Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Moore Of Feminine Style: A Rhetorical Examination Of "Wednesdays With Beth", Terrie Meeks

Masters Theses

Beth Moore is a best-selling author of books and Bible studies, a speaker to crowds that fill places like the Georgia Super Dome, as well as an international speaker, a radio and television personality, and she is achieving this milestone as a woman, in a world lit with male stars. Through all of these venues it is estimated that Moore speaks to hundreds of thousands of people each year. One of Moore's most recent ventures is speaking on Life Today with James and Betty Robison. Each week features an episode of "Wednesdays with Beth." Using Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's theory of …

The Risks And Rewards Of Personal Writing In The High School Classroom, Dannette L. Williamson

Masters Theses

In light of the Common Core State Standards, more research is needed on the importance and transfer value of personal writing high school classrooms. These standards have brought a more rigorous focus to student learning. With a stronger emphasis on argument and source-based writing, high school educators need to reexamine if or how personal writing should fit into curricula. For this study, approximately thirty students from each grade at Effingham High School were surveyed. The entire English department, as well as staff members from other disciplines at Effingham High School, were also surveyed. Prominent findings of the data show that …

Reuniting Old Allies: A Case For Creative Composition, Stephen M. Jefferies

Masters Theses

Since the split between creative writing and composition that largely occurred in the late 1920s, the two departments have wrestled with boundaries that have defined and challenged both courses. Despite the occasionally contentious relationship between creative writing and composition/rhetoric scholars, the two disciplines have served as strong allies in the past. "Reuniting Old Allies" argues that returning to such an alliance could provide a fruitful, blended approach to writing.

This thesis traces the history of this schism from Aristotle to the modern English department, attempting to reconcile the two departments with a middle-ground approach called critical-creative composition that emphasizes the …

Dish And Pot: Scatology And Liminal Space In Samuel Beckett, Keegan Bradford

Masters Theses

In the final novel of Samuel Beckett's trilogy, The Unnamable, the eponymous main character whose monologues, musings, and diatribes comprise the entirety of the work bemoans his inability to harness the communicable properties of language: "...it's like shit, there we have it at last, there it is at last, the right word, one has only to seek, seek in vain, to be sure of finding in the end, it's a question of elimination" (Three Novels 368). Beckett's work is consumed with this question of elimination. In this sense, language is parallel to scat in Beckett's work. Beckett's absurd language, circular …

No Greater Love: Recognition, Transformation, And Friendship In The Harry Potter Series, Stephen Parish

Masters Theses

Nobody today doubts the momentous influence the Harry Potter series has had on a generation of readers. Many scholars and critics assume Harry's place amongst other great works of children's literature, and indeed the series has brought about a revival in children's literature scholarship. Despite this popularity, many critics question the series' aesthetics, its attention to moral demeanor. Therefore, what element exists in Harry Potter that could enforce its aesthetic quality? Based on a rhetorical reading of the texts, my thesis upholds the aesthetic nature of the books through an analysis of the trio's friendship and and its impact on …

"Petticoat Gunboats": The Wartime Expansion Of Confederate Women's Discursive Opportunities Through Ladies' Gunboat Societies, Cara Vandergriff

Masters Theses

This study represents a feminist historiographical recovery of the discursive practices of Confederate women in Ladies' Gunboat Societies in the Civil War South, with particular attention to the rhetoric of club formation, epistolary writing, and networking through national newspapers. A turn toward an examination of process-oriented rhetoric as supported in the work of Andrea Lunsford and Robin Jensen provides a robust framework for the methodology of recovery of non-traditional rhetorical texts in this project. As we explore these process-oriented texts, we discover the material motives Confederate women had for contributing to the war effort in an unprecedented way: the construction …

Life Inside The Spectacle: David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, And Storytelling In The Age Of Entertainment, John Hawkins

Masters Theses

This project explores George Saunders's In Persuasion Nation and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest as interventionary literature. The thesis asserts that the two works confront the problems of isolation and dehumanization created by entertainment-based consumerism; they do so by depicting satirically exaggerated consumer societies and placing well-developed, sympathetic characters in those settings. The thesis includes a consideration of Jameson and deBord's theories of spectacle and Wallace's stated concerns with postmodern irony as an ineffective form of critique.

