Rhetoric Commons^™

Propasafe-Hybrid: A Text-Based Hybrid Propaganda Detection Tool (Ila 2026 Presentation), Thomas Kimmeth, Avijit Roy, Vivek Sharma

Publications and Research

This presentation introduces Propasafe-Hybrid, a hybrid system for sentence-level propaganda detection that combines offline transformer-based classification with selective large language model (LLM) explainability. The system employs a two-stage pipeline in which a local BERT-based classifier evaluates all input text and filters non-propagandistic content, while only high-confidence candidates are forwarded to an LLM for rhetorical technique labeling and explanation. This design enables cost-aware, privacy-conscious, and scalable analysis by reducing unnecessary reliance on external models.

Propasafe-Hybrid identifies propagandistic techniques such as loaded language, obfuscation, and appeal to fear, and generates concise natural language rationales that make these techniques interpretable to users. By …

The Art Of Masking And Performing For The Perfect Marriage In William Shakespeare’S The Taming Of The Shrew, Rita Oliva

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores how William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew exaggerates the art of masking and performing as necessary social techniques for women surviving the patriarchal culture of Padua. Through close analysis of Katherine and Bianca Minola, both sisters adopt performative identities, the “shrew” and the “ideal woman,” that reflect, resist, and expose the restrictive gender norms governing female behavior, qualifications for marriage, and worth. While Bianca’s apparent passivity and rhetorical femininity promote her to manipulate societal expectations to her advantage, Katherine’s refusal to submit to the societal and cultural standards of Padua results in her categorization of a …

Digital Rhetoric Of The Invisible: Bisexual Literacy Practices On Tiktok, 2020–2021, Olivia Wood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation uses auto- and digital-ethnographic methods to analyze the literacy practices of bisexual TikTok users primarily during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, during which time TikTok exploded in popularity among U.S. social media users, especially among young adults. It is also an exercise in neuroqueer composing, diverging at times from the norms of academic writing and the dissertation genre to perform and intentionally draw attention to neuroqueer styles of thinking and communication. I argue that bisexual invisibility and contemporary bi+ rhetorical activity must be understood within the context of LGBTQ+ political history, particularly …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Com 3064 (Classical Rhetoric), Jamel Coy Hudson

Open Educational Resources

Rhetoric has fallen on hard times today. When it isn't disparaged as "empty," it is dismissed as "mere." And so, we have empty rhetoric and mere rhetoric. We have politicians accused by their opponents of delivering campaign speeches full of … rhetoric. The accusation, if it sticks, is usually devastating to the accused. No one, least of all our politicians, appears capable of defending that rhetoric is a prerequisite for democratic government.

But it wasn't always so. This is a class about better times for rhetoric. Times when the greatest heroes of the day—like the fictional Achilles and the very …

Syllabus For Writing For The Social Sciences, Brenna E. Crowe

Open Educational Resources

A writing class designed for students pursuing degrees in the social sciences—the major assignments are a "career builder" where student practice rhetoric with professional writing on job searches, a literature review, a public awareness campaign, an informational interview, and a portfolio.

Intercultural Communication, Anthony Naaeke

Open Educational Resources

I believe that learning is a life-long process, cumulative, reflective/critical, experiential, accessible to some people and not to others, and directed toward some action that benefits self, community, and the world. From this perspective, we will adopt the open pedagogy method of learning because it is most suitable and beneficial for the following reasons:

1. In open pedagogy the learning doesn’t end after the semester but what we learn in class should motivate all of us to continue to reflect on our lives and the circumstances of our times and neighborhoods and seek ways to address them.

2. Learning builds on learning. …

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Through The Scholastic Looking Glass: The Pedagogical Potential Of Textual Deformation For Poetic Studies, Taylor Dietrich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the pedagogical usefulness of the antithetical reading model of textual deformation for the study of poetic works. No formal pedagogical plan exists for the education of students in poetic studies through textual deformance. This thesis does not go as far as structuring one in its entirety. Rather, it surveys the digital humanities landscape, showing a collective affinity within a number of textual studies approaches that advocate for textual deformance as useful for interrogating texts, and aligns the overlapping symmetries within those working methodologies with pedagogical imperatives like those embedded in Ryan Cordell’s Kaleidoscopic Pedagogy Laboratory—the intent being …

