This project explores how cosmopolitan personas rhetorically negotiate the space between local and global, discursively tying people to the national as well as to the global or transnational. It examines the possible co-existence of cosmopolitanism and nationalism while identifying how each is articulated in response to the other. As global networks become increasingly complex, rethinking borders and how they are articulated is essential. Can a quintessential cosmopolitan also be a public nationalist? Are cosmopolitan discourses compromised by their presumed lack of attachment to the local? To what extent and with what success are cosmopolitanism and nationalism siultaneously articulated? In order to study these and other questions, I analyze the public personas crafted by cosmopolitan figures Vaclav Havel, Jimmy Carter, and Edward Said. By illuminating how they negotiate that ambiguous space between locale and its absence, a project attentive to the rhetorical possibilities of discursive connection in a world increasingly devoid of shared loyalties and histories enables a fuller understanding of the possibilites of intercultural contact in a globalizing world.

@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } The purpose of this project is to provide a thorough account of delivery by tracing the history and evolution of delivery from antiquity to the present day in order to expose the spread and transmission of proto-masculine ideologies through delivery. By looking at delivery from an evolutionary perspective, delivery no longer becomes a tool of rhetoric, but the technology of rhetoric, evolving over time in the same way the system of rhetoric itself has evolved. Contemporary scholarship on delivery continues to look at delivery as a tool—as the ink, the paper, the computer screen, the keyboard, the font, the hypertext, the web design, and so forth—of communication. Contemporary scholarship re-works the classical definition of delivery to fit into a contemporary context, and consequently ignores the proto-masculinity embedded into classical delivery and its spread from public speaking to all speaking situations—and the larger consequence of this approach is that proto-masculinity remains embedded and idealized. Focusing specifically on delivery’s history and evolution into a post-human, cyborg technology demonstrates how proto-masculinity has operated within delivery and how proto-masculinity has been spread through delivery instruction. The importance of re-situating delivery within the rhetorical canons affects rhetoric as a whole because it demonstrates that not only is delivery still crucial to rhetoric, and possibly still the most important rhetorical canon, but also because it de-naturalizes the proto-masculine imperatives embedded within delivery and conveyed through delivered language performances.

This thesis offers a new approach to mind modelling in modernist narratives. Taking Nietzsche’s work as exemplary of modernist ideas about cognition’s relational basis, I argue that conceptual blending theory, a particularly cogent model of a fundamental cognitive process, has roots in modernism. I read inscriptions of relational cognition in modernist narratives as “conceptual blends” that invite cognitive mobility as a central facet of reader response. These blends, which integrate conceptual domains, invite similarity-seeing and difference-seeing, exposing the reader to new conceptual content and new cognitive styles; she is thus better able to negotiate the reading-related complexities of modernist narrative’s formal innovations and the real-world complexities of modernity’s local and global upheavals. Chapter One considers blending’s interrelated rhetorical motivations and cognitive effects in Chiang Yee’s Silent Traveller narratives: bringing together English and Chinese domains, Chiang’s blends defamiliarize his readers’ culturally entrenched assumptions, invite collaborative reading strategies, and thus equip his readers for relating flexibly to a newly globalized world. Moving away from blends in a text’s narration, Chapter Two focuses on blends as textual structuring principles. I read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as a thinking mind with fundamentally relational cognitive processes; I consider the mobile cognitive operations we perform reading about a text’s mind thinking and thinking along with it. Chapters Three and Four cross the nebulous text-peritext border to examine blends in modernist prefaces. Chapter Three focuses on blends in Joseph Conrad’s and Henry James’s prefaces, relating them, through the reading strategies they invite, to the narratives they accompany. Chapter Four considers allographic prefaces to Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets and two of Chiang’s narratives: blends in these prefaces invite the cognitive mobility necessary for reconceptualizing both allographic preface-text and East-West relations. All four chapters treat the modernist narrative text as a textual system whose blends, often interacting and borderless, signal reciprocal, mutually permeable relations among its textual levels. Dialogic relations also underwrite the interaction between these blends and blends the reader performs when engaging with them. Modernist narratives model (bear inscriptions of) cognition’s relational processes in order to model (shape) the reader’s mind.

Following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Afghan women suddenly gained high visibility all over the world. Since then, representations of Afghan women in the Western media and notably in the U.S. news media provide a critical concern to scholars. Much of the relevant literature on this topic speaks to the fact that the dominant portrayal of Afghan women in the Western media has shown them as passive victims of war and violence, to be liberated only by the Western military intervention. However, the question remains as to how the popular fictional narratives, as another vivid source of information, represent Afghan women to the Western readers. To address this question, A Thousand Splendid Suns, as a popular novel authored by Khalid Hosseini, an Afghan novelist, was selected. Bormannian fantasy theme analysis of this novel conveys the passivity of women in the context of Afghanistan. The findings reveal that the portrayals of Afghan women in the novel correspond with the images of Afghan women in the Western media. Moreover, an examination of a sample of book reviews of the novel unveils the important contribution of Khalid Hosseini to the Orientalist discourse.

