Master of Arts / Department of Speech, Theatre, and Dance / Charles J. Griffin / The primary purpose of the Supreme Court is to interpret the constitution. The Court determines whether acts in society are Constitutional. Because of this responsibility, the Court itself is an institution that influences and is influenced by ideology and rhetoric. Because society’s ideology changes due to humans conversing with one another, so does the law. Given this context, America’s First Amendment provides an abundant body of artifacts where the law and rhetorical ideology overlap. One particular right granted in the First Amendment is the freedom to speak. This right granted by the Constitution is titled the free speech clause. This clause has been a subject of debate throughout American history. Furthermore, this right has been defined, re-defined, and shaped to fit certain particular interests in society. The Supreme Court last year made a recent landmark decision that concerns freedom of speech and campaign finance. This study will examine Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission in order to investigate the rhetorical strategies and ideological influences embedded within the decision. The methodological tool of McGee’s proposed ideograph will be used in order to answer the following research question: What role does ideology, concerning free speech, play in the Citizens United v. FEC? From the given analysis, two ideographs emerged, <Marketplace of ideas> and <Corruption>. These two ideographs provided the basis to articulate an ideological framework by which scholars can understand the Supreme Court and answer the following research question. Furthermore, the analysis of this decision assisted this study to explain possible implications and conclusions from the ruling in Citizens United.

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This thesis is an examination of the extent to which contemporary British plays written by women constitute an ideological theatre. It is based upon the premise that there is a relationship of feminist theatre practice to feminist theory, where theory is seen to have informed practice and practice has informed the theory. I argue that an ideological theatre can be understood with reference to first, playstructure and second, the place of the performer in relation to both character and spectator. The implications of these can be seen terms first, of representation and second, of the physical presence of the body of the performer on stage and are therefore seen to be to do with the representation of issues on stage and performance issues to do with the woman performer respectively. Using aspects of a materialist-feminist analysis I examine the ways in which feminist epistemology has brought about a transformation of social relations in so far as these are deployed through representation and specific processes of performance based upon the slogan "the personal is political". This involves looking at the influence of performance issues and acting, especially at power-relations as they are reproduced and represented in selected theatre exercises. Importantly, these strategies for reading are always seen in the context of modem British political theatre; the importance of this emerges through my proposition that an ideological theatre practice is one which both establishes and foregrounds a relationship or resistance to existing theatrical form or genres. This constitutes the first part of my thesis. The second part of the thesis is comprised of three case studies. In these I draw together aspects of representation and the processes of performance established in Part One as a way of understanding selected plays constructed in relation to existing genres. In Chapter Three I look at the plays of Sarah Daniels in relation to melodrama; in Chapter Four I look at the plays of Liz Lochhead in relation to adaptation. Chapter Five is my concluding chapter in which I stress the importance of both foregrounding previous genres and questioning generic expectations by examining the interactions of theatre with stand-up comedy in the work of Claire Dowie.

This thesis argues for an analysis of popular television in relation to the dominant political ideas and values of Thatcherism. Examining the power of popular entertainment genres to inscribe and inform public understanding of political debates, the thesis offers an analysis of television realism in relation to genres such as situation comedy and drama serials. Using the work of Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and the Bakhtin Circle, the methodology concentrates on a discursive model of interpretation which draws on elements of semiotic and discourse analysis. It refers to the field of hermeneutics in order to address some of the problems of textual analysis and considers the ontological problems of television realism, particularly as they relate to the representation of political ideas. The thesis also considers the role of realism as an important ideological feature of dramatic representation on television. The contribution of the thesis to the field of Media Studies lies in its engagement with the sphere of political discourse in relation to popular television programmes over a specific period of intense ideological activity. In choosing to examine Thatcherite discourse in relation to work and unemployment, the thesis considers issues of class and gender in relation to changing attitudes to unemployment as expressed through narrative and other discursive patterns in the medium of television drama. The thesis argues that television drama of the period responded to the dominant rhetoric of Thatcherite politics concerning work and unemployment with a variety of identifiable structures and dramatic strategies. The ideological import of these strategies is assessed through a combination of textual analyses and socio-political appraisal of the phenomenon of Thatcherism.

