Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Silent Subjects: Silence In Theories Of Subjectivity, Nikki Ann Agee

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Postmodern theories describe human subjectivity as fragmented. (Faigley 12). Unlike Enlightenment thinkers, who theorized the Cartesian subject as an autonomous, stable, rational self with "privileged insight into its own processes" (111), postmodern theorists "decisively [reject] the primacy of consciousness and instead [have] consciousness originating in language, arguing that the subject is an effect rather than a cause of discourse" (Faigley 9).

The idea that language constructs who subjects are, how they are, and who they may and may not become is very powerful, for it suggests subjects cannot consciously know themselves apart from language. Self-knowledge results from social, institutional, and …

Bringing "Abnormal" Discourse Into The Classroom, Virginia M. Tucker

English Faculty Publications

Assuming student discourse is prone to error, teachers have long implemented rules that ensure "safe" discourse, particularly in composition instruction. My fifth grade teacher taught me to place a comma in a sentence whenever I take a breath rather than teaching me the language of comma rules. To my dismay, many of my first-year composition students raise their hands in agreement that they too have been taught to place a comma wherever their lungs suggest. These students learn to call independent clauses a complete sentence, and to them an ellipsis is merely “dot, dot, dot.” In an attempt to reach …

The Bridge, Volume 6, 2009, Bridgewater State College

the bridge

Volume 6 Staff

Sarah Haag, Editor-in-Chief
Tara M. Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief
Amanda Armas
Laura M. Bowen
Rachael Dunphy
Grant Ferro
Kyle J. Giacomozzi
Matthew Keogh
Jillian Moore
Lauren Rheaume
Shannon Rosenblat

Mary Dondero, Faculty Advisor
Jerald Walker, Faculty Advisor
Linda Hall, Alumni Consultant
Rosann Kozlowski, Alumni Consultant

Developing A Model For An Incarnational Ministry At The Webb Chapel Church Of Christ, L. Bert Alexander

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

This doctor of ministry thesis presents the results of a project to promote the development of an incarnational ministry at the Webb Chapel Church of Christ. This intervention employed a team of Webb Chapel opinion leaders representative of various subgroups of the congregation. In the fall of 2008, this group met for eight sessions to discuss the self-emptying practices of Jesus and the need for his followers to emulate those self-emptying practices in their individual lives. Through interaction in the eight sessions, the group developed a model by which self-emptying practices could be implemented at Webb Chapel. Evaluation of the …

Hip Hop Rhetoric: Relandscaping The Rhetorical Tradition, Roberto Jose Tinajero Ii

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation is a rhetorical analysis of hip hop music and culture. Chapter 1 focuses on adding hip hop rhetoric to the discussion and terrain of rhetoric and writing studies and to the rhetorical tradition. Chapter 2 uses the rhetorical notion of kairos to discuss the ethos of hip hop culture and discourse. Chapter 3 uses hip hop rhetoric to discuss the tensuous-solidarity between Latinos and African Americans. Chapter 4 focuses on Latino/Borderland Hip Hop and discusses the multi-consciousness of Latino identity. Chapter 5 focuses on Christiian religious imagery in gangsta rap music. There is also a short conclusion.

The Impact Of Collaborative Analysis Of Student Work On Student Achievement Among Third Graders In The Area Of Writing: An Action Research Study, Jami A. Lee

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Georgia Writing Assessment scores revealed that there were third grade students at an elementary school in rural Southeast Georgia struggling to meet the state standards. This pre-experimental, action research study examined the impact of collaborative analysis of student work on student achievement among third graders in the area of writing through a one-group pretest-posttest design. The pretest phase of this quantitative study was comprised of the collection of scored student writing samples followed by professional development training for teacher participants on collaborative analysis of student work. The posttest phase of the study included the collection of scored student writing samples. …

Patrick Henry: From Strong Statements To A Strong Cause, Michael George

The Corinthian

Justice, domestic tranquility, a common defense and the blessings of liberty are all established by the Constitution of the United States of America. Without the Revolutionary War, these blessings of liberty would have been crushed under the heel of the British Empire; and without Patrick Henry and his address to the Virginia House of Burgesses on March 23, 1775, there would not have been a Revolution, and there certainly would not have been any semblance of the United States of America. Through his unique use of style, rhetorical questions, and emotional appeal Patrick Henry’s speech “Give Me Liberty or Give …

