Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Silence And Self-Making: Black Lung Rhetoric And The Ken Hechler Letters, Jennifer De Pompei

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis combines history, rhetoric, and feminist identity studies to discuss the subject of black lung disease and the Appalachian coal miner. The first chapter examines the "evolution of mentalities" in historical and popular discourse surrounding the miner, which reflects James V. Catano's subversive form of the self-making identity in Ragged Dicks. The second chapter uses the feminist theory of silence as a form of control and power to understand the absence of black lung disease from the literature of coal. The final chapter is a case study of the correspondence between Congressional Representative Ken Hechler of West Virginia and …

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 …

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 …

The Abjection Of The Pythia, Alaina Dyann Tackitt

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent academic research has garnered considerable popular interest on the matter of whether the Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, was high. Current findings aim to prove that vapors emitted from beneath the tripod on which the Pythia prophesied were intoxicating, thereby causing her frenzied state and statements. Contemporary scientists’ intense interest in proving that the Pythia was not prophetic evokes the question of why the once widely accepted, now generally rejected, idea that a female body can serve as a vessel for the words of the immortal deity holds such significance for modern science. When this curiosity is considered in …

Narratives Of Architectural Revolution In Online Christian Rhetoric, Quentin David Vieregge

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how online Christian communities reconcile the democratizing, anti-hegemonic effects of dialogic web tools, such as wikis, blogs, and video-sharing sites with the authoritarian characteristics of some organized religions. In the first chapter, I discuss technodeterminism and what I call the theme of "revolutionary architectures" in digital humanities scholarship. This theme occurs in narratives that assume that a new interface, Internet tool, or type of coding will redefine the rhetorical relationship between writers, readers, and site administrators, usually in a benevolent way. I argue that scholars within the field of Computers and Composition use narratives of architectural revolution …

Saved By The (Alexander Graham) Bell: An Analysis Of Synchronous Communication And Student Satisfaction / Retention Rates In The First Year Online Composition Classroom, Jennifer Jane Lynch

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Online first-year writing courses, with all of their promise, still maintain alarmingly low retention and student satisfaction rates, driving online curriculum designers to take another look at ways to increase both retention and satisfaction. To replicate the high rates of face-to-face classes, we must revisit and revise our approach to communication in the first-year writing online classroom. Think about it: The online classroom has abandoned a mainstay in education for thousands of years - synchronous communication. Why have we been so quick to dispose of it? Are we now paying the price?

This research will provide additional value to the …

Fresh, Frugal, And Fabulous: A Woman's Guide To Cooking With Life, Tricia Mahoney

Dissertations, Theses and Capstone Projects (Full IR Collection)

A narrative cookbook, including tips and stories for managing a downturn in finances with style and fortitude.

Keeping History Alive: David Mccullough And The Debate Between Popular And Academic History, James R. Allen

History

The purpose of this paper is to explore the differences between academic history and popular history through David McCullough, one of the most successful popular history writers. It attempts to reconcile the schism between the two schools of thought, and provide a middle ground where each can stand.

Rationale For Pride Of Baghdad, Crag Hill Ph.D.

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

A rationale for teaching the graphic novel Pride of Baghdad at the secondary level.

Sequential Art, Graphic Novels, And Comics, Brian Kelley

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The first global distribution of a paper prepared for the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Graphic Novels Special Interest Group of the International Reading Association,the Executive Board of the New Jersey Reading Association, and the Legislative and Professional Standards Committee of the NJRA.

Review Of Teaching Graphic Novels, By Katie Monnin, Susan Spangler

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

No abstract provided.

Rationale For Magneto: Testament, Brian Kelley

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

A rationale for teaching the graphic novel Magneto:Testament in secondary schools.

Comic Vision, Gale Acuff

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

A narrative, rhetorical poem

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.

Introduction To A New History Of The Sermon : The Nineteenth Century, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

This is the introduction to A New History of the Sermon:The Nineteenth Century, a collection of essays I edited for Brill Academic Publishers. It discusses the concept and history of "rhetorical criticism," and seeks to lay a foundation for the rhetorical study of the Anglo-American pulpit.

Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus, Priscilla Finley

Library Faculty Research

A worthwhile update to the first edition (2004), this volume combines a dictionary-style thesaurus with notes, comparisons, and brief essays from notable contemporary writers and editors that clarify complexities and ruminate on points of contention.

Threatening Bodies Resisting Containment: Enemy Combatants, War Protestors And Same-Sex Couples, Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The U.S.-launched "War on Terror" has been a major driving force in political discourses during the last few years, including presidential discourse. Since September 11, 2001, presidential rhetoric has systematically entangled international efforts, such as "the War on Terror" and the War in Iraq, with domestic issues, such as same-sex marriages and civil unions. In so doing, international and domestic threats have been effectively merged into one, and in the process, specific bodies have been constructed as "terrorist" agents in need of strict containment (for example, enemy combatant bodies, war protestor bodies, and the bodies of same-sex couples). This paper …

Handling And Preventing Journalistic Fraud: Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Kenneth Munson

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Fraud is a growing concern in the news business, especially in recent years where numerous journalism scandals rock its foundation. This paper examines the most prominent cases: Stephen Glass, the reporter for The New Republic newsmagazine who completely or partially fabricated 27 stories in the late ‘90s; Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who was found to have plagiarized or made up his supposedly on-thescene reporting in 2003; and Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for her Washington Post story about a child heroin addict who, in actuality, did not exist. This paper will examine flaws …

A Joint Rolled In Toilet Paper: Funkadelic’S Funky Soul, Joseph T. Thomas Jr.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Through an examination of Parliament-Funkadelic’s lyrics and music, this paper explores shit, dirt, and the funk, investigating their relationship to George Clinton and his band’s desire to darken the Humanistic project of Enlightenment, their desire to soil language, and thereby question conventional, bourgeois values. The author argues that Funkadelic participate in what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the “peculiar logic” of the carnivalesque, detourning status quo notions of culture and society, creating complex contortions through the blurring of the good and the bad, the cerebral and the carnal, the sublime and the mundane. In essence, Funkadelic are a musical carnival that exists …

Alonzo "Old Block" Delano, Nicolas S. Witschi

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

When Alonzo Delano died on 8 September 1874, newspapers throughout the Northern California region lamented the passing of a favorite local celebrity. A death notice issued by the Sacramento Union on 10 September (reprinted a day later by San Francisco’s Daily Alta California), observed that Delano “was known by reputation throughout the State as an author and a man of integrity. [. . .] He was a writer of much native humor and plainness of speech, abounding in facts, anxious to do justice to all and injury to none.” The San Francisco Chronicle echoed this sentiment, adding that he …

Reading Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, Karen E. Ramirez

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Helen Hunt Jackson was one of America’s most renowned and prolific female writers of the 1870s and 1880s, best known during her lifetime (1830-1885) and into the early twentieth century for her poetry, domestic essays, travel sketches, and moralistic novels. However, as Jackson herself predicted, her most enduring legacy is her writing advocating American Indian rights (Higginson, “Helen” 151). Most significantly, her 1884 novel Ramona protests American Indian displacement in southern California and, more broadly, criticizes Anglo-American conquest through land acquisition. A bestseller when it appeared, Ramona has never gone out of print; has been translated into many languages; was …

Mary Clearman Blew, Evelyn I. Funda

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Defying the Welch family edict to “Never speak aloud of what you feel deeply,” Mary Clearman Blew has garnered national recognition as an eminent writer in the American west by choosing to write candidly about the riddle of her family, their deeply felt losses, and her sense of “the contradictions of double vision, of belonging in place and being out of place” (Balsamroot 4; Bone Deep 174). Unsparingly honest and accessible in eight books of fiction and nonfiction, in person Blew is, nevertheless, a quiet, dignified, and reserved woman who still thinks of herself as a bookworm, the girl …

Style: A New Perspective On Kate Chopin, Daniel Arredondo

Theses Digitization Project

Uses Edward Corbett's theory of style to help define Chopin's style and expose her rhetorical strategies (sentence and paragraph length, diction, tropes, scheme, etc.) in the short story "The Story of an Hour ." Examines the controversy over using literature to teach composition and provides an analysis of the reasons for and against using literature in composition classes. Finally, defends the use of literature in writing classrooms.