American Novels Amidst The Rise Of New Media: Emergent Publics And Forms, Sarah Ruth Jacobs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines long-term shifts in the quantities and demographics (namely the race and educational attainment) of twentieth-century American literary readers alongside the rise and popular consumption of new media (namely television and the internet). The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are testament to a great expansion in the numbers and demographics of literary readers, and in turn an increase in the variety and intended audiences of literary publications. Examples include the rise of “middlebrow” readers and books in the 1940s and the rise of African-American, feminist, and countercultural small presses in the 1960s and 1970s. However, even as the variety …

The Prince -- Brief Synopsis -- Powerpoint, Zach Davidson

Open Educational Resources

This is a very brief PowerPoint covering some key ideas in Machiavelli's THE PRINCE.

The Making And Silencing Of “Axé-Ocracy” In Brazil: Black Women Writers’ Spiritual, Political And Literary Movement In São Paulo, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

In this article, I will focus on two influential writers from the south of Brazil, Cristiane Sobral who currently lives in Brasília, from Rio de Janeiro, and Conceição Evaristo who currently lives in Rio de Janeiro state, from Minas Gerais. I got to know them in São Paulo in 2015 at a public event: the “Afroétnica Flink! Sampa Festival of Black Thought, Literature and Culture.” I will include references to some of their younger contemporaries such as Raquel Almeida, Jenyffer Nascimento, and Elizandra Souza, all of whom reside in São Paulo, in order to illustrate the Black Brazilian women writers’ …

Radical Solace And Young Adult Writing: Racialized Dis/Ability, Fan Fiction, And Feel(Ing)S In Composition, Jenn Polish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Deficit-model pedagogies too often abound in our writing classrooms, in everything from punitive attendance policies to content selection and course design methodologies that inadvertently favor students whose bodies fit a white supremacist, ableist norm. I develop conceptions of fandom and consent-based pedagogical practices, and I argue that these can bring us closer to radical solace in our college writing classrooms, particularly when our classrooms are full of variously marginalized students. These students too often must endure deficit-model pedagogies that assume inexpert writing styles in both their written compositions and, indeed, in the very composition of their bodies. What happens, I …

That's So Gay!: Queer Texts In The U.S., Jesse S. Rice-Evans, Andrea Stella

Open Educational Resources

Gender is facing an identity crisis: queer identities in the new era of gender and genre are subverting paradigms of communication and genre by working with language and narrative in new ways. Queer biography and autobiography mark an important turn in contemporary literature and poetics: the shift from a male-dominant gaze towards a kaleidoscopic perspective on queer embodiment, trans and non-binary narrative, and speculative writing about other worlds & possibilities, which offer us as readers new opportunities for storytelling and thinking about writing. These forms also make space for other identities traditionally excluded from mainstream cultural narrative spaces, and we’re …

Fiqws Fall 2018: Phase 2 Assignment Prompt The Exploratory Essay, Sabina Pringle, Missy Watson

Open Educational Resources

This phase two writing assignment prompt for FIQWS 10003 - HA1 WCGI History & Culture and FIQWS 10103 - HA1 Composition for WCGI History & Culture (fall 2018) provides guidelines for writing an Exploratory Essay in which students will consider the ideas of course readings and compose an essay that demonstrates their engagement with those ideas. The rhetorical purpose of this assignment is for students to demonstrate the ways in which their thinking about language and literacy has developed so far in the course, using evidence based on interpretations, ideas, and examples as well as passages from four or five …

"Betwixt The World Destroyed And World Restored": Subjectivity And Paradisal Recovery In John Milton's Late Poems, Chihping Ma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study focuses on the discovery of subjectivity through the recovery of lost paradise in Milton’s late poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. This theme revolves around the tension between the affective and the empirical, which also configure the spheres of the sacred and the profane. I explore how the irresistibly emancipatory impulse of recovering lost paradise compels Miltonic subjects to seek ways to return to their originary state or the divine ensemble. During this process, the subject is engaged with his own incapacity or privation while reaching into the sphere of unknown potentiality. In …

City College English 11000, Thomas Collins

Open Educational Resources

This is a syllabus for a zero-textbook-cost section of City College's English 11000, a first-year composition course.

