Rhetoric Commons^™

Virtual Agency: A Hermeneutic Examination Of The Network And Actors Within The Composition Classroom, Ronald Dean Straight

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Dissertation explores the visible and invisible rhetorical choices made in, around, and through the composition classroom and its community of practice, students, faculty, technologies, staff, and other undiscovered actors, through Actor Network Theory and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The discoveries will better situate the impact of identities and actancy within composed, hybrid worlds. Students, society, the world is now collectively connected and able to communicate, acquire knowledge, and interact on a virtual world stage. The exigence for this dissertation's exploration is that Moore, et al. (2016) concluded that students did not make a connection between the technology they have access …

God Of War: Masculinity And Fatherhood Through Procedural Rhetoric, Andrew A. Morgan

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

Video games and academia have a long history with one another. Academic researchers have continued to debate the extent to which video games can materialize real world effects. In this thesis, I employ procedural rhetoric and feminist scholarship to analyze the rhetorical power of God of War. I focus on the game’s immersive procedures and the performances of masculinity from Kratos, Atreus, and Baldur. These three characters all perform different masculinities, and their interactions with one another inform the game’s portrayal of masculinity and fatherhood. By engaging in violence and depicting nuanced performances of masculinity, God of War positions the …

Bureaucratic Modernity And The Erosion Of Practical Reason: A Rhetorical Education As An Antidote, David Impellizzeri

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

To what extent and in what ways does modernity reveal itself through the bureaucratic? This project aims at an interpretive understanding of bureaucratic modernity. The rationalization of society and action in the (late) modern world requires that an increasing number of human activities and domains be explained in allegedly neutral, ‘rational’ terms and without reference to morally substantive ends. Ultimately, this entails a form of epistemic reductionism that elevates instrumental rationality to the exclusion of practical reason and probabilistic ways of knowing. Bureaucratic modernity signifies a decrease in choices that can be legitimized in public on some basis other …

Away With The Apprentice: Graduate Worker Advocacy Groups And Rhetorical Representation, Zachary B. Marburger

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry (2017-2022 archives)

While graduate workers have a long history of organizing and advocating on their own behalf, concerns specific to their unique identity as both laborers and students have not yet permeated the discourse surrounding worker rights in higher education. Using Edward Schiappa’s work on how definitions are created and circulated, I position that the work and labor of the graduate student is under-discoursed because of the mundane definition of the graduate worker as an apprentice first and foremost. Drawing on the public literature of the Committee on Rights and Compensation (CRC), a current effort to unionize graduate workers underway at the …

Taking An “Ecological Turn” In The Evaluation Of Rhetorical Interventions, Peter Cannon

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to develop a new method for the evaluation and assessment of therapeutic libraries in a health ecology. To do so, I employ a modified version of Lloyd Bitzer’s rhetorical situation as a methodological tool for the investigation of health ecologies by applying an ecological analysis to an alcohol and other drug (AOD) treatment center in Tampa, Florida. By modifying Bitzer’s rhetorical situation schema and expanding the concept of health ecologies, I develop several innovations useful for tracing the impact of actants and rhetorical events specific to health and medicine. A major focus of this dissertation is a …

Still Writing At The Master’S Table: Decolonizing Rhetoric In Legal Writing For A “Woke” Legal Academy, Teri A. Mcmurtry-Chubb

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

When the author wrote Writing At the Master’s Table: Reflections on Theft, Criminality, and Otherness in the Legal Writing Profession almost 10 years ago, her aim was to bring a Critical Race Theory/Feminism (CRTF) analysis to scholarship about the marginalization of White women law professors of legal writing. She focused on the convergence of race, gender, and status to highlight the distinct inequities women of color face in entering their ranks. The author's concern was that barriers to entry for women of color made it less likely that the existing legal writing professorate, predominantly White and female, would problematize the …

Setting The Stage And Building Homes: Architecture Metaphors And Space In Donne's First Caroline Sermon, Alexander S. Laws

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Through his use of "foundation" and "house" metaphors in his "First Sermon Preached to King Charles at St. James, 3 April 1625," John Donne discreetly presents his ideologies and principles before the new king, while simultaneously criticizing his contemporaries' misguided bickering over religio-political factions. This essay seeks to unpack the history surrounding, as well as the casuistical logic found within Donne's first sermon preached during the Caroline period, which both explicitly and implicitly addresses the foremost anxieties of the people of the changing age.

