<p> This essay attempts to formulate a phenomenological conception of the subaltern historical figure that has been absented from archives of state violence. In order to do so, a reading of the myth of Echo is placed alongside Saidiya Hartman's work on Venus' presence in the archive of the Atlantic Slave Trade to argue for a shift to consider "echo" as a notion of subjectivity that encompasses the dilemmas that Hartman lays out. In shifting to read the lost subaltern historical figure through this mythos, this essay argues that we revisit and expand on the concerns of speaking for others by understanding the articulation of subjectivity at the moment of disarticulation, or in the break. Through this framework, the essay turns to consider the productivity of grief as a politic and applies the considerations to the Brazilian National Truth Commission.</p><p>

I conducted this study to provide insights toward deepening understanding of association between culture and writing by building, assessing, and refining a conceptual model of second language writing. To do this, I examined culture and coherence as well as the relationship between them through a mixed methods research design. Coherence has been an important and complex concept in ESL/EFL writing. I intended to study the concept of coherence in the research context of contrastive rhetoric, comparing the coherence quality in argumentative essays written by undergraduates in Mainland China and their U.S. peers. In order to analyze the complex concept of coherence, I synthesized five linguistic theories of coherence: Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory, Carroll’s theory of coherence, Enkvist’s theory of coherence, Topical Structure Analysis, and Toulmin’s Model. Based upon the synthesis, 16 variables were generated. Across these 16 variables, Hotelling t-test statistical analysis was conducted to predict differences in argumentative coherence between essays written by two groups of participants. In order to complement the statistical analysis, I conducted 30 interviews of the writers in the studies. Participants’ responses were analyzed with open and axial coding. By analyzing the empirical data, I refined the conceptual model by adding more categories and establishing associations among them. The study found that U.S. students made use of more pronominal reference. Chinese students adopted more lexical devices of reiteration and extended paralleling progression. The interview data implied that the difference may be associated with the difference in linguistic features and rhetorical conventions in Chinese and English. As far as Toulmin’s Model is concerned, Chinese students scored higher on data than their U.S. peers. According to the interview data, this may be due to the fact that Toulmin’s Model, modified as three elements of arguments, have been widely and long taught in Chinese writing instruction while U.S. interview participants said that they were not taught to write essays according to Toulmin’s Model. Implications were generated from the process of textual data analysis and the formulation of structural model defining coherence. These implications were aimed at informing writing instruction, assessment, peer-review, and self-revision.

<p>McPeek, Samuel E. Bachelor of Arts, Concordia College, Ann Arbor, MI, Spring 1978; Master of Divinity, Concordia Seminary, Spring 1982; Master of Science, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Spring 2007; Doctor of Philosophy, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Summer 2017 Major: English Title of Dissertation: Religious Rhetoric and the Radio: The Sermons of Rev. Dr. Oswald C.J. Hoffmann, International Lutheran Hour Speaker, 1955 - 1985 Dissertation Director: Dr. Keith Dorwick Pages in Dissertation: 199; Words in Abstract: 281 ABSTRACT Rev. Dr. Oswald C.J. Hoffmann served as the speaker of The Lutheran Hour, an internationally broadcast religious radio program, from 1955 until 1988 and as Speaker-Emeritus from 1988 until his death in 2005. As a Lutheran pastor, Hoffmann brought with him almost twenty years of ministry experience as a parish pastor, a college professor, and the first public relations director of the Lutheran Church?Missouri Synod (LCMS), as well as the skills of a gifted preacher. Throughout the three decades that Hoffmann served in this position, he was much more than a voice on the radio and his notoriety extended well beyond the structure of his own denomination; he was well known both nationally and internationally, meeting with and interviewing political leaders, business leaders, celebrities, and dignitaries worldwide. Although Hoffmann was a major religious figure and a popular preacher of the second half of the twentieth century, little scholarship has been conducted on his preaching. The question this dissertation will address is, how is Hoffmann?s preaching distinct amidst the many voices proclaiming the faith? There are two ways in which this question can be addressed: the first is theologically and the second is rhetorically. Theologically, this dissertation will argue that it was Hoffmann?s style of preaching as pastoral care, or Seelsorge (the term used by Luther), that made him an effective radio preacher and furthermore, his preaching exemplified and contributed to the overall tradition of Lutheran homiletics. Rhetorically, however, this dissertation will investigate how Hoffmann keeps his radio audience?s attention against the sonic field in which he preaches. In order to address this question, I will analyze Hoffmann?s sermons using the five canons of rhetoric: Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery.