Aeschylean Drama And The History Of Rhetoric, Allannah K. Karas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation demonstrates how the playwright Aeschylus contributes to the development of ancient Greek rhetoric through his use and display of πειθώ (often translated “persuasion”) throughout the Oresteia, first performed in 458 BCE. In this drama, Aeschylus specifically displays and develops πειθώ as a theme, a goddess, a central principle of action, and an important concept for his audience to consider. By tracing connections between Aeschylus’ innovations with πειθώ and later fifth and early fourth century conceptions of Greek rhetoric, I argue that Aeschylus plays a more important role in the development of practical principles and concepts of the …

Spyfall: Information Games And Scholarly Conversation, Nancy M. Foasberg

Publications and Research

Social deduction games like Spyfall can be used to model the rhetorical concept of the Burkean parlor for students.

Toward The Anthropology Of White Nationalist Postracialism: Comments Inspired By Hall, Goldstein, And Ingram’S “The Hands Of Donald Trump”, Jeff Maskovsky

Publications and Research

This article explains Donald Trump’s brutal political effectiveness in terms of his white nationalist appeal. It locates the intellectual, popular, and policy imperatives of Trumpism in a new form of racial politics that I am calling white nationalist postracialism. This is a paradoxical politics of twenty-first-century white racial resentment whose proponents seek to do two contradictory things: to reclaim the nation for white Americans while also denying an ideological investment in white supremacy. The article shows how Trump’s excoriation of political correctness, his nostalgia for the post–WWII industrial economy, his use of hand gestures, and his public speaking about race …

Evolving The Genre Of Empire: Gender And Place In Women's Natural Histories Of The Americas, 1688-1808, Diana Epelbaum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the eighteenth century, “natural history” was a capacious genre designation that alluded to conventions as diverse in their cultural and political resonances as they were in their applications within the New Science. My project is a genre study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural history text and art produced by women scientists, explorers, colonists, and early Americans writing the New World; it destabilizes rigid notions of genre that exclude women, suggesting that genre is by nature fluid, inclusionary as well as exclusionary. To this end, I return into conversation understudied naturalists Maria Sybilla Merian, Jane Colden, and Eliza Pinckney, who …

Disability As Diversity: A New Biopolitics, Michele Friedner, Karen Weingarten

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Fictions Of Whiteness: Transatlantic Race Science, Gender, Nationalism, And The Construction Of Race In Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (1823-1867), Philip E. Kadish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Fictions of Whiteness argues that political beliefs preceded and determined the race science theories which nineteenth century American white novelists applied or invoked in their work, the inverse of the current critical consensus. For issues ranging from Indian removal to slavery and Reconstruction, and utilizing theories from of Condorcet, Buffon, Camper, Louis Agassiz, James Pritchard, Johannes Blumenbach, and George Borrow these authors shifted allegiances to divergent race theories between and within works, applied those theories selectively to white, black, and Indians characters, and applied the same scientific race theories to politically divergent rhetorical ends. By analyzing shifting application of different …

The Making Of Knowledge-Makers In Composition: A Distant Reading Of Dissertations, Benjamin M. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Combining qualitative coding with original algorithmic and quantitative analyses, this project aggregates and visualizes metadata from 2,711 recent doctoral dissertations in Composition/Rhetoric, completed between 2001 and 2010 (inclusive), in order to establish an empirical baseline of what new and established scholars in Composition/Rhetoric agree upon as acceptable research in the field. I find that both subject matter and methodologies largely collocate within a small number of clusters, but not without cross-over among these clusters, and I call for increased dialogue among schools focusing on these different methods and subjects.