Understanding "A Common Word Between Us And You" Through I.A. Richards' New Rhetoric, Jonathan Gamble

Augsburg Honors Review

I.A. Richards defines rhetoric as the study of misunderstandings and their remedies. I argue in this paper that "A Common Word Between Us and You" (ACW) - a rhetorical letter coauthored by H.R.H Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad and 38 Muslim scholars - shares Richards' definition as its end and anchors his theory in practice. ACW is an attempt to avoid misunderstandings and to allow for understandings between Christians and Muslims about two of their common Scriptural commandments: love of God and love of neighbor. In Richards' call for a new rhetoric, he asserts that the core of rhetoric must be …

A Praxis Of Oral Homiletics: Preaching From The Heart, Weiwen Tu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Christian preaching has been a central and significant custom to the practitioners of biblically confessional and creedal communities in worship, evangelization, and discipleship. Yet modern preachers confront two challenges presented by the New Homiletic and the media environment. Undue favor toward narrative-based form, audience-oriented eventfulness at the expense of biblical authority, and shifting media that alter the preacher’s identity and incapacitate the preacher’s orality have led to a dissonant handling of form and content and thus a profound decline in the quality of the Christian pulpit.

This project grows out of an attempt to integrate an Augustinian hermeneutic and homiletic, …

A Rhetoric And Philosophy Of Interprofessional Healthcare Education: Communication Ethics In Action, Matthew Corr

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Healthcare professionals belong to a moral community. Caring for patients is a community act carried out by healthcare professionals working in teams within complex political and organizational systems. This teamwork is crucial to quality patient outcomes; however, incivility threatens to derail necessary and effective collaboration towards the common organizational good. Necessarily, interprofessional healthcare education is becoming a required element for pre-health professionals. Currently, schools are using competency-based approaches to interprofessional education to teach ethics/values, roles/responsibilities. communication, and teamwork. For reasons explicated throughout this dissertation, the categorizing of these particular elements as competencies is problematic and cultivated within a positivistic and …

The Ethics Of Occultic Communication: An Invocation Of Joshua Gunn And Sissela Bok, James Thomas Begley Jr.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Occultic rhetoric, according to Joshua Gunn, is a genre of discourse concerned with the study and practice of secret communications. The strategic sharing of secret messages involves a host of methods and conventions designed for the selective disclosure of hidden knowledge, thus controlling the boundaries of (and accessibility to power between) insider and outsider groups. Occultic rhetoric has its uses in everyday encounters, but the abuse of such manipulative strategies, especially by those in the academy and other positions of power and trust, calls for an ethical response. This dissertation submits occultic rhetoric to moral investigation by incorporating the works …

When Humanity Meets Technology: Contemplating Neil Postman's Critique Of Advertising, Yingwen Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project aims to contemplate Postman’s critique of advertising and offer insights to understand Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) in today’s mediated environment. As an essential component of IMC, the history of advertising demonstrates and documents that the medium of communication has an extensive influence on IMC practices. The concern about how communication media affect human perception, understanding, and behavior, resides within the central claim of the study of media ecology. Thus, this project investigates IMC through the lens of Postman’s media ecology perspectives, and argues that Postman’s prescient ideas provide both hope and constructive insights. Moreover, Postman’s thermostatic perspective, rooted …

A Rhetorical Analysis Of Opening Statements In Trial: Reconsidering The Classical Canon Of Invention, Andrew Chandler

Undergraduate Theses

This analysis of 21 opening statements probes at current persuasive practices employed by trial attorneys through the lens of mainstream legal advice and an expanded definition of rhetorical invention – one which includes both discovery and creation. An evaluation of such practice reveals the utility, and furthermore the duty of the advocate, to draw upon an expanded realm of available arguments.

Donald Trump Did A “Very Good” Job: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Candidate Trump’S Campaign Speeches, Caroline Mohan

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Since mid-2015, Donald Trump has shaken the political arena with an unprecedented yet effective public rhetorical repertoire. Regardless of alleged scandals, frequent social media usage, and extemporaneous and fiery rally speeches, the president’s approval ratings remain steady and he continues to move forward in his international and local political endeavors. Though these factors often posed large obstacles for past presidents, Trump has overcome them by use of audience identification, transparency, honorific pandering, and shrewd control of a vulnerable political sphere. In this study, rhetorician Kenneth Burke’s fantasy-theme and cluster criticisms are used to analyze Trump’s overall rhetorical themes, in social …

A Rhetoric Of Coupons: Analyzing Fsis And Fsi Coupons Through Rhetorical Lenses, Blake Lubinski

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

This thesis consists of two journal articles that examine newspaper coupon booklets called free-standing inserts (FSIs) through feminist and visual rhetoric lenses. The first article attempts to identify the “ideal couponer,” or the audience suggested by the product categories, visuals, and language appearing in FSIs. Through content and textual analyses using a feminist rhetoric lens, the article argues that FSIs evoke the idea of an audience of mothers who conform to gendered cultural assumptions about womanhood and parenthood. The article concludes with theoretical and business implications of these findings, contending that more rhetorical research is necessary to understand how FSIs …

On The Variations Of 'Occupatio' In "Richard Ii", William Kelly Reeder

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent scholarship of Shakespeare’s Richard II has been interested in or preoccupied with its historical relations. Particularly the plays association with the Essex Rising of 1601, and the censorship of the deposition scene, both of which seem to resonate for history with Elizabeth’s enigmatic comment expressing her identification with Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard II.

