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This dissertation explores how aesthetic claims in scientific arguments help construct scientific ethos through demonstrations of the rhetor's judgment. By examining the works of Josiah Willard Gibbs and Henry Rowland, two prominent nineteenth-century American scientists, through the lens of their formal rhetorical training as students in American universities, this dissertation investigates how aesthetic judgment is enacted in scientific writing and explores the rhetorical history of the terms "simplicity," "brevity," "imagination," and "taste" and their use in scientific arguments. The aesthetic judgment that both scientists demonstrate in their written work reinforced an understanding of scientific ethos. By placing nineteenth-century scientific writing in contact with the rhetorical theories of the time, this dissertation explores the history of aesthetic judgment in rhetoric and its influence on conceptualizations of the faculty of taste. The dissertation illuminates the connections between rhetorical training and the ability to perform appropriate judgment when creating a reliable scientific ethos in writing. Constructing a scientific ethos in writing became increasingly important and complicated during the time of great institutional change in scientific research, which occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century in America. Scientists constructed scientific ethos through demonstrations of aesthetic judgment in order to respond to the exigencies of both institutional pressures and disciplinary expectations. / English

While previous research in rhetoric and composition investigates how novice composition instructors negotiate the boundaries of professionalism and identity (Dall'Alba; Grouling; Restaino), the role of dress, or "performative strategic attire" (Mckoy), in crafting these teaching personas has not yet been explored. Viewing everyday dress choices through the lens of embodied rhetoric allows for a deeper understanding of the complex decision-making process of choosing what to wear (Woodward). Further, analyzing dress choice through embodied rhetoric showcases how clothing becomes a tool to craft a persona and inhabit an identity or role. Through positioning instructor's self-identity and naming their experiences and influences used in navigating the indeterminate boundaries of professionalism, we can further understand how novice instructors leverage dress to embody their new identity in academia. This study focuses on a sample population of three current Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) and three recently graduated GTAs, all currently teaching first-year composition within a large state university in Florida. Borrowing from methodologies used previously in the interdisciplinary field of fashion studies research, this study combines qualitative research methods of interviews with deep descriptions of outfits participants wore while instructing and visual analysis of those clothing items (Smith and Yates; Woodward) to locate concrete stories of the prior expectations imparted both by the institution and the novice instructors themselves. From this analysis, I argue that dress provides a material and visual space representing core aspects of how GTAs mediate their position as in between dichotomous identities of student and instructor. Ultimately, I suggest that by studying how the liminality of these positions is expressed and experienced through dress, we can move towards more equitable practices in the field of rhetoric and composition, in the process interrogating the idea of what it means to be "professional."

published_or_final_version / abstract / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

This project examines the impact of environmentalism as it operates in presidential rhetoric after Earth Day 1970. Specifically, I look at how environmentalism is constructed and then utilized in the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, H.W. Bush, and William Jefferson Clinton. I argue that U.S. presidents use the rhetoric of environmentalism as a rhetorical tool to define their ideal citizen, interpret complex rhetorical situations for the American people, and introduce policies. Environmental vocabularies, I argue, are crucial to understanding presidential communication, as they enable presidents to move policy discussions away from technical discourse and frame ideas using accessible and familiar terms. This project, in many ways, highlights the discursive identity of the American people and the role of structuring vocabularies in presidential power. In each post-Earth Day administration, the citizenry is invited to participate in a version of environmentalism that also reflects the chief executive's political vision for the country. Through a Burkean cluster and agon analysis, each of the three case studies reveals the unique way each presidency defines environmentalism and the strategic function of each definition. Chapter 3 uses a cluster-agon analysis to demonstrate how environmental rhetoric helps Ronald Reagan construct his economic policy. Chapter 4 argues that H.W. Bush's unique definition of environmentalism functions as a strategic communication tool that helps shape his domestic and international policies. It was also an important step in breaking down binaries between economic development and environmentalism that had shaped present-day understandings of environmentalism. A cluster-agon analysis reveals that although he was considered to be a failed environmental president, Bush's definition of environmentalism laid the groundwork for future, more successful environmental presidencies. As the last case study in this project, Chapter 6 looks at environmentalism within President Clinton's presidency, arguing that his definition of environmentalism operationalizes a unique cluster of terms that allows him to advocate for social justice issues and circumvent a lame-duck Congress. By understanding the environment as a set of values and not a tangible object, these case studies unpack the wide variety of cultural work that its language is able to do. This research on a macro level is an analysis of political communication strategy, understanding what words work and what words don't. Unlike many rhetorical projects, however, this project uses environmentalism as a lens through which the possibilities and limits of presidential power can be explored.

