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Removing The Mask Of Comedy To Reveal The Person Beneath: A Rhetorical Analysis Of How Three Comedians Engage In, And Go Beyond, The Post-Comedy Turn, Steve Ingham

Wayne State University Dissertations

From court jesters to lounge performers, the ‘Chitlin’ Circuit’ to vaudeville, radio to Netflix, the goal of comedy has been the same: use a comic frame to make the audience laugh. However, some modern comedians have altered that paradigm, including purposefully non-comedic material in their stand-up specials. While other comedians have done this before, they did so as an addendum to the narrative of their special, not as an integral part of that narrative. In this project, I engaged in a rhetorical analysis of three modern comedians, through the lens of humor theory, as they included purposefully non-comedic material, engaging …

Constitutive Memories Of City Space: Rhetorics Of Civil Rights Memory In Detroit’S Urban Landscape, Scott Mitchell

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines public memories of civil rights injustice and resistance as constitutive rhetorics of urban culture and spatiality for the city of Detroit. By studying the city of Detroit as it navigates an ongoing period of dramatic change and redevelopment, this study demonstrates how material manifestations of memory become the constitutive forces that define what many describe as “Detroit’s heart and soul.” This project illustrates the embedded cultural logics produced from sites of public memory, thereby arguing city spaces as locations bound to their legacies and beholden to material and symbolic consequences of their past. This dissertation proceeds through …

Pathetic Politics: An Analysis Of Emotion And Embodiment In First Lady Rhetoric, Stephanie Lynn Wideman

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation explores the theoretical and practical relationship between our understandings of emotion’s role in political decision-making. In this pursuit I seek a resurrection for pathos’s legitimacy in persuasive studies through the pursuit of the pathetic political realm. This work has three primary concerns: how may pathetic power be accessed, from where does this power originate, and how might political actors enact this power for their own political goals. I draw primarily from theories related to visual rhetoric and the body in order to provide perspective on how the body is politicized through the pathetic realm. Theoretical perspectives are drawn …

This Is Us Saying Who We Are: Speaking The Rhetoric Of Mental Disability, Renuka Uthappa

Wayne State University Dissertations

People with mental disabilities, or what are sometimes referred to as “mental illnesses,” face stigma when they interact with the public. To fight this stigma, the members of a small, grassroots, advocacy organization known as the Speakers Bureau travel to high school and college classrooms narrating their experiences with mental disability. They do so to replace culturally circulating stereotypes regarding such disability with more accurate and positive images. This dissertation is an auto-ethnographic exploration of the rhetoric of the Speakers Bureau. Through rhetorical analysis of members’ classroom speeches, of interviews with each speaker, and of the speaker’s self- assessment of …

Politics And Pedagogy: Recuperating Rhetoric And Composition's Native Ethical Tradition, Derek Risse

Wayne State University Dissertations

Over the past decade, scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have shown renewed interest in the topic of ethics, prompting what some have described as an ethical turn in the discipline. Spurred by a deep-seated concern for the legacies of humanism, scholars have turned increasingly to extra-disciplinary referents in continental philosophy. This dissertation works to recuperate the discipline’s native ethical tradition via a critical rereading of the often-implicit treatment of ethics in Composition scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s. Returning to this “critical” moment and emphasizing the rich thinking around the question of ethics provides fuller and more disciplinary-specific resources for …

Public Subjects: Wayne State, Institutional Texts, And Public Rhetoric, Michael Mcginnis

Wayne State University Dissertations

Applying a public sphere approach to Wayne State, I argue that the university has defined itself as a public subject within public debates about race, educational access, and economic development in the city of Detroit, even when such commitments to its local urban public sphere have existed uneasily alongside its ambition to function as a research university with a primary research mission within a wider public sphere of peer research universities. I focus on Wayne State University’s urban mission and open for consideration the ways the university has both expanded and contracted its relationships to its local and academic public …

Interactive Security: The Rhetorical Constitution Of Algorithmic Citizenship In War On Terror Discourse, Avery Henry

