Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2006. / Communication Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Biography and Kenneth Tung's five big ideas in compliance management

In this thesis my aims are twofold. First, I provide an auto-history of the concept of reason in Anglophone IR from 1919 to 2009. I uncover the centrality of the language of reason. I show that the concept of reason has constituted, undergirded, and empowered many prominent IR scholars’ discourses. Second, I bring out a taxonomy of four construal of rationality. I argue that IR thinkers have spoken in four languages of reason. Kantian reason stands in a relation opposed to passion, emotion and instinct, and makes the stipulation that to base actions on the intellect is prerequisite for pursuing interest and moral conduct. I argue that the British Liberal Institutionalists, Has Morgenthau, Richard Ashley and Andrew Linklater are bearers of this construal. Utilitarian reason refers to the maximization of interests under constraints, where interest can be defined as strategic preference, emotional attachment, or cultural value and constraints as a two-person game, uncertainty or risk. I demonstrate how Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn, Glenn Snyder, Robert Keohane, Robert Gilpin, Helen Milner, Andrew Moravcsik and many other theorists use the concept. Axiological reason means following rules, cultures and norms, and always uses game as an analytical foundation and attends to the problem of how to enforce rules. I argue that Kenneth Waltz, Nicholas Onuf, Friedrich Kratochwil and K.M. Fierke have deployed the concept to construct their theories. Historical reason views all values as conditioned within a specific spatial-temporal background, and insists that moral problems, which are constituted in the margin of every political conduct, must be solved by overcoming universal morality and the unilateral pursuit of interest. I show that Raymond Aron, Martin Wight, David Boucher and Christian Reus-Smit have conceived of reason in this way.

Both France and the U.S. have witnessed extensive immigration in the twentieth century, and today, more than ever since World War II, the world's population is in dramatic flux. Currently almost fifty-four million people worldwide are identified by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as displaced people. If and how France and the U.S. should accommodate displaced peoples has agitated political debate in France and the U.S. with conservatively aligned political parties in both countries rejecting calls to resettle displaced peoples in France and the U.S. At the center of this dissertation is the following research question: how are immigrants rhetorically constructed in high school French and U.S. history textbooks? Rhetoric is not just about persuading an audience; it is about using identifications that program the audience not to think, but to automatically believe that one thing is associated with another. In this dissertation I use Kenneth Burke’s rhetoric as identification to examine how immigrants are rhetorically constructed in four high school French history textbooks and two high school American history textbooks, all of which are widely distributed in their respective countries. I disarticulate rhetorical constructions of immigrants in these history textbooks by interrogating the interactions of their political, economic, social, and cultural structures. In Burke’s rhetoric as identification "social cohesion and control" are realized through apposition and opposition. In the following quotation Burke explains a salient element of his rhetoric as identification: “A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so.” Why are so many people in France and the U.S. persuaded that peoples displaced by war and poverty should be locked outside their borders? Through a Burkean analysis, I locate answers to this question in the historical master narrative evidenced in the high school French and U.S. history textbooks selected for this study--a narrative that rhetorically constructs skewed characterizations of immigrants.

This thesis explains the "systematic" refinement of Kenneth Burke's theoretical process through his development of a theological paradigm for the dramatistic vocabulary. It describes the merging metaphysical and dialectical issues in Burke's critical thought and locates a theoretical shift in A Grammar of Motives, where Burke posits the prototype for his key term, "act." The study then interprets the formal treatment of the prototype in The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology, and demonstrates how the derived paradigm maintains and advances the convergence of metaphysics and dialectics, and how it reestablishes the interaction between language structure and usage in two types of definition or explanation (temporal-logical, narrative-tautological). This thesis also describes the purpose and functional range of Logology.