This thesis argues that the most prominent account of Protagoras in contemporary rhetorical scholarship, Edward Schiappa's Protagoras and Logos, loses critical historiographical objectivity in Platonic overdetermination of surviving historical artifacts. In the first chapter, I examine scholarship from the past thirty years to set a baseline for historiographical thought and argue that John Muckelbauer's conception of productive reading offers the best solution to the intellectual and discursive impasse in which contemporary Protagorean rhetorical theory currently resides. The second chapter explains the pitfalls of Platonic overdetermination and the ways in which Plato himself was inextricably situated within an ideological blinder, from which fair treatment of competing philosophical ideology becomes impossible. Finally, I argue for a historical Protagoras free of Platonic overdetermination by looking to Mario Untersteiner's 1954 Sophists. Untersteiner looks to Plato not for an accurate historical account, but for insight into why the great philosopher found the sophists to be such great perturbations. Rediscovering Protagoras through a Sophistic paradigm, I hope to open space for new, productive discourse on the first Sophist.

Recently, feminist scholars have begun to question the traditional telling of the history of rhetoric. Dissatisfied with a history which is told in terms of privileged, white males to the exclusion of all other voices, these scholars have worked to recover "lost" female rhetoricians and have begun critically rereading the traditional narrative of the history of rhetoric in terms of the gender and power structures which helped create it. This project takes as its goal the recovery of women's lament in ancient Greece. Through close readings of classical texts, analyzing ancient legislation, and using anthropological work on modern Greek laments, I demonstrate that lament offered women in ancient Greece a unique opportunity for public performance and a powerful position to speak from. I then show how the city-state of Athens took great pains to contain this genre first by legislating against it and later by creating a rhetorical institution, the epitaphios logos (funeral oration), which worked to contain lamentation and tell a history of Athens without women. Lastly, I attempt to locate lament inside the rhetorical tradition as a form of pre-rhetoric. I show that not only was this form of speech stylistically powerful, but that it also had an underlying epistemology, one which is similar to the poetically-based rhetoric of the sophists. / Graduation date: 2001

Fashion is a site of cultural production where issues of gender, identity and consumerism meet. While the rhetoric of the fashion industry often remains focused on innovation at the expense of women's lived experiences, independent fashion bloggers provide a necessary cultural critique of its practices. However, as the fashion industry pays more attention to bloggers in order to engage their growing readership, bloggers’ oppositional role has become more complicated. To explore the current context of these women’s writing in relation to a powerful economic industry, I analyze the role that ethos plays as a rhetorical concept and analyze how it is used by female bloggers who write about women’s fashion. In light of recent scholarship and of the current media landscape, bloggers’ use of ethos is important to their work even as it is complex and contradictory.

The following is an exploration of the use of epideictic rhetoric strategies in nineteenth-century conduct manuals, Sarah Stickney Ellis’s The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits, and Harriet Martineau’s Household Education. In examining the rhetoric of the conduct manuals, this researcher has identified the audience, the rhetorical situation, the exigence of that situation, and the use of phronisis, areti, and euonia by both authors. Because the rhetoric of the conduct manual has not been discussed in current critical perspectives, this research is a starting point for further study. The different types of rhetorical strategies used by each author are the focal points used to uncover how epideictic rhetoric can be understood beyond the restrictions of funeral orations and ceremonial speeches. The primary critical research used in this project has been that focused on epideictic rhetoric and the conduct manuals themselves.

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.