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation traces algorithmic citizenship as it is constituted through war on terror discourse. Utilizing Ron Greene’s rhetorical materialism, this project analyzes corporate discourse along with presidential address and policy to map how they interpellate citizens’ subjectivity. Specifically, the dissertation follows George Bush’s presidential rhetoric as he defines the war on terror and invites the public to participate. Then the dissertation examines how the political discourse associated with government 2.0 is also an economic discourse that works to articulate citizenship alongside consumerism. The next chapter follows the presidential rhetoric of Barack Obama as he intensifies the surveillance and war fighting …

Distant Localities: The Rhetorical Contradictions Of Local Food Narratives, Anna Grace Zimmerman

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation explores the rhetorical construction of the local food movement through the narrative genre of the food exposé. On its face, local food appears to be a grassroots movement, and yet, through an analysis of the tropes used to describe and construct the movement, another story emerges – one intended for elite audiences. Using narrative critique, this project explores both the narratives of local food, as well as the deployment of that narrative into the material world and in the construction of particular identities. Ultimately, I argue that the narratives of local food give the impression that this way …

Detroit's Sport Spaces And The Rhetoric Of Consumption, Anthony C. Cavaiani

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation argues how Detroit’s spaces of sport consumption rhetorically configure the city’s identity. Specifically, this project interrogates the city’s sports spaces and argues how they anchor identity in the following ways: through the production of accessible discourses, through the emphasis on certain discourses and the de-emphasis of other discourses, through the regulation, control and biopower of the city’s sports spaces and their rhetorical effect on Detroit’s identity, and through the creation of distinct public memories produced from these discourses.

Commedia: Rhetoric And Technology In The Media Commons, Conor James Shaw-Draves

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the organization of individuals through online social media applications and other community-building websites, such as Facebook, Wikipedia, Google Maps, and online classrooms, using the Aristotelian rhetorical concept of the commonplaces as well as political, critical, and legal theory. Based on these analyses, this dissertation also provides pedagogical recommendations for the teaching of writing with technology in both online and physical classrooms.

A Genealogy Of Ecological Rhetoric: Heraclitus, Bacon, Darwin And Huxley, Jared Grogan

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is a genealogical study of historical intersections between rhetoric and ecology. Studying the works of Heraclitus, Francis Bacon, T.H. Huxley and Darwin as "bridge figures" in the history of rhetoric, science and ecological thought, I examine how their rhetorical theories and strategies (as discursive practices, performances and techniques) form a genealogy that bridges rhetorical and ecological theories and practices. My analysis studies their critical assessments and uses of rhetoric as it intersects with each figure's new investigations into natural philosophy, nature, and evolutionary biology, while drawing out relevant lessons for contemporary ecological and rhetorical thinkers. The main threads …

Re-Imagining Invention (Post)Pedagogy From Ulmer's Electracy To Design, Ruth Elaine Clayman

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is a historical project that traces the development of notable strands of composition pedagogy first crafted by Gregory Ulmer in his 1984 Applied Grammatology that continue to the present day, and groups them together in how they are incorporating multimodal tools in writing instruction that demand innovation in composition instruction. This will demonstrate how the work of certain contemporary composition scholars can be seen as creatively re-working the invention model that was devised and promoted by Ulmer in 1984. Through this history of invention in composition, Ulmer's invention model of writing instruction is clearly seen as both situated …

Without Content: Rhetoric, American Anarchism, And The End(S) Of Radical Politics, Michael John Ristich

Wayne State University Dissertations

My study suggests there is a homology between the Platonic critique of rhetoric and the critique of anarchism made by both Marxism and liberalism. I investigate this problematic by taking up a genealogical examination of anarchism in America that begins with America's founding and concludes with a discussion of the resurgence of populist/anti-Statist rhetoric(s) in the early twenty-first century. In doing so, I argue that anarchism is a politics "without content;" it is a rhetorical politics that challenges the (re)turns to metaphysics and Marxism in the wake of poststructuralist and postmodern thought. Specifically, in light of the contemporary Tea Party …

