Rhetoric Commons^™

Prudence And Decorum And The Invention Of American Democracy: An Examination Of The Ratification Debates For The Federal Constitution In 1787-88, Robert Bryan Brito

Wayne State University Dissertations

Abstract

This dissertation examines the ratification debates for the federal constitution in 1787-88. The goal of this project has been to examine the use of the rhetorical strategies of prudence and decorum as they are employed within the debates in Massachusetts, Virginia and New York.

In Massachusetts, classical notions of representation are challenged by the use of binding instructions given to delegates sent to the ratification debates. In addition, Massachusetts federalists had to overcome objections to the proposed constitution based on the system of representation, as well as the absence of a Bill of Rights. Federalists Challenged these views, and …

Flickering Cities: Multimedia City Fabrics And The Changing Nature Of Citizenship, Andrew Geddes Engel

Wayne State University Dissertations

How do the multiple media in cities today cause us to rethink the constructions and locations of our artifacts and their effects on us? In this dissertation, I argue that city artifacts, and by extension cities themselves, exist as multiple iterations scattered across the whole range of the media spectrum. The new persuasive potential of these iterations in their different media necessitate a turn to “post-urban” city fabrics, and these new fabrics are expansion and re-expression of the urban in unexpected media. Therefore, we must work to acknowledge and take advantage of the ways cities “flicker” as their artifacts are …

Reading Between The Numbers: The Colonial Rhetorics Of Fantasy Football And The Illusion Of Control, Robert Kyle Kellam

Wayne State University Dissertations

In this project, I build on existing research in the critical intersection of media, sport, gaming and race to explore how fantasy football, an entertainment byproduct of the National Football League (NFL), rearticulates and recontexualizes the colonial ideology already prolific in the NFL and other products of American media culture. I investigate how fantasy football may represent an innocuous, yet exigent place to study the commodification and consumption of bodies in our contemporary media landscape because of the way that the increasingly popular game operates in a capitalistic logic, where NFL players are almost exclusively valued for their statistical production …

Standing By: Police Paralysis, Race, And The 1964 Philadelphia Riot, Nicole Maurantonio

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Although considerable scholarship has explored the riots of the 1960s as the culmination of tensions simmering throughout the tumultuous decade, this article examines Philadelphia’s 1964 riot and the ways that local newspapers attempted to frame the violence. By urging Philadelphians to view the riot as the outcome of an ineffectual police department, which was ill-equipped to confront black “hoodlums,” journalists privileged frames of police paralysis and marginalization. The circulation of these two frames alone, however, cannot explain the eventual demise of the city’s Police Advisory Board. This study argues that the imagery of police standing idly by while the streets …

Subversive Liminality And Ideological Warfare: The Zombie Mash-Up As Resistance To Hypermasculine Revenge Narratives Post-9/11, Veronica L. Cooper

Online Theses and Dissertations

This project plots the coincidence of the "zombie renaissance" and system-justifying nationalist rhetoric post-9/11. The project discusses this cultural cross-section with zombie mash-up fiction, using masculinity and trauma theories, in an attempt to illuminate the motives of "us vs. them" rhetoric and hypermasculine revenge narratives in the post-9/11 decade. First, I use Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim (2009) to examine liminality as subversive counter-discourse to the masculine hegemony post-9/11. Second, I use Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) to look at the effects of revenge culture and how non-emphasized femininity and hegemonic (hyper)masculinity co-construct each other.

