Dissertation Students
Dissertations in progress
Rhiannon Goad
Founding Fathers: Constructive Rhetoric and Discourses of Masculinity
Whether in a white supremacist Reddit forum or on Broadway, we find Americans idealizing the ‘founding fathers.’ People from widely divergent ideological groups attempt to claim the founders for their own, producing the trope of the ‘founding fathers.’ As such, the ‘founding fathers’ becomes a way to communicate authenticity and belonging to and by a variety of political positions. Scholars of political communication have focused on the rhetoric of the ‘founding fathers’ (Mercieca 2010; Golden 2006; Leff and Mohrmann 1974) and the ways politicians incorporate the founding fathers into narratives of American history (Murphy 2005; Stuckey 2010.) This dissertation builds this work to examine the audiences politicians create (or fail to create) when calling upon ‘the founding fathers.’ Through case studies of three political identities (Libertarian, Democrat, and queer), I argue that interpellating subjects via ‘the founding fathers’ creates a point at which political communities naturalize and obscure the construction of the ideology and identity of American Exceptionalism. Further, I argue that engaging in the trope of the ‘founding fathers’ entails distinct ideological compromises for each political group. According to critics of constitutive rhetoric, even though language produces ideology and subsequent ideologies, producing political subjects through ideology is a discrete process because ideologies converge, within language, in a way that conceals the constructed origin of each. In this dissertation, I seek to unravel these ideologies and focus on the trope of the ‘founding fathers’ to map the production of both the ideology and identity of American Exceptionalism.
Dissertations Completed
Jeremy Smyczek “Pragmatism and Popular Science: Rhetoric, Refutation, and Rationalism in Contemporary Science Outreach” (2018) Assistant Professor, St. Bonaventure University
This dissertation explores the relationship among popular science books, rhetorical scholarship on scientific discourse, and the American pragmatist tradition in rhetorical scholarship. I principally argue three points: that rhetorical research into science offers rhetorical pragmatists vocabularies and techniques for understanding how pragmatism can be articulated as a theory of discourse; that rhetorical pragmatism offers rhetoricians of science a theory of scientific participation in democratic cultures; and finally, that both traditions can be instructive for training new science rhetors on crafting inclusive public outreach. Through reading popular science books by the authors Sam Harris, Kenneth Miller, and Jonathan Haidt, analyzing the refutational structure of their arguments, and then conducting detailed examinations of how the books have been received, the study identifies a mismatch between scientists’ stated goals of persuading skeptical audiences and the effects of exacerbating interdisciplinary strife, affirming agreement among like-minded readers, and missing or alienating those resistant to scientific consensus. I recommend a form of outreach based in John Dewey’s commitment to experiential education and discussion over arguments from authority and antagonistic debate.
Tekla Hawkins “The One Where: Fan Fiction as Playable Media” (2015) Assistant Professor, UT Rio Grande Valley
This dissertation positions fan fiction as a key component of new media literacy, examining the relationships between its modes of production, its role as embodied, posthuman literacy practice, and its implications for understanding and teaching digital rhetoric. Written and read by millions of people, fan fiction is widely regarded as immature writing by those outside fannish communities, and so fan fiction scholarship typically focuses on the behavior and psychology of fandom. My dissertation shifts the focus to the texts fandom produces. I am more interested in fan fiction as a new media object. Built upon database/interface structures and associational linking, it requires the same modes of reading the internet does, and forefronts its own medium in the ways we see in the best postmodern texts.
This database structure means readers and writers can view their own texts and their source texts as what game scholars call playable media; that is, not texts to be accepted whole or as complete in themselves, but as material to make something else with. In this way, reading and writing fan fiction is always a rhetorical exercise. This kind of storytelling, which constantly reaches toward something beyond itself, also reflects the current negotiations we’re having about the boundaries of ourselves – where do we end and our computers begin? What do our own interfaces look like, and what do we do with them? If we are building our own stories and languages, do they reflect the autonomous original thinker western culture prefers, or do we reflect our machines? I don’t suggest fan fiction is a radical break from the past, but agree with Lev Manovich that the parts of our culture that were in the background are now being foregrounded, and that fan fiction is one of the best examples we have of this shift.