This master thesis examines commercial video games and their relation to the concept of immersion and realism. Games as a communicative medium is quite a new area of interest within rhetorical research in Sweden. Most of the research conducted has, however, been focused on gaming and formation on opinion – games that explicitly tries to persuade the player, unlike commercial games that focus on entertainment, that is. But that does not mean that commercial games cannot influence us. From time to time we can read about video games in the press and the discussions they generate. Most recently, China has banned the Swedish video game Battlefield 4 when Chinese government officials was claiming that the game portrays the Chinese military in an unfair manner. Thus we seem to ascribe meaning to the things that happen to us in the digital world, and that what happens in the digital world also has effects in the physical world, which the example clearly implies. With all the advanced gaming consoles today, I often find that game journalists and game developers in many contexts are talking about realism and immersion as two concepts that make up a good gaming experience. But what is realism and immersion: what does it mean and how do they relate to each other, and what kind of rhetorical impact do they really have on the player in the game? Although there is more research about commercial games and rhetoric in an international context, there is no one to my knowledge that has been exploring the concept of immersion and realism in games in this way. In this essay I argue that it is crucial to understand immersion and realism in order to fully understand the video game medium and its persuasive aspects. By examining three popular games Battlefield 4, Grand theft auto V, and The last of us, and by applying the theories of Nelson Goodman and Kenneth Burke to my examination, my aim is to increase the understanding of the effect of realism and immersion in games. I find that there are several ways that rhetoric can help us in understanding the two concepts. Both realism and immersion could be seen as something that enables the creation of identification within the realms of gaming. My suggestion is that we should understand realism as something that is enabled by the use of symbols and that it is enabled through the use of procedures in gaming. While my other suggestion is to perceive immersion as something that transfer the player from the couch and into the game world through argumentation and narrative. Both realism and immersion is something that make the player feel that he or she is one with the characters, the events and the story in the game.

This thesis reconsiders Maurice Halbwachs' theory of collective memory in terms of rhetoric. My purpose is to examine specifically how fading generations conform the present to the past as they fight to maintain and defend their collective identities. Although rhetoric and memory studies have often focused on the complex matters of national collectives, Halbwachs was also concerned with the individual and his or her interaction among those groups that matter in everyday living and memory's role in generational shifts that slowly transform culture. Halbwachs' theory helps determine exactly how attempts at conflict resolution are sometimes guarded defenses against threats to one's personal and collective identity. In contrast to the generally accepted use of memory as selectively adapting the past for present purposes, this protection of identity may require the present to remain faithful to one's past. To examine how memory and rhetoric are complementary, I draw a parallel between Maurice Halbwachs' collective memory theory and Jim Corder's notion of individual identity as historical narrative. Then, in further retracing Kenneth Burke's influence on Corder's work, I also compare Halbwachs' social constructionist view of memory to Burke's theories of symbolicity and identification. Finally, I apply these theories to the recent 2012 debate in Ybor City, Florida over the Spanish spelling of Seventh Avenue in which passing generations struggle to preserve their identity and sense of belonging in the changing social milieu. In demonstrating how people seek a more permanent sense of identity articulated through memory, this debate offers an alternative to the theory of identity as a rhetorical performance negotiated in the present.

Kenneth Goodman's view of the reading process suggests that the reader utilizes three cue systems (grapho-phonic, semantic and syntactic) in obtaining meaning from the visual array. The study was designed to explore means by which first year high school students could be taught syntax informally to facilitate their utilization of syntactic cues in reading. The literature was reviewed to provide an understanding of those syntactic structures which were likely to present difficulty and to discover theoretically sound bases for teaching strategies. Because of the absence of data on Australian students in the first year of secondary school, a survey of the Grade 8 population of a large metropolitan high school was undertaken. This survey linked syntactic knowledge to scores obtained on a standardized test of reading comprehension. Suggestions on the informal teaching of grammar were then proposed.

In this dissertation, we develop novel computationally effiient model subset selection methods for multiple and multivariate linear regression models which are both robust and misspecification resistant. Our approach is to use a three-way hybrid method which employs the information theoretic measure of complexity (ICOMP) computed on robust M-estimators as model subset selection criteria, integrated with genetic algorithms (GA) as the subset model searching engine. Despite the rich literature on the robust estimation techniques, bridging the theoretical and applied aspects related to robust model subset selection has been somewhat neglected. A few information criteria in the multiple regression literature are robust. However, none of them is model misspecification resistant and none of them could be generalized to the misspecified multivariate regression. In this dissertation, we introduce for the first time both robust and misspecification resistant information complexity (ICOMP) criterion to fill in the gap in the literature. More specifically in multiple linear regression, we introduce robust M-estimators with misspecification resistant ICOMP and use the new information criterion as the fitness fuction in GA to carry out the model subset selection. For multivariate linear regression, we derive the two-stage robust Mahalanobis distance (RMD) estimator and introduce this RMD estimator in the computation of information criteria. The new information criteria are used as the fitness function in the GA to perform the model subset selection. Comparative studies on the simulated data for both multiple and multivariate regression show that the robust and misspecification resistant ICOMP outperforms the other robust information criteria and the non-robust ICOMP computed using OLS (or MLE) when the data contain outliers and error terms in the model deviate from a normal distribution. Compared with the all possible model subset selection, GA combined with the robust and misspecification resistant infromation criteria is proved to be an effective method which can quickly find the a near subset, if not the best, without having to search the whole subset model space.