Hangin' With Judas: A Narrative Analysis Of Stephen Adly Guirgis's 'The Last Days Of Judas Iscariot', Constance Falconer

Masters Theses

Stephen Adly Guirgis has created an era-melting play, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, which explores the timeless debate between divine mercy and free will. A systematic application of Walter R. Fisher's narrative analysis, through form identification and a functional analysis, determined how Guirgis accomplishes persuasion. This qualitative study focused on Guirgis's narrative, using Walter R. Fisher's narrative paradigm as a framework to answer the research question(s): (1) If Guirgis's ideology and created world in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot are foreign and imagined, how is narrative probability and narrative fidelity achieved?; and, (2) How does Guirgis persuade his …

Fifteen Percent Or More: A Content Analysis Of Geico's Commercial Advertising, Paul Davis

Masters Theses

In this media saturated world which is lived in today, the general public is bombarded by a multitude of advertisements. This thesis was conducted to examine Geico's commercial advertising looking specifically at their use of humor. The Elaboration Likelihood Model and the Humorous Message Taxonomy were used to conduct this content analysis. The research examined the route of persuasion and elaboration that were used in 60 Geico commercials from five of their most recent campaigns. The Humorous Message Taxonomy helped to establish which types of humor were being used along with the processes and relationship between elements. Three research questions …

"It's Just That For The First Time, I Feel... Wicked": A Rhetorical Analysis Of Wicked's Elphaba Using Kenneth Burke's Guilt-Purification-Redemption Cycle, Patricia Foreman

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine the Broadway production, Wicked, and more specifically, the character of Elphaba, or the Wicked Witch of the West. The study utilized Kenneth Burke's theory of the guilt-purification-redemption cycle, and considered Elphaba's journey between the three steps of Burke's cycle. In order to understand this journey better, the researcher considered various facets of the show, including the script, lyrics, costuming, including attire and make-up, and interactions with other characters in the production. Elphaba's causes of guilt, including her mother's death, her relationship with Glinda, her cause in working with Animals, and failed magic …

Refresh. Create. Inspire. The Mission, Vision And Values Behind The Coca-Cola Company And The Digital Marketing Strategies Of The "Open Happiness" Campaign, Sara Svendsen

Masters Theses

Due to the influence of Coca-Cola on advertising, digital marketing, and marketing strategies, the present rhetorical analysis seeks to show the many aspects of digital media in the Company's present "Open Happiness" campaign. The study of the campaign seeks to show that the Company mission statement, Company values and the vision of The Coca-Cola Company are implemented into all of the different facets of the Open Happiness campaign, and in the context of Mood Management Theory, exude the overall theme of the campaign, happiness. The parts of the campaign that were analyzed were focused on the YouTube channels of The …

Disease, War, And Famine In The Sudan And Haiti: A Crisis Noticed And A Crisis Ignored, Melissa Whalen

Masters Theses

The media acts as a gatekeeper and decides what material to cover and what not to cover. In order to better understand why one disaster receives media coverage and another crisis is virtually unnoticed by the media, the motives behind covering one story over another is analyzed in this study. Three major American newspaper articles concerning the Haitian earthquake and the crisis in Darfur are examined in order to discover the media's motives for covering Haiti over Darfur.

Upvoting The Audience: A Burkean Analysis Of Reddit, Doug Urbanski

Masters Theses

My thesis examines the Internet community Reddit through the rhetorical framework of Kenneth Burke, specifically his work with identification between individuals and how identification shapes communities. I focused on three sections of Reddit: World News, Ask Reddit, and Politics, and analyzed the best-voted comments of top posts from each section, focusing on how anonymous users communicate with one another and how their anonymity might influence the ways they interact. Additionally, I propose a method for instructors to use Reddit in the classroom, taking advantage of the medium's systematic anonymity.

Daniel Hannan, Thomas Paine, And The Rhetoric Of Outrage, Danae Brack

Masters Theses

The purpose of this rhetorical study is to examine the textual charisma of Thomas Paine's Common Sense and Daniel Hannan's speech "The Devalued Prime Minister of a Devalued Government" and how that charisma made these artifacts successful in spreading outrage surrounding the historical and political events of their respective eras. The author uses Weber's theory of charisma filtered through Rosenberg and Hirschberg's expanded theory identifying lexical charisma, or the charisma of messages. The author analyzes Paine's and Hannan's use of persuasiveness, believability, and powerfulness, translating each of these characteristics into specific cues that can be identified in the individual texts. …

