Texte remanié de: Th. Ph. D.--New Haven (Conn.)--Yale university. / Notes bibliogr. Index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 309-316). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the rhetorics of fear operating in public discourses surrounding metal music. This analysis focuses on how the public rhetorics deploy identity on listener populations through both the mediation and legislation of identities. Specifically, this mediation takes place using both symbols of fear and arguments constructed on potential threats. Texts for analysis in this study include film and television documentaries, newspaper articles, book-length critiques of and scholarship on heavy metal, and transcripts from the U.S. Senate Hearings on Record Labeling. "Heavy metal" and "metal music" are labels that categorize diverse styles of music. While there is no exemplar metal song that accounts for a definition of the genre, the terms have been consistently used in rhetorics of fear. These rhetorical movements produce and deploy deviant identities, depend on the construction of cultural crisis, and generate counter rhetorics of agency for individuals and subcultures. The study moves 1) chronologically through metal history, 2) geographically from the United States to Norway, and 3) contextually through media events that produce the public discourses of identity, crisis, and counter rhetorics. This study charts the rhetorical movements that have created fear within communities, leading to threats of legislation or criminalization of segments of the population.

This thesis seeks to offer a rhetorical explanation to the sudden rise of superhero films in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This study draws on the theoretical writings of Kenneth Burke and his concepts of equipment for living and form. I argue through the rhetorical usage of form these films have constructed symbols that respond to the trauma and fears audiences experience living in the context of a post 9/11 world. Chapter one outlines a historical literature review tracing the origins of superhero films to their literary roots in comic books. This literature review outlines the history of comic book characters addressing social fear and trauma throughout the United States' history and suggests that superhero movies continue this tradition through the visual medium of film. Chapter two constructs a methodology in which to critically examine these films. The chapter outlines Burke's concept of the Symbol and Barry Brummett's notion of the rhetorical homology. With this methodology in place, chapter three and four present case studies explicating how form manifests itself in specific superhero films and explores the rhetorical influence these movies have on audiences. Chapter three examines the Symbol that is found within three films: Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Spider-man. Chapter four looks critically at the rhetorical homology that exists between the film 300 and the Bush administrations justification of the Iraq invasion. Furthermore, chapter four defines the Mask found in V for Vendetta as a site for political protest and a rhetorical source of empowerment for the disenfranchised. The concluding chapter investigates the ramifications of these symbols and critiques the messages some of them suggest to audiences and also discusses the opportunity for further research in the subject area. / text

This dissertation provides an exploration of the nature and scope of the category of the Unconscious as a necessary feature of rhetorical theory and criticism. In order to demonstrate the fundamental importance of the Unconscious to rhetorical theory and criticism, this dissertation focuses on Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory of Dramatism. Burke is one of the most frequently cited theorists by rhetorical scholars, and offers a familiar site for rhetorical scholars to understand the Unconscious as a rhetorical factor. Burke formulated a theory of the Unconscious by drawing from Freudian psychoanalysis. Since Freud, Jacques Lacan has advanced and altered the Freudian understanding of the Unconscious. Therefore, by navigating the terrain of both Burkeian and Lacanian scholarship, this dissertation moves toward a BurkeLacanian theory and method to offer a more critical lexicon for the rhetorical study of the dialectical relationship between the conscious and Unconscious parts of the psyche. In doing so, this dissertation develops and answers the following questions: How can we theorize the Unconscious as a rhetorical factor? How is Burke's theory of the Unconscious rhetorically useful? How might we understand Burke's theory of rhetoric differently and better if we read his Freudian influences through Lacanian scholarship on the Unconscious? How is a theory of the BurkeLacanian subject rhetorically useful? How does a BurkeLacanian theory of the Unconscious inform productive criticism? This dissertation applies a BurkeLacanian theory of the Unconscious by introducing a rhetorical method called "Ideographic Cluster Quilting." This method moves toward the rhetorical study of texts as cultural psyches that are constructed from fragments of discourse that form around figures of abjection. In order to demonstrate the usefulness for studying Ideographic Cluster Quilts, this dissertation analyzes the cultural psyche that forms around the figure of the "illegal immigrant" as abject. In doing so, we gain an insight into the Unconscious hatred of humanity as the perverse core of American identity that qualifies which bodies do and do not matter. We will also gain an insight into the way nationalistic identities function within globalization by confining labor forces within national boundaries, while multinational corporations move freely around the world. / text