Cette thèse pose un regard nouveau sur un discours méconnu qui pourtant, joue un rôle d'influence important dans notre vie quotidienne: celui des banques. À l'aide des théories de l'énonciation, on arrive à dégager de ce discours qui se dit objectif des marques explicites et surtout, implicites, de subjectivité. Par l'analyse des choix lexicaux et des figures présentes dans ces textes, il devient possible de circonscrire un ensemble de valeurs constitutives de l'image et du rôle social que s'attribuent ces puissantes sociétés. Par un ensemble d'exemples tirés des textes entourant le débat sur les projets de fusions bancaires au Canada en 1998, nous arrivons à poser l'hypothèse que le discours des banques se caractérise par sa visée: imposer l'image d'une industrie solide qui se veut au service et à l'écoute des besoins de sa clientèle tout en étant une industrie responsable dont l'ensemble des activités sert les intérêts de tous les citoyens.

Abstract not available.

News, as we know, saturates our lives: from the morning newspaper to televised late-night reports there is no denying the influence and impact media can have on our daily lives. In the context of a post September the 11th world, one of the dominant trends in press media is the use of fear-based rhetoric. This research paper is concerned with how the Canadian press media constructs fear, particularly the fear of disease, and how this fear is further disseminated through translation. As well, it explores some of the dominant discourses concerning translation in the press and in general. The main hypothesis is that translation acts as a space of contagion with the power to disseminate certain emotions that develop in response to current events. Observations include a case study of French and English-Canadian press articles on the avian flu and the discursive strategies used to convey fear of the disease, as well as a potential framework for translators of the press.

In the eighteenth century, Russia passed through a period of sweeping social reforms. Russia was modernized, and modernization was viewed as westernization. Russia had to accomplish the modernization as quickly as possible and catch up with the rest of Europe, a formidable task requiring transfers of Western European knowledge and values on a massive scale. Translation became the sole means of carrying out these transfers in the least time-consuming fashion. My research focuses on the social role of translation. I applied Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory as well as some concepts from works by Pierre Bourdieu and Lev Gumilev. Luhmann's theory provided a stimulating theoretical basis for analyzing major translation flows, the place of translation in the overall social system of the Russian Empire as well as the contribution translation made to the process of Russia's unfolding westernization. Bourdieu's concepts helped consider the role of agency in the translation 'field' and explain the distribution of symbolic capital in society that led to foregrounding translation as a major means of westernization. Gumilev's ideas about ethnogenetic evolution made it clear that the eighteenth century was the acmetic stage of the evolving superethnos and that is why became such a pivotal period in Russian history. Translation was regarded as a boundary phenomenon of the system (in this case, the Russian Empire). Serving as the system's boundary, translation opened the system to influences from the environment. In eighteenth-century Russia, intrasystemically, translation became a crucial means of introducing new ideas, helping to change the official discourse by introducing a heterodoxa (an alternative social discourse). Translation came to the fore of the social stage and became a principal means of renegotiating the systemic communication. Intersystemically, translation also was instrumental for the system's projecting information about itself into the environment. Finally, translation played a crucial global-systemic role. Europe integrated into a global functional super-system (Luhmann) where law, economy, science, and art formed international functional subsystems, no longer divided by national frontiers. Translation was a sine qua non enabling Russia to become part of this global system.

