Digital Commons Network^™

A Rhetoric Of Change: Church Growth And Social Change At The Richmond Outreach Center, Rebekah Holbrook

Theses and Dissertations

The Richmond Outreach Center “The ROC” is an independent soulwinning megachurch in Richmond, Virginia. This thesis explores how rhetoric plays a role in the rapid growth of this urban church and considers the church’s response—rhetorically and politically—to the city’s social issues. Through a rhetorical analysis of sermons and written texts by Geronimo Aguilar, the ROC’s founder and pastor, it is concluded that Aguilar has generated a rhetoric of change that says social change must come to Richmond and that everyone, both rich and poor, are responsible for change. Aguilar galvanizes an audience to seek social change because he articulates roles …

Rhetorical Problems And Cinematic Solutions: The Visual Arguments Of The 'Obama Infomercial', Bryan Ricke

All Theses

Most Americans remember the outcome of the presidential election on November 2nd, 2008, and the intense media coverage of the entire campaign. Just three nights before Election Day, the Barack Obama campaign purchased primetime air slots on seven major broadcast and cable stations across the country to air a 30-minute 'infomercial' entitled
American Stories: American Solutions. This thesis looks at this television program with a specific focus not on the verbal message of American Stories: American Solutions, but on how this message is framed through cinematography. The thesis first explores research in the fields of rhetoric, film, politics, and race, …

Designing For Cultural Diversity: Participatory Design, Immigrant Women And Shared Creativity, Naureen Mumtaz

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Immigration and multiculturalism are realities of the globalized world that has given rise to subcultures, which possess specialized knowledge. This increasing interaction among people from diverse cultures has produced a complex ethno-cultural mosaic that presents formidable challenges for visual communication designers’ as well as for other designers. Cultural diversity of designers and audience of messages in a design scenario brings complexity in the design research process. This research study explores an effective visual communication language, through the medium of the poster, for culturally diverse audience of immigrant women in Edmonton, Canada. The decision was informed by triangulated results from a …

Screen/Writing: Time & Cinematics In An Age Of Rhetorical Memory, Joshua Hilst

All Dissertations

This essay argues that part of memory is external to ourselves. This memory, which began with writing but has since grown to encompass digital media, the internet, and other forms of new media, faces a two-fold problem in the information age. The first is privatization, which is represented by copyright, and has heretofore received a greater share of scholarly attention. Regulation is represented through the concept of protocols, which are the rules digital media execute in order to perform functions. Protocols are a regulation of external memory, which I argue also represents a threat to deliberation, the form of rhetoric …

Making Rhetorical Scents: An Olfactory Grammar Of Motives Based On Kenneth Burke's Pentad, Janet Miller

All Theses

Scent is inherently persuasive, but the language of scent is largely missing from rhetoric's vocabulary. This is because language cannot express the 'truth' of an odor. Identification of odor as substance is dependent on consubstantiality between the author and reader. We instead describe smells using metaphorical language, or by invoking episodic memories and emotional reactions. In this way, scent is dramatistic. In order to consider the possibility of a grammar of scent beyond metaphor, the author develops an olfactory pentad (Sniff, Context, Emanation, Odor Object, and Response) by applying the framework of Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad. In this way, scent …

Enregistering Style, Barbara Johnstone

Barbara Johnstone

No abstract provided.

Movement Without Motion: The Rhetoric Of Conservative Counter-Claims To Global Warming Theory, William Edwards

Theses and Dissertations

Many U.S. conservatives view government mandates to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases as a threat to the economy of the developed world. Conservative think tanks have adopted a common rhetoric to instill doubt about proposed mandates in the minds of elected officials, the media, and the public. Using a survey of the websites of 14 conservative think tanks, this thesis analyzes counter-claims to global warming theory to identify rhetorical artifacts that typically characterize conservative responses to issues, and to show how rhetorical theory can help anticipate the nature of such responses. The research identifies unifying speech codes – such as …

A Burkeian Analysis Of The Embryo In The Congressional Debate Over Federally Funding Embryonic Stem Cell Research (1998-2001), Sharese Willis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract Willis, Sharese. Ph.D. The University of Memphis. May 2010. A Burkeian Analysis of the Embryo in the Congressional Debate over Federally Funding Embryonic Stem Cell Research (1998-2001). Major Professor: Loel Kim, Ph.D.Debates about publicly funded science research have attracted the interest of various types of stakeholders who use different strategies to argue their positions. The more scientists use human biological material as their focus of study, the more nonscientists call for and participate in debate about such research. In this dissertation, I study the debate about embryonic stem cell research by analyzing transcripts from Congressional hearings held from 1998 …

