This dissertation is interested in how people talk about character in a variety of public spheres. Specifically, it explores the tangled relationship between authenticity and ethos, or what is taken as the distinction between intrinsic and constructed character. While this dissertation does not presume to settle the question of authenticity’s actuality, it does discuss the ways authenticity cues in rhetorical acts continue to influence how “sincere character” in those acts is understood, even as audiences exhibit shrewdness in recognizing that character is a purposeful manifestation of the rhetor. The fundamental phenomenon this dissertation seeks to describe is how people, with better and worse success, negotiate the dissonance between valuing character as authentic and as presentation and representation. Character in this view is a much richer and more paradoxical concept than many discussions of the term admit. A too-diluted study of ethos limited strictly to pinpointing credibility in an argument makes it difficult to articulate why an exhibition of character sometimes works and sometimes flops. Ethos in its fullest complexity is, and is not, constructed by any single act; it is the consequence of narratives, both of those narratives, and also what we say about those narratives; it is something we know about a rhetor, at the same time that it comes from what the rhetor claims to know; it is, most important, an appeal to authenticity, even when we know ethos is discursively, kairotically, and socially constructed. This dissertation offers an expanded definition of ethos as rhetorical transactions that rhetors and audiences mutually negotiate in order to determine the extent to which all sides will have their rhetorical needs met, and the extent to which all sides can assent to the those needs. The dissertation, using the works of Wayne Booth, Kenneth Burke, and Chaïm Perelman as its primary theoretical structures, offers pedagogic implications for these mutual negotiations. / text

As Aristotle wrote, rhetoric is an art or faculty of finding the available means of persuasion in a given circumstance, and the late nineteenth century was a time in American history when many authors used utopian fiction as the best available means of persuasion. For a few years, the utopian novel became a widespread, versatile and common rhetorical trope. Edward Bellamy was the most popular of these writers. Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward was not only the third best-selling book of nineteenth century America, it inspired over a hundred other utopian novels and helped create a mass movement of “Bellamy clubs” along with a political party (Nationalism). During the latter part of the nineteenth century, American public discourse underwent a general shift from a focus on communal values to a focus on individuals as the source of truth. Utopian fiction of the era helps illuminate why and how this shift occurred. In nineteenth century America, literature was generally not considered to be rhetorical. At most, critics treated fiction as a form of epideictic rhetoric, aiming only to delight, educate, or create discussion. When fiction was used to promote legislative agendas and thus entered into the realm of deliberative rhetoric, critics argued that its transgression of rhetorical boundaries supposedly ruined its appeal. Utopian literature came the closest to breaking down the barriers between literature and rhetoric, as hundreds of utopian novels were published, most of them in response to Edward Bellamy. A close rhetorical reading of Looking Backward details its rhetorical nature and helps account for its rhetorical success. I treat each of the novels as participants in the larger cultural conversation, and detail the ways in which they address Bellamy, each other, and issues such as the temperance movement and the decline of classical languages in higher education. In modern times, though Bellamy has faded from the public memory, he has proven useful in a variety of contexts, from a political punching bag to a way to lend an air of erudition to various types of popular fiction. / text

