Wayne Booth's neologism rhetorology, introduced in 1981, hasn't caught on in rhetorical scholarship. Nevertheless, in this essay I hope to revive rhetorology by harmonizing it with Paul Woodruff's work on reverence. I show how harmonizing these terms makes each more comprehensible. In order to illustrate how reverence and rhetorology might be made more practical I also analyze two arguments in the health care debate leading up to the passing of the Affordable Health Care for America Act in early 2010. Ultimately I hope to show that rhetorology is a reverent rhetorical practice, one that can help us restore a needed sense of communal reverence in contemporary democracy.

Technology offers students and educators an uncharted digital landscape of possibilities. Some educators feel strongly that technology enhances the classroom; others feel that it doesn't necessarily improve traditional teaching methods, and some even feel that it is detrimental to students' ability to focus or engage in face-to-face conversations. My project focuses on critical dialogue as defined by various theorists, and explores whether or not secondary English classrooms that use iPads continue to use the dialogical methods as outlined by these theorists (most of which could not have foreseen today's technological advancements). By relying on these theorists and scholars to provide definitions and descriptions of dialogue and its benefits, I explain unique opportunities that the iPad offers students for dialogical learning in general. In particular, I describe ways educators can use iPads in the secondary English classroom that clearly overcome the potential disadvantages that concern some teachers.

Η παρούσα εργασία επικεντρώνει το ενδιαφέρον της στην προσέγγιση των ποιημάτων, τα οποία περιέχονται στα Κείμενα Νεοελληνικής Λογοτεχνίας της Α΄ τάξης του Γυμνασίου. Η προσέγγιση αυτή επιχειρείται σύμφωνα με τη «ρητορική εκδοχή» της Αναγνωστικής Θεωρίας, τη βάση της οποίας συγκροτούν οι θεωρίες των: Roman Jakobson, Paul de Man και Wayne Booth. Η βασική μας υπόθεση ότι η όλη προσέγγιση των ποιημάτων για την Α΄ τάξη του Γυμνασίου διέπεται και από τη «ρητορική εκδοχή», όχι μόνο από την «ερμηνευτική» που αναφέρει το Διαθεματικό Ενιαίο Πλαίσιο Προγράμματος Σπουδών (2002), επιβεβαιώθηκε. Από την ανάλυση του υλικού μας, το οποίο περιλαμβάνει δεκαεννέα (19) ποιήματα, προέκυψαν ορισμένα ενδιαφέροντα ευρήματα. Πιο συγκεκριμένα, η μελέτη μας εντόπισε ότι στα ποιήματα της Α΄ τάξης του Γυμνασίου υπάρχουν αρκετοί ρητορικοί τρόποι, όπως, η μετωνυμία, η προσωποποίηση, η ρητορική ερώτηση, το σύμβολο, η αλληγορία, η ειρωνεία, με κυρίαρχη, ωστόσο, τη μεταφορά. Επίσης, στα ποιήματα καταγράφηκαν οι έννοιες του υπονοούμενου συγγραφέα και του υπονοούμενου αναγνώστη, ενώ αρκετές από τις ερωτήσεις/εργασίες που συνοδεύουν κάθε ποίημα στο σχολικό βιβλίο παραπέμπουν σε μεγάλο βαθμό στις θεωρητικές θέσεις των τριών βασικών εκπροσώπων της «ρητορικής εκδοχής» της Αναγνωστικής Θεωρίας. Το κύριο συμπέρασμά μας είναι ότι η διδασκαλία της Λογοτεχνίας στη Δευτεροβάθμια Εκπαίδευση, συγκεκριμένα στην Α΄ τάξη του Γυμνασίου, αξιοποιεί εκτός από την «ερμηνευτική εκδοχή» και τη «ρητορική εκδοχή» της Αναγνωστικής Θεωρίας, εφόσον στηρίζεται και χρησιμοποιεί αρκετές από τις θέσεις, τους όρους και τις έννοιες που συναντούμε στις θεωρίες των βασικών εκπροσώπων της «ρητορικής εκδοχής». Η διαπίστωση αυτή μπορεί να διευρύνει και να εμπλουτίσει ουσιαστικά τις διδακτικές προσεγγίσεις της Λογοτεχνίας στη Δευτεροβάθμια Εκπαίδευση. / This paper focuses on the approach of the poems contained in the Texts of Modern Greek Literature, the A΄ class of the Gymnasium. This approach was attempted in accordance with the «rhetoric version» of Reader-Response Theory, the basis of which, is formed by theories of: Roman Jakobson, Paul de Man and Wayne Booth. Our basic assumption that the whole approach of the poems for the first grade of the High school is governed by the «rhetoric version», not only by the «hermeneutic», as described by the Curriculum (2002), confirmed. From the analysis of the material employed, which includes nineteen (19) poems, there are some interesting findings. More specifically, our study found that the poems of A΄ class of high school there are several rhetorical modes, such as metonymy, personification, rhetorical question, symbol, allegory, irony, principal, however, the metaphor. Also, the poems were recorded concepts of implied author and implied reader, while several of the questions/ tasks that accompany each poem in the text book refer largely to the theoretical positions of the three main representatives of the «rhetoric version» of Reader-Response Theory. The main conclusion is that the teaching of Literature in Secondary School, specifically in the first grade of high school, utilizes the «rhetorical version» of Reader-Response Theory, apart from the «hermeneutic» one, since it is based on and uses many of the views, terms and concepts encountered in the theories of fundamentals representatives of the «rhetorical version». This finding can broaden and enrich substantially the teaching approaches of Literature in Secondary Education.