Teach For America Teachers' Blogs On Teaching, Samantha Nicole Holt

Masters Theses

In 1989, Princeton University senior Wendy Kopp conceived the idea of a national teacher corps that would place the brightest young people in the schools that were the most difficult to staff. This idea, which became Teach For America (TFA), took life in 1990, and has since become a powerful force in the public education reform movement. TFA consistently attracts college graduates from the nation’s top universities, and with the funding it receives from private donors as well as the federal government, the organization recruits and trains these individuals who commit to teach in the country’s highest-needs public schools. Critics …

Bridging The Gap: Understanding The Skills And Writing Knowledge Of Entering College Composition Students, Laura Ashley Sceniak

Masters Theses

Given the often-discussed struggles of first-year university students as they learn to write in college, this qualitative interview study was an exploratory investigation of the experiences of five first-year students during their first semester at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The study focused on their experiences in high school and in English 101, the first course in the university’s two-semester first-year composition sequence, which all undergraduates at the university are required to take. This study sought the perspective of these students to answer the questions: (1) What do first-year students in first-year composition classes know about writing, and (2) How …

From A Rodent To A Rhetorician: An Ideological Analysis Of George Alexander Kennedy's Comparative Rhetoric, James Begley

Masters Theses

George Alexander Kennedy, a professor of classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has given birth to a new understanding of rhetorical studies: he argues for the evolution of rhetoric from animals to humans. Using Sonja Foss's methodology of "ideological criticism," this thesis examined Kennedy's case as presented in his book, Comparative Rhetoric: an Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction. This study discovered that the book was heavily influenced by a secular, pro-evolutionary ideology which dually contributed to its selective use of scientific evidences and production of inconsistent arguments. Evaluated on the basis of Biblical principles, this thesis concluded …

You Sir Are A Fine Young Gentleman. Thank You, My Lady: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Eighteenth Century Conversations Regarding Gentility And Gender, Kati Overbey

Masters Theses

This study rhetorically analyzed the eighteenth century work of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison's The Spectator and Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator using Kathleen Turner's framework for rhetorical history as social criticism integrating text and context. Ten essays from The Spectator as well as ten essays from The Female Spectator were selected based on content and subject matter regarding manners and gentility. When Turner's framework for analysis was applied to the essays, defining characteristics of gentility were revealed. A presentation of the results of the textual and contextual analysis of these twenty selected essays is provided. An analysis of the …

The Significance Of Silence: The Muted Voices Of Count Fosco And Laura Fairlie In The Woman In White, Melanie Page

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the intricacies of voice using narrative theory and reader-response theory with Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White. Since Collins first wrote this epistolary novel serially, he wrote aware of his audience as he printed segments with different narrators. This novel allowed Collins the opportunity to reveal an internal set of narrators' responses to other characters' voices--responses that sometimes conflict with and modify one another. At the same time, Collins' contemporary audience's responses to the novel reveal the role of characters' voices in shaping reactions of members of the novel's reading public. Two opposing figures--Laura Fairlie and Count …

Student-Consultant Continuum: Incorporating Writing Center Techniques Of Peer Review Into The Composition Classroom, Maria Lynn Soriano

Masters Theses

Peer collaboration about writing often functions as a required step in the writing processes of first-year writing students. Within the composition classroom, students read and respond to the writing of their peers, sometimes obtaining useful feedback, and sometimes just getting “You did a good job” as an evaluation. Outside of the classroom, the Writing Center exists as a space where students can work with a trained consultant to receive helpful suggestions and a thorough evaluation of their writing. Though the first-year writing classroom and the Writing Center exist as physically separate places, both rely on principles of collaboration and conversation …

Subsemy: Using Subversion To Create Multiple Meanings In Rhetorical Texts, Kane Madison Click

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on the use of subversion to create multiple meanings in rhetorical texts. Subversion, an element focused on by Fiske (1986, 1987) and McKerrow (1988) in their early contributions to the rhetorical study of multiple meaning texts, has been an ongoing lacunae in the study of polysemic texts. I wish to provide a correction to this problem by offering the concept of subsemy. By examining the role of strategic ambiguity and irony in the functioning of subversion, the concept of subsemy provides a missing picture of how popular cultural texts, film in particular, can function subversively.

