Digital Commons Network^™

Phronesis And Philosophical Hermeneutics In Rhetoric And Philosophy Of Communication Praxis: A Pastoral Implication, Nichodemus Okafor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The overarching telos of this dissertation is walking the humanities into the marketplace. Its specific purpose is seeking how to enact the praxis of rhetoric and philosophy of communication. In keeping with Calvin Schrag’s “communicative praxis” and Ronald Arnett’s “responsive, learning rhetoric,” this research considers phronesis and philosophical hermeneutics as pragmatic tools of rhetoric and philosophy of communication praxis. It seeks the implication of rhetoric and philosophy of communication praxis in the pastoral field visualized as a marketplace, since the marketplace is not merely a place of capitalism, but a real world where people engage their concrete human condition/existence in …

Neil Postman's Loving Resistance Fighter: A Philosophy Of Communication In The Age Of Technopoly, Ryan Mccullough

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project walks the work of Neil Postman (1931-2003) into the philosophy of communication. Traditional conceptions of Neil Postman’s body of work position his ideas within the traditions of media ecology, general semantics, or, more broadly, as a form of media studies and criticism. In addition, others label Postman’s work, especially in Technopoly (1992), as pessimistic, deterministic, and/or imbibed with Luddite tendencies. This project articulates a different view and contends that Postman’s scholarship, in particular his articulation of the loving resistance fighter in the final chapter of Technopoly, is committed to resisting the nefarious forces embedded in both technology …

A Burkean Analysis Of Eighteenth, Nineteenth, And Twentieth Century Christian Hymns, Keely Hardeman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Hymns are one of the most popular forms of Christian worship, dating back to biblical times. Throughout history, hymns have been a way for people from all backgrounds and beliefs to express themselves in song. Hymnists have based their hymns on scriptures from the Bible, but have also written their hymns based on inspiration from scripture or divine revelation as well as their own earthly experience. To this day, hymns are still very present in both traditional and contemporary places of Christian worship, suggesting they are continually influential to the masses. My analysis looks at how hymns inform Christians’ theological …

Taiwanese Indigenous Representation, Rhetoric Of Resistance, And Heteroglossia In Warriors Of The Rainbow: Seediq Bale., John Yu-Choh Chang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the relationship between Taiwanese indigenous narrative and rhetoric, in textual representations of the Seediq people and the 1930 Musha Incident. It explores how the forced colonization of Taiwanese indigenous people affected their identities and cultural representation, and how multi-voiced forms of narrative, storytelling, and meaning-making have rooted in indigenous oral traditions and rituals that counter colonial representations. Across a range of cultural texts, I identify what I call Taiwanese indigenous rhetoric of resistance (TIRR), drawing on Simon J. Ortiz’s theory of indigenous literature and oral traditions as indigenous-nationalist forms of cultural resistance. In addition, I draw on …

Isocrates's Place In Postmodern Advertising, Christopher Barkley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study in communication and rhetoric seeks to ascertain constructive applications for distinct advertising practices by examining Isocrates’s work and place in postmodern advertising. The focus uses 5 principles known to Isocrates which are: 1) commonwealths of households, 2) integration of reputation, elegance, substance and style, 3) education and public discourse, 4) phronesis and praxis, and 5) truth and verisimilitude. These 5 principles can form a constructive and practical advertising approach. This study is important. It examines Isocrates through the lens of advertising and extends the research done about him by leading Isocrates scholars who have looked primarily at his …

The Construction Of Identity Through Tattoos: A Semiotic And Performative Exploration Of Trauma, Erin Lionberger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this current historical moment, tattoos and tattooing have become a glorified cultural phenomenon that has been thousands of years in the making. The idea that tattoos can be used to express one’s identity is not a new concept — various fields, such as anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology, have studied the relationship between tattoos and identity. In this dissertation, I explore the signification and performative aspects of Auschwitz concentration camp tattoos and 9/11 memorial tattoos, while also considering the changes in meaning and interpretation that occur within and throughout space and time. Chapter one introduces the topic and provides …

The Rhetoric Of Parody And Persona: The Rhetorical Construction Of Donald Trump Through Parody In The 2016 Election, James Lyle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The intent of this dissertation is to explore the rhetorical nature of parody in the context of the American electoral process. This work draws on existing research in the field to show how humor is an important method for engaging the public sphere. This project develops the rhetorical nature of humor, works through existing research on conceptualizations of humor and its importance for societal dialogue, and then addresses the specific contributions to the study of parody offered by Mikhail Bakhtin and Kenneth Burke to demonstrate the potential for parody to act as a form of rhetorical illumination of existing rhetorical …

"Don't Put An 'Or' Where God Puts An 'And'": Constitutive Rhetoric In Queer Appalachia., Brooke Elizabeth Boling

