Rhetoric Commons^™

Defining The 99%: A Rhetorical Critique Of The Occupy Wall Street Movement, Molly Forgey

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Social actors assume a large task when attempting to legitimize their movement and motivate participation. For Occupy Wall Street (OWS) dissidents this task was even greater given that their grievances lie both with government and with large corporations, two of the most influential entities in the United States. Such obstacles sparked an interest in studying the language strategies OWS rhetors employed when attempting to define the movement. This thesis examines these strategies in order to discover how the movement was framed, and how framing processes relate to the collective’s identity. The discourse analyzed includes the initial call to action published …

The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy: A Metaphorical Look At Life, The Universe, And Everything, Thomas David Thompson

Communication Studies

A look at the integral use of metaphor as a heuristic in the process of human learning.

Rhetorics Of Engagement Across And About Faith And Worldview Difference, John Maclean

Theses and Dissertations

Interactions across faith and worldview difference are becoming increasingly common in many communities and around the world. These interactions can be verbally or physically violent, and even deadly, or they can be beautiful and enriching, or they can be ignored, resisted or refused. In this dissertation I put scholarship that endorses a broader conception of rhetoric in conversation with my personal experience in interfaith relations and dialogue in order to discover better ways to study these interactions. I propose and develop two constructs, "rhetorical space" and "rhetorical stance", that I use to explore and analyze people's attitudes toward and experiences …

Vanguardia Mujerista Haciendo Escuela: An Oral History Of Cuban Feminism, Marie Eszenyi

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The high rate of female political participation in Cuba has led many journalists, political scientists, and activists to claim that the country is quite possibly the most feminist in Latin America (Torregrosa, 2012). As the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality (2012) indicates, Cuba ranks third in the world for female participation in legislative bodies. Indeed, Cuba has a long history of female political and revolutionary involvement that positions Cuban feminism both on the forefront and the margins of the economy, governmental institutions, culture, society, military systems, and the workplace during various historical points. Moreover, Cuba’s location just 90 miles …

Occupy The Future: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Dystopian Film And The Occupy Movement, Justin J. Grandinetti

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The anarchic Occupy Wall Street protests, which began in 2011, had an immediate impact on politics and the global lexicon. By introducing the terms “the one percent” and “the 99%” into the public sphere, Occupy was able to draw attention to growing global income inequality. This revolutionary spirit was not lost on popular culture, as a number of films that followed the protests were linked to Occupy. The Hunger Games (2012), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Elysium (2013) represent films that were not only extremely successful in the box office, but were also connected to the Occupy Movement because …

Siren Song: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Gender And Intimate Partner Violence In Gotham City Sirens, Katlin Schmidt

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project investigates comic book discourse. Specifically, I investigate how comic narratives provide readers with an interpretation for how they should discern and assess “appropriate” behaviors for women. The artifact of analysis included in this project is DC Comics Gotham City Sirens (2009). This text features popular female superheroes, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, and Poison Ivy. Because comic books utilize both textual and visual means to disseminate a message, this project evaluates the visual rhetoric of these characters within the narrative. Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm is used to provide an understanding to how these visual means contribute to the meanings assigned …

Redeeming Rhetoric: Augustine's Use Of Rhetoric In His Preaching Ministry, John A. Sypert

Liberty Theological Review

The art and practice of rhetoric occupied a fundamental place in the ancient Roman world. It is thus not surprising that Augustine (354-430 AD) was deeply committed to the art of speaking well. He spent his youth mastering the theory of rhetoric, putting into practice what he had learned during a preaching career of almost forty years. This essay examines elements of rhetoric in Augustine’s preaching, arguing that he purposely appropriated common rhetorical elements in his preaching for the purpose of making Scripture both plain and compelling to his audience. Augustine’s training in rhetoric is summarized, followed by an overview …

In(Di)Visible Dream: Rhetoric, Myth, And The Road In America, Raymond Blanton

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation takes a rhetorical approach in exploring the mythology of the road in American culture, and in particular the road as an encounter with the other. Specifically, I argue for the road as a mythic archetype, developing an ultimate vocabulary of the road as an Upward/Downward Way in an effort to transcend the dialectical tensions inherent in extant discourse of the road as rebellion. I begin by situating the road as psychagogic rhetoric, a leading of the soul, in Plato’s Phaedrus, to delineate a fixed and reasoned progression of an ultimate order of the road. Then, I extend these …

Designs Of Meaning: Tools For Digital Storytellers, Aimée Knight, Austin Starin

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

As the creation of digital texts flourishes in and out of the classroom, new strategies for composition are needed. Digital stories are multimodal by nature; they communicate meaning through multiple media, especially the combination of text, audio, image, animation, video, and interactive content forms.