The Speaking Christ: Gesture In Early Netherlandish Art, Allison Catherine Dilliard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT Dilliard, Allison Catherine. M.A. The University of Memphis. May 2010. The Speaking Christ: Gesture in Early Netherlandish Art. Major Professor: Todd Richardson, Ph.D. By the late medieval period, certain compositions and motifs became standard practice when representing Christ with Mary, such as his performing a gesture of blessing. In three fifteenth-century Netherlandish works, of which two are attributed to the Robert Campin Group and one to Rogier van der Weyden, a gesture that is not in keeping with the more traditional motifs is employed by Christ. In this thesis, based on an iconological and semiotic approach, I argue that …

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. …

Feminist, Linguistic, And Rhetorical Perspectives On Language Reform, William Dorner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As people become aware that society treats women unfairly, they also perceive related shortcomings in the way that Modern English references women. For example, many have objected to the so-called generic he, the third-person masculine pronoun employed to refer to a person of unknown gender, and provided several alternatives, few of which have been widely adopted. Nonetheless, change is evident in the case of they becoming an increasingly common solution to refer to a person of unidentified gender. The intentional reform of the Modern English language, both in the past and present, has been a result of people's reactions to …

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 …

Studying And Teaching "Law As Rhetoric": A Place To Stand, Linda L. Berger

Linda L. Berger

This article proposes that law students may find a better fit within the legal culture of argument if they are introduced to rhetorical alternatives to counter narrowly formalist and realist perspectives on how the law works and how judges decide cases. The article makes a two-part argument: first, introducing law students to rhetorical alternatives allows them to envision their role as lawyers as constructive, effective, and imaginative while grounded in law, language, and reason. Second, offering rhetorical alternatives allows law professors to enrich their own study and teaching and to develop a more nuanced understanding of the law school classroom …

A Revolution In Rhetoric: Recycling The Language Of Control Through Rhetorical Activism, Jerien Elizabeth Rausch

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The English language, with its infinite space and possibility, is and can be recycled to recreate authority of voice and representations of the past. Where once language was used for creating and maintaining colonial control, now, with its careful study and critical (re)applications through fictions written as alternative versions of colonial events, it can be a source of power for the reclamations of identity, culture, religion, history, story, context, and imagination. This study (re)examines an iconic exploration and colonial narrative to highlight the rhetoric used to capture and create Indigenous Peoples and places. Additionally, this study explores how works of …

Fighting The Good Fight : The Missional Use Of Militant Language, David Mark Durst

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Recovering Brande : Freewriting And Sustainable (Procedural) Expression, Richard Bower

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Dorothea Brande is rarely known in rhetoric and composition yet continues to hold popular influence over writers attracted to Cartesian beliefs. The aim of this project is to recover Brande's contributions in order to rethink composition's trajectories. Chiefly, Dorothea Brande's legacy has been in creative writing through Becoming a Writer. In this bestseller, she establishes a program for putting the Cartesian divide to work. "Writing with the unconscious mind in the ascent," as Brande explains about what Ken Macrorie and Peter Elbow later call freewriting, harnesses the bifurcated consciousness of writers and begins a journey of unification.

Perelman's Theory Of Argumentation And Natural Law, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

Chaim Perelman resuscitated the rhetorical tradition by developing an elegant and detailed theory of argumentation. Rejecting the single-minded Cartesian focus on rational truth, Perelman recovered the ancient wisdom that we can argue reasonably about matters that admit only of probability. From this one would conclude that Perelman’s argumentation theory is inalterably opposed to natural law, and therefore that I would have done better to have written an article titled “Perelman’s Th eory of Argumentation as a Rejection of Natural Law.”

However, my thesis is precisely that Perelman’s theory of argumentation connects to the natural law tradition in interesting and productive …

Studying And Teaching “Law As Rhetoric”: A Place To Stand, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

This article proposes that law students may find a better fit within the legal culture of argument if they are introduced to rhetorical alternatives to counter narrowly formalist and realist perspectives on how the law works and how judges decide cases. To support this proposal, the article describes and evaluates an upper-level elective course in Law & Rhetoric, which I have offered at two law schools since 2003.

The article makes a two-part argument: first, introducing law students to rhetorical alternatives allows them to envision their role as lawyers as constructive, effective, and imaginative while grounded in law, language, and …

The Past, Presence, And Future Of Legal Writing Scholarship: Rhetoric, Voice, And Community, Linda L. Berger

Linda L. Berger

This Article welcomes a new generation of legal writing scholars. In the first generation, legal writing professors debated whether they should be engaged in legal scholarship at all. In the second generation, assuming that they should be engaged in scholarship, legal writing professors discerned and defined different genres of and topics for the scholarship in which some or all of us were or should be engaged. In this Article, we map the contours of a third generation of legal writing scholarship—one that integrates the elements of our professional lives and engages more effectively with our professional communities. The core of …