Constitutive rhetoric focuses on the idea that in times of historical crisis, speakers possess the ability to repair the language of the community and reshape the identity of the community. This dissertation relies upon the concept of constitutive rhetoric to examine the Supreme Court’s reapportionment and redistricting decision. By employing constitutive rhetoric, the Supreme Court reacts to the crisis of representation because of malapportionment and redistricting to transform our Constitutional republic to a Constitutional democracy and, further, to debate competing visions of representation and democracy necessary to sustain political life and the democratic experience. Chapter I offers readers a literature review on constitutive rhetoric, a literature review on reapportionment and redistricting, and presents readers with an outline of the dissertation. Chapter II provides a brief history of redistricting in the United States since Colonial times, the development of apportionment and redistricting law at the state court level, and the Supreme Court’s invention of a rhetorical tradition in apportionment and districting law before the Reapportionment Revolution. In the last section of Chapter II, I argue that the Pre-Revolution Supreme Court cases weakened the authority of the rhetorical tradition of judicial deferment. Chapter III examines the Supreme Court’s decision in Baker v. Carr, which reconstitutes the authority of the judiciary in apportionment and redistricting law by redefining the meaning of voting rights and the political questions doctrine, as well as reconceptualizing the law behind voting rights. Further, this chapter outlines the new role of the judiciary in American society and the ethos of judicial restraint that is to guide apportionment and redistricting cases. Chapter IV examines the development of the new rhetorical tradition in apportionment law from the Reapportionment Revolution cases of Gray v. Sanders, Wesberry v. Sander, Reynolds v. Sims, and the rest of the Supreme Court cases form the 1960s. In this new rhetorical tradition, the Supreme Court reconstitutes the American republican to create a legal and moral American democracy, a form of government that rests on the development of the democratic experience and the expansion of the right to vote at the local, state, and federal level. Chapter V examines the Supreme Court cases during the 1970s and the 1980s where, because of their ideological divisions, the Justices offer the American people competing visions of representation and democracy in an attempt to gain interpretive dominance for their visions. Finally, Chapter VI examines the Supreme Court’s decisions from the 1990s and 2000s. In these decisions, the Justices debate the best means to achieve racial reconciliation through apportionment and redistricting law and the best formation of democracy to secure that reconciliation.

Working from Charland's (1987) description of constitutive rhetoric, this thesis is concerned what the popular zombie apocalypse television series The Walking Dead (TWD) has to say regarding survival behavior in a post-apocalyptic world. TWD's plot focuses primarily on the relationships between survivor characters situated among the crumbling remains of society and humanity. An attempt is made to show how TWD (1) establishes a common ideology among its characters, and therefore (2) constitutes its characters as a primary audience through an ideology of inhumanity by three narrative ideological effects. In doing so, the study aims to advance understanding of constitutive rhetoric in a temporal sense and also to emphasize that popular culture artifacts suggest viewers as secondary audiences and implied auditors tied to ideologies. The results of this analysis suggest the new order of a post-apocalyptic world binds survivors into a collective and transhistorical subject. These characters are tied to their past before the apocalypse and also become relatively relatable for viewers. / Master of Arts

This project investigates how rhetorical texts influenced the witch trials that were held in Salem in 1691-1692, how rhetoric shaped the response to this event, and how rhetorical artifacts in the twentieth and twenty first centuries have shaped American public memory of the Salem witchcraft crisis. My analysis draws from three different chronological and rhetorical viewpoints. In Chapter II, I build upon work done by scholars such as McGee, White, and Charland in the area of constitutive rhetoric to address the question of how the witchcraft crisis was initiated and fueled rhetorically. Then, as my examination shifts to the rhetorical artifacts constructed immediately after the trials in Chapter III, I rely on the tradition of apologia, rooted in the ancient Greek understanding of stasis theory to understand how rhetorical elements were utilized by influential rhetors to craft a variety of different explanations for the crisis. And finally in Chapter IV, I draw from individuals such as Halbwachs, Kammen, Zelizer, and Bodnar, working in the cross-disciplinary field of public memory, to respond to the questions of how we remember the trials today and what impact these memories have on our understanding of the themes of witchcraft and witch hunting in contemporary American society. Therefore, this project uses the lens of rhetorical analysis to provide a method for examining and understanding how individuals, both in the seventeenth century and today, have engaged in the act of updating their reflections about this facet of American history.

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Eve Ensler's goal in writing The Vagina Monologues was to generate a dialogue regarding women's sexuality to counter the silence that pervades the patriarchal culture that they inhabit. To achieve this goal, Ensler constructs two ideologies—one grounded in patriarchy and another supposedly grounded in female agency and dialogue—to reveal the problems within the current ideology in hopes that her audience will adopt her new ideology and resolve the detrimental silence women endure. To evaluate its success, this study utilizes an eclectic approach—comprised of constitutive rhetoric, second persona, third persona, and bell hooks' rhetorical options—to determine if the play's content encourages the dialogue Ensler desires. / Master of Arts