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This thesis seeks a portable and accessible model for centralising photographs in enquiry. I argue that photographs are potent sites of human value making but are typically relegated to illustrating word-based considerations, while the vast mass of ‘ordinary’ photographs are excluded from even this function. The context in which I develop and test the model is the heroic era of Antarctic exploration, a time and place that is dominated by an entrenched mythology, and where photographs have been assigned a merely pictorial role. In seeking to reactivate these objects and pictures I turn to Elizabeth Edwards’ notion of using photographs to think with, tracing the evolution of this idea through generations of thinking about photography, and emphasising recent writers such as Geoffrey Batchen, Margaret Olin and Joan Schwartz. My work confirms a resonance with Edwards’ thinking but also a need to emphasise photographic materiality and the photographic collective. Further, I demonstrate that this thinking also resonates with the work of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, confirming a construction of photographs as generative anchoring points in networks of identification that are both culturalised and subjective. My model for thinking with photographs draws in Kenneth Burke’s pentad of dramatistic analysis, arguing a productive fit with his concern to filter the rhetorical detritus of human behaviour as an entrée to viewing core motivations. The pentad has not previously been used to think with photographs but it is able to be deployed successfully for this purpose by refreshing its operation in line with writers such as Robert Cathcart, James Chesebro and Gregory Clark. For Antarctica, thinking with photographs involves negotiating margins – depicted, physical, temporal and ideological, and in addressing the photographic mass this thesis argues a reactivation of margins as points of insight rather than barriers of exclusion. Recent writers such as Francis Spufford, Stephen Pyne, John Wylie and Kathryn Yusoff have found new ways to construct the performance of Antarctic exploration, and, in this spirit, the thesis enacts Burke’s pentad to think with the photograph collection of ‘second tier’ Antarctic explorer, Ernest Joyce. It shows Antarctic exploration to be also an intensely personal experience, with the power to overhaul mindsets but offering no guarantee that new expectations can be delivered on. In Joyce’s photographs it finds a nexus of contested narratives and contested photographies, and the seeds of a Benjaminian modernity that speak of the personal implications of the dissolution of meta-narratives.

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This dissertation argues that a diversity of epistemology within the field of rhetoric and composition can encourage Imagining as a strategy to negotiate the conundrums and binaries of the post-everything era, especially in negotiating the social presence of online learning. I trace Imagination from Enlightenment Pedagogy, which privileged the individual, unteacheable genius, to the conflation of invention and Imagination and the disappearance of both in current-traditional, modern, and postmodern pedagogy. Underlying this disappearance seems to be a distrust of Imagination, as exemplified by Kenneth Burke. I suggest that strategy of Imagining, rather than the faculty of Imagination, is needed—a move that is congruent with the active agency suggested by Marilyn Cooper. I also suggest that the theoretical basis for Imagining as a bridge can be found in the “Thirdness” of Charles Sanders Pierce. Following Coleridge, I suggest that four means of knowing serve as foundations for Imagining: the group, the text, knowledgeable others, and the spirit. These four means can give the field of rhetoric and composition a diversity of epistemologies, and these terms provide the means to more fully describe our complex, partial, and recursive ways of knowing in the twenty-first century. These ways of knowing are especially necessary in online learning where teachers and students may only “see” each other through their words. I argue that these means of knowing enhance Imagining and that a unsyllabus is a way to implement Imagining.

his dissertation examines the rhetoric of the homestead movement in antebellum America as a particular instance of domesticity. Homestead rhetoric alters the modes of identity and subjectivity usually found in domesticity, and alters the home-nation metaphor at the moment when the nation faced an increasing sectional divide that would lead to a Civil War. As deployed by Congressmen, homestead rhetoric used domesticity to define the relationship between manhood and citizenship. Harriet Jacobs uses this rhetoric in her autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to shape an identity more in line with male homesteaders than with the subjects of women’s domesticity. E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Haunted Homestead offers the home-nation metaphor as a solution to national crisis, but ultimately the crisis is too large to solve through domesticity. This dissertation uses Jurgen Habermas’s concepts of lifeworld and system to assess the types of subjects created through the different modes of domesticity. Lifeworld describes modes of communication that foster the agency of individuals, and system describes the instrumentalization of individuals into roles where they are only a means to an end. The lifeworld created through homestead rhetoric is ultimately systematized by the importance of transforming land into property; Harriet Jacobs recognizes that she must escape the systematization of slavery and enter into a new economic system to have her rights fully acknowledged; Southworth’s failure to find a literary solution to national problems suggests the limits of a literary lifeworld, or the extent to which the domestic itself has been systematized. This dissertation concludes by considering how Laura Ingalls Wilder’s experience homesteading in South Dakota can bring an ecocritical perspective to lifeworld and system. Ingalls Wilder rejects the system of commodified nature to find contentment in a lifeworld affirmed through an agrarian relationship to the land.