Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Benjamin Capps, Ernest B. Speck

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

One might assume that a requisite for becoming a successful novelist about the Southwest is to be born in Archer County, Texas. Both Benjamin Capps and Larry McMurtry were born there, but their interests are different. Capps has been concerned with the background of his region, while McMurtry treats contemporary themes. Capps has now published eight novels, plus three pieces of non-fiction, about the West.

Voltaire’S Concept Of Enlightened Eloquence, Thomas M. Carr Jr.

French Language and Literature Papers

Near the beginning and end of his Lettres philosophiques (1734), his first major text promoting the principles of enlightenment, Voltaire gave examples of two very different kinds of eloquence. In the third letter on the Quakers, he pictured George Fox converting his jailers with his inspired preaching. In the last letter, he praised the eloquence of Pascal before he attempted a refutation of the Pensées, calling Pascal’s projected apology for Christianity “un livre plein de paralogismes éloquents et de faussetés admirablement déduites.” Each is representative of a brand of eloquence Voltaire found objectionable. The first kind, appealing chiefly to …

"The Power Of Speech/ To Stir Men's Blood": The Language Of Tragedy In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Gayle Greene

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

In the Rome of julius Caesar, language is power and characters rise or fall on the basis of their ability to wield words. Their awareness of the importance of language is indicated by terms they associate with it.

1980 Ray Family Papers, Department Of Library Special Collections

Ray Family Papers

No abstract provided.

Dorothy Johnson, Judy Alter

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Although her work is primarily rooted in her home state of Montana, Dorothy Johnson was not born a Westerner. Her birthplace was a farm in McGregor, Iowa, a town in the heart of the Midwest. Born on December 19, 1905, she was christened Dorothy Marie Johnson and called Marie by friends and family until she went to college.

Leslie Marmon Silko, Per Seyersted

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

No abstract provided.

Joaquin Miller, Benjamin S. Lawson

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

When Joaquin Miller died in 1913, he had been conspicuous on the American literary scene for over forty years. Given to seeing his literary career as an analogue to the actual exploration and settling of the West, he conceived, enacted, and recorded an eventful life in which he himself figures most prominently. Miller had created a public image, which was probably a self-image as well, of himself as writer and as Westerner. His prose and poetry are sometimes marked by the romantic excesses of Byron or Swinburne; and his life and work include picturesque posings as the Wild Westerner. But …

Tom Robbins, Mark Siegel

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

No abstract provided.

Janet Lewis, Charles L. Crow

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Janet Lewis’s writing career has spanned nearly sixty years, long enough for her to reflect, were she interested in the subject, on the disparity between excellence and fame. She has published poetry, short stories, essays, children’s books, opera libretti, and novels. She has been praised by distinguished writers and critics, including Theodore Roethke and Donald Davie. Two of her novels, The Wife of Martin Guerre and The Trial of Soren Quist, have been hailed as masterpieces. She remains little known, however, even though she has a circle of enthusiastic admirers.

The Decline Of The Written Word, William Safire

The Courier

Part of a commencement speech delivered by William Safire to the graduating class of 1978 at Syracuse University, William Safire bemoans the state of rhetoric and the written word, chastising not only the White House but society at large. He argues attention spans have steadily waned over the years, with popular culture filling the void where intellectual discourse used to exist.

Gary Snyder, Bert Almon

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

No abstract provided.

Jack Kerouac, Harry Russell Huebel

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

No abstract provided.

1979 Ray Family Papers (06/11/1979), Department Of Library Special Collections

Ray Family Papers

No abstract provided.

1979 Ray Family Papers, Department Of Library Special Collections

Ray Family Papers

No abstract provided.

Charles Marion Russell, Robert L. Gale

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

No abstract provided.

Enos Mills, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

No abstract provided.

C.L. Sonnichsen, Joyce Gibson Roach

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

El Paso is located at almost the farthest point of West Texas, where the Rio Grande River begins its sweep into the Big Bend country. Strangers find it a region extreme in its limitless supply of nothing. Even natives joke about the area. It is a place where “every living thing seems prepared to fight for its life. Even the plants go armed and hardly a shrub can be found without a spine or fang somewhere" (Roy Bean, p. 71). Texans do not expect a man from Minnesota with a Ph.D. from Harvard to write affectionately about the sand, …

Ruth Suckow, Abigail Ann Hamblen

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In her Memoir Ruth Suckow speaks of the small Iowa town where she was born as a place that looked ahead toward fresh beginnings. She describes other towns where she lived as older and more settled. But all of them, she implies, are dependent upon the sunshine, rains, and rich fields of the great farming region that is known as the Midwest, the Middle West, or Mid-America.

1978 Ray Family Papers, Department Of Library Special Collections

Ray Family Papers

No abstract provided.