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Appalachians who use the word “queer” to specifically refer to being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and/or asexual, are regularly faced with negotiating how these parts of their identity can exist simultaneously, as many both within and without the region believe it is impossible to be Appalachian and queer at the same time. Despite rampant homophobia in the region and external narratives suggesting that queer Appalachians do not exist, these folkx have carved out spaces for themselves to assert their identities and create community and belonging through rhetorical actions. Many of these spaces are online, taking place through digital …

Communication In The Ruins: Walker Percy And The Art Of Symbolic Mediation, Justin Bonanno

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation proposes to explore the mediating function of the symbol through the work of Walker Percy. In the first chapter, I provide the necessary background for undertaking this project. First, I situate Percy in his historical moment and review key events in his life that helped to shape his philosophy of communication. Second, I sketch out some of the primary coordinates in Percy’s thought. Percy’s hermeneutic of the self requires an understanding of the difference between sign and symbol, dyadic and triadic events, environment and world, and immanence and transcendence. Third, I review some of the key intersections with …

Friendship In The Digital Age: Implications From A Philosophy Of Communication Approach, Tiffany Petricini

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Friendship is a central relationship-style that grounds us. Much of the literature on the effects of technology on our relationships, especially friendship, has taken a skeptical approach. The notion of friendship is historically-situated, thus, it requires attention in each era and has prompted questions throughout human history. Our time is no exception. Changing cultures and redefinitions of basic human institutions have led us to our current moment, in which we are experiencing a loud and continuing debate on the effect of technology on our lives. Advancements in science have allowed us to understand our past and present in new ways. …

Bureaucratic Modernity And The Erosion Of Practical Reason: A Rhetorical Education As An Antidote, David Impellizzeri

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

To what extent and in what ways does modernity reveal itself through the bureaucratic? This project aims at an interpretive understanding of bureaucratic modernity. The rationalization of society and action in the (late) modern world requires that an increasing number of human activities and domains be explained in allegedly neutral, ‘rational’ terms and without reference to morally substantive ends. Ultimately, this entails a form of epistemic reductionism that elevates instrumental rationality to the exclusion of practical reason and probabilistic ways of knowing. Bureaucratic modernity signifies a decrease in choices that can be legitimized in public on some basis other …

A New Materialist Rhetoric: Theorizing Movement From A Rhetorical Ethnography Of Hiking, Bryan Picciotto

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the field of rhetoric, conventional concepts of movement depend on dialectical theories of materiality that posit matter is not rhetorical until acted upon by human sign or symbol systems. New materialist philosophy, which considers the dynamism of matter without situating materiality in dialectical relationship to language, provides a theoretical context for reconceptualizing the rhetoricity of movement. Working from a nondialectical approach to materiality, this dissertation theorizes how movement functions rhetorically, specifically within cultural practices of hiking. For this project, I participated in 15+ hikes at state and national parks in Maine, and generated a multimodal archive of 1,000+ audio, …

"Prejudice": The Impact On Dialogic Communication Ethics, Cyril Latzoo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work seeks to elaborate upon the contributions of dialogic communication ethics to a rhetorical understanding of prejudice. The aim is to address the problematic nature of ethical rhetoric apropos of dialogic communication, arguing that there are contending views in the community of memory, and that prejudice is an integral aspect of dialogic communication ethics. Drawing upon Arnett’s concept of dialogic ethics, I argue that there is need for a “dialogic turn” towards the notion of prejudice in the postmodern era. I begin by looking at Chesebro (1969), Arnett (1987), Johannesen (2001), and Arnett, Arneson and Bell (2006) to advance …

Video Games, Influence, And Identification: The Perpetuation Of Culture Through Digital Worlds, Steven Zwier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Video games, through their widespread popularity and appeal, transmit meaningful ideas, beliefs, and attitudes via the use of digital worlds, narratives, characters, and play. Play has always held a key role in human life, but the video game medium accentuates and accelerates the reach and impact of play on human users. Jacques Ellul’s philosophy of social propaganda and Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory each offer important implications to the persuasiveness of video games; however, when placed in conversation with one another, the union of Ellul and Burke leads to a more complete understanding of how video games have such an effect …

The Ethics Of Occultic Communication: An Invocation Of Joshua Gunn And Sissela Bok, James Thomas Begley Jr.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Occultic rhetoric, according to Joshua Gunn, is a genre of discourse concerned with the study and practice of secret communications. The strategic sharing of secret messages involves a host of methods and conventions designed for the selective disclosure of hidden knowledge, thus controlling the boundaries of (and accessibility to power between) insider and outsider groups. Occultic rhetoric has its uses in everyday encounters, but the abuse of such manipulative strategies, especially by those in the academy and other positions of power and trust, calls for an ethical response. This dissertation submits occultic rhetoric to moral investigation by incorporating the works …

A Praxis Of Oral Homiletics: Preaching From The Heart, Weiwen Tu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Christian preaching has been a central and significant custom to the practitioners of biblically confessional and creedal communities in worship, evangelization, and discipleship. Yet modern preachers confront two challenges presented by the New Homiletic and the media environment. Undue favor toward narrative-based form, audience-oriented eventfulness at the expense of biblical authority, and shifting media that alter the preacher’s identity and incapacitate the preacher’s orality have led to a dissonant handling of form and content and thus a profound decline in the quality of the Christian pulpit.