Kress, Van Leeuwen, Wysocki, Ball and other multimodal scholars believe that as we see writing transition to the "logic" of the senses, new spaces and new approaches are necessary. DeVoss & Selfe (2002) argue for new "rhetorical positionings" for teachers of writing in digital environments to "help students explore, develop, and communicate more effectively within online …

Pleased To Tweet You, Cate Blouke, Paul Muhlhauser

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

"Pleased to Tweet You" is an interactive, personal narrative of Cate's experiences using Twitter at academic conferences, loosely following the narrative structure of a traditional five act play. The article describes and reenacts the ways in which live-tweeting creates a "participatory theatre" for conference-goers, and Cate argues for an ethics of participation around how Twitter is used in these situations. Although the article focuses on academic conferences, the issues addressed -- participation, attention, and performativity -- apply equally to any live-tweeting experience, be it political protests, presidential debates, or the Oscars. Incorporating both real and fabricated tweets related to the …

The Rhetoric Of Exile In The Preaching And Teaching Of The Anglo-Saxon Church: Glimpses Of The Cultural Ideology In Old English Homilies, Yi-Chin Huang

The Hilltop Review

Abstract.

This article explores how the early medieval vernacular homiletic discourse produced in Anglo-Saxon England strategically employs the rhetoric exile, a theme whose significance is also articulated widely in Old English poetry. As words denoting such similar ideas as exile, banishment, exclusion, casting/driving out, etc., recur significantly in the homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, including the homilies of Ælfric, Wulfstan, and the Blickling and Vercelli Codices, I propose an analysis of the instances in which the rhetoric about exile is used in preaching and theology in order to reveal not only the Church authors/teachers’ ability and effort to translate Latin …

Living Proof: Autobiographical Political Argument In We Are The 99 Percent And We Are The 53 Percent, Doron Taussig

Media and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

People often cite life experiences as evidence in political arguments, though personal experience is far from generalizable. How do these arguments work? In this paper, I consider the rhetorical dynamics of “autobiographical political argument” by examining We are the 99 Percent and We are the 53 Percent, two blogs that use autobiographical stories to make discursive points. I argue that these autobiographical appeals efficiently use all three of Aristotle’s persuasive “proofs”—logos (logic), ethos (credibility), and pathos (emotion). Then I show that many of the blogs’ stories focus on “redemption,” a theme personality psychologists have found emphasized in the narrative …

Beyond Syntax And Cities At War: Doing Rhetoric's History And Theory Alloiostrophically, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

How does one make contact with difference when doing rhetoric's history and theory? Rather than being afflicted with an anxiety that John Schilb once termed heterophobia, what if doing the history and theory of rhetoric were healthy about heteros? Heteros means "difference" but visually the word shows more than this, namely "eros" in "heteros" - love in difference.

In this chapter, I explore a love of difference in the history and theory of rhetoric. Starting from my own love of Homer that I dare express, I tum to a peculiar text about Homeric rhetoric, …

Introduction: A Revolution In Tropes, Jane S. Sutton, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Our view of tropes is that they are rhetoric's own unique resources, but for ineluctable historiographical reasons have been more or less closed off from the production of theory. Our "trope project" began simply enough. If the workings of tropes could be identified in a new way, then the aim and purpose of rhetoric could be retheorized in terms new to democratic deliberation. Working under the slogan "Yes, tropes-but all of them," we attempted a new classification system based on the Greek roots of hundreds of tropes listed in various old and new sources such as Bernard Dupriez's A Dictionary …

Figuring Out/In Rhetoric: From Antistrophē To Alloiostrophē, Jane S. Sutton, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

