As the public becomes more aware of environmental issues, corporations are pressed to consider and address the sustainability of their practices. Unwilling to drastically change business models, many corporations turn to greenwashing in an attempt to construct an environmentally friendly image while doing little to nothing to address sustainability issues. Using Kenneth Burke's work on identification and terministic screens, I analyze The Coca-Cola Company's "2020 World Without Waste Report" to illuminate how consumers come to believe in and identify with corporate greenwashing tactics. In line with Burke's theories related to identification, I argue that Coca-Cola's greenwashing strategies can be categorized into three main tactics: establishing common ground, creating antithesis against a shared enemy, and subtly invoking a sense of transcendence. Through my analysis, I also expand Burke's notion of transcendence and propose that established ethos and intertextuality can foster identification. By understanding how these rhetorical strategies operate within corporate texts, consumers can be more aware of greenwashing and hold corporations more accountable.

The purpose of this study has been to determine the ways Edmund S. Muskie used identification in five speeches which he delivered during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1971. Kenneth Burke's rhetorical concepts of identification and combustiality are used to analyze the speeches. Chapter I includes an introduction to Muskie's political life and an examination of the basic principles of Burke's rhetorical philosophy of indentification. Chapter II delves into the nature of Muskie, the man. Chapter III examines the texts of the speeches and reveals the strategies of identification which he used. Chapter IV summarizes Musikie's use of Burkeian identification in relation to himself and the times.

Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England, weaves the courtier's strategy of sprezzatura throughout her public orations in order to help her identify with her audience of courtiers, scholars, and politicians. Through her use of sprezzatura, Elizabeth woos her audience and transcends the differences of opinion that lead to conflict between the Queen and her audience members. Using Kenneth Burke's theory of rhetoric as identification, this thesis employs rhetorical analysis in order to discover how Queen Elizabeth's use of sprezzatura enables her to portray herself as a humanist scholar, a political servant, and a dedicated defender of her country and thus, identify with her audience. Because these identities also have gender implications, this analysis of Elizabeth's rhetorical choices uses Judith Butler's theory of gender as performance in order to realize the ways in which Elizabeth assumes a masculine identity and also manipulates gender expectations. As Elizabeth uses sprezzatura to delight her audience, smoothing the way for her identification with their characteristics and values, she also reveals her need to transcend division and conflict through the use of her own language. In her 1564 speech at Cambridge, Elizabeth transforms the conflict surrounding her gender by acknowledging it and confronting it in a way that allows her to repudiate specific aspects of negative feminine constructions. When Parliament petitioned her once again to marry in 1576, the Queen moves the focus away from her marital status by turning the discussion into a review of her reign, so that in discussing her success so far, she changes the topic under negotiation to one that she and her audience could more easily agree on. Finally in 1586, after Parliament asked for Mary Stuart's execution, Elizabeth shifts the violence of their differences over what to do with Mary to a third party, emphasizing the dangerous divide between England and Mary's European supporters in order to represent her relationship with Parliament as a united effort to protect the country and its religion. In all three situations, Elizabeth introduces the conflict into her own language and then successfully transforms it, removing the violence.

While poetry has historically been connected with rhetoric, few rhetoricians have studied contemporary poetry. Jeffery Walker suggests that this is because contemporary poetry, unlike classical poetry, no longer addresses all socio-economic levels of society but has become insular and self-referential (329). He criticizes that poetry no longer cuts vertically across one culture's hierarchy. I agree that poetry no longer addresses all segments of society, but I argue that this doesn't mean poetry is no longer rhetorical. Contemporary poetry now operates horizontally to unite the cultural elite of many national and ethnic groups by appealing to their identity as poetry readers. Using the identification theories of Kenneth Burke and Naomi Marin, the rhetoric in contemporary poetry becomes more apparent. As an example of how contemporary poetry creates identification among the literary elite, I examine the work of Aleš Debeljak—a former Yugoslavian Slovene poet who must define his national identity while appealing to a transnational community of poetry readers. Debeljak's poetry demonstrates the sophisticated work poetry does to create identify and identification.