This paper proposes to resolve the question of the play’s censorship by interpreting the deposition scene as a dramatization of transubstantiation, perhaps triggering Elizabethan censors.

Transubstantiation is the doctrine by which the Catholic Church interprets the Eucharist using the distinction between substance and accidens (eternal and …

The Emergent Matter Of Archives : A Rhetorical Investigation Of The Queer Formation Of The Williams-Nichols Archive., Richard Wysocki

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Scholarly conversations across disciplines have asked researchers to consider archive as a site of power—often framed in terms of archives’ potential impact on history and practices of knowledge making more generally. This dissertation contributes to such conversations as they relate to queer archives and material rhetoric, exploring the Williams-Nichols Archive, an LGBTQ archive housed at the University of Louisville. I extend interdisciplinary scholarship to argue for approaching archives as rhetorical emergences rather than as containers or locations for discovery, a perspective that foregrounds the archive and archival practices as the subject of research. Drawing on archival research and oral history …

When Process Becomes Processing: Managing Instructor Response To Student Disclosure Of Trauma In The Composition Classroom, Kelci Barton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In first-year composition courses, there are three aspects of teaching that are researched well so far: disclosure of trauma in student writing, instructor feedback, and emotional labor. The disclosure of trauma is almost completely unavoidable in first-year composition. We encounter an issue with instructor feedback; how do we provide feedback to student writing, like grammar and mechanics, when the student has disclosed trauma in the writing? Additionally, we can build off this with emotional labor, which already occurs consistently in teaching but is heightened in this instance. When providing feedback to a student who has disclosed trauma, this can be …

The Rhetoric Of Sickle Cell Anemia, Raquel Mcfarland Robvais

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation examines the rhetorical treatment of sickle cell anemia as synecdoche, representing a preoccupation with racialized discourses of disease and the affective registers manifested in public life. From its inception SCA has taken on cultural meanings to satisfy ideological arguments about the nature of black bodies.

It has been appropriated to create “categories of difference and belonging” (Schramm et al). I examine how SCA is gathered by rhetors to serve varying ideological purposes and cultural communities. It is utilized to invite different readings that conceptualize the black body as an object of scientific experimentation, as an agent for resistance …

Argumentative Rhetoric And Logical Reasoning As Engagement With Being, Jeremy Barris

Humanities Faculty Research

The paper tries to show that when the deepest or foundational aspects of truth are at issue, both consequentially logical argument and rhetoric that aims to establish truth or justified conviction must engage with the being, or the irreplaceable particularity, of its audience’s members and also that of the arguer, what we refer to in ordinary language as who the person is. Beyond the existing discussion of existential rhetoric, the paper argues that this engagement with being is necessary to establish not only truth that directly concerns or turns on the arguer’s and audience’s being, but also truth or justification …

Epideictic Rhetoric And British Citizenship Practices Remembering British Heroes From The 1857 Indian Uprising At Civic Celebrations, Danielle Nielsen

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

Epideixis is generally understood as ceremonial rhetoric that praises or blames. When examined through the lens of civic celebrations such as the Coronation Durbars in fin de siècle colonial India or the protection of Confederate monuments, epideictic rhetoric instructs the audience to uphold what are purported to be the community’s common values.This educational epideixis, however, also exposes veiled anxieties not commonly associated with a seemingly ceremonial speech act. This new understanding of epideictic should encourage rhetoricians to further question rhetors’ use of epideixis and interrogate other aims in those speech acts.

Disruption, Remix, And Mediation: Analyzing "Bot" Algorithm Case Studies To Better Understand Rhetorical Agency In The Digital Age, Aaron Geiger

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Algorithms are ubiquitous components of digital age rhetoric and communication. Although they are integrated within our daily online functions, shaping our discourse and interactions with one another and with other algorithms, little is known how they shape rhetorical agency. Most of our online communication occurs through social media on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and we rely on social spaces like Wikipedia for updated information that is shaped by social constructs. We presume that since we program algorithms, their communicating functions mimic human discourse and can be shaped similarly.