Cosmopolitanism After Derrida: City, Signature And Sovereignty, Puspa Damai

English Faculty Research

Cosmopolitanism in Derrida's works sounds like an afterthought in comparison to other more recurring themes of his texts, like 'writing', 'differance', 'supplement', 'metaphysics', or 'violence'. Cosmopolitanism seems to belong to deconstruction, which is often associated with decentring, fragmentation, and critique of totality and universality, only as an intimate other, a foreign element grafted in the body by force, or by miracle. That is the reason why, perhaps, hardly any cosmopolitanist refers to the issue of cosmopolitanism in Derrida or in deconstruction, so much so that even Derrida has written very sparsely on it as it belongs perhaps to the dormant, …

Spectrogenetic Translation In Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things And Elsewhere, Puspa Damai

English Faculty Research

South Asians, in their attempts to articulate post-colonial subjectivity, have themselves only reinscribed various aspects of colonial exoticism in their work. South Asian author Arundhati Roy’s rendering of untouchability in terms of godliness in The God of Small Things resonates with colonial ideologies that read “subalterns” as objects, not as subjects. Roy’s invocation of colonial methods of translation envisions untouchability in “absolutist terms”—a strategy that may ultimately mitigate against a recognition of the highly varied experiences, social agencies, and subjectivities of dalits living in South Asia and abroad.

Heroic Orual And The Tasks Of Psyche, Gwenyth Hood

English Faculty Research

C.S. Lewis's last novel, Till We have Faces: A Myth Retold, concerns transformations. After all, it deals with the myth of Psyche. In Greek, Psyche means not only soul but also butterfly.¹ This brings to mind the metamorphosis of a crawling caterpillar into a winged butterfly, analogous to the protagonist's transformation from mortal to goddess. In Lewis's retelling, not only does a mortal human becomes an immortal goddess,² but also, an ugly soul turns beautiful, a coarse, barbaric populace grows into a gracious civilization, and cruel divinities with a thirst for human blood become loving guardians of the …

International Teachers In The American Classroom : Deposing The Myth Of Monolingualism, Jodi G. Lehman

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

An international graduate teaching assistant‘s way of speaking may pose a challenge for college students enrolled in STEM courses at American universities. Students commonly complain that unfamiliar accents interfere with their ability to comprehend the IGTA or that they have difficulty making sense of the IGTA‘s use of words or phrasing. These frustrations are echoed by parents who pay tuition bills. The issue has provoked state and national legislative debates over universities‘ use of IGTAs. However, potentially productive debates and interventions have been stalemated due to the failure to confront deeply embedded myths and cultural models that devalue otherness and …

Un/Commonplaces: Redirecting Research And Curricula In Rhetoric And Writing Studies, Brian J. Mcnely

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Un/Commonplaces is guided by a broad and fundamental question of inquiry regarding writing and disciplinary research: how can some of the predominant ways that our discipline has approached writing be retheorized to better approximate the complexity of contemporary rhetorical knowledge work? A corollary inquiry explores the resonances with English Studies that persist--and seeks to uncover how they persist--in our field. I argue that we can negotiate such issues by tracing and troubling some of our core disciplinary commonplaces, those commonsense notions and practices too frequently and easily adopted from English Studies and perpetuated within the often tumultuous and hegemonic relationship …

A Critical Analysis Of Immigration And Terrorism In The Usa Patriot Act Of 2001 Through Political Rhetoric., Cesar Hugo Rodriguez, Jr,

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study incorporates the rhetorical implications that presented themselves after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2009. A look at the history of rhetoric in this study gives insight into the present situation of what political rhetoric can accomplish when used as a tool of deception.

Rival Radical Feminists--Frances Willard And Ida B. Wells: The Rhetorical Slugfest Of Two Nineteenth-Century Queen Bees Over Lynching, Anita August

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Rival Radical Feminists considers the role of gender and race as master status determining traits and examines them as influential social markers of identity and representation within a nineteenth-century feminist social movement (FSM)--the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Rival Radical Feminists examines how, within a FSM where gender issues understandably govern the political narrative that the philosophical core of the movement shifts into separate and competing spheres when gender issues intersect with racial prejudice? Specifically, Rival Radical Feminists argues that when both political actors are female, with one circumscribed politically by her gender, like Willard, and the other by both …

The Curious Case Of Jim Mcgreevey, Justin Eckstein

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project examines the apologetic discourse surrounding James Edward "Jim" McGreevey's August 12, 2004 resignation as governor of New Jersey. A cursory reading of the allegations McGreevey faced reveals a curious incongruity between the initial accusations of corruption and his apologizing for being homosexual. In short, McGreevey stood accused of corruption for a number of terrible cabinet appointments. Yet, he apologized for being gay and having a "consensual" affair with his former director of Homeland Security, Golan Cipel. Through a close reading of the texts, I decipher how McGreevey's apology modified the public's understanding of the events that lead to …