My project intersects with the recent move, led by scholars such as Anne Wysocki and N. Katherine Hayles, toward understanding digital media as embodied rhetoric and composition. While I can’t echo the early hopes that computers would democratize classrooms, my dissertation argues that in building texts, readers and writers begin to recognize the language structures that construct the rest of their worlds.
Megan Eatman “Identification and Interpretive Rights in the Rhetoric of Violent Spectacle” (2014) Assistant Professor, Clemson University
This dissertation approaches lynching, the death penalty, and stealth torture as multimodal public discourse, comprised of violent events, their representations, and their surrounding debate. While the forms of violence I discuss all have avowed communicative purposes, I argue that the rhetorical emphasis on these messages often masks more important claims about group identity and the nature of punishment. Through examination of the physical and discursive constructions of these violent events, I argue that these spectacles serve as centers of identification, through which rhetors reinforce divisions between groups and standards of violent and non-violent argument.
Chapter 1 builds on existing lynching scholarship, including Peter Ehrenhaus and A. Susan Owen’s discussion of lynching as a constitutive rhetorical text for Evangelical Southern publics, to argue that pro-lynching rhetoric reinforces lynching’s implied standards for public debate in its insistence that white Southerners are the only people fit to interpret lynching. Chapter 2 uses Wendy Hesford’s conception of the spectacle to discuss the rhetorical operations of the contemporary death penalty, arguing that death penalty retentionist rhetoric de-emphasizes the live text of execution and, in its place, suggests that citizens should draw on normalized feelings of anger and a form of “common sense” linked to retributive justice. Chapter 3 discusses how rhetors manage interpretations of visual and multimodal representations of violence, limiting what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls “the right to look” to reduce the visibility of these texts, even when they are circulating widely.
Ultimately, the dissertation suggests that all of these violent practices persist in part through the narrowing of interpretive rights and the construction of “outsider” observers as deviant.
By discussing organized public violence as a multimodal text, this dissertation contributes to and identifies potential issues in the growing conversation about rhetoric and violence. The dissertation draws attention to the role that epistemic injustice, including racialized and classed assumptions about audience relationships with violent images, plays in pro-violence rhetoric, and suggests how scholars and activists might approach these violent practices without replicating their underlying assumptions.
Stephanie Odom “Re-evaluating the Place of Literature in Composition” (2013) Assistant Professor, UT-Tyler
My dissertation describes an important debate within the field of composition pedagogy: whether imaginative literature can or should be used to teach rhetoric and composition. In the mid-1990s, composition scholars argued over this question in composition journals, but no consensus was ever reached. This unresolved debate is relevant today since scholarship in rhetoric and composition from the last 15 years reflects a higher status for the field; literary studies have also changed to reflect a cultural studies approach that dovetails easily with the goals of rhetoric pedagogy. This dissertation explores how the teaching of composition and literature can benefit from teachers’ being broadly trained; to allow literary texts into the writing classroom does not necessarily mean a reversion to current-traditional pedagogy or narrowly conceived literary appreciation writing prompts. In discussing these possibilities, I describe four common arguments against using literature in composition classes and present evidence to counter those arguments from a variety of sources: historical teaching methods, theoretical pedagogical texts, articles and books about teaching practice, and syllabi and related material from current composition instructors.
My dissertation was a multi-method examination of the debate over using literature in first-year composition classes: the history of the debate within composition scholarship, the frequency that instructors assigned literature, the presence of literary texts in composition anthologies, and the relationship between using literature in composition classes and student evaluations of the instructors. My background in literary studies and composition research helped me obtain a 3/3 job in a small department at a regional state university—my dream job! I usually teach writing classes—everything from freshman composition to graduate classes in composition theory or pedagogy—but I can teach literature if needed. I wrote the dissertation that would prepare me for a position like this one, and though it was a rocky process, I love where it led me.
