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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 185-196).

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-76).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Texas Christian University, 2008. / Title from dissertation title page (viewed Feb. 26, 2009). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Environmentalists are accustomed to using the rhetorical appeals of guilt and sacrifice to advocate their agendas. I argue that the motivations of guilt and sacrifice do not mirror the goals of sustainability, and are easy for anthropocentric-resourcist ideology (ARI) agendas to counter. When it comes to actual environmental policy change, however, the rhetorical means in which guilt and sacrifice appeals arise are valid and sustainable: the melodramatic frame and dialogic engagement. I use these rhetorical tools to inform my readings of two eco-comedic artifacts: Earth to America! and my own performance work with "The Composters." Through these analyses, I argue that comedy is a viable method that matches the message of environmentalism. Comedy becomes a kind of discursive biomimicry that mirrors, as a predator does a prey, the language of ARI. Since comedy is dependent on contradiction and juxtaposition, it becomes an adequate tool for calling the bluff on ARI agendas that are based on illogical claims that sound ecologically savvy (e.g., "clean coal"). In this dissertation I undertake an examination of these informative overlaps. I place eco-comedy on the line in order to map a more sustainable environmental rhetoric between the intersections of melodrama, dialogic engagement, environmentalism, comedy, and advocacy.

<p> This dissertation is written in collage format, a non-linear style that belongs to the creative area of arts-based research, falling midway between fields of philosophy and poetry. The linearity of a traditional dissertation cannot capture the elusive multidimensionality of paradigms still in transition&mdash;the postmodern and the quantum, both of which explore the instability of meaning and subjectivity of a participatory world described by the observer effect, linking the knower with the known. </p><p> A collage dissertation is multidimensional. It is spacious, using the blank spaces on each page to draw the reader into making the associative leaps befitting a written structure that is rhizomatic and fractal rather than linear, a text more widely metaphoric than logically metonymic. A second kind of spaciousness occurs as the collage&rsquo;s far-reaching overtones are emitted by ideas inextricable from their poetic form. Due to the expansive overtones, readers of this text will inevitably create meaning more than they will find it. As well, this spaciousness of subjective response is parallel to the broad range of the writer&rsquo;s sources: gleaned not only from the relation between tenets of the postmodern and the quantum, but broadly transdisciplinary, culling from physics, psychology, linguistics, literary theory, dream theory, neurology, mythology, and art. </p><p> The author has designated the Greek god Hermes as the presiding deity of this work. Most encompassingly, this god personifies the complementary qualities inherent within border crossings: both ruler of the metaxic space of the in between, as well as a thief carrying messages from gods to humans, befuddling them as he enlightens them. A creature of great complexity, Hermes bestows meaning that is endlessly mercurial, and yet, all meaning, despite its mercuriality, is doomed to become culturally rigidified within paradigms that constrain our thinking&mdash;such that we inevitably become sentenced by our sentences. </p><p> Fittingly, in his travels between the underworld and the world of mortals, Hermes personifies the collage dissertation&rsquo;s complementary interplay of research that is both academic and personal, external and internal. When these two forms of investigation coalesce, especially within the capacious umbrella of the transdisciplinary, a tempest of implication befalls writer and reader.</p><p>

<p>This dissertation develops a quantum rhetoric: the entanglement of matter and meaning, language and materiality, being and doing. Rather than exploring intersections between rhetoric, philosophy, literature, physics, and the like, I claim that rhetorical being and practice cut across such disciplines in decisive, generative ways. I stress that rhetoric?an affective, communicative way of being, doing, and relating in the world, of acting despite contingency and relativity?underlies much disciplinary (re)volution in the 20th century and beyond. In this way, quantum rhetoric is the marriage of the humanities and sciences, of language and materiality. Quantum rhetoric overturns the classical epistemology of language as controllable, deployed, and reflective of reality. On the contrary, quantum rhetoric is diffractive, approaching language through difference and unpredictability. Here, physics complements rhetoric for three central reasons: first, for its focus on materiality, which materializes rhetoric into bodies and minds in motion, composed of human and non-human beings, compounds and artifacts; second, for its grounding in uncertainty, rooted in rhetoric?s Sophistic origin; and third, for its emphasis on action, doing, and work, mirroring rhetoric?s concerns. Rhetoric, in turn, complements physics in three main ways: first, rhetoric?s focus on affect, effect, and resonance attend to the consequentiality of physics?of entangled bodies in motion?thus humanizing physics and giving meaning to material facts; second, rhetoric foregrounds the effects of our symbolic instruments on our relation to the world; and third, rhetoric fronts the centrality of language, instrumentation, and symbolic subjectivity, distancing us from our assumptions. Together, rhetoric and quantum physics?quantum rhetoric?make central the materiality, uncertainty, and difference in our symbolic endeavors, unearthing a rhizomatic reality: contingent at root. We are all, Einstein writes, ?non-rigid bodies of reference,? and our symbolic systems and ethical practices must be just as fluid, perceptive, and receptive to flux. Applying theory, I envision the university?and first-year writing and critical thinking classrooms in particular?quantum rhetorically, shaping assignments that cultivate rhetorical being: a way of life, grounded in quantum rhetoric, which responds responsibly to chance, change, and the unknown, and which ungrounds assumptions in pursuit of a more viable democracy.