The aim of this thesis is, within two films Wall Street and Wall Street. Money Never Sleeps, to explore characters from different levels of capitalism’s characteristics and ideological positions, what kind of society and ideological patterns the two films reflect and in which ways do the films promote and/or criticize capitalism. Theories on ideology and ideology critique are applied and used in a discourse analysis in order to compare characters of different levels of capitalism’s ideologies and characteristics over times in the films and describe what kind of society and ideological patterns the two films reflect. The outcomes show that characters’ ideologies and characteristics actually change over times in the films. And the outcomes also show that the two films generally promote capitalism by creating same model of story under different societies and ideological patterns.

This dissertation addresses the different ways in which Americans define citizenship and nationhood and the associated implications for politics and political rhetoric. I argue that the contesting of the national identity--the ways in which a given image of the United Sates is privileged over other images of the nation--is central to the ideological divisions of the United States today. The dissertation begins by examining existing scholarship on the nature of ideological divisions and arguments in contemporary US politics, and the survey demonstrates that each of these approaches tells us a great deal about how certain individual factors influence ideological arguments, but these insights tend to come at the cost of minimizing the roles played by extremely powerful societal forces like race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. I propose, therefore, a view of the left-center-right political spectrum in the United States as a spectrum based on competing--and sometimes overlapping--nationalist ideologies, with opposing groups competing for control of the state agencies that sustain and diffuse the national high culture. According to this view, individuals define their position in the ideological spectrum based on whom they culturally identify with, and practitioners of political rhetoric would benefit from identifying the culture of their ideology with the American "mainstream." Toward this end, the dissertation draws on nationalism theory to establish a theory to examine how competing national identities are contested both in political rhetoric and in popular media that is not explicitly political. The dissertation then concludes by identifying rhetorical strategies that have been effective at crossing ideological lines in the past and proposing new strategies that can be effective at crossing ideological lines in the future.

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In sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, portrayals of the Turk reflected aspects of Christian thinking. More specifically, these views varied according to ideological outlook, place and time. To complicate matters further, while there are a variety of images of the Turk responding to a range of Christian concerns, the nexus of images of the Turk - the imago Turci – is essentially contradictory. English portrayals and responses to the Turks are not uniform, but vary, while the Turk operates at once both from within and at a distance from English culture in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. In other words, the Turk is both real and imagined. This project is a response to these issues. It examines the ways in which Turks - both real and imagined - not only figure in early modem English prose texts as a site of their cultural production, perpetuation, and negotiation, but also the ways in which these images relate to and participate in current political and cultural debates that also informed these prose texts. As a consequence of the diversity of the imago Turci in a wide range of available, printed prose works, I adopt five categorical distinctions representing five groups of overlapping genres, or modes for my analysis: history, religion, travel, mercantile writings and romance. Reading the material in their historical contexts, one of the arguments to arise from this is that the use of the Turk in these English texts reflects the wider cultural and political developments in Western Christendom and England, and between Christendom and the Ottoman Empire. The central argument of this project is that the imago Turci in early modem English prose emerges as a complex discursive site in which a variety of competing interests are negotiated.

The field of language learning motivation has traditionally been a 'self'-centred one, characterising the individual learner as subject to influence by, but essentially separate from, the sociocultural environment. Models of language learning motivation have been concerned with theorising the self, but have not fully accounted for the role of the other. The recent emergence of sociocultural approaches has seen a welcome move towards addressing this gap, theorising the language learner as engaged in complex relationships with various others, all constituted by and constituting their sociocultural contexts. Within this paradigm, researchers have begun to consider ways in which language learning motivation may be part of broader motivation for learning in various life domains - intellectual, social, emotional, ethical - though this is as yet an emergent area of scholarship. This study adopts one such sociocultural approach, namely Ushioda's person-in-context relational view (2009, 2011). Using a theoretical framework and innovative dialogical research design based on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, I present dialogues describing the learning experience and motivation of six English-language learners, and create a definition and interpretation of language learning motivation as ideological becoming, a process of learning to be in the world. This definition and interpretation integrate the language learner and their social context in ways which understand language learning motivation as socially constructed, involving relations with many different others; which understand language learning motivation as part of motivation towards broader personal and social growth and development; and which foreground learners' own voices and perspectives. In accounting for the reciprocal influence between the language learner and the world as heard through learners' own voices, this study offers an important conceptual contribution to the language learning motivation field. Furthermore, it represents a methodological contribution to both the language learning motivation field and to qualitative inquiry more broadly. Finally, it offers political and practical contributions, and makes suggestions for future research and researchers.