Todd Battistelli “Appeals to Reason: Negotiating Rhetorical Propriety and Dialectical Constraints in Church-State Separation Discourse” (2013) Writing Center Faculty, Western Governor’s University
The history of rhetoric is punctuated by uneasy intersections with other models of reason, especially when it comes to the question of defining good persuasion. This dissertation addresses those intersections by examining the rhetoric of church-state separation court cases, reading them through logical, dialectical and rhetorical models. Rhetoricians acknowledge that effective persuasion is not necessarily ethical persuasion. One longstanding answer to the question of how rhetors ought to behave themselves has been the coupling of rhetorical training with ethical and political frameworks intended to balance the power of persuasion with the interests of society. Those in the logical and dialectical traditions, on the other hand, have sought good arguments in the study of the relationship between abstract propositions. While these abstract systems afford coherent and internally consistent models for right reason, neither the methods of logic nor the dictates of ethics prevent problematic arguments from occurring, and neither provides effective means for countering those unethical arguments that are nonetheless persuasive. The discourse of church-state jurisprudence is beset by such problematic arguments, despite the hope that lawyers and judges might avoid rhetorical pitfalls, and in analyzing those arguments this dissertation will both refine theoretical definitions of problematic argumentation and locate potentially effective responses to those arguments.
Douglas Coulson “The Judicial Construction of Whiteness: The Rhetoric of Race, Religion, and Nationality in Arguments Before the Supreme Court and Other Federal Courts in U.S. Naturalization Cases, 1909-1952″ Assistant Professor, Carnegie-Mellon University
This dissertation focuses on the rhetorical aspects of legal discourse which have been largely neglected in the modern era, when law has largely attempted to conceal the significance of suasory to its creation and application. To explore these issues, my dissertation examines the arguments and judicial opinions from a selection of judicial cases that determined whether individuals petitioning for U.S. citizenship by naturalization were racially eligible for citizenship under the original U.S. naturalization statute which prior to 1952 only extended eligibility to “white persons” and certain other racial groups. Drawing upon specific examples from these cases in which the judicial opinion writing took a “narrative turn,” producing lengthy, even “epic,” narratives that traced the geographical, political, religious, and cultural histories of numerous racial groups through millennia of history to determine whether they are “white,” I examine the significance of rhetorical concepts to an adequate understanding of common law jurisprudence. In contrast to prior scholarship, which has been content to point out the contradictions in the racial classifications arrived at in the cases, I examine how the arguments of the participants in the cases suggest that the prerequisite courts interpreted whiteness in a less ideological and more contingent manner than prior scholars have claimed, reflecting growing tensions between race, religion, and nationality in early twentieth century America.
Eric Dieter “Enduring Character: The Problem with Sincerity and the Persistence of Ethos” (2009) Director for Student Engagement, Recruitment, and Outreach in the Longhorn Center for Academic Excellence
Character, known in rhetorical studies as ethos, is a much richer and more paradoxical concept than many discussions of the term admit. In both its classical and modern conceptions, ethos is an under-explored concept in the political arena, where notions of character typically sway between the self-conscious poles of “branding” and “straight shooting.” To a lesser extent, ethos is also largely under-explored in rhetoric and composition studies, where most current conceptions of ethos are quickly glossed in undergraduate rhetoric textbooks as, like pathos and logos, simply another organ passively to find and pin while dissecting an argument’s constituent components.
These formulations tend inadequately to explain why we, as rhetorical being, desire authenticity even though we incongruously recognize that it is often constructed. A too-diluted study of ethos can make it difficult to articulate why an exhibition of sincere character sometimes works and sometimes flops. Ethos in its fullest complexity is, and is not, constructed by any single speech; it is the consequence of narratives, and yet the very way we frame the narratives of which it is consequent; it is something we know about a speaker, at the same time that it comes from what the speaker claims to know; it is, most important, an appeal to authenticity, even when we know ethos is discursively, kairotically, and socially constructed.
Dieter’s dissertation, Enduring Character: The Problem with Authenticity and the Persistence of Ethos, is interested in how people talk about character in a variety of public spheres, popular, political, and pedagogical. Specifically, he explores the tangled relationship between authenticity and ethos, or what is taken as the distinction between intrinsic and constructed character. While his dissertation does not presume to settle the question of authenticity’s actuality, it does discuss the ways authenticity cues in rhetorical acts continue to influence how “sincere character” in those acts is understood, even as audiences exhibit shrewdness in recognizing that character is a purposeful manifestation of the rhetor.
