This thesis is a case study on newspaper discourse representation of SARS. The study uses two representative English newspapers in Asia – the China Daily (“CD”) and the South China Morning Post (“SCMP”). By comparing the discursive construction of the same event – the outbreak of SARS - in the two newspapers, it aims to reveal that the practice of news follows institutional, cultural and political assumptions, and also make visible the two newspapers’ embedded attitudes and ideological positions. The methodology is a critical corpus linguistics (CCL) approach, especially using KWIC format (Key Word in context), word frequency, collocation, and concordance data, which is analyzed according to transitivity systems of systemic functional grammar (SFG). The main approach of the study is achieved by a computer-assisted corpus analysis with the help of software “Wordsmith 3.0” (on line version). Results indicate that through the comparison of the newspapers’ corpora, there are statistically significant differences between the two newspapers’ word patterns. First, in the context of SARS, the CD corpus and the SCMP corpus shows different word choice and words frequency in occupying disease-relevant and human-relevant words. Second, when SARS is situated as the node word, the collocation results discuss the observation that the CD tends to treat the SARS epidemic from a national struggle perspective, while the standpoint of the SCMP is more based on the human health and safety, and its social role as the fourth estate. Moreover, the collocation of the three selected keywords is summarized for finding out the general patterns of their concordance lines. Third, according to further concordancing analysis, the study investigates to what extent critical corpus linguistics and transitivity systems of systemic functional grammar can be mutually reinforced and interpreted within the disease discourse context, textually, culturally and ideologically. In particular, a power hierarchy model is established and used in the transitivity analysis. Results show that the two selected newspapers discursively constructed the SARS-issue in a different way, and these differences help to understand how the ideologies work in both newspapers.

This dissertation examines the feminist intersections of composition studies, visual rhetoric, and comics studies in order to identify a rhetorically interdisciplinary approach to composition that moves beyond composition studies’ persistent separation of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, rhetoric and ideology, and analysis and composition. Chapter one transgresses the qualitative/quantitative divide using keyword analysis and visualization of 2,573 dissertation and thesis abstracts published between 1979 – 2012 to engage in what composition studies scholar Derek Mueller terms a “distant reading” of the extent and contexts of composition studies’ self-identified interdisciplinarity. Complementing my more traditional literature review, the results of this analysis validate the necessity of my analytical and pedagogical interventions by suggesting that composition studies has not yet addressed comics through the feminist intersections of visual rhetoric and critical pedagogy. Chapters two and three develop a rhetorical analytical approach to comics that moves beyond comics studies’ persistent separation of rhetoric and ideology by positing conflict as an identifiable form of rhetorical persuasion in the Martha Washington comics. These comics were collaboratively created by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons between 1989 – 2007. Following feminist rhetorician Susan Jarratt’s case for rhetorical conflict as a pedagogical tool and extending Chicana feminist Chela Sandoval’s conceptualization of meta-ideologizing in which oppressive ideologies are re-signified via recontextualizations that juxtapose ‘old’ and ‘new’ signs of ideological meaning, I explore the rhetorically persuasive conflict arising from visual, conceptual, and embodied juxtapositions of race, class, and gender made visible in these comics. Chapter four outlines a feminist, critical, visual rhetorical – what I call prismatic – approach to composition pedagogy that requires (1) contexts in which differences and conflicts can be identified and engaged, (2) explicable sites of intersection between ideological perspectives and rhetorical construction, and (3) models for the transition from ideological critique to (re)composition. This is not an add-pop-genre-and-stir approach to composition pedagogy; rather, it intentionally deploys comics’ inherent multimodality as a challenge to students’ often narrow definitions of rhetoric and composition.