Le but de la thèse est de comprendre l'origine et le fonctionnement des couples philosophiques tels que présentés par Chaim Perelman et Lucie OlbrechtsTyteca dans la théorie de l'argumentation. Notre recherche sur cette intuition originale d'une structuration du discours philosophique par des couples de notions de base nous a conduit à regarder du côté de la sémiotique pour en comprendre le fonctionnement et nous a obligé à questionner la pertinence de la préoccupation de la philosophie traditionnelle envers l'origine

Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the Gulf Coast and the United States in August of 2005. While an emerging literature base details the consequences and lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina, a critical missing piece for understanding Hurricane Katrina American landfall is a rhetorical perspective. I argue a rhetorical perspective can significantly contribute to a better understanding of Hurricane Katrina’s implications for creating policy, community and identity. As a case study, I employ Kenneth Burke’s cluster analysis to examine the use of the label “Third World” to describe New Orleans, the Gulf Coast and the United States in the mass media coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

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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.

This essay is about the principles and rules that control persuasive computer games. The term persuasive games mean computer games, video games and other similar artifacts that are produced to shape opinion. The rhetorical scholar Ian Bogost at Georgia Tech claims that this kind of games mainly get their persuasive power by using procedural rhetoric and that games as a medium gives special conditions for procedurality.  By procedural rhetoric Bogost means an argumentation that is based on rules and choices, as opposed to texts, movies and images. (Bogost 2007). Bogost describes these procedures as quite specific for games and claims that they differ qualitatively from “ordinary” rhetorical arguments even if they just as other arguments work by establishing enthymems. However when I in my preliminary study tried this hypothesis, I seemed to distinguish several similarities with argumentation strategies used in political or juridical debate, such as Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca´s associative argumentation techniques. In this essay I examine if and how Perelman and Olbrechs-Tytecas associative argumentation techniques can be used to describe (and understand?) rulebased rhetorical procedures in persuasive games. This analysis is carried out on two recent Swedish persuasive games and proves the hypothesis fruitful. This result also points to the possibility to view rules as something that control all forms of argumentation. Despite this result, the investigation doesn´t contradict the presumption that computer games in many ways, have specific possibilities, beyond procedural rhetoric, such as the opportunity for interaction, receiver adaptation, and the capacity to process big amounts of data.