Nonfiction, Documentary, and Family Narrative:
 An Intersection of Representational Discourses and Creative Practices explores the role of personal memory, family history, and inter-generational storytelling as the basis for making a nonfiction film. The film, American Boy, tells the story of my mother’s immigration to the United States after the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, opening a discussion of four generations of my family life in the context of historical events, exile, self re-invention, and identity formation. As a media producer and nonfiction author, I narrate my understanding of these events to my infant son, as a way of communicating my grandfather’s role in the revolution, my mother’s childhood, and my own mediation of my family’s trauma. Through the use of archival footage including newsreels and commercials, as well as my own archive of family photos and documents, I re-construct the existing materials to build my own associations concerning time, memory, and place. The film, as my creative practice, leads to a theoretical analysis of representational discourses which inform the work. This deconstruction of nonfiction and meta-analysis includes my study of several practitioners in the craft of non-fiction: Kati Marton, Robert Root, Primo Levi, Eva Hoffman, Patricia Hampl, Dinty W. Moore, Peter Balakian and others.

A look at how artists in the grunge and Riot Grrrl movements constructed public identities that typically appealed to the economic, cultural, and social conditions of the early 1990s. These public personas -- perceived as “honest” -- were defined by negotiation with mainstream culture, the notion of the “confessional,” and gender construction. By examining how these identities were constructed, composition students can see how cultural influences mediate their own identity construction. A “grunge/Riot Grrrl” pedagogy is proposed that encourages students to look at how identities are constructed across a multimedia landscape, reflecting the way grunge and Riot Grrrl artists built public personas using music, lyrics, interviews, album covers, photo shoots, and videos. An online assignment is suggested that would allow students to “profile” their public selves and the cultural conditions that influence them so that students can use multimedia to show their public identities.

College students seek degrees to obtain employment in their field of interest, however, as the 21st century progresses, employers are often requiring specific skills in addition to degrees and transcripts. As students graduate with their Associates, Bachelors, and Graduate degrees, they plan to present these degrees as sufficient evidence of their qualifications. However, there is recent criticism of college degrees as evidence of qualifications. A beneficial alternative for students would be digital badges. A digital badge is a visual representation that signifies a specific achievement with detailed metadata attached. Digital badges in first-year writing courses would benefit students as they develop specific writing and critical thinking skills as prompted by the curriculum. First-year writing digital badges can include: researching, synthesizing, writing process, constructing authority, etc. as deemed appropriate by the instructor. Ultimately, students will display their badges on their resumes, CVs, or any other document verifying their achievements.

More often than not, when we think about visual rhetoric, especially in the fields of composition and literature, we imagine such visual texts as video games, advertisements, and graffiti/art. It’s rare that our thoughts turn to tattoos and the idea that women’s tattoos in particular, as visual text, act as a rhetorical device subverting dominant social norms of how heteropatriarchy defines woman and femininity. The dominant notions of how we think about text – writing, rhetoric, and the publication of narrative – facilitates the construction of a tattoo rhetoric. Utilizing a feminist lens, this thesis demonstrates the visual rhetoric of women’s tattoos and the construction of a tattoo rhetoric, drawing from elements of queers of color, women of color, and visual rhetoric scholars, as well as such theorists as Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Mikhail Bakhtin. I explore Shelly Jackson’s Skin and the embodied texts of Kat Von D’s tattoos to convey the disidentification from and deconstruction of traditional and dominant notions of writing, rhetoric, and narrative, as well as heteropatriarchal constructs and governance of women, women’s bodies, and femininity. The visual rhetoric of women’s tattoos empowers women to radically challenge mainstream perceptions of feminine beauty, reclaim agency over their own bodies, and construct new meaning of woman and embodied texts. Women’s tattooed bodies facilitate the deconstruction of dominant ideologies of woman, femininity, and of text; the reconstruction of how woman and visual text are defined; and the construction of a tattoo rhetoric.

This work explores how authors employ literary modes to persuade readers towards one side or another of the environmental debate and whether the works promote constructive discourse on environmental issues. It uses two seminal works from each side of the environmental discourse, Silent Spring and The Population Bomb and The Ultimate Resource and The Skeptical Environmentalist, to analyze stylistic differences and similarities, to compare public reception, and to explain the increasing polarization of environmental discourse.

Major companies in the insurance industry—notably Allstate, Progressive, and Farmers—often employ personification as a creative rhetorical tool in digital video advertisements. By leveraging brand characters in various ways, these companies seek to establish trust and engender emotional impact in customers. Allstate ascribes destructive characteristics that are associated with house cats to its Mayhem character; in doing so they evoke the desired emotional responses of humor and fear. Progressive creates and deploys the Motaur character, a visual personification and play on the Centaur; in this case, the company’s rhetorical strategy is to evoke humor and nostalgia that resonate with motorcycle owners. Farmers’ strategy is to win customers by demonstrating experience and empathy; they do so with the Professor Burke character, whose professorial ethos functions to evoke feelings of trust. I employ the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) in my analysis to explore the relationships between personification, emotional appeals, and persuasion.