Constitutive rhetoric theory posits that community identity is rhetorically created. There are various approaches to constitutive rhetoric, though most rhetoricians have chosen to focus on the works of Maurice Charland and Michael McGee, whose approaches focus on audience so much that often the rhetor has no agency. This project blends their ideas with those of James Boyd White to create works of criticism that highlight an increased amount of agency for the rhetor. As examples, I have chosen four case studies from the year 1954: the Brown v. Board decision, the Army-McCarthy hearing (specifically McCarthy's heated exchange with Joe Welch), the addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance, and the first article in the first dated issue of Playboy. Each chapter is designed to provide an example of what a constitutive analysis in the style of White would look like. The project begins with a description of the theories and analyses, including constitutive rhetoric, postmodernism, and textual analysis. The Brown v. Board analysis begins with a brief history of the case, moves to a rhetorical analysis, and then connects the analysis to ideas of constitutive rhetoric. The McCarthy sections examines the "Have you no sense of decency?" exchange between Welch and McCarthy. It begins with a brief explanation of McCarthy's reputation, and then utilizes an understanding of conspiracy rhetoric in the rhetorical analysis in order to explain McCarthy's constitutive efforts. The Pledge of Allegiance analysis provides a brief a summary of the Congressional arguments made to add the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance, then provides a textual analysis of the Pledge (with the addition), emphasizing the power of those words, especially given the epideictic nature of the Pledge. The Playboy research focuses on the first 1954 article, which directly addresses the question of American identity. The article is contextualized with Hugh Hefner's self-proclaimed Philosophy of Playboy. Finally, all of these case studies are tied together again with further explanations of constitutive rhetoric, showing that White's understanding of constitutive rhetoric can be used to bolster Charland and McGee's in order to give agency to the rhetor.

This dissertation analyzes the ways in which Mennonite rhetors used historical narratives to construct a coherent Mennonite identity in the 1940s and 1950s. During this era, U.S. American Mennonites faced a multitude of threats to their sectarian group identity, most especially during the Second World War. In response to these exigencies, a group of American Mennonite historians, who would later become known as the "Goshen Circle" of Mennonite historiography, discursively wove a new subject identity--known as a monogenic conception of Anabaptism--which reinforced Mennonite group identity and legitimated Mennonite faith convictions to outsiders. Until this point, Mennonite historians, sociologists, and others have only considered the discourse of the Goshen Circle along narrow lines. On the one hand, many historians have rejected the Goshen Circle discourse as simply partisan, and therefore "bad," history. On the other hand, other scholars still think that the historical work of the Goshen Circle simply "recovered" or "rediscovered" elements of Anabaptism which were implicit in the Mennonite tradition. In contrast to these positions, this dissertation argues that the establishment of an Anabaptist subjectivity was a rhetorical achievement and analyzes how several texts attempted rhetorical interventions to transform the already-given historical situations faced by twentieth-century Mennonites. I substantiate this claim by utilizing Maurice Charland's (1987) theory of constitutive rhetoric to analyze the discourse of three primary figures of Goshen Circle monogenic Anabaptist historiography: Harold S. Bender, Guy F. Hershberger, and J.C. Wenger. My analysis demonstrates: how these rhetors asserted the existence of a unified Anabaptist-Mennonite people, how they used "transhistorical" narratives to build networks of identification between sixteenth-century Anabaptists and their supposed twentieth-century Mennonite descendants, and how their constitutive rhetoric positioned Mennonites to take material action to confirm their place in the Anabaptist narrative.

The field of rhetorical aesthetics has a long and rich history. Despite that history, however, aesthetic artifacts have yet to be considered with the same weight that conventional rhetorical artifacts are. My project is to consider the rhetorical effectiveness of aesthetic artifacts, making a case for more inclusion of these types of artifacts in rhetorical theory. I will demonstrate the effectiveness of the aesthetic by performing a comparative analysis of both an aesthetic and conventional reaction to the 2019 fires at Notre Dame de Paris. By considering the constitutive power of the aesthetic, I will argue that the depth of analysis that the aesthetic allows makes it, in some cases, a more effective space for rhetorical analysis than conventional artifacts.

This dissertation investigates the rhetorical constitution of a religio-political social collective which has come to be understood as Christian Reconstruction (CR). CR is guided by conservative Calvinism (Reformed theology) and upholds the ideas of theonomy, postmillennialism, and presuppositional apologetics. Some of the leaders associated with CR are R. J. Rushdoony, Gary North, Gary DeMar of American Vision and Doug Phillips of Vision Forum. A few of its key practices are homeschooling, the father ‘returning home,’ and having as many children ‘as God will allow,’ (a vision aligned with the Quiverfull movement). It is primarily a national movement within the United States, not limited to a singular geographical location or denomination. This study provides a comprehensive overview of CR, illustrating how the grammars of CR are animated, embodied, and upheld in peoples’ lives and practices. Through the observation of conferences and events, and the collection and examination of media materials, this analysis takes a constructivist approach to piecing together the discursive fragments that constitute CR. CR grammar is richly embedded in a web of interaction, media, technology, images, bodily adornment, performance, music, games, and consumer culture. My theoretical framework utilizes the work of critical cultural theorists (Gramsci, 1971; Butler, 1990; Hall, 1976, Laclau, 2005) in combination with theories of constitutive (Burke, 1950; Charland, 1987; McGee, 1975) and visual rhetoric and display (Olson, Finnegan & Hope, 2008; Prelli, 2006; Selzer & Crowley, 1999) to examine the types of social, cultural, and political subjectivities, practices and institutions that are constituted within the CR community. It focuses primarily on the patriarchal identities within CR families as well as the focus on nationalistic teaching about Christian American history as methods for changing the culture of America. I consider the hegemonic machinations of CR grammars in constituting these identities. Finally, this study makes available a methodology and method for the study of dispersed “peoples” and their discursive lives. I demonstrate that multi-sited ethnography, combined with the theories of constitutive and visual rhetorics and critical cultural studies provides a systematic heuristic with which to inquire into a people, its culture, activities, identities, and how they constitute themselves.