Movie In Search Of America: The Rhetoric Of Myth In Easy Rider, Hayley Susan Raynes

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis is a rhetorical analysis of the movie Easy Rider. It explores how auteurs Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern's use of road, regional, and cowboy mythology creates a text that simultaneously exposes and is dominated by the ironies inherent in American culture and breathes new life into the cowboy myth, reaffirming the cowboy's place as one of America's most enduring cultural icons.

James Stevens, James H. Maguire

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

By 1930, James Stevens had gained a national reputation as one of the Northwest’s most promising and outspoken young writers. Seventy-five years later, he has slipped so far into obscurity that relatively few people know of his contributions not only to Northwest writing but also to American literature in general and to the literature of the American West in particular. His tall tales made Paul Bunyan one of the great heroes of American popular culture. The controversial literary manifesto he co-authored with Oregon author H. L. Davis led to a new era in the history of the Northwest’s literature. And …

Gary Paul Nabhan, Gioia Woods

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Between spoonfuls of posole at the Morning Glory Cafe in Flagstaff, Arizona, Gary Paul Nabhan mused about the distinctive character of western American literature. “What is western literature about?” I asked him. Without hesitation, he replied, “It is about a process of disorientation and reorientation.” The mountains, sand dunes, and canyons of the western landscape govern western imagination. That landscape, he believes, is responsible for the dis- and reorientation that characterizes the work of many western writers. Nabhan continued, “I should say that in an odd way, that’s even true of Native American literature [....] Leslie Silko writes about the …

Josephine Miles, Erik Muller

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“You could say I saw California grow up. Right along with me!” So Josephine Miles linked her life and region (Childress 40). The link between her poetry and California has not always been declared by the poet or detected by her readers. Miles mused upon the problem: “Sometimes there’s a certain kind of critic that says I’m a California poet [. . .] he says I have a lot of loose lines and a lot of locale. But then another critic will say, ‘She’s not to be identified as anything but English because her poetry is rather neat and universal’” …

Louis Owens, Linda Lizut Helstern

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“'I prefer infinitions to definitions,’” Alex Yazzie, the cross-dressing Navajo anthropologist in Louis Owens’ Bone Game, declares (46). So did Louis Owens. In his life, in his death, and above all in his writing, Louis Owens (1948-2002), novelist, essayist, literary and cultural critic, crossed boundaries and refused definitions. Born in Lompoc, California, Owens came to understand the arid landscape of the west through the lens of his early childhood in the Yazoo bottoms of Mississippi. He was a Native mixedblood who acknowledged not only his multi-tribal heritage, Choctaw on his father's side and Cherokee on his mother’s, but the …

But Who Is Any Longer Interested In The Possible?: Kathy Acker In Hell Failing Fuck You, Jake Kennedy

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In 'But who is any longer interested in the possible?': Kathy Acker in Hell Failing Fuck You I explore and celebrate Acker's use of a tropics of failure (plagiarism, pain, terror, gender-play, bad jokes, dumbness) as an inimitable strategy for achieving counter-cultural art and community. The prose style and scholarly apparatus of my article reflect not only my position as a poet/academic but also attempt to model an ethical, non-authoritative, Acker-informed critical language.

Beyond 'Hot Lips' And 'Big Nurse': Creative Writing And Nursing, Sandra Young

English Faculty Publications

This essay describes a special topics creative writing course designed for nursing students, and argues that creative writing strategies work to improve nurses' compositional skills. Also discussed are other potential benefits from creatively writing patients' lives, notably, the blending of arts and sciences, and the ways in which medical schools are encouraging their students to study the humanities, especially literature and creative writing. The essay includes student creative writing samples.

The essay also discusses the depiction of nurses in popular culture. M*A*S*H*, Richard Hooker’s black comedy about the antics of doctors and nurses during the Korean War, gave us “Hot …