Examining Gender In Pharmaceutical Rhetoric Through A Cultural Studies Lens: A Case Study On The Gardasil Vaccine, Jennifer Fickley-Baker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

On June 8, 2006, Merck announced the debut of Gardasil, the world's first vaccine found successful in preventing human papillomavirus (HPV) infections, a sexually transmitted infection that is one of the main causes of certain cancers in men and women, including cervical, vulvar, penile and anal cancers. To promote the vaccine's release, Merck launched Gardasil's "One Less" advertising campaign that included television commercials, print ads and a consumerfocused website (www.Gardasil.com), each promoting the message that "you" could now be "one less woman" affected by cervical cancer ("One Less" campaign). The vaccine, tested and approved only for females age 9-26, was …

Writing Across Institutions: Studying The Curricular And Extracurricular Journeys Of Latina/O Students Transitioning From High School To College, Todd Ruecker

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation is based on a year and a half multi-institutional study of seven Mexican American students transitioning from high school to a community college or a university. It explores the differences between high school, community college, and university literacy environments, focusing on the following: the impact of standardized testing at the high school level, the role of rhetoric and composition disciplinary expertise in shaping first-year composition (FYC) curricula, writing in the disciplines, and the digital divide between institutions. Seven case studies examine students' literacy experiences across institutions as well as both challenges and sources of support in and beyond …

Tracing Boundaries, Effacing Boundaries: Information Literacy As An Academic Discipline, Grace L. Veach

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Both librarianship and composition have been shaken by recent developments in higher education. In libraries ebooks and online databases threaten the traditional "library as warehouse model," while in composition, studies like The Citation Project show that students are not learning how to incorporate sources into their own writing effectively. This dissertation examines the disciplinary origins and current status of information literacy and makes a case for increased collaboration between Writing Studies and librarians and the eventual emergence of information literacy as a discipline in its own right. Chapter One introduces the near-total failure of information literacy pedagogy and the lack …

Musical Rhetoric And Sonic Composing Processes, Kyle D. Stedman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project is a study of musical rhetoric and music composition processes. It asks the questions, "How does the nature of music as sound-in-time affect its rhetorical functions, production, and delivery?" and "How do composers approach the task of communicating with audiences through instrumental music?" I answer these questions by turning to the history of musical rhetoric as practiced in the field of musicology and by interviewing composers themselves about their composition practices--approaches that are both underused in the rhetoric and composition community.

I frame my research participants' responses with a discussion of the different degrees to which composers try …

Towards An Alloiostrophic Rhetoric, Jane Sutton, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

This essay offers the exigence and outlines a strategy for theorizing "alloiostrophic rhetoric" and the practices and possibilities if such a theory. In brief, alloiostrophic rhetoric is on that turns towards difference, diversity, and the other. We explore such questions as the following. Why is a theory of alloiostrophic rhetoric needed? What are its primary characteristics? How might alloiostrophic rhetoric be performed?

As the preposition towards in our title indicates, this essay is, by necessity, a sketch. The necessity arises, in part, from the scarce historical resources of this trope, alloiostrohos, and in part from a received tradition--dominated …

Imaging Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon And The Future Of The City (Book Review), Nicole Maurantonio

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Time capsules are artifacts that at face value appear antithetical to the enterprise of history. Capturing frozen moments in time, time capsules flatten the dynamic and contingent nature of the past. Yet, as the contributors to Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City argue, the artifact is simply an entry point opening up larger questions of the complex relationships between past, present, and future. In this case, the “time capsule” is a single text, famed city planner Edmund Bacon’s 1959 essay, “Philadelphia in the Year 2009.” When read with the benefit of twenty-first- century hindsight, Bacon’s essay, …

Facebook And Its Users: Using Grounded Theory To Understand Perceived Interactivity As A Constraint In The Rhetorical Situation, Katie Lee Retzinger Pruitt

English Theses & Dissertations

The general term interactivity has been used in a variety of disciplines to describe phenomena that occur in website interfaces; however, definitions and explanations about what constitutes interactivity and how it functions do not consider the specific ways in which interactivity can function and be perceived by users in specific rhetorical situations. In this study, I address the problems with the literature about general interactivity in writing studies and in other disciplines such as computer science, advertising, marketing, and communication studies by distinguishing between two types of interactivity—functional and perceived. I situate the different types of interactivity rhetorically, which can …