This project grows out of an attempt to integrate an Augustinian hermeneutic and homiletic, …

A Rhetoric And Philosophy Of Interprofessional Healthcare Education: Communication Ethics In Action, Matthew Corr

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Healthcare professionals belong to a moral community. Caring for patients is a community act carried out by healthcare professionals working in teams within complex political and organizational systems. This teamwork is crucial to quality patient outcomes; however, incivility threatens to derail necessary and effective collaboration towards the common organizational good. Necessarily, interprofessional healthcare education is becoming a required element for pre-health professionals. Currently, schools are using competency-based approaches to interprofessional education to teach ethics/values, roles/responsibilities. communication, and teamwork. For reasons explicated throughout this dissertation, the categorizing of these particular elements as competencies is problematic and cultivated within a positivistic and …

Remaking Identities, Reworking Graduate Study : Stories From First-Generation-To-College Rhetoric And Composition Phd Students On Navigating The Doctorate., Ashanka Kumari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation responds to the decreasing number of first-generation-to-college doctorates in the humanities and the limited scholarship on graduate students in Rhetoric and Composition. Scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have long been invested in discussions of academic and/or disciplinary enculturation, yet these discussions primarily focus on undergraduate students, with few studies on graduate students and far fewer on the doctoral students training to become the next wave of a profession. In this dissertation, I argue that if we engage intersectional identities as assets in the design of doctoral programs, access to higher education and academic enculturation can become more manageable …

Four Phases Of Subjectivity: A Rhetorical And Phenomenological Analysis Of Aimé Césaire And Cahier D’Un Retour Au Pays Natal, Chelsea Binnie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation project sets out to perform a rhetorical and phenomenological analysis of the subjectivity that Césaire portrays in his epic poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, or Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. Césaire published and republished Cahier four times in a 17-year period and the modified accounts of subjectivity presented in the lines of the poem mirrors that of Césaire’s own human subjectivity. Césaire poetically unleashes Cahier and his Négritude project in an effort to shift the geography of reason from its self-appointed European center, to create a liminal space for the totalized …

How To Avoid Becoming The Accomplice To Your Own Murderers: Reading James Baldwin As A Critical Pedagogue, Breana Shrease Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

James Baldwin is a well-known author and activist in American literature. He had long been a champion of civil rights, using his platform to speak about the iniquities and issues affecting black people in America. Though his work is read often in literary circles, his writing could serve to supplement the field of critical pedagogy with Rhetoric and Composition. Paulo Freire, the conceiver of critical pedagogy through his foundational text Pedagogy of the Oppressed, identified the pitfalls of educational systems that see teachers as knowledge-givers and students as knowledge receptacles based on his experiences teaching illiterate adults in Brazil under …

Attaining Scientific Literacy Through A Rhetoric Of Science Composition Pedagogy, Stephen C. Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For the past sixty years, acquiring scientific literacy has proven to be a daunting task in education, especially for undergraduate nonscience majors. Although some education scholars have recognized the importance and use of arguments to teach science, these pedagogical practices often are aimed at primary school children rather than college students or involve reporting science experiments rather than actually studying or constructing arguments about issues related to science.However, in this dissertation, I contend that educators often neglect a more available tool that not only examines arguments concerning scientific issues but also demonstrates the very heart of scientific literacy: critical thinking. …

Articulating The New Normal(S) : Mental Disability, Medical Discourse, And Rhetorical Action., Andrew Wesley Holladay

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“Articulating the New Normal(s): Mental Disability, Medical Discourse, and Rhetorical Action” studies the writing of people diagnosed with autism and post- traumatic stress disorder within online discussion boards related to mental health and outlines their unique rhetorical strategies for interacting with biomedical ideologies of psychiatry and activist discourses. The opening chapter situates this dissertation in relation to previous scholarship in Rhetoric, Disability Studies, and other fields. I also provide a summary of the set of mixed methods I use to gather and analyze my data, including rhetorical analysis, corpus analysis, and qualitative interviews. In Chapter 2, “Medical Terminology and Discourse …