Kenneth Burke and John Dewey each published books on aesthetics in the 1930s. These texts present parallel conceptions of aesthetics as holding a distinctly rhetorical role in society. My project is to line up these theories, focusing particularly on two key terms in each theory: Burke's eloquence and Dewey's expression. Together, these two terms explain what constitutes an aesthetic experience and explain how an aesthetic experience can open up individuals in a society to a variety of perspectives and identifications. As individuals are allowed to inhabit the experiences of others through their interactions with art, they are poised to become more cooperative and compassionate members of a democratic society.

Students often struggle to understand why the required writing course is important in their academic and non academic life. My project seeks to bring these two parts of students' lives together by urging writing teachers and students to consider a richer concept of the term "composition," one that includes the fundamental work of composing meaningful knowledge by assembling and reflecting on raw experiences. Dewey's term "an experience" clarifies how students constitute knowledge from their experiences, and Burke's methodological concept of form offers students a model for writing that accommodates that Deweyian sort of learning. Building off of these aesthetic theories, I suggest that significant learning experiences must be composed and organized through critical reflection.

Technology offers students and educators an uncharted digital landscape of possibilities. Some educators feel strongly that technology enhances the classroom; others feel that it doesn't necessarily improve traditional teaching methods, and some even feel that it is detrimental to students' ability to focus or engage in face-to-face conversations. My project focuses on critical dialogue as defined by various theorists, and explores whether or not secondary English classrooms that use iPads continue to use the dialogical methods as outlined by these theorists (most of which could not have foreseen today's technological advancements). By relying on these theorists and scholars to provide definitions and descriptions of dialogue and its benefits, I explain unique opportunities that the iPad offers students for dialogical learning in general. In particular, I describe ways educators can use iPads in the secondary English classroom that clearly overcome the potential disadvantages that concern some teachers.

My focus for this essay is on understanding the rhetorical process that occurs when people come together despite their differences—that is what rhetoric is all about. Kenneth Burke argues that this process, for alienated people especially, happens poetically, more than semantically because there are too many differences to overcome semantically between alienated people and the dominant community. This essay is about how the rhetorical process of identification as described by Burke helps us to explain how we cross barriers that divide people who are different to create moments of mutual understanding—identification. In this essay, I look at the experience of reading Gloria Anzaldúa's work from the rhetorical perspective that Burke's theory of rhetorical identification provides. In the case of Borderlands, Anzaldúa helps us understand how an alienated person can prompt a momentary, present space of shared experience through poetic language.

Experimental studies on the coupled effects of transport properties and unsteady fluid dynamics have been conducted on laminar, acoustically forced, hydrogen jet diffusion flames diluted by argon and helium. The primary purpose of this research is to determine how the fuel Lewis number and the flow unsteadiness play a combined role in maximum flame temperature and affect NOx emission from jet diffusion flame. The fuel Lewis number is varied by increasing/decreasing the mole fraction of diluents in the fuel stream. Therefore, maximum flame temperatures and then NOx emission levels were expected to differ for Ar- and He-diluted flames. In an investigation of unsteady flames, two different frequencies (10 and 100 Hz) were applied to observe a behavior of NOx emission levels and flame lengths by changes of unsteady fluid dynamics and transport properties.

This project responds to a problem in scholarship describing the relationship between virtual avatars and their physical users. In Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle identifies points of slippage wherein the persona of the avatar becomes conflated with the user‘s sense of self to create an authentic self predicated on both real and virtual experiences (Turkle 184-5). Although the conflation of the authentic self with the virtual has provided various affordances for serious games or other pedagogical projects such as classrooms hosted through the game Second Life, the processes enabling identification with an avatar have been largely overlooked. This project examines several layers of influence that affect how users play with identity to create successful social performances within an online community connected to a work of fiction. In doing so, the user must consider his or her own motivations for creating a persona, how these motivations will allow the avatar to achieve social acceptance, and how these social performances connect to the scene created by the work of fiction. Using an online role-playing forum based on a work of fiction as a site of analysis, this project will borrow from game studies, dramatism, and identity theory to create a framework for discussing processes through which users identify with their virtual avatars.