Recognition Of The Transgender Self: An Examination Of The Apologia Of The 'Pregnant Man', Erika Marie Thomas

Wayne State University Dissertations

In 2008, Thomas Beatie, a legally recognized male, transgender man, became pregnant with his first child and approached the American mass media to tell his story and defend his decisions. Shortly thereafter, the public fought against his image, attempting to normalize his body and gender. Beatie's unique gender blurring, his choice for exposure and social recognition, and the resulting public controversy surrounding the incident makes for an important test case to understand Beatie's discursive and visual strategies directed toward the American public.

This study, a rhetorical examination of the discourse and iconic visual image used by Beatie while his pregnant …

Rhetorical Outcomes: A Genre Analysis Of Student Service-Learning Writing, Thomas Brady Trimble

Wayne State University Dissertations

Service-learning continues to be a popular pedagogical approach within composition studies. Despite a number of studies that document a range of positive impacts on students, faculty, institutions, and community members, the relationship between service-learning and student writing outcomes is not well understood. This study presents the results of a genre analysis of student-authored ethnographies composed in four distinct sections of a service-learning--based intermediate writing course at a Midwestern urban research university. Results of the analysis are then used to develop a contextualized writing assessment framework to evaluate student writing outcomes and to consider the implications of using contemporary genre theory …

Saving The Home Of The Tadpoles One Tree At A Time: A Framing And Pedagogical Analysis Of Wangari Maathai's Green Belt Movement, Anke Thorey Wolbert

Wayne State University Dissertations

While often mistaken for `just' an environmental organization, Kenya's Green Belt Movement (GBM) is engaged in environmental protection, feminism, human rights, education, sustainable development, democratic participation, and peace issues, amongst others. This diverse approach to social change makes it sometimes difficult to place the GBM within current social movement theory. To further our understanding of the GBM's unusual approach, this dissertation examines the framing efforts of the GBM's leader, Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Maathai, as well as the organization's educational practices. Leaning on Entman's (1993) and Kuyper's (2006) definitions of framing, this project analyzes the development of the GBM's frame(s) …

Gender And Race, Online Communities, And Composition Classrooms, Jill Anne Morris

Wayne State University Dissertations

As the culmination of a two-year long Internet ethnographic study of three separate sites, I use examples of women and minorities fighting against discrimination online to explore the power structures inherent to networks and how these might affect classroom practice. I will show how our ordinary assumptions in rhetoric and composition as well as computers and writing about the necessity of safe spaces in fostering communication about gender and race and safety for people of color and women online might actually be harming the rhetorical effectiveness of these writings. To focus this discussion, I will develop three case studies and …

The Intersection Of Image, Rhetoric, And Witnessing: A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Abu Ghraib Prisoner Abuse Scandal, Elizabeth Jane Durham Smith

Wayne State University Dissertations

This project looks at the Abu Ghraib Prisoner Abuse Scandal and the ways those figured in the notorious images were named as "bad apples" to explain the shocking scenes to a mainstream American collective as well as expands more traditional understandings of witnessing through the examination of this complex moment. Beyond the narrowly legal and political issues, the photographs from Abu Ghraib also raise questions about how images of atrocities are received, interpreted, and contested with this project rephrasing the question "what do we see when we look at the images from Abu Ghraib?" to that of "what did we …

An Africentric Reading Protocol: The Speculative Fiction Of Octavia Butler And Tananarive Due, Tonja Lawrence

Wayne State University Dissertations

This examination of Africentric speculative fiction (ASF) applies an Africentric reading protocol to selected works of Octavia E. Butler and Tananarive Due. Butler's Parable Series and Due's African Immortals Series are examined using seven elements of Africentric narrative specific to cultural speculative fiction. Finally, I discuss the implications of using an Africentric reading protocol as an example of cultural analysis that can be adapted to the textual analysis of culturally specific works of fiction.