However, a rich text analysis of three different case studies …

“Because We Have Chosen A Life Of Peace”: A Quantitative And Qualitative Study Of Vegan Food Narratives, Silke H. Feltz

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Restaurants, grocery stores, fast food chains, and companies all over the United States introduce the consumer to more vegan products, dishes, and services than ever before. The rise of veganism therefore offers a rhetorical platform that should be studied. This dissertation discusses the rhetoric of veganism by analyzing food narratives of vegans through a critical intersectional lens and consists of three research stages. The first research stage investigates the narratology of Glenn Scott Lacey’s documentary, Vegan: Everyday Stories(2016). In particular, this rhetorical analysis focuses on the evaluative belief system of vegan storytelling by applying narrative and ideological criticism. The …

From Tony Soprano To Donald Trump: Situating The Rhetoric Of The 2016 Trump Presidential Campaign In The Antihero Genre, Harry Bodell

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In the wake of Donald Trump’s stunning victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, scholars and political pundits alike were left scrambling to understand what had occurred. While there is no single explanation for this unexpected turn of events, the present study argues that an overlooked and central aspect of Trump’s appeal was foreshadowed by the increased prominence of antihero protagonists in American media, particularly exemplified by the recent “Golden Age” of television wherein television series like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Dexter found critical and popular success by building compelling narratives around morally flawed …

Visual Rhetoric In Comics: The Rhetoric Of Sexual Assault In The Wake Of Mattress Girl, Brianna Marie Burke

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the visual rhetoric of sexual assault through the unique medium of web-based comics composed by noncommercial artists. The focus was on features compiled from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, as well as one related to representation of those involved in sexual assault: abusers and survivors, art style, act and gaze, size of frame and social distance, horizontal angle, and vertical angle.

This examination reveals four things about the rhetoric of sexual assault and consent in these comics. First, the comics are used as documentary-like, …

Delivery, Facilitas, And Copia : Job Market Preparation And The Revival Of The Fifth Canon., Joseph Turner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This essay argues that English Studies departments should implement training programs in oral delivery strategies for graduate students seeking tenure track employment. A sample a 13-week training program, modeled on elements of classical rhetorical pedagogy, can help students develop and refine stills in oral delivery necessary for academic job interviews.

St. Augustine And The Rhetoric Of De Ordine, Natalie Gigliotti

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study contributes to scholarship on the question of Augustine and rhetoric by considering Augustine’s use and understanding of rhetoric in De ordine, one of his early philosophical dialogues composed during his transition from a life in rhetoric to a life in philosophy. The author studies the text through consideration of Augustine’s rhetoric in relationship to three major rhetorical authorities of the time, particularly their cultural applications: sophistic rhetoric, Ciceronian rhetoric, and Christian rhetoric. Through study of these relationships, one perceives Augustine’s ingenuity at work as he integrates diverse authorities into his rhetoric of order (ordo) and …

Four Phases Of Subjectivity: A Rhetorical And Phenomenological Analysis Of Aimé Césaire And Cahier D’Un Retour Au Pays Natal, Chelsea Binnie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation project sets out to perform a rhetorical and phenomenological analysis of the subjectivity that Césaire portrays in his epic poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, or Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. Césaire published and republished Cahier four times in a 17-year period and the modified accounts of subjectivity presented in the lines of the poem mirrors that of Césaire’s own human subjectivity. Césaire poetically unleashes Cahier and his Négritude project in an effort to shift the geography of reason from its self-appointed European center, to create a liminal space for the totalized …

Literature In The World: A Critical Discourse Study Of World Literature Pedagogy, Elisa Cogbill-Seiders

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

“Literature in the World” is a critical discourse analysis of world literature pedagogy in U.S. higher education. It investigates the ways discourse communities in higher education produce and shape the field of world literature. The dissertation begins by establishing and analyzing the generic conventions of university mission statements, finding they are primarily dominated by discourse on global learning. It follows with an analysis of world literature course descriptions from the same schools. World literature course descriptions alternatively replicate, resist, or subvert global learning discourses. The last chapter uses findings from the first two chapters to trace how university and instructor …

Rhetoric In Film: Three Explorations Of Influence In Documentaries And Digital Stories, Emily Knapp

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

This thesis is made up of three distinct articles, two written with the intention of publication while the third consists of a digital story and subsequent reflection on the process of creation. The first article serves to answer the question “Do documentary films inspire activism?” by analyzing data gained after surveying 266 members of the James Madison University community. The results suggest that viewers are moved to emotion when witnessing struggle but that they are moved to action when said action directly impacts their own life. The second article is a rhetorical analysis of the 2013 documentary film Blackfish. …