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Systemic Noise: Investigating The Posthuman Rhetorical Movement Of"You Did N'T Build That", Maclain Bernabei Scott
Systemic Noise: Investigating The Posthuman Rhetorical Movement Of"You Did N'T Build That", Maclain Bernabei Scott
Theses and Dissertations
While campaigning for reelection in 2012, President Barack Obama gave a speech in which he uttered the sentence “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” In the aftermath of the speech, the phrase “you didn’t build that” circulated widely in political discourse, generating a variety of responses from campaigns and commentators as to what the phrase means. This thesis uses a posthuman rhetorical framework to investigate how “you didn’t build that” influenced and was transformed by political discourse systems. Specifically, I synthesize scholarship on complex systems, enthymeme, and new materialism to argue that the ambiguity of the phrase …
Building Complexity, One Stability At A Time: Rethinking Stubbornness In Public Rhetorics And Writing Studies, Chris Mays
Theses and Dissertations
In deliberative argument, in political discourse, in teaching, and in casual conversation, as rhetors we often hope that our attempts at interaction will have some effect on the participants in these discursive environments. The phenomena of stubbornness, however, would seem to suggest that, despite our efforts, there are times when rhetoric just doesn't work. This dissertation complicates this premise, and in so doing complicates common understandings of both stubbornness and rhetorical effect. As I argue, rhetorical effects exist within a complex rhetoric system, within which they circulate and are interconnected with a diversity of other rhetorical and non-rhetorical elements. …