abstract: This dissertation explores the discursive construction of work and family identities in the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) regulatory rulemaking process. It uses dramatism and public sphere theory along with the critical legal rhetoric perspective to analyze official FMLA legal texts as well as over 4,600 public comments submitted in response to the United States Department of Labor's 2008 notice of proposed rulemaking that ultimately amended the existing FMLA administrative regulations. The analysis in this dissertation concludes that when official and vernacular discourses intersect in a rulemaking process facilitated by the state, the facilitated public that emerges in that discourse is bounded by official discourses and appropriated language. But individuals in the process are able to convey and contest a range of work and family identities that include characteristics of public, private, abuse, accountability, sacrifice, and struggle. It further demonstrates that different circumferences for crafting work and family identities exist in the regulatory rulemaking process, including national, international, and time-bounded circumferences. Because the law is a discourse that has far-reaching rhetorical implications and the intersect between vernacular discourses and legal discourses is an underexplored area in both communication and legal studies, this dissertation offers a contribution to the ongoing work of scholars thinking about work and family identities, the material consequences of the intersect of work and family, and the rhetorical implications of legal discourse. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Communication 2012

In the spring of 2011, major protests broke out against the Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad. As a result of this, the Syrian Civil War, one that has cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives as well as forced millions from their homes into refuge, was initiated. The war is still today an ongoing conflict. The following study is a narrative analysis of how the Swedish press reported on the war. The main focus of the study will be placed on the actors, actions and motives from the articles. The source material consists of articles from three major Swedish newspapers that were published during three different time periods, ranging from the year of 2011 to the year of 2013. One general conclusion is that there are several similarities to be found between Swedish reports on the Syrian Civil war and the Gulf War, as well as the results from other studies on Swedish crisis communications. The results show that the three newspapers mediate a similar narrative with the same specific actors involved. The narratives are easy to understand, and the various roles assigned to the different actors are definite. Together, the articles tell a story of good versus evil.   Few of the active domestic Syrian groups during the war are named in the articles. The foreign actors from the articles consist primarily of the Western superpowers, Arabic neighbors, the United Nations and the European Union. There is a great difference in relation to the expectations placed upon, as well as authority given to the Western countries and the Arabic ones. This is discussed in relation to the term Orientalism coined by Edward Said. The motives behind the actors actions are rarely named in the article, neither are their rights to make said actions specified. This could be explained through the narratives and the inherent need to press’ to simplify things. It could also be explained with what Kenneth Burke refers to as a transformation, in this case implying that motives can be found in the actors. A didactic discussion is also included.

Though Kenneth Burke has often been dismissed as a brilliant but idiosyncratic thinker, this dissertation will argue that he is actually a precocious systems theorist. The systemic and systematic aspects of Burke’s work will be demonstrated by comparing it to the General Systems Theory (GST) of biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Though beginning from very different starting points, Bertalanffy and Burke develop similar aims, methods, and come to remarkably similar conclusions about the nature and function of language. The systemic nature of Burke’s language philosophy will also become evident through an analysis of the Burkean corpus. Burke’s first book contains several breakthrough ideas that set him irrevocably upon the path of a systemic theory of symbolic action. Burke’s next book, influenced by GST-inspired biology, seeks to understand the nature of associative networks by employing an organic metaphor. Burke’s interest in systems comes from his desire to repair the cultural system crumbling around him as a result of the Depression. Consequently his next book, Attitudes Toward History, studies what happens to such “orientations” (i.e., the systems by which humans classify and evaluate the world) during epistemological crises. The Philosophy of Literary Form is concerned primarily with the function of these orientations. In A Grammar of Motives Burke seeks to understand the basis for transformation of these evaluative systems, and in A Rhetoric of Motives he demonstrates how these transformations are used to persuade. Burke next turns his attention to understanding a small part of the system, a theological doctrine, in The Rhetoric of Religion. Burke’s theory appears plausible when compared to and supplemented by GST and the related self-organizing system theory. Furthermore, a paradigm shift to non-mechanistic cognitive theory allows us to refine and extend Burke’s intuitive theory of symbolic action. The final chapter will argue that symbolic action is the manipulation of the quality space, which is a multi-dimensional model for the super-system composed of mental, linguistic and cultural sub-systems. In mental systems, skeletal information structures called schemas combine to form simple models, which in turn combine to form a model of the world. Similarly, a culture can be seen as a system of schemas held in common by the group. The linguistic system labels, transmits and thus evokes these schemas. The primary means by which the quality space becomes reconfigured is through metaphor, which creates new schemas, and modifies the connections between schemas (and thus the position and relative value of a schema). Metaphor, therefore, is the basis of symbolic action. This systemic theory of symbolic action may be modeled by Connectionist networks. These analogical neural networks provide a model for how brains form and associate categories and support Burke’s assertion that thought is primarily analogical and categorical, thus affording the means for refining Burke’s theory of symbolic action. Ultimately, such a theory may provide a unified field theory for rhetoric, showing how various symbolic action strategies work and interrelate. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