The Cuban Missile Crisis Speech: An Analysis Of Text Evolution, Ashlyn Gentry

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

On October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy delivered a televised speech announcing the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. This speech has been a subject of scholarship in the field of communication, yet no critic has performed a comprehensive analysis of its multiple drafts and their relationship to the final version. By using a comparative analysis, one can examine the process of presidential decision-making, the translation of those decisions into prose, and the strategic language used to communicate a particular message. This project follows the evolution of Kennedy's address, tracing the changes from one draft to the next, in …

Next Generation Owls: Customized Solutions And The Move Toward Open-Sourcing, Matthew J. Gilchrist, Tammy Conard-Salvo

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Presentations

This session from the 2009 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) identifies technologies for next generation online writing centers, describing customized solutions for online tutoring and the potential for making these into open-source technologies for other centers. Presenters will discuss new OWL technologies, definitions for changing technologies, and OWL pedagogy and praxis, as well as usability, development, and sharing/open-sourcing of online tutoring technologies. The issues raised in this panel are the result of an OWL Technology Summit held in 2007 where representatives from eleven institutions met to explore trends in online tutoring technology development. This panel brings forward key …

Invisible Hands: Recognizing Archivists’ Work To Make Records Accessible, Sammie L. Morris, Shirley K. Rose

Libraries Research Publications

Two faculty members, one an archivist and the other a rhetoric and composition scholar/professor collaborated in processing the papers of a rhetoric and composition scholar. This project allowed the archivist to gain a better understanding of archival researchers' needs, while allowing the researcher to better understand the thought process and activities inherent in archival processing-- the activities of organizing, describing, and preserving primary source materials in the archives. Through this article the authors seek to demystify and increase transparency of archival processing, while enhancing researchers' abilities to interpret the archival collections with which they work.

Lamp Winter 2009, Liberty University

Lamplight: Literary and Fine Arts Magazine

No abstract provided.

The Undergraduate 2009, Saint Mary's College Of California

The Undergraduate Spectrum

No abstract provided.

Spectrum 2009, Saint Mary's College Of California

The Undergraduate Spectrum

No abstract provided.

United States Certificate Programs In Technical Communication : A Feminist-Sophistic Investigation, Jim Nugent

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Technical communication certificates are offered by many colleges and universities as an alternative to a full undergraduate or graduate degree in the field. Despite certificates’ increasing popularity in recent years, however, surprisingly little commentary exists about them within the scholarly literature. In this work, I describe a survey of certificate and baccalaureate programs that I performed in 2008 in order to develop basic, descriptive data on programs’ age, size, and graduation rates; departmental location; curricular requirements; online offerings; and instructor status and qualifications. In performing this research, I apply recent insights from neosophistic rhetorical theory and feminist critiques of science …

Not Your Mother's Latinas : Film Representations For A New Millennium, Jeannie Ann Patrick

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

This dissertation seeks to contribute to film, feminist and Latino/a studies by exploring the construction and ideological implications of representations of Latinas in four recent, popular U.S. films: Girlfight (Kusama 2000), Maid in Manhattan (Wang 2002), Real Women Have Curves (Cardoso 2002) and Spanglish (Brooks 2004). These films were released following a time of tremendous growth in the population and the political and economic strength of the Latina/o community as well as a rise in popularity and visibility in the 1990s of entertainers like Selena and actresses such as Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek. Drawing on the critical concepts of …

El Análisis De La Consigna Argumentativa En La Calidad Del Discurso Y En El Aprendizaje De Las Ciencias Naturales, Sandra Gilabert Medina, Merce Garcia-Mila Palaudarias, Mark Felton

Faculty Publications

En los últimos años nuestras aulas de ciencias han incorporado la argumentación como una herramienta para promover la construcción de conocimiento. Un aspecto generalmente olvidado en dichas intervenciones, así como en las investigaciones de las cuales derivan, es el análisis del impacto que el objetivo de la argumentación tiene en la actividad argumentativa desplegada en las aulas. En el discurso argumentativo distinguimos dos tipos de actividad: la oposición y la deliberación. En la actividad de oposición el objetivo es mantener el punto de vista y debilitar las alternativas, mientras que en la actividad de deliberación el objetivo es consensuar un …