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Identification Through Inhabitation In Literature, Film, And Video Games, Charlotte Palfreyman Smith Jun 2012

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 May 2012

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 Apr 2012

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 …


Burke, Rhetoric And The Doctor: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Doctor Who, Kemp Nishan Muñiz Apr 2012

Burke, Rhetoric And The Doctor: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Doctor Who, Kemp Nishan Muñiz

All Student Theses

This paper performs a rhetorical analysis of the science-fiction program, Doctor Who, using theories from Kenneth Burke. Series Five of the show is analyzed using Burke’s theory of identification, the representative anecdote and the dramatistic pentad. The analysis with identification theory exemplifies the show’s ability to create identification with the audience that, in turn, drives the audience to watch. While the identification connects the audience to the show, the pentad explains how the characters of the show are driven by a pursuit of idealistic humanism rooted in individuality. The final analysis demonstrates that the program embraces more of a representative …


Indexing And Dialectical Transcendence: Kenneth Burke's Critical Method, David Erland Isaksen Mar 2012

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 …


The Rhetoric Of Evidence In Recent Documentary Film And Video, Steven W. Schoen Jan 2012

The Rhetoric Of Evidence In Recent Documentary Film And Video, Steven W. Schoen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Documentary is a genre of film that portrays "real" events using depictions that connote the objectivity and facticity implied by the processes of photorealism. Many contemporary documentary theorists and critics observe a constitutive problem in this ethos: despite the apparent constructions and agendas of documentary filmmaking, the framing and assumption of documentary as a window on the world tend to naturalize its own constructions as "real." Critics who engage documentary trace the multitude of ways this problem plays out in particular films. These projects yield many important insights, but they most often approach documentary as a form of inherently deficient …