The crisis on Wall Street. This essay is a comparative study of how two business newspapers report on the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings in September 2008. Seven articles from the Swedish European financial newspaper Affärsvärlden (Business World) and five articles from the Chinese-Asian news agency XINHUA FINANCE are examined. The aim is to analyze, understand and evaluate from a rhetorical perspective. My thesis is that rhetors storytelling can tell us more about how we cope with crisis in the global economic discourse. The texts can portray man as a narrative creature when identification as a rational actor is not enough.  The analytical methods used are linguistic analysis with an emphasis on metaphor analysis, narrative analysis based on pentad - Critical dramatism, and discourse analysis with doxological outlook.  The results show that both newspapers seek to defend the global economic discourse, but they do so in different ways. Affärsvärlden advocates calmness and conveys a cautious attitude. The heart of the crisis, as well as its solution, is on Wall Street. XINHUA advocates control and expresses confidence in authorities and the system. Asia is presented as Wall Street's savior. / Krisen på Wall Street. Uppsatsen är en komparativ studie av hur två affärstidningar berättar om banken Lehman Brothers Holdings konkurs i september 2008. Materialet för undersökningen är sju artiklar från den svenska europeiska finanstidningen Affärsvärlden och fem artiklar från den kinesiska asiatiska nyhetsbyrån ZINHUA FINANCE. Syftet är att analysera, förstå och värdera situationen från ett retoriskt perspektiv. Tesen är att tidningarna (retorerna) kan visa oss, via sina texter, berättelserna om en kris i den globalekonomiska diskursen. Texterna kan visa människan som narrativ varelse där identifikationen som rationell aktör inte räcker till. Analysmetoderna som används är lingvistisk analys med störst vikt vid metaforanalys, narrativ analys utifrån pentaden - kritisk dramatism, samt diskursanalys med doxologisk utblick. Resultatet visar att båda tidningarna strävar efter att försvara den globalekonomiska diskursen, fast de gör det på olika sätt. Affärsvärlden manar till lugn opch visar en avvaktande attityd. Räddningen och krisens centrum finns på Wall Street. XINHUA visar på kontroll och tilltro till auktoriteter och systemet. Asien framställs som räddare åt Wall Street. Nyckelord: Retorik, lingvistisk analys, metaforanalys, Eubanks, narrativ analys, Pentden, Burke, diskurs, doxa, Lehman Brothers konkurs, 17 september 2008, Affärsvärlden, Xinhua Finance.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Tennessee, 2007. / Title from title page screen (viewed on Mar. 31, 2008). Thesis advisor: Michael L. Keene. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Amidst the upheaval of the French Revolution, the British parliamentarian and political theorist Edmund Burke received a vibrant reception in German-speaking Europe. Anxious to uncover the ideological roots of the anarchy that enveloped France – and worried that their own society might be vulnerable to a similar fate – a series of important German thinkers began studying his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). This dissertation brings into focus the diverse interpretations of Burke that were assembled in this turbulent era, and explains them vis-à-vis contemporary debates among German idealists (Kant and his heirs) about the philosophical nature of freedom. This dissertation centers on Burke’s three most perceptive and influential students: the civil servant and philosopher August Wilhelm Rehberg; the journalist, translator, and diplomat Friedrich Gentz; and the political economist and cultural critic Adam Müller. For many decades, both German- and English-speaking intellectual historians have shoehorned these thinkers into a rigid ideological box labeled ‘conservatism’. Inspired by Burke, they are said to have turned away from the ideals of Enlightenment, theorizing an illiberal form of politics that was traditionalistic, authoritarian, and reactionary. A careful, contextualized reconstruction of their engagements with Burke, however, renders this thesis untenable. Far from triggering a monolithic backlash against Enlightenment, Burke in fact inspired a series of divergent, and often incompatible, analyses of the Revolution’s origins, grounded in different readings of his Reflections. Rehberg, for instance, saw Burke as a principled skeptic: he admired the Reflections as an incisive critique of the revolutionaries’ philosophical dogmatism. Gentz, an erstwhile student of Kant, disagreed completely, arguing that Burke’s politics were entirely compatible with Kantian metaphysics. In his view, the Reflections’ central insight was that it takes political prudence to realize the rights of man in practice. Müller, finally, read the Reflections as a lament for the fall of Christendom, and as a diagnosis of the social alienation and moral confusion that had followed its demise. In other words, whereas Rehberg was a Humean skeptic and Gentz was a Kantian liberal, Müller was a Trinitarian Christian. Each of these men, moreover, claimed Burke as an ally. What this means is that Rehberg, Gentz, and Müller cannot have jointly invented a single thing called ‘conservatism’, and Burke cannot have inspired it. This becomes clear only after we recognize that at the turn of the nineteenth century, neither the meaning of Enlightenment nor the crux of Burke’s Reflections was clear: these were not fixed variables, but points of contemporary debate. By recapturing the diversity of Burke’s German reception, this thesis invites scholars to consider the ways that his students shepherded their differing visions of Enlightenment through the fires of the Revolution, down into the nineteenth century.

This diploma thesis deals with the famous controversy concerning interpretation of the French Revolution between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. This controversy is put into context with English debate on the revolution, which commenced with Price´s sermon (On the Love of our Country, 1789). Burke responded with his work Reflections on the revolution in France to that and subsequently Paine reacted with a text Rights of Man, in which he expounded his philosophy of the rights of man. The focus concentrates in the diverse interpretation of the concept of human rights with both authors.