Chapter 1, 'Disciplinary Anxiety and the Composition of Composition,' reviews the …

Renaissance Humanism And The Ottoman 'Other' - Discourse Construction, Position And Power, Aramis Miranda-Reyes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 had an overwhelming geopolitical impact on Western Europe which included a discursive shift that depended greatly on the ideological construction of this event by its contemporaries for its consequences. In other words, the nature of Western European discourse subsequent to the Fall of Constantinople was rooted in the psychological impact this loss of territory had in contemporary secular and church leaders as well as their functionaries, many of which were key humanist figures. Consequently, Renaissance writers who constructed the Ottomans as 'others', were also writing within a context of power relations. In this …

Technology And The Glass Imagination: Isolation And Closeness From The Window To The Screen, Sarah Elizabeth Welsh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In computer and cell phone screens, as in 19th-century architecture, glass employs a frame to show a specific picture, and keeps us at a distance from what lies behind it. Glass' dichotomies in technology (transparency and reflection, isolation and closeness) have become stronger metaphors for our experience with technology. This paper will look at the similarities between the language and metaphors created by glass in 19th-century architecture and 21st century technology, and glass' role in connecting us to and alienating us from the world 'outside.' In so doing, the role of glass in the imagination and its impact on modernity …

Voices From On High: Rhetorical Education In A Jewish Women's Writing Center, Andrea Rosso Efthymiou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnographic dissertation looks at how the mission statement at one institution of higher education--Yeshiva University (YU)--establishes rhetorical education for its undergraduate students. The research site for this study of rhetorical education and institutional mission is the college writing center at YU's women's campus, Stern College for Women. This study defines rhetorical education as the way an institution authorizes written, spoken, and behavioral communication, with the goal of developing its students as civic beings, through its institutional mission. My findings demonstrate how undergraduate writing tutors disidentify with institutional rhetorical education to subvert, resist, and revise institutional rhetorical education, offering alternatives …

Occupy Wall Street's Challenge To An American Public Transcript, Christopher Neville Leary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the rhetoric and discourses of the anti-corporate movement Occupy Wall Street, using frameworks from political ethnography and critical discourse analysis to offer a thick, triangulated description of a single event, Occupy Wall Street's occupation of Zuccotti Park. The study shows how Occupy achieved a disturbing positionality relative to the forces which routinely dominate public discourse and proposes that Occupy's encampment was politically intolerable to the status quo because the movement held the potential to consolidate critical thought and action. Because the "soft" means of re-capturing public consent were weak in 2011 because of the 2008 economic collapse, …

Mapping The Methods Of Composition/Rhetoric Dissertations: A “Landscape Plotted And Pieced”, Benjamin M. Miller

Publications and Research

What methods do graduate students take up for their dissertation projects? This article shares findings from distant reading of 2,711 abstracts, suggesting that humanist approaches predominate within the Consortium of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition, but not without some methodological pluralism. A large number of studies outside the consortium are also considered.

Unhinged: Kairos And The Invention Of The Untimely, Robert Leston

Publications and Research

Traditionally, kairos has been seen as a “timely” concept, and so invention is said to emerge from the timeliness of a cultural and historical situation. But what if invention was thought of as the potential to shift historical courses through the injection of something new or alien into a situation? This essay argues that kairos has not been able to free itself from its historical constraints because it has been bound to a human sense of temporality. By evolving along patterns different from print, the apparatus of the cinema developed in a way where it was not bound to illustrating …

The Inadvertent Alliance Of Anthony Comstock And Margaret Sanger: Abortion, Freedom, And Class In Modern America, Karen Weingarten

Publications and Research

This article investigates how moral-reformer Anthony Comstock, who helped outlaw the practice of birth control and to have abortion criminalized, and Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and birth-control activist, advanced their causes through the discourse of freedom and self-control. While Comstock’s and Sanger’s works are often seen in opposition, this article questions that positioning by pointing out how they both lobbied against accessible abortion using similar tactics. Finally, this article demonstrates how Comstock and Sanger, through different means, worked to present abortion as a depraved practice that would lead to the demise of American society. Presenting Comstock and Sanger …

Retórica De La Predicación E Ideología Dominica En La Quinta Parte De El Conde Lucanor, Fernando Degiovanni

Publications and Research

Resumen

Frente a la hipótesis ampliamente aceptada de que la quinta parte de El Conde Lucanor no tiene relación temática y formal directa con el resto del libro de Don Juan Manuel, este trabaj o postula que la última sección no sólo representa una prolongación del asunto de la "ética estamental" presente en los "enxiemplos" y proverbios, sino que, desde el punto de vista retórico, es la porción destinada por el autor para operar como complemento discursivo de las restantes. En este sentido, luego de estudiar sus características estructurales - en especial, los procedimientos de la amplificatio -, y atribuir …