English, Speech, & Foreign Languages
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The transgression of humor: Towards a rhetoric of comedy
(May 2023)ABSTRACT JASON PARKER THE TRANSGRESSION OF HUMOR: TOWARDS A RHETORIC OF COMEDY MAY 2023 In this dissertation, I discuss the elements of comedy that are grounded in rhetoric. I explore how comedy is rhetorical and how ... -
Platonism in practice: The American transcendental rhetorics of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott
(2022-12-01)American Transcendentalism has often been noted for sharing characteristics with Platonism. While there has been a substantial amount of research done on the influence of Platonism, I take a different approach by exploring ... -
Absence and rhetorical (non) circulation: "Nasty woman" Kamala Harris in 2020
(2022-08-01)This project is an activist one that adds to digital scholarship, applies to praxis in writing classrooms, and has the potential to inform future political practices. In particular, this project traces the absence, presence, ... -
Ghost Kingdoms and Phantom Worlds: Narrative strategies in adoptee autofiction
(2022-08-01)In this thesis, I investigate Betty Jean Lifton’s theory of the Ghost Kingdom as it appears in adoptee-written narratives. Lifton describes the Ghost Kingdom as a “psychic reality” where what-if projections of lost or ... -
Haunted things: Examining trauma and resistance in the fiction of Helena Maria Viramontes
(2022-08-01)This thesis examines how material objects function in the works of Helena María Viramontes to reveal the traumatic experiences of her Chicana characters. It simultaneously questions how the critical lenses of thing theory ... -
The rhetoric of oppression and marginality in Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy
(2022-08-01)This research study argues that the rhetoric of oppression creates harm and marginalizes various groups of people, specifically Black women. A social issue that appears to have no end in sight, oppression and marginality ... -
Paradoxical power: Victim claims as a rhetorical genre
(2022-05-18)When Michael Brown was shot and killed, the country picked sides – either white police officer or black decedent – which led to increasingly public skirmishes in the war over who the United States accepts as a victim. From ... -
Performance under fire: A study of rhetorical firefighter identities
(2022-05-25)Firefighters, through the repetitive performance of their shared job, construct a collective rhetorical identity. Fire departments, like many organizations, often adopt written core values in an aim to guide employee ... -
Fat, cisgender, male protagonists in award-winning, young adult literature: An analysis
(2022-01-31)Up to the present, most academic publications and conversations concerning fat characters in young adult literature center fat women and girls. When fat, male characters are addressed, they tend to be viewed through a ... -
I am command: A narratological analysis of patriarchal notions of power in Shonda Rhimes' Scandal
(9/22/2021)Using a narratological framework, this dissertation examines the rhetorical construction of power in the 2012-2018 television series Scandal, contending that showrunner Shonda Rimes subverts the dominant narrative in ... -
Rhetorically reimagining undergraduate labor organizing: Prospects, problems and possibilities
(12/9/2021)The question of undergraduate labor organizing has been debated since the 2016 Columbia decision which now includes undergraduates. Scholars view rhetoric and composition analysis centered on students as writers and scholars, ... -
Remediating the metalanguage of multiliteracy in alphacentric discourse: A genre analysis of instructional materials in regional first-year composition programs
(8/25/2021)For over two and a half decades now, Scholars such as Cynthia Selfe (1988), The New London Group (1996), Stuart Selber (2004), and many others referenced in this dissertation, advocated for multiliteracy curricula while ... -
“Everything is true here, even if it’s not”: Reconsidering fictionality in Reddit’s r/Nosleep
(8/20/2021)The rise of digital participatory cultures has corresponded with new online discourse communities, each with their own languages, genres, and communicative norms. This thesis represents a detailed examination of one online ... -
The rhetoric of protest in the Supreme Court case of Hansberry v. Lee and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun
(8/2/2021)This research study examines the rhetoric of protest in the legal case involving Carl Hansberry and his struggle to keep the home he had purchased for his family in a previously all-White neighborhood in Chicago. He filed ... -
A study of human connections through terministic screens and narrative strategies in selected works of Sarah Orne Jewett
(7/28/2021)Nineteenth-century American author Sarah Orne Jewett provides a voice for undervalued cultures and illustrates the significance of these cultures in her narratives. This study examines human connections in Jewett’s ... -
Necro-rhetorics: Agency, ethical interventions, and the digital corpse
(7/12/2021)Digital legacies and immortality have never been more important to our lives than they are now. The growing connection between technology and mourning necessitates the critical examination of our digital literacies in ... -
Identification, division, and understanding in contact zones: Using Vietnam, Long Time Coming to explore the rhetorical power of invitation
(7/27/2021)In America, our military combat veterans are considered a vulnerable population, and in 2016, they were number four on the nation’s list of the top ten most disparate communities. The Vietnam War veteran leads by the ... -
Writing the Republic: *First* First Ladies
(6/10/2021)While much has been written about our nation’s first First Ladies, not much attention has been paid to the rhetoric of these women. As the New Republic worked to build and create a democracy, Martha Washington, Abigail ... -
The changing horizon of composition studies: An examination of the influences of collaborative an online pedagogies on first-year college writing
(2011)Scholarship involving writing process theories and composition pedagogies undertaken in the last 25 years suggests that the writing-as-process model has experienced and will continue to experience significant change. The ...
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