Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1948 L67 / Master of Science

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1962 A43

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1984 W8 / Master of Science

This folio and accompanying commentary draw together my compositional work over the period of the PhD and plot the development and exploration of a number techniques which are to be found in varying degrees in each of the works but with different emphases. These techniques include the use of: parallel structures and metres to provide a sense of independence of compositional ideas; parallel tonal centres within overarching schema to control and draw thematic material together; the use of rhetorical musical gestures that seek to break free of their context; fragmentation and the accumulation of material in terms of quantity and density in order to facilitate a sense of change; the limitation of pitch material in order to create a sense of stasis; and the use of slow sustained melodies that lack a clear pulse in order to create a sense of musical events that are not bound by time.

This dissertation theorizes and applies what I term revisionary rhetoric, a rhetoric that emerges at the intersection of feminism and revision. I define revisionary rhetoric as a rhetoric of relationship, thereby drawing attention to the fact that all human relationships, including those that exist between readers and writers, enjoy moments of intimacy, closeness, and connection, but they also involve inevitable separation, loss, disappointment, and pain. However, theories and practices of revision within the discipline have focused on a writer's attempts to revise in order to connect with her audience through achieved consensus. The assumption is that to be persuasive writers should revise in order to remove those textual moments that might offend or confuse potential readers. In privileging clarity and connection in our work on revision, I believe we've failed to theorize how readers/writers contend with the inevitable disconnections that permeate their experiences with texts. We can, of course, simply ignore that these moments exist; we can teach our students to delete them from their drafts all in the name of "effective" revision. But to do so sends a troubling message to our students: that when they can't relate to or connect with something they read, they can simply skip it, ignore it, forget about it, and move on. Revisionary rhetoric responds to the reality of disconnection by describing strategies writers can use to make themselves heard as they demonstrate their commitment to listening to others. Such a paradox demands a revisioning of silence as it deconstructs a voice/silence binary, for listening demands participatory silence. After revising silence through three disciplinary contexts, I identify key textual features of revisionary rhetoric--metadiscursivity and intertextuality--and, through an examination of sample texts, I describe how these features reveal the constructed nature of all texts and thereby create gaps, or silences, out of which readers can respond. I specifically analyze the ways in which multigenre texts enact revisionary rhetoric, and I argue for more of them, both in the field and in the classroom, for they demand the kind of rereading that is necessary to practice a relational rhetoric.

This project explores the productive form and function of rhetorics that produce and are produced by the US crisis of migration. Occupying the disciplinary interstices of rhetorical theory, transnational feminist inquiry, ethnic studies, and critical analyses of race, this project presents an analysis of citizenship as defined by DREAMer activism. "DREAMer" is the popular label given to undocumented young activists who initially mobilized in support of the DREAM Act. I analyze multimodal texts from the National Immigrant Youth Alliance's (NIYA) "Bring Them Home" campaign, a DREAMer-led set of actions advocating for migrant belonging, and argue that in addition to their radical possibilities, migrant-rights rhetorics also reify neoliberal discourses of gendered, sexualized, and racialized oppression that sustain the dehumanization of migrants of color in the US. At a time when migration crises are gaining increasing global attention, this project challenges scholars and activists to imagine discourses and practices that avoid reproducing racialized, sexualized, and gendered oppressions. I analyze multimodal texts related to the Dream 9, Dream 30, and Dream 150 actions in which groups of DREAMers who had been deported or left the US on their own accord presented themselves at various US Ports of Entry and asked the US for asylum. Part of NIYA's "Bring the Home" campaign, these unprecedented actions transformed traditional migrant-rights activism by asking for DREAMers to be allowed to "return home," thus, crafting the nation-state as the home in which DREAMers belong. Employing rhetorical analysis, I argue that DREAMer activism helps to redefine the nation-state in ways that are more inclusive to migrants of color; yet, because they rely on the nation-state as the granter of belonging, these migrant rhetorics also reinforce neoliberal nationalist ideas of individualism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy that legitimize the continued exclusion of migrants of color from the national imaginary.

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published_or_final_version / abstract / Humanities / Master / Master of Philosophy