The subject of this paper is the philosophy of comedy. It is an orientation through history of laughter and its connection to the essence of comedy. This investigation tries to pinpoint some characteristics of the comedian and the task of the comedian today, focusing primarily on comedy in the public sphere. This paper concludes that comedy could be something physical and biological, but also something political. Humor is general and something very common but also culturally unique. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate comedy as something highly spiritual, absolute human and animalistic. It also aims to connect comedy to the philosophical discipline and strengthen its bond to the academic field. This paper includes some theories of humor, from both an evolutionary, scientific perspective to a more philosophical and theological view. It also includes a political discussion of how one can joke about everything and why comedy is important today.

Kenneth Burke has been described as arguably the most important rhetorician and critical theorist of the twentieth century, and yet an important part of his scholarship has been generally overlooked by the academic community. The pentad has become the most prominent "Burkean" framework for analyzing texts, yet Kenneth Burke himself preferred "a more direct" way of approaching texts which he named "indexing." This thesis recreates this method from the pieces found in his scholarly writing, personal correspondence, and the papers his students produced for the class he taught at Bennington College. Kenneth Burke believed indexing could uncover the "pattern of experience" or "motivational structures" a text embodies, and thereby help people become aware of the persuasive power different texts have. The method of indexing has two parts: 1. Finding the implicit equations in a text, and 2. Tracking the hierarchies of terms and God-terms in those equations. Identifying equations in a text starts with finding "key terms" in a text, meaning terms which carry special significance as indicated by their intensity and frequency of usage. One then tracks the context of these terms throughout a text to find which other words frequently occur together with these words. The second step, tracking hierarchies of terms, is done by finding how the terms in the equations relate to each other in a hierarchy. We start with specific and move upward to more general terms. On the top of the pyramid we find the God-term, which is the driving motivation and ground of all possibility in the text. Kenneth Burke hoped his method of indexing could help us understand the power language and motivational structures have to drive human action, and that we could question our own motivational structure as well as that of others and of the communities we operate in.

Sammanfattning: Det mest märkbara resultatet i studien är att det inte krävs en stor aktör med många följare för att påbörja en stor kampanj, men det är nödvändigt att få hjälp av dem för att nå en viral spridning. De två studerade kampanjerna hade helt olika sätt att kommunicera på, där MeToo hade en allvarsam ton och Ice Bucket Challenge ett humoristiskt och positivt laddat budskap - båda om smärtsamma ämnen. Eftersom de båda blev virala visar resultatet att det viktigaste är ett känslomässigt laddat budskap som påverkar folk, oavsett om det är glada, ilskna eller sorgsna känslor. Det krävs stark känslomässig påverkan för att personer ska känna sig motiverade att sprida vidare ett budskap. Samhällsklimatet och aktuella samhällsfrågor kan hjälpa en kampanj bli viral, men är inte nödvändig. Det finns ingen specifik riktlinje eller mall att följa för att bli viral, men det är viktigt att ha hög spridbarhet på sitt budskap och motivera mottagaren att dela vidare.

Uppsatsen är en retorisk studie av Ebba Buschs och Nyamko Sabunis kommunikation på Instagram ur ett identifikationsperspektiv. Studiens material är Instagraminlägg från partiledarnas Instagramprofiler och undersökningen studerar vilka tekniker de använder för att skapa igenkänning och social gemenskap. Något som är viktigt på sociala medier är personlig närvaro och att ge intryck av sin privatperson. Uppsatsen undersöker även hur Busch och Sabuni skildrar sin individuella person i inläggen.  Studien är en komparativ studie av de två svenska partiledarna och syftet med studien är att studera vilka retoriska tekniker som används för att skapa identifikation och gemenskap. Det är intressant att studera eftersom sociala medier används som en källa till social kontakt och igenkänning. Huvudteorin är Burkes identifikationsteori och studien utgår även ifrån teorier om politisk kommunikation.  Studien visar att intrycket av transparens är viktigt för att skildra sin privatperson och att det finns skillnader mellan Buschs och Sabunis inlägg. Busch flöde ger intryck av henne som privatperson, vilket är en viktig strategi när det gäller att skapa band med väljarna. Medan Sabunis flöde ger intryck av henne som partiledare och hennes vision inom politiken. Studien visar att partiledarna använder olika retoriska och kommunikativa strategier för att skapa gemenskap och igenkänning.