Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Braving Shame: The Rhetoric Of Bravery In Contemporary Women's Memoir, Debra Gayle Parker

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation interrogates the rhetoric of bravery as a culturally-infused way of hearing certain kinds of personal narratives. As a cultural rhetoric, “bravery” has deep roots in masculine militaristic ideology in which cowardice, courage, and shame are conceptually linked to a sense of duty. The memoir industry represents one environment that archives what is valued as brave writing. As rhetoric precariously at work in the memoir industry, this dissertation investigates the cultural assumptions that drive literary bravery as it is used to assess contemporary memoirs, particularly memoirs written by women. Braving Shame invokes a new brand of bravery—one that de-emphasizes …

Collective Management In A Cooperative: Problematizing Productivity And Power, Avery Edenfield

Theses and Dissertations

Since the mid-twentieth century, the structure of the workplace has undergone a transformation. While the conventional firm with its rigid bureaucracies is still in use, many businesses have grown increasingly flexible, flat, and polycentric: “empowerment” and “innovation” are the coin of the realm. As the way we work changed, professional communication scholarship pivoted to consider communication practices in these structures.

While professional communication scholars have long discussed these kinds of organizations, they have not discussed an increasingly popular alternative: cooperatives. Owned and operated by the people who use them, these organizations can significantly affect the communities in which they operate. …

Two Strivings: Uplift And Identity In African American Rhetorical Culture, 1900-1943, Jansen Blake Werner

Theses and Dissertations

During the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century, the notion of “uplift” functioned as a major thematic within African American rhetorical culture. In this milieu, “uplift” generally connoted a sense of collective self-help. However, in contrast to more generalized reform efforts, uplift was expressed as a distinctly intraracial endeavor. That is, rather than overtly leveraging the dominant white society to enact legal or political reforms, uplift typically centered on the ways in which African Americans could enhance the quality of black life independent from white involvement.

Understood as public proposals for how African Americans could employ forms of self-help to …