This study explores academic women's experience of writing and blocking through ethnographic interviews focusing on the women's history of writing in the academy, impediments to writing they have faced, and strategies they have used to write through blocks. Women in the humanities and social sciences at three-levels of academic accomplishment--master's students, doctoral students, and junior faculty--participated in hour-long interviews. Particular attention was given to the impact of the writer's academic and social context on her ability to compose. The results demonstrated that block, rather than a fixed entity, is a phenomenon that occurs along a continuum. It is affected by the individual's acculturation into the academy, including explicitness of cultural norms, her family and social life, the presence or absence of direct instruction in the discourse modes of her discipline, and the role and type of evaluation she has experienced in relation to her writing. Solutions and potential solutions for writing through block are discussed, as well as implications for future research in teaching, advising, and in the acculturation process of graduate students and junior faculty.

This dissertation uses the rhetorical theory of Kenneth Burke to illuminate the development of Walt Whitman's rhetorical poetics, in which Whitman sought to transform the reader's identity from one based on static and divisive notions of race, class, region, and gender to a malleable identity based on the actions of the human body. I show how this rhetorical poetics is the product of a number of factors, including the variety of roles poetry played in early nineteenth-century American culture, the economics of the publishing industry, the fragmentation of the two-party system, and nineteenth-century oratorical culture, and that a careful examination of the intersection of Whitman and these factors reveals the development of this rhetorical poetics. I focus on four bodies of evidence: Whitman's pre-Leaves of Grass poetry; the various rhetorical roles poetry played in America from 1820–1850 (roles shaped in large part by changing economic conditions) as exemplified by three poets whom Whitman read and admired, McDonald Clarke, Martin Farquhar Tupper, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Whitman's pre- Leaves of Grass notebooks; and the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman's early poetry reveals a young poet, intensely aware of the variety of roles poetry could play, moving progressively toward a poetry that could combine the communal persona of the ballad with the individual persona of the romantic lyric. In his pre-Leaves of Grass notebooks, written from 1848–1855, we see Whitman struggling to discover a poetics that will replace party politics. Close attention to external references, developments in style and rhetoric, and manuscript evidence reveals both the order of the notebooks and the different purposes for which Whitman used them, and the origin of some of the key themes of Leaves of Grass, including slavery, race, class, the body, and sexuality. Finally, the 1855 text itself is an overtly rhetorical text. While C. Carroll Hollis has shown how Leaves of Grass reflects nineteenth-century oratory at the micro-level, I show how the macro-level also reflects that discourse. Specifically, I show how “Song of Myself” employs theories of rhetorical arrangement described by Aristotle and Hugh Blair.

Invention should be privileged in the writing classroom. This is the most important implication resulting from extensive interviews with seven published writers about how they write. There are vast differences in their approaches to writing, but one thing common to all of them is that invention is central. Invention was central for Aristotle and for early eighteenth century pedagogical theorists, and it was again privileged by the theorists involved in the early days of the writing process movement of the 1960s, but historically it has always been gradually neglected. One predominant pedagogy today, often labeled current-traditional rhetoric, privileges form and correctness. The attempts to discredit current-traditional pedagogies have long been raging, and yet writing textbooks continue to teach their methods. Three important approaches to composition often associated with the process approach—expressionism, cognitive rhetoric, and social constructionism—represent a pulling apart of Aristotle's important proofs of ethos, pathos, and logos. The pedagogies of invention that are usually associated with these theories tend to emphasize one proof over another, and the unfortunate result is a narrowing of the concept of invention. Until we privilege and enrich invention we may never see the changes needed in the conceptualization and teaching of the process approach. We need to broaden our perception of a writer's process of writing to understand when invention is occurring and to recognize its powerful drive. Because of its serendipitous nature we need to be less rigid in our pedagogy to allow for and validate a writer's proclivities. Pedagogical implications from this study include the need for student writers to begin their writing and to be continually nourished by their own inventions. They will be motivated by their ideas to improve their writing. Student writers need to know the importance of recognizing and recording their inventions and to trust their individual writing processes that produce the inventions. Student writers will benefit by sharing in-process writing with people they trust, and they will benefit from the positive comments of teachers in response to their writing. Invention centered pedagogy, fortunately, promotes writing worthy of praise by teachers.