Largely focused on the 2008 presidential election, Dieter’s dissertation close reads the campaigns of candidates from both of America’s big political parties. Dieter’s dissertation is less interested in for whom people vote than in how they go about making that choice while talking about, and with, a rhetor’s character. The fundamental phenomenon his dissertation seeks to describe is how people, with better and worse success, negotiate the dissonance between valuing character both as authentic and as presentation and representation.
Dieter’s dissertation offers an expanded definition of ethos as rhetorical transactions that rhetors and audiences mutually negotiate in order to determine the extent to which all sides will have their rhetorical needs met, and the extent to which all sides can “assent” to the those needs. The dissertation, using the works of Wayne C. Booth, Kenneth Burke, and Chaïm Perelman as its theoretical structures, also offers pedagogic implications for these mutual negotiations.
Nathan Kreuter (co-directed with Jeff Walker) “Rhetorical Intelligence: Understanding the US Intelligence Community as a Discourse Community and Knowledge-Building Discipline” Associate Professor, Western Carolina University
This dissertation explores how the US Intelligence Community operates rhetorically. Drawing on the examples generated by recent, catastrophic failures in the IC, the dissertation focuses on the IC’s attitudes towards language, politics, epistemology and the sciences in its attempt to explain the knowledge-building practices that have led to 9/11 and the misguided war in Iraq. While the Intelligence Community claims to be both a-political and even a-rhetorical in its own discourse, the dissertation does not accept those claims, but does use them as a starting point from which to understand the IC’s knowledge-building practices and how they might be improved. www.natekreuter.net
Amanda Moulder(co-directed with James Cox) “”[T]hey ought to mind what a woman says”: Early Cherokee Women’s Rhetorical Traditions and Rhetorical Education” (2010) Writing Program Director and Assistant Professor, University of San Diego
“they ought to mind what a woman says”: Early Cherokee Women’s Rhetorical Traditions and Rhetorical Education endeavors to understand what happens when people of distinct traditions interact on uneven ground, where one group has greater power than the other. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Cherokee women used oratory, and later writing, to insist on their mandate to participate in and help shape public debate. I show how eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Cherokee society was structured to provide Cherokee women with the cultural, social, and political literacies that empowered them to insert themselves into public discussions about the fates of their people. This era was one in which the Cherokee Nation was under a set of threats brought on both by the Washington and Jefferson administrations’ civilization programs and, later, by Jacksonian Cherokee removal policies. These programs resulted in some radical reorientations in Cherokee gender roles. Nevertheless, from the earliest written records of Cherokee women’s rhetorical engagement—speeches of Cherokee female leaders at US-Cherokee treaty meetings—to the 1831 petition that Cherokee women wrote to convince their own government to stop selling Cherokee ancestral homelands, their rhetorical traditions speak to Cherokee cultural, social, and political continuity in the context of European colonialism.
Erin Boade “ (2009) “The Limits of Civility in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements: Four African-American Women’s Autobiographies” Instructor, University of Southern Mississippi
Rhetoricians have long praised argumentation as a productive alternative to violence, and while I agree that it can be such an alternative, my dissertation aims to enter this conversation in order to complicate our understanding of violence and coercion. My dissertation makes two main arguments, 1) that the dominant narrative of the civil rights (CRM) and Black Power movements (BPM) has been insufficiently challenged by rhetoricians, and 2) that this lack can be explained in part by these scholars’ preference for civility and decorum over coercion in persuasion. I argue that both the CRM and BPM actually share similarities in both tactics and philosophies, and looking beyond assessing these movements in terms of their alleged levels of civility allows us more fully to account for the complexity of their rhetorical situations.
Rodney Herring “Manners of Speaking: Linguistic Capital, Composition Pedagogy, and Cultural Production, 1870-1900″ (2009) Assistant Professor University of Colorado Denver
This dissertation concerns a moment of intense anxiety about Standard English, the late nineteenth century in the United States, when popular, scholarly, and literary writers worried over the possibility that people with social pretensions could, by manipulating their language, masquerade as something they weren’t—that is, pass for a new and better class. Many of these writers found ways to dismiss such people by judging them to have bad grammar. Commentary on grammar, however, had paradoxical consequences: on the one hand, arguments for grammatical correctness revealed the secrets of speaking well to the emerging middle-class readers from whom such secrets were meant to distinguish the elite; on the other hand, texts supporting the tolerance of linguistic pluralism eventually informed the attitude elite readers used to distinguish themselves from the intolerant middle class. “Manners of Speaking” argues for seeking the grounds of this paradox—or more accurately, double paradox—in social contradictions, such as the requirement that some people have “bad grammar” if others are to possess distinguished manners of speaking.