We begin with critical reflections on rhetoric as the antistrophē of dialectic. Here is the first line of Aristotle's Rhetoric: "Rhetoric is the counterpart [antistrophos] to dialectic." What this means exactly has been a point of some controversy over centuries of study in the rhetorical tradition. As John Rainolds said, "There are as many interpretations of this little word . . . as there are interpreters." However, we see something other, namely that these "many interpretations" of rhetoric as antistrophē are actually "one." The result is an amplification of the face of rhetoric to look, act, perform, …

Characterization Of Prose By Rhetorical Structure For Machine Learning Classification, James Java

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Measures of classical rhetorical structure in text can improve accuracy in certain types of stylistic classification tasks such as authorship attribution. This research augments the relatively scarce work in the automated identification of rhetorical figures and uses the resulting statistics to characterize an author's rhetorical style. These characterizations of style can then become part of the feature set of various classification models.

Our Rhetorica software identifies 14 classical rhetorical figures in free English text, with generally good precision and recall, and provides summary measures to use in descriptive or classification tasks. Classification models trained on Rhetorica's rhetorical measures paired with …

Detroit's Sport Spaces And The Rhetoric Of Consumption, Anthony C. Cavaiani

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation argues how Detroit’s spaces of sport consumption rhetorically configure the city’s identity. Specifically, this project interrogates the city’s sports spaces and argues how they anchor identity in the following ways: through the production of accessible discourses, through the emphasis on certain discourses and the de-emphasis of other discourses, through the regulation, control and biopower of the city’s sports spaces and their rhetorical effect on Detroit’s identity, and through the creation of distinct public memories produced from these discourses.

Rhetoric, Participation, And Democracy: The Positioning Of Public Hearings Under The National Environmental Policy Act, Kevin C. Stone

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

There are two predominant models for thinking about proper communicative conduct on the part of citizens participating in federal environmental decision making. The consultative model is typically the basis for traditional forms of public participation. The consensus model has been developed as an alternative to the perceived failings of traditional forms of public participation, and underpin increasingly common collaborative approaches to public participation). In this paper, I will take a humanities based approach to advocating for the consideration of a third approach, that of ‘reasonable hostility.’ I argue that neither of the currently dominant models of participatory conduct successfully accounts …

Student And Instructor Responses To E-Feedback, Julia Reidy

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This empirical study provides further insight into how instructors decide on the methods used to respond to student writing and whether these criteria match what students want from this feedback. What are instructors' considerations when they adopt e-feedback practices? Do these considerations align or conflict with student preferences for how they receive feedback? How does the rhetorical content of these technologies (visual presentation and choices offered to users) affect the ways both teachers and students use them? To address a research gap, this study focuses on e-feedback, which is in-document feedback from instructors distributed via the Web to students (also …

Crime Control, Due Process, & Evidentiary Exclusion: When Exceptions Become The Rule, Elizabeth H. Kaylor

Proceedings of the New York State Communication Association

This paper uses the dichotomy between Herbert Packer’s (1968) two models of criminal justice advocacy – “crime control” and “due process” – as a rhetorical paradigm for understanding policy debate about the exclusion of relevant evidence at trial. Understanding the opposition between crime control and due process advocates as a rhetorical controversy, in which commonly-used ideographs camouflage dramatically different constructions of the concepts at stake, helps to illuminate the way each side mobilizes public support for their narrative of doing . While both the exclusionary rule (which prohibits the use of illegally-obtained evidence in criminal cases) and the “fruit of …

Language, Truth, And Rhetoric, Collin Pointon

e-Research: A Journal of Undergraduate Work

The words of Martin Heidegger are no example of the lowest form of wit. His sentence is meant to be interpreted in two important ways that utilize different meanings of the word "truth." Our common understanding of the word truth is not something innate but a product of history and culture that stretches back through the Romans to the ancient Greeks. Alētheia in ancient Greek was translated to veritas in Latin. The translation included an interpretation--as all translations do (which is why translation is rhetorical in nature)--of alētheia as a Platonic entity. Alētheia was interpreted as something transcendent; something that …

Isaac Watts And The Culture Of Dissent, Andrew Eli M. Yeater

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Although Isaac Watts wrote hymns in the early eighteenth century, some of his hymns, such as “Joy to the World,” “Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed?,” and “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” survive today as well-known hymns. However, little has been written about the rhetorical effects of his hymns. This thesis demonstrates that, like any other literary work, Watts’ hymns can be analyzed rhetorically. This thesis analyzes Watts’ hymns with the aid of Louis Montrose’s New Historicism, showing how Watts’ hymns were impacted by the English culture in which he lived and how they impacted the religious culture to …