Virginia Sorensen, L L. Lee, Sylvia B. Lee

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“If you burrow for roots, it was the fault of my grandmother,” the protagonist of Virginia Sorensen’s novel The Man with the Key remarks. And although we must ignore the half-ironic reference to a fault—and remind ourselves that an author’s characters are not the author—this metaphor is an exact image of Virginia Sorensen’s world and of her works. Sorensen has published eight novels, most of them about the American West, as well as a number of short stories and a group of children’s books. Her roots are the very essence of almost all, and certainly of the best, of her …

Alfred Henry Lewis, Abe C. Ravitz

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

He was a cowboy and a lawyer, a journalist and a novelist. At ease passing the time of day with drifters in front of Melinda's House of Call at Watrous (Mora County) in the sparse territory of New Mexico or debating socio-economic philosophy with sophisticated Tammany politicians just outside City Hall in New York, Alfred Henry Lewis—Western regionalist and Eastern muckraker—was enchanted by America’s land of legend and myth beyond the frontier, and he forever glanced backward with nostalgia at his “pampas years,” when he roved "for many moons" between “the Canadian in the Panhandle and the Gila in Arizona.” …

Don Berry, Glen A. Love

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In his first two novels of the early Oregon country, Trask and Moontrap, Northwestern author Don Berry placed himself within what has come to be perhaps the essential tradition in serious Western American literature. Like such earlier writers as Willa Gather, Robinson Jeffers, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and like his contemporary fellow-Northwesterner Gary Snyder, Don Berry conveys to us a sacramental belief that transcendent power or energy awaits man’s explorations within the natural world. Further, Berry’s work asserts that this participation, this ultimate reconciliation with the patterns of earth and sky, water and rock, must be undertaken in …

Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa), Marion W. Copeland

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Because Charles Eastman’s best known book is his earliest, Indian Boyhood (1902), and because that autobiography and its sequel, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916), have been most often used as sources for studies of the cultural transition of the Sioux, the literary value of those and of Eastman’s later books has gone largely unexamined. Eastman subtitled the 1916 volume The Autobiography of an Indian, but one cannot therefore assume that the conventions of European-American autobiography control Eastman’s work.

Creating An Environment Which Produces Improved Student Writing, George David Brown

Masters Theses

Plato said, “When the mind thinks, it talks to itself.” The mind must use words when developing ideas, when formulating concepts, when digesting and assimilating information. When the student writes, the mind should think. However, this does not always occur. The main problem in student writing is that the student does not think. For writing is thinking, the most exact and exacting kind of thinking.

This thesis suggests that in order to improve student writing, the conditions for improved thinking must exist. These conditions would include a change or environment from the traditional, authoritarian one to an open, self-appraising one. …

An Analysis Of The Speaking Style Of Heber C. Kimball: Mormon Leader, James Francis O'Connor

Theses and Dissertations

The primary function of this thesis was to determine, through the analysis of three randomly selected speeches, the speaking style of Heber C. Kimball. The selected speeches were presented in three different utah locations, and they covered a span of nine years (1856-65). All three speeches were presented to a Mormon audience and were religious in nature.

Seven elements of style have been used for the analysis of the three speeches. They are: accuracy, clarity, propriety, economy, force, striking quality, and liveliness. It was determined that President Kimball's speaking style was weak in the areas of accuracy and clarity. In …

The Interpretive-Rhetorical Situation: A Framework For Post Performance Analysis Of Interpretation, John Korinek

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The interpretive-rhetorical situation was formulated by blending Lloyd Bitzer's concepts of the rhetorical situation with contemporary interpretation theory. interpretation is momentary, the foundation established as The concept of as a suasory speech act in the sense that it transactional, and intentional, established for theory formation. The key concept an application for the interpretive-rhetorical situation was that it formed a cohesive framework for guiding post performance aspects of interpretation, especially performance criticism and experimental research. An experimental study was conducted, testing the newly formed breakdown of the traditional interpretation elements of writer, reader, and audience into the constituents of exigency, audience …

A Shape A Writer Can Contain, Don Welch

Special Collections

Detailed instruction on how to write an essay from Nebraska poet Don Welch

A Study Of A Language Program Focusing On Basic Writing Skills And Creative Writing Activities And The Affect On The Writing Skills Of Third Grade Students, Zelma Jane Ballard

Theses Digitization Project

No abstract provided.

1977 Ray Family Papers, Department Of Library Special Collections

Ray Family Papers

No abstract provided.

Josiah Gregg And Lewis H. Garrard, Edward Halsey Foster

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

New Mexico and that vast region spanned by the Santa Fe trail—a region utterly unlike anything east of the Mississippi—must have seemed enormously exotic and exciting to Americans a hundred and fifty years ago. It was a segment of the continent which most Americans knew only through books, and there were many of them, highly colored and occasionally inaccurate, to satisfy, or increase, their curiosity. American interest in the region expanded as the decades passed and culminated, of course, in the Mexican War and American possession of the Southwest.