The internet is fundamentally a large storage unit for immense amounts of data. Consequently, the majority of online users log on to the internet in order to find information. Innovations in technology continue to make both the production and consumption of this information an easily achieved endeavor, resulting in high expectations for instantaneous answers via immediate search results. While a plethora of information is not difficult to find, knowing what to do with that information is often problematic. To turn information into knowledge requires an ability to contextualize it and critically engage with it. WebMD is a highly recognizable health information database that often runs into information overload problems with its users. This thesis will examine the information that the WebMD website provides, as well as its usability. The goal is to investigate, firstly, the importance of context for knowledge-forming when users perform online information research and, secondly, the critical literacy required to use such information.

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How can the enterprises in Taiwan take preventive measures handle or manage the crises is an important issue. Crisis Management has become a major concern in public relations of all private sectors. This study aims to examine various crisis management strategies adopted by different enterprises affected by crises. This thesis specifically raises the following questions to discuss that the enterprises employ used Burke¡¦s Rhetorical Analysis with Dramatism strategy to analyze two case studies. The study found out the conclusions as follows: 1. Enterprises in Taiwan did not respond to crisis clearly and quickly. 2. Enterprises did not utilize image-repair-strategieswell. 3. They usually used ¡§act and agency¡¨in Pentadic analysis to interact with stakeholders. 4.Enterprises should cooperate with distributors to prevent crisis and establish a secure shopping environment.

This thesis examines the rhetoric of Louis D. Brandeis in light of pragmatism-specifically, the philosophical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. While a number of scholars claim that pragmatism has nothing to offer politics, rhetoric, or decision-making, this thesis argues that Brandeis's method of acting politically, speaking publicly, and solving problems exemplifies the pragmatic political style-a style of political operation that is characteristically pragmatic, a direct extension of James and Dewey's philosophy. This thesis illustrates Brandeis's pragmatic political style through an analysis of his rhetoric prior to taking his seat on the United States Supreme Court, his rhetoric while on the Supreme Court, and his rhetoric as one of America's most prominent Zionists. This thesis shows that pragmatism (at least William James and John Dewey's classical American pragmatism-the pragmatism Brandeis exemplifies rhetorically) can be a fruitful part of political operation.

"Occupying Memory: Rhetorical Studies for the 99%" revitalizes rhetorical memory by emphasizing memory's rhetorical production and non-declinable relationship to forgetting, the persuasive force of local genealogy, and the capacity of memory to spur invention and civic intervention. "Occupying Memory" performs its revival of memory through theorization of the contemporary Occupy Movement. The first chapter, "Becoming Activist," argues that memories are rhetorically produced, and supports this supposition by analyzing various activist practices, icons, and experiences. I consider the discursive production of memory through Occupy's practice of the "human microphone," and the imagistic production of memory through images such as the Guy Fawkes Mask. I also consider forgetting in the production of memory, and analyze how subjects are compelled to action through "forgotten" affects and traumas that drive one to compose self-narratives. "Giving an Account of One's Wealth," strives to develop a strategy for teaching writing called "im-personal writing," and employs Percentile Narratives from the Occupy Movement throughout its implementation. I analyze existing narratives from multiple theoretical perspectives, and focus on how students can consider the rhetorical production of their memories while avoiding the pitfalls associated with "personal writing" such as the quest for authenticity. "The Infinite Archive," considers how the binary opposition between so-called "live" and "technological" memory deconstructs, and avers that the digitization of memory is an instance of "hyper-extension" rather than "externalization." I consider multiple cases of such extension in the form of social media archives including Twitter, live streaming video, and viral memes. The problem of digital forgetting and networked multitudes is likewise engaged. "Stiller than Still" contends that (singular) bodies and specific living structures can function as monuments oriented toward the future. I argue that the type of memory such monuments produce is a "common" rather than "public" memory, one that entails resistance to state control, participatory democracy, and the preservation of difference. I also consider the nature of "common" forgetting in relation to affirmation. The text culminates with "Beginning(s)," as I consider how rhetorical memory and the Occupy Movement open onto the future, as well as the relation between memory, social movements, nostalgia, and hope. / text

The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of undergraduates’ metacognitive beliefs about writing and knowledge, ways that those beliefs may change during the semester, and the relationship of beliefs to their persuasive writing. Scales assessing epistemological and writing beliefs were given to students in lower-division rhetoric and writing courses (N=241). Generally, students experienced significant changes in their beliefs about knowledge, learning, and writing across the semester, as assessed by the Epistemological Beliefs Questionnaire (Schommer, 1993) and writing beliefs scales (White & Bruning, 2002). Thus, students at the end of the semester reported beliefs that learning was a slow process and that knowledge was contingent. Although regressions predicting quality of students’ persuasive writing from the belief scales were not significant, qualitative analyses revealed interesting trends in papers from students with different epistemological stances and beliefs about writing, particularly with regard to their use of sources. / text