One Quotation, Two Meanings: Quotation Analysis Exercise, Dan Gleason

Writing Bootcamp Unit

This challenging lesson gives students practice in analyzing quotations very closely. The exercise begins with the premise that quotations never “speak for themselves,” and that writers need to explain what quotations mean. To prove this point, this lesson shows students that specific quotations can in fact “mean” (or support) very different claims; in fact, students use a single quotation to advance almost opposite arguments. The goal of the lesson is for students to understand that quotations may be very malleable, and thus they always need clear framing and explanation. This lesson uses a short essay, “What is an American?” as …

Mapping Injustice: The World Is Witness, Place-Framing, And The Politics Of Viewing On Google Earth, Joshua P. Ewalt

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Working from assumptions that inequality is often spatially informed, a set of interactive cartographies has recently proliferated on Google Earth. In this essay, I analyze one of those interactive cartographies: The World is Witness produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). I read the map as an organizational rhetoric that frames place as "embedded injustice." I also argue that thorough analysis of the framing of local place on Google Earth must inherently question whether the map can create a disruption in the viewing subject. While the map presents vital information on excruciatingly despicable acts of injustice, and the …

The Headless Paragraph: Back-Forming Topic Sentences, Dan Gleason

Writing Bootcamp Unit

This exercise is designed to give students practice in creating and understanding topic sentences. Rather than asking students to create their own paragraphs headed with topic sentences, this exercise gives students the paragraphs and asks them to synthesize the topic sentences from the content provided. Such back-formation can help students grasp that a topic sentence does not merely start the paragraph, but also organizes and summarizes its key content.

Aaron And The Golden Calf In The Rhetoric Of The Pentateuch, James W. Watts

Religion - All Scholarship

In the Pentateuch, the contrast between law and narrative, or more precisely, ritual instructions and ritual narrative, is nowhere more stark than in the relationship between the Golden Calf story (Exod 32-34) and the instructions for building the Tabernacle (Exod 25-31, 35-40). The former vilifies Aaron by placing him at the center of the idolatrous event while the latter celebrates Aaron and his sons as divinely consecrated priests. Though source criticism has long since distinguished the authors of these accounts, it does not explain the intentions behind a literary juxtaposition that is too stark to be anything but intentional. Nor …

“Above All Greek, Above All Roman Fame”: Classical Rhetoric In America During The Colonial And Early National Periods, James M. Farrell

Communication

The broad and profound influence of classical rhetoric in early America can be observed in both the academic study of that ancient discipline, and in the practical approaches to persuasion adopted by orators and writers in the colonial period, and during the early republic. Classical theoretical treatises on rhetoric enjoyed wide authority both in college curricula and in popular treatments of the art. Classical orators were imitated as models of republican virtue and oratorical style. Indeed, virtually every dimension of the political life of early Ameria bears the imprint of a classical conception of public discourse. This essay marks the …

Multiple Literacies, Fragmented Identities: Arab Students At American Universities, Gamil Mohammed Al-Amrani

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a combination of ethnography and case study which describes the Social and cultural context of literacy acquisition among Arab students at the University of Arkansas. I examine the power relations that define this minority group in the larger Social context and describe how these relations shape, transform, and sometimes threaten their cultural identities in the classroom. The dissertation investigates the different Social and cultural factors that facilitate or obstruct their learning process, factors such as age, gender, religion, and marital status. It explains how the students' acquisition of literacy exists within a larger dynamic process of Social …

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Master Communicator, Jonathan M. Gunderson

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

A Speech Of Defense: Obama's Apologia For Himself And The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Trevor Adams Hogan

Communication Studies

During the 2008 Presidential Election, Democratic candidate Barack Obama faced political controversy surrounding his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Videos surfaced on ABC News of Wright making racist and anti-American statements during his sermons. Obama who had strong ties to Wright over many years was criticized for his relationship with Wright. Because of their connection, Obama's political success was tied to his association with Wright. In a speech titled "A More Perfect Union", Obama makes an Apologia or defense for himself, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Addressing the Kategoria or attacks made against himself and Wright, Obama uses the speech …