Grassroots Diplomacy And Vernacular Law: The Discourse Of Food Sovereignty In Maine, John Welton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the discourse of food sovereignty in Maine, a coalition of small-scale farmers, consumers, and citizens building an alternative food system based on a distributed form of production, processing, selling, purchasing, and consumption. This distribution occurs at the municipal level through the enactment of ordinances. Using critical-rhetorical field methods, I argue that the discourse of food sovereignty in Maine develops a ‘constitutive’ rhetoric that composes rural society through affective relationships. Advocates engage the industrial food system to both expose its systemic bias against small-scale farming and construct their own discourse of belonging. Based upon agrarian values such as …

From Impressionism To Impressions: Intertextuality, Rhetoric, And Signifyin' In John Coltrane's Impressions, Jeremy Noel Grall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Often the term improvisation gives the impression that the music spontaneously materializes from nothing; however, how spontaneous is it really? David Borgo aptly characterizes this conundrum, "To improvise requires the capacity to act, and, for it to mean anything at all it must surely be 'about' something, a common definition of intentionality." Jean-Jacques Nattiez's Discourse on Musicdiscusses this intent and its place within a larger societal context through his adaptation of Molino's tripartition. This is a process in which our broader aesthetic valuation of style influences our creativity and is reflected in a tangible piece of music, which is then …

Kenneth Burke's Adolescence, 1915-1920: An Archival Study Of Influence, William Ernest Schraufnagel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation applies the method of influence studies to the archive of communication theorist Kenneth Burke (1897-1993) between the years 1915-1920. During this time, Burke was influenced by British and French aesthetic writers along with some philosophy and the writings of Cicero. As he was not conventionally trained in an academic discipline, this study shows how Burke’s theory of communication began to emerge from these disparate strands.The strongest influence on Burke during this time was the novel Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater. As Harold Bloom’s theory of influence teaches, strong writers such as Burke “misread,” or willfully distort, their …

It’S About ‘That Time’ To Break The Cycle: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Challenging Menstrual Taboos, Audrey Marie Lamborn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Menstrual taboos exist around the world, and while new conversations are starting to address these issues, in many regions these taboos limit women’s daily lives and can even lead to serious health problems. Artifacts around the world are starting to emerge to challenge these preconceived notions and bring menstrual hygiene awareness as well as products to women in need. While the origination of the menstrual taboo is not clearly defined, various literature discusses both the cultural and religious origin and perpetuation of menstrual taboos. This thesis examines various artifacts found in the regions of the United States and the United …

Outsourcing Our Memory 2.0: Using Walter Ong's Orality/Literacy Studies To Recognize Technologies Effects On Memory, Rishi Raj Bahl

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

At the heart of media ecology is the principle that technology not only deeply influences society, but also controls most aspects of daily life. Additionally, media ecology investigates how media and communication processes profoundly affect human perception and understanding. The pervasive role that technology plays in modern life today has exacerbated the results of technology on human beings. Some of these outcomes are not desirable and may be a hindrance to the progress of our society. This dissertation takes particular interest in the multifaceted consequences that the overuse of technology imposes on our ability to fully utilize our memory.

In …

"If This Stuff Matters, Why Isn't It Being Shared?" : Citations, Hyperlinks, And Potential Public Futures Of Online Writing In Rhetoric And Composition., Elizabeth Frances Bergeron Chamberlain

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation addresses two deceptively discrete questions: (1) how academics might reach wider public audiences, and (2) how and why people cite the way they do. It takes citation practices as a telling though often tacit practice, one through which it is possible trace the contours of a larger story about how writing is changing as it moves online. That story: Writers increasingly reflect goals of provocation, of attracting a wider and potentially global audience, of spreading a message rapidly and virally, of responding to recent events and conversations, of sharing sources and resources. To explore these questions, this dissertation …

Your Face Betrays You: A Fantasy Theme Analysis Of Lie To Me, Caroline Campbell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research concerning the consequences of edutainment has revealed that television shows have the capability to influence audience members. As the lines between education and entertainment are becoming increasingly blurred, viewers may not be aware of how watching such shows impacts them. Lie to Me is a popular edutainment television series that educates viewers about the power of micro expressions. Ekman has dedicated a large part of his life to the development of research related to micro expressions. The show’s main character, Cal Lightman, portrayed Paul Ekman’s special talents and knowledge through his ability to detect micro expressions. The first three …

Imc: Its Rhetorical And Philosophical Foundation And Impact, Allison Raemore Peiritsch

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A review of current integrated marketing communication (IMC) literature indicates that IMC has swept the globe. IMC has become the normative marketing practice for organizations to promote their goods and services, as well as an increasingly popular area of academic study. At the same time, literature shows inconsistency in IMC's professional practice and academic instruction. An increasing number of IMC theorists suggest that "true" IMC involves reorienting an organization to become consumer-focused and responsive at every level. This broader vision for IMC points to the discipline's communicative underpinnings. It is dialogic, other-oriented and interpretive in nature, yet most organizations and …