abstract: This dissertation develops a heuristic—one I call the iterative narrative reflection framework—for rhetorically engaged, data-driven teacherly theory building using Kenneth Burke’s frames of acceptance and rejection. Teacher-scholars regularly develop curricula and lesson plans informed by theory and prior experience, but the daily practice of teaching and learning with students rarely plays out as expected. In many cases, institutional constraints and the unpredictable lives of students interact with teachers’ plans in surprising and sometimes confounding ways. Teachers typically make sense of such challenges by constructing post-hoc narratives about what happened and why, attributing motives and agencies to other participants in ways that suggest how to respond, move forward, and get back on track. Whether such narratives are part of a deliberate practice of reflection or an informal and largely unnoticed mental process, they are rarely thought of as constructed accounts and therefore as rhetorical acts that can be subjected to serious review, criticism, and revision. Yet these stories are shaped by familiar genre conventions that influence interpretations of events and motives in ways that may or may not serve well as teachers consider how best to respond to unfolding events. Using the iterative narrative reflection framework to guide my analysis of my own teacherly narratives through multiple layers of reflection and criticism, I demonstrate across the dissertation’s three cases how such deliberate, methodical analysis can reveal tacit assumptions and additional interpretive possibilities. Ultimately, such a process of iterative reflection enables the teacher-scholar to choose from among a wider range of available means of persuasion and pedagogical possibilities. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2019

Haole is a contested, multi-faceted word in Hawaii. It generally means “foreigner,” or “white person.” It is used to refer to both tourists, and haoles like me, or those who are born and raised in Hawaii. In either case, it is always negative, referring to something “other” and really, colonial. Paraphrasing rhetorician Kenneth Burke, this thesis analyzes how this word “works in the world,” and from there, explores how identity, culture, and belonging are constructed through language. The essential questions become: are culture and identity constructed and performed, through language, tradition, and cultural engagement? Or is some blood content or ethnicity warranted to claim cultural belonging, and in this case, a Hawaiian identity? The method for this research began with seven interviews with people from Hawaii—a mix of haoles, hapa (mixed race) people, and ethnic Hawaiians—followed by the analyzing of these interviews, and ending with my personal engagement with these findings autoethnographically. Writing this thesis has changed how I see my own identity in Hawaii. I have used this autoethnographic method to share this transformation, explore it, and through it, mimic the in-flux nature of identity construction and language at large. I see this thesis as fluid and subject to change; as a jumping off point for future research on an otherwise “silent” topic, silent in that people in Hawaii do not openly discuss this issue; as the beginning of a necessary dialogue on what it means to be haole, what it means to be Hawaiian, and the nature of identity and cultural construction at large.

This study compares and contrasts the writings of Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, to determine whether they are contradictory, compatible, or complementary. Burke can be regarded as the founder of modern conservatism, and Smith is an early and powerful advocate of market-orientated liberalism. Today, their ideas have been blended into a system of “liberal conservatism” that serves as the unofficial political ideology of most right-of centre parties throughout the English-speaking world. However, it is not so immediately apparent that Smith and Burke can be reconciled with each other. In the course of this study, Burke and Smith’s ideas are considered at various levels of abstraction. They share a nuanced view of human beings as complex, social, sympathetic and self-interested. They both adhere to an empiricist epistemology that is distrustful of deductive rationality, especially when applied to complex human societies. In order to cope with this complexity, Burke and Smith alike counsel humility and pragmatism, and emphasise the importance of contingency. Furthermore, they suggest that policymakers rely on mechanisms that reveal information held by large numbers of individuals: tradition in the case of Burke, and the market mechanism in the case of Smith. Burke is a staunch opponent of arbitrary power, and an advocate of colonial liberty. However, he defends the prescriptive powers of the state, and argues that liberty should be tempered by self-restraint. Smith advocates a “system of natural liberty” in economic affairs, but acknowledges that such a system takes place within the framework of a coercive state. In terms of policy, Burke and Smith share similar views on external free trade and laissez-faire within the domestic economy, but there are important stylistic and substantive differences in their views on the relief of the poor. Ultimately, this study argues that Burke and Smith’s complementary policymaking framework, rather than their actual views on policy, is the true point of convergence between them. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Political Sciences / unrestricted