Aesthetics In Visual Rhetoric: An Analysis Of The Volkswagen Beetle, Melanie Ann Barker

English Theses & Dissertations

This thesis outlines how aesthetics can add to the current functionality of the field of visual rhetoric. A methodology for an aesthetic analysis was created and then executed using the classic Volkswagen Beetle as an artifact. The end result of this thesis will be an argument for the inclusion of aesthetics in visual rhetoric, and thus greater understanding of the emotional ties of audiences and the potential for stronger analyses.

From Superhero To Human: A Genealogical Criticism Of Depictions Of Police Officers In Media From The 1970s To The Present, Samantha Wendy Ann Neher

Communication Studies

This senior project suggests that media depictions of law enforcement encourage viewers to adopt certain viewpoints towards police officers. In addition, the more realistic and humanizing that these presentations become, the more positive that the general public’s perceptions of police officers become. By utilizing a genealogical criticism of eight different law enforcement movies, and with support from public opinion polls and the communication theory of Cultivation, this paper will exemplify how the above statement is true.

Acts Of Rebellion: The Rhetoric Of Rogue Cinema, Adam Breckenridge

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this project was to articulate a definition and understanding of the emerging genre of rogue cinema through the lens of rhetorical theory. To this end, I lay out a theoretical groundwork based principally on the works of Kenneth Burke and Slavoj Zizek to build a definition and to analyze the works of four filmmakers whose work could be considered rogue: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Dusan Makavejev, Lars von Trier and Werner Herzog.

The first chapter is dedicated to articulating the theorists I use and showing how they can be used to examine rogue films. The second chapter is dedicated …

#Definerhetoric 2014, Harlot Editors

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

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Queer The Tech: Genderfucking And Anti-Consumer Activism In Social Media, Matthew A. Vetter

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

A companion text to a piece of online activist rhetoric, this essay attempts to explain how social media networks and other digital interfaces intercede and influence users' constructions of gender and consumer identity. Gaining awareness of the influence networks have over our lives, should empower users to appropriate and subvert those networks for alterior agendas. This essay, and the activism it introduces, demonstrates an appropriation of Pinterest, a "pinboard-style" social media network, for the purposes of suberting and exposing its typical hetero-normatie and pro-consumer practices.  Â

Crime And Poverty In Detroit: A Cross-Referential Critical Analysis Of Ideographs And Framing, Jacob Jerome Nickell

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how the relationship between crime and poverty is rhetorically constructed within the news media. To this end, I investigate the content of twelve news articles, published online, that offered coverage of crime in the city of Detroit, Michigan. I employ three methods in my criticism of these texts: ideographic analysis, critical framing analysis, and an approach that considers ideographs and framings elements to be rhetorical constructions that function together. In each phase of my analysis, I developed ideological themes from concepts emerging from the texts. I then approached my discussion of these findings from a perspective of …

Fashioning A Rhetoric Of Style: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Urban Street Style Representations In New York City, Amber Pineda

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how urban street styles are used rhetorically within local boroughs in New York City as a form of resistance to the dominant fashion industry that dictates what is "in fashion" through media. A total of fifteen video blogs developed by The New York Times were analyzed, each containing a representation of one of the five boroughs of New York City: Staten Island, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens. The analysis identified themes of a rhetoric of style, consisting of primacy of text, imaginary communities, aesthetic rationales, market contexts, and stylistic homologies. These themes were then analyzed by drawing …

The State Of The Anti-Union Address: A Rhetorical Critique Of Select Service Worker Training Methods, Richard Ries

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is an interdisciplinary master's level thesis that explores links among technical writing, training manuals, surveillance, and anti-union rhetoric used with service workers in select American chains and franchises. Brief histories are provided, including those of technical writing, the rise of unions in America, and how technical writing became inextricably linked with labor. A major shift occurred in the 20th century when workers began interacting less with products and more with the public. The research focuses on training manuals, techniques, and rehearsed dialogues of McDonald's, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Whole Foods, Panera, and Publix, though similar organizations are referenced. Service worker language, …