African-American Life Writing: Harriet Jacobs And Bell Hooks, Luo Yi

Masters Theses

Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and bell hooks' Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood share a common concern with emancipation and employ complementary rhetorical strategies. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl presents Harriet Jacobs' journey of personal self-discovery through various relationships with others, and her personal narrative finally serves the larger goal of emancipation for her people. Jacobs' narrative is full of other voices, or personae. Even the narrator, Linda Brent, is pseudonymous, or "other," in this sense. Jacobs invokes these personae in her autobiography; she explores her experiences as a web of …

Integrating Student Expectations Into Writing Center Theory And Practice, Mary J. Bonevelle

Masters Theses

When students go to a writing center to be tutored, they expect a certain type of instruction based on their prior experiences. Many students are perplexed to find that the parameters of writing center instruction are quite different than they anticipated. The resulting conflict between student expectations and actual center methods often induces tensions which can impede the effectiveness tutorial instruction. This thesis explores the basis of student expectations, strategies for addressing student expectations in practice, and the importance of acknowledging these expectations in writing center theory.

Chapter 1 discusses the incongruous relationship between writing center theory and practice and …

Computer Assisted Instruction And The Basic Writer, Kathy Ford

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Children Learning To Write: A Progression Through Predictable Stages, Shirley D. Vestal

Masters Theses

A first-grade teacher documents her students' progression through predictable stages as they learn to write: distinct units of scribbling and/or ground line and profile in drawing, letters, words, sentences, story structure (character, setting, problem, solving the problem, and ending the story/telling how the characters felt), and conventions (capital letters, punctuation, and conventional spelling).

Criteria based on readability at each stage by a knowledgeable and sensitive reader are an important aspect of this study.

The class writes every day using a five-day story format:

Day One: Character Pink paper

Day Two: Setting Blue paper

Day Three: Problem Yellow paper

Day Four: …

An Analysis Of Writing Across The Curriculum, M. Katherine Haight

Masters Theses

Between 1900 and 1925 several changes took place which modernized American universities. One of the most significant involved a different curriculum. The new program was, in part, geared toward preparing students for specialized careers. This approach, however, made it possible for teachers outside of English to eliminate writing from their courses and, more generally, to develop distorted and limited views of the uses of writing. Today, Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs are being incorporated into many colleges and universities across the country in an attempt to correct misperceptions and to bring writing back into non-English courses.

WAC stresses the …

Inside Or Outside The Whale: George Orwell's Art And Polemic, Richard H. Walker

Masters Theses

This chronological study of the evolution of the works of George Orwell is helpful for the futurist, the citizen awash in groupthink, scholars of standpoint epistemology, of mind and nature, of radical humanism, and others. A former British officer and Spanish revolutionary, he became a Democratic Socialist who believed in intellectual freedom above all and was a champion of the common man. Described as the leading exemplar of the public intellectual, he focused on activism vs passivism (and pacifism), and transforming art and politics into cultural power with mind and nature as the foundation. Like few others, he understood cultural …

The Rhetoric Of Documentation: Two Approaches, Walt Wisnewski

Masters Theses

In an attempt to clarify how a beginner who has not yet mastered a software program is to learn to use word processing programs, this thesis examines two examples, WordPerfect and W.W. Norton's TEXTRA from the standpoint of their documentation. Software developers have adopted conflicting rhetorical strategies in their documentation: some have sought clear instruction via a rule-based rhetoric with a reliance on jargon-free standard English, and others have pursued an inferential rhetoric. These two strategies parallel two models in modern communications theory: a decoding model and an inferential model. WordPerfect seems to follow a decoding (rule-based) approach and TEXTRA …

Evolution/Creation Debate: A Rhetorical Analysis, James V. Miteff

Masters Theses

During the course of human history, many social issues have come and gone. One argument that caught the writer's eye is the argument about how man came to exist.

Purpose of Study

The purpose of this study is to analyze an evolution/creation debate that took place at Columbus College, Georgia, on May 6, 1981. Evolutionary theory was supported by Dr. Schwinner, a paleontologist from Columbus College. His partner was Dr. Frazier, a professor of geology at Columbus College. Creation theory was supported by Dr. Henry Morris, President of the Institute for Creation Research, San Diego, and Dr. Slusher, an astronomer …

Tutoring German Esl Students, Sabina Mussgnug

Masters Theses

Tutors of American university writing centers can be invaluable advisors for German ESL students who come to study in the United States. The tutors can directly assist German students in coping with their particular academic and cultural difficulties.

German students must adapt to the American academic conventions to become successful students at their U.S. universities. The tutors can point out to them the features of the American academic standard and show them effective methods for learning and studying in the American environment.

The American academic standard includes the students' almost perfect reading comprehension. Students must be prepared for heavy reading …