perspectives in verbal and symbolic arenas rather than physical ones. Burke owes this …

Negotiation Through Identification: Elizabeth Tudor's Use Of Sprezzatura In Three Speeches, Alisa Brough

Theses and Dissertations

Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England, weaves the courtier's strategy of sprezzatura throughout her public orations in order to help her identify with her audience of courtiers, scholars, and politicians. Through her use of sprezzatura, Elizabeth woos her audience and transcends the differences of opinion that lead to conflict between the Queen and her audience members. Using Kenneth Burke's theory of rhetoric as identification, this thesis employs rhetorical analysis in order to discover how Queen Elizabeth's use of sprezzatura enables her to portray herself as a humanist scholar, a political servant, and a dedicated defender of her country and thus, identify …

Educating For Democracy: Reviving Rhetoric In The General Education Curriculum, David M. Stock

Theses and Dissertations

This study is, in part, a response to arguments that claim higher education fails to prepare students with fundamental communication skills necessary for everyday life and indicative of "educated" persons. Though the validity of such arguments is contestable, they nonetheless reflect fundamental inadequacies in current educational theories and practices that have evolved over centuries of curricular, cultural, and socioeconomic change. Current theories and practices in higher education, specifically general education, reflect a misunderstanding of both the purpose of education in a democracy and the role of the liberal arts, specifically rhetoric, in accomplishing that purpose. The consequences of rhetorically-impoverished general …

The Valuation Of Literature: Triangulating The Rhetorical With The Economic Metaphor, Melissa Brown Gustafson

Theses and Dissertations

Several theorists, including the Marxist theorists Trevor Ross, Walter Benjamin, and M.H. Abrams, have proposed theories to explain the eighteenth-century shift from functional to aesthetic conceptions of literature. Their explanations attribute the change to an increasingly consumer-based society (and the resulting commoditization of books), the development of the press, the rise of the middle class, and increased access to books. When we apply the cause-effect relationships which these theorists propose to the contexts of nineteenth-century America, Communist East Germany, WWII America, and 9/11 America, however, the causes don't correlate with the effects they theoretically predict. This disjunction suggests a re-examination …

Philip Morris Faces "The Truth": A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Persuasiveness Of Two Teen-Targeted Anti-Smoking Advertising Campaigns, Marybeth Mcmurray

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the persuasiveness of anti-smoking television advertisements aimed at teens and produced by Philip Morris's Youth Smoking Prevention Program and the American Legacy Foundation's truth campaign. The advertisements are analyzed rhetorically using Kenneth Burke's dramatistic approach, supplemented by theory related to persuasive advertising, characteristics of at-risk adolescents, persuasive attack, and persuasive defense (apologia).

The analysis indicates that strong central themes present in both the Philip Morris and truth campaigns act as a means of rhetorical persuasion, but are not necessarily rhetoric designed to persuade adolescents not to smoke cigarettes. The truth campaign advertisements contain both strengths and weaknesses. …

A Burkean Logological Analysis Of Doctrine And Covenants Section 88, Joann Farias

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis applies Kenneth Burke's method of logology as exemplified in The Rhetoric of Religion to analyze the Mormon text Doctrine and Covenants Section 88. This method of logology is based on the assumption that what is said about God in theology reveals a religion's use of language to influence human motives. The logological method uses six analogies to discover the motives implicit in religious terminologies. These six analogies are as follows: words-Word, Matter-Spirit, the Negative, the Titular, Time-Eternity, and the Formal.

This study revealed that the terminology contained in Doctrine and Covenants uses motives far diferent from the motives …