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

Young adult dystopian fictions follow the patterns established by the classic adult dystopias such as George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, but not completely. Young adult dystopias tend to end happily, a departure from the nightmarish ends of Winston Smith and John Savage. Young adult authors resist hopelessness, even if the fictional world demands it. Using a rhetorical approach established by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Company We Keep, this thesis traces the reasons for the inclusion of hope and the strategies by which hope is created and maintained. Booth's rhetorical approach recognizes that a narrative is a relational act. At issue in this study is the consideration of what follows from viewing a narrative as a dynamic exchange between text, author and reader. Through a focus on rhetoric as identification, the responsibilities of both the author and the reader to a text are identified and discussed. Three young adult novels, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, The Giver by Lois Lowry and Feed by M.T. Anderson will be analyzed as case studies. Together the analysis of these novels reveals that storytelling is an act of forging identifications and forming alliances. The reader becomes more than just a spectator of the author's rhetoric; the reader is a fully involved member of the interpretive and evaluative process.

This thesis seeks to understand how we read and understand the use of depictions of violence by examining its rhetorical presentation. Although the media gives us a mixed understanding of the way that experiencing violence secondarily (that is, through all types of media) affects us, scholarship in this area has proved clear connections between viewing/experiencing depictions of violence and raised levels of aggression. On the other hand, there is a clear difference between gratuitous depictions of violence and socially useful depictions of violence (i.e., the difference between a slasher movie and a holocaust movie) that that area of scholarship does not expressly take into account. I argue that the language of trauma studies has the ability to evaluate the impact of violent texts on audiences and that Kenneth Burke's Dramatistic Pentad has the ability the examine depictions of violence to uncover explicit and hidden ideologies that affect the presentation of the violence and, thus, our reception and interpretation of that violence. Working in conjunction, these two theories can help audience's understand depictions of violence on an ideological level and help them to assess the violence's potential traumatic impact on themselves and others within certain contexts. To demonstrate this theory of understanding violence, I make two short analyses of Native Son and The Lovely Bones and demonstrate an in-depth analysis of Fight Club and Blood Meridian in order to give an example of the type of reading I am advocating and its potential for understanding and interpreting depictions of violence in ways that uncover both social benefit and harm. In the end, I hope that this theory of reading violence might extend beyond the sample readings I have done and into other types of media, so that we can all understand the ways that violence is used rhetorically for social and political purposes and be able to both use it and interpret it responsibly.