Chapter I. This is a critical study of the rhetoric of Sir Thomas More and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and of plays in which they are portrayed. The purpose is to discover whether or not the rhetoric of the playwrights preserves the integrity of the ideas of the central characters as evidenced by the rhetoric found in their original works . Chapter II. Rhetorical criticism is rendering a judgment on the fitness, correctness or appropriateness of those discourses, spoken or written the aim of which is to influence the readers or hearers. There is much variety in methods of rhetorical criticism. This study will use the dramatistic pentad proposed by Kenneth Burke. Its elements are act, agent, agency, scene and purpose. It will also employ the naming of strategies, another term from Burke meaning methods or attitudes. In addition judgments will be made on the basis of significant ideas, creative choice of language, integrity and credibility. Chapter III. Sir Thomas More was a lawyer, scholar and public official in England at the time of King Henry VIII. He incurred the King’s displeasure by his refusal to support him in his efforts for a divorce. He believed strongly in the need to preserve one’s integrity by obeying his conscience. In his trial speech, his main strategies were related to the importance of conscience and his knowledge of the law. He was pronounced guilty of treason and executed. Chapter IV. In a Man for All Seasons, the playwright has used several theatrical strategies that help to focus attention on More, the central character. He is presented as a genial man of firm reliance on the law and obedience to his conscience. On the basis of a comparison of the rhetoric in the play with that of More, it is concluded that the playwright faithfully preserved the integrity of More’s ideas. Chapter V. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a theologian, pastor and teacher of Germany during the Nazi regime. He opposed the Nazis on theological grounds, and gradually came to believe that he must become active personally and politically. He joined the resistance movement in a plot to assassinate Hitler. He was imprisoned and executed. His chief motive for action was obedience to God. In selected writings, he is seen to have a strong faith in God, and great hope for the future. Chapter VI. The Cup of Trembling is a play based on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, though using mostly fictional names. Again, the playwright uses devices that bring out the hero’s character. His struggle against the Nazis is seen to involve a corresponding struggle within himself as he makes decisions about his role in the situation. His faith in God and obedience to God are expressed, as well as his hope for the future. On the basis of similar ideas expressed in both media, it is concluded that the playwright succeeded in preserving the integrity of Bonhoeffer’s ideas. Chapter VI I. The key idea of conscience is seen to have been preserved by both playwrights. A number of major ideas were traded from the original figure to the play, and their integrity was seen to be preserved. Therefore, it is concluded that the playwrights did preserve the integrity of the ideas of the two men in the rhetoric of their plays. The major implication of this conclusion is that drama is an effective means of expressing the rhetoric of important historical figures.

In first-year composition courses, there are three aspects of teaching that are researched well so far: disclosure of trauma in student writing, instructor feedback, and emotional labor. The disclosure of trauma is almost completely unavoidable in first-year composition. We encounter an issue with instructor feedback; how do we provide feedback to student writing, like grammar and mechanics, when the student has disclosed trauma in the writing? Additionally, we can build off this with emotional labor, which already occurs consistently in teaching but is heightened in this instance. When providing feedback to a student who has disclosed trauma, this can be emotionally taxing on the instructor, as they may have to hide emotions regarding feedback to disclosure. How can the instructor manage their emotional labor in this instance – or how can instructors provide feedback to student disclosure of trauma in a manner that both prioritizes the student and instructor’s mental health?

From the distribution of religious tracts at Ellis Island and Billy Sunday’s radio messages to televised recordings of the Billy Graham Crusade and Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, American evangelicals have long made a practice of utilizing mass media to spread the Gospel. Most recently, these Christian evangelists have gone online. As a contribution to scholarship in religious rhetoric and media studies, this dissertation offers evangelistic websites as a case study into the ways persuasion is carried out on the Internet. Through an analysis of digital texts—including several evangelical home pages, a chat room, discussion forums, and a virtual church—I investigate how conversion is encouraged via web design and virtual community as well as how the Internet medium impacts the theology and rhetorical strategies of web evangelists. I argue for “persuasive architecture” and “persuasive communities”—web design on the fundamental level of interface layout and tightly-controlled restrictions on discourse and community membership—as key components of this strategy. In addition, I argue that evangelical ideology has been influenced by the web medium and that a “digital reformation” is taking place in the church, one centered on a move away from the Prosperity Gospel of televangelism to a Gospel focused on God as divine problem-solver and salvation as an uncomplicated, individualized, and instantaneously-rewarding experience, mimicking Web 2.0 users’ desire for quick, timely, and effective answers to all queries. This study simultaneously illuminates the structural and fundamental levels of design through which the web persuades as well as how—as rhetoricians from Plato’s King Thamus to Marshall McLuhan have recognized—media inevitably shapes the message and culture of its users.

This thesis examines the birth, rise in popularity, and evolution of the video essay, a subgenre of the essay found recently in online literary journals. Chapter one provides a brief history of the alphabetic essay as it expands to include photo essays, audio essays, and essay-films. The second chapter outlines the history of the online literary journal and John Bresland’s role in the introduction of the video essay as it appears in online journals. Chapter three contains an examination of the way image, text, and sound function in video essays and the tools and strategies essayists are using to create them. The fourth chapter is composed of three case studies of Bresland’s work in an attempt to analyze the continuing evolution and breadth of the form.