Krista Ratcliffe’s term “non-identification” offers a version of identification that assumes identity is not always identifiable. As an attitude that fosters cross-cultural listening, non-identification asks us to listen to others from a place of “neutrality,” with “hesitancy,” “humility,” and “pause” in order to consider identity’s fluid nature (73). This thesis first argues that this term might also describe speaking strategies premised on non-identifiability. As I’ll show, an inventive non-identification would articulate some rhetorical strategies that neither “identification” nor “disidentification” currently articulate. However, rhetorical scholars need more theoretical and practical guidance for what this kind of speech looks like. So, this thesis also argues why, despite criticism to the contrary, the writing of Kenneth Burke offers an ideal account for inventive non-identification. Burke’s descriptions of the terms “synecdoche function,” the “mystic” and “poetic language” achieve the same effects as Ratcliffe’s non-identification, yet Burke describes these same effects from the perspective of the speaker. Following my re-reading of Burke, I ground the theory of inventive non-identification in a brief rhetorical analysis of Yan Phou Lee’s 1887 autobiography When I Was a Boy in China. By showing how this theory applies to Asian American rhetoric, I conclude that inventive non-identification has utility for the field of rhetoric more broadly.

No description available.

The purpose of this study has been to analyze the rhetoric of Gloria Steinem in order to determine how she uses identification in her attempts to unify the members of the Women's Liberation Movement and to enlist the cooperation of others outside the movement. The rhetorical theory and concepts of identification and consubstantiality developed by Kenneth Burke, literary and rhetorical critic, have been used in this study. The representative examples of Steinem's rhetoric which have been analyzed include a speech made at Southern Methodist University on February 3, 1972, Steinem's feature article "Sisterhood," which was published in the 1972 Spring Preview Issue of Ms. magazine, and a speech made by Steinem at the opening session of the National Women's Political Caucus in Houston, Texas, on February 9, 1973. This study has revealed Gloria Steinem to be, during the years from 1967 until the present time, a vital spokeswoman for the Women's Liberation Movement. The means through which Steinem chose to combat the oppression of women was rhetoric. The three examples of Steinem's rhetoric analyzed in this study indicate that her basic premise concerns the long-standing subjugation and exploitation of women by the ruling class -- white males.

The transition to motherhood is difficult and jarring for many women. Not only does this transition demand life-altering changes to a woman's life, but especially in more recent times, this transition offers nothing but uncertainty. As the role and understanding of women continues to change, what motherhood means becomes increasingly difficult to define; additionally, the traditional narratives of stay-at-home mothers who are always happy to do housework and nurture their children no longer apply for many 21st-century women, leaving new mothers feeling uncertain about who they are and who they want to become. Since the turn of the century, mothers have turned to the blogosphere to document and share the events of their everyday lives, making the blogosphere a space for mothers to share the highs and lows of modern family life with their family, friends, and other mothers. The scholarship published on mommy blogs suggests that for the writers of these blogs, the act of blogging provides writers with the opportunity to literally revise the events that occur in their lives on their blogs, which allows them to actively shape and create their maternal identities. In turn, their blogs are read, complicated, and validated by a community of other readers, which implicitly suggests that readers are being affected in some way by their reading experiences. Although the relationship between the blog and the blog writer has been given adequate attention in the scholarship on mommy blogs, the relationship between the blog and the blog reader has not been fully explored. Consequently, my research attempts to explain how a reader's perception of her maternal identity is influenced by her reading experiences. By applying Kenneth Burke's theory of literary form to the public texts of mommy blogs, I suggest that readers are affected in equally profound ways as the bloggers themselves. Looking at reader responses through Burke's theory of form demonstrates that the act of reading a mommy blog allows readers to experience life as someone else lives it, which often reveals a gap between the reader's real experiences and her vicarious experience reading. This space prompts a shift in attitude in readers; however, these shifts vary from reader to reader. Some readers may feel inspired, while others feel envious or inadequate by the same blog, which suggests that either way, a reader's perception of her maternal identity has changed. And although these shifts depend in part on the experience offered by the blog, their response reflects their own experiences of motherhood and expectations for how motherhood should be represented, making mommy blogs ultimately a place where readers actively shape their maternal identities as well.