Rodney Herring is assistant professor of English and director of composition at the University of Colorado Denver. He has published articles on the history of rhetoric and the rhetoric of economics. His dissertation, “Manners of Speaking: Linguistic Capital, Composition Pedagogy, and Cultural Production, 1870-1900,” considered the moment in the late nineteenth-century United States, when popular, scholarly, and literary writers—worried by the possibility that people with social pretensions could, by manipulating their language, pass for a new and better class—attempted to use language standards as a means of reinforcing distinctions between social classes. He is currently at work on a book about the emergence of the institution of finance (financial instruments, organizations, and policies) in the United States’ early national period. Finance, he argues, in an analysis of credit markets, banking, money, and taxation, is both a set of ideas (like value or debt) constructed and sustained by the operation of rhetorical principles and a field of politico-economic phenomena (like exchange and investment) produced out of rhetorical struggles.
Lena Khor “Human Rights Discourses on a Global Network: Network Acts and Actors from Humanitarian NGOs, Conflict Sites, and the Fiction Market” Associate Professor, Lawrence University
This project reconsiders the debate on the advantages and disadvantages of the globalization of human rights by attending to the discursive (and thus changeable and changing) nature of human rights language and ideology, and the networked system in which it traffics. By modeling a global discourse network, I examine how as the discourse of human rights circulate worldwide, it might be affected by and be affecting its subjects, especially their individual identity and agency.
2007-8
Zachary Dobbins
Rhetoric’s Empathy: Deliberation, Narrative Imagination, and the Democratic Hope of Inquiry
Rhetoricians have long sought to improve our capacity to reason together, to achieve at the very least mutual understanding in the face of conflict and difference. In Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, however, Wayne Booth argues that the so-called rational-irrational split, in part, keeps us from understanding one another’s reasons. Despite this call to improve our rhetoric, there persists (even in writing pedagogy) the sense that we must choose between reason and “sentiments” like empathy.
In my dissertation (directed by Patricia Roberts-Miller) I advance both philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s claim that compassion is a crucial component of reason and Booth’s claim that the “supreme purpose of persuasion” is “mutual inquiry and exploration.” My project argues for placing empathy central to our conceptions of dialectic and deliberation, central also then to rhetorical education and practice. Two questions drive my inquiry: Does empathic reasoning – an instance of what Nussbaum calls the narrative imagination – help us better understand and negotiate conflicts of competing, perhaps even incommensurate, values and beliefs? And what can writing pedagogy and rhetorical theory on argumentation offer to help foster this capacity for reasoned deliberation, reciprocation, and thus informed judgment?
Exploring these questions, I examine the pedagogical uses of perspective shifting, what social psychologists describe as the most cognitively advanced empathic process. Indeed, scholars in disciplines ranging from rhetorical theory and social psychology to education and political theory argue that empathic reasoning is required to improve democratic deliberation. More specifically, then, my project examines empathy as a mode of reasoning – a method of rhetorical analysis and ethical inquiry that asks these questions about authors, readers, and texts (arguments especially, narrative fiction included): Does the author/rhetor evidence an empathic attitude towards her subject or audience, including also her opposition? Does the author/rhetor model a process of empathic reasoning, for example, by dramatizing multiple shifts in perspective? Does the author/rhetor produce an empathic response by encouraging her audience actually to engage in perspective shifting?
I conclude that rhetorical instruction informed by perspective shifting – as both a mode of analysis and a standard of rhetorical success – provides rhetoricians an especially useful pedagogical tool with which to teach controversial issues and texts, by foregrounding conflicts of competing values and multicultural difference while requiring critically engaged confrontations with these diverse perspectives. And despite the sure limits of empathic reasoning, there is great need, I argue, for striving to cultivate its possibilities. For there is certainly room enough for improving the ways we reason together, in part by expanding our capacities to imagine more fully – charitably, responsibly, critically – the contingencies that inform and the particulars that comprise our reasons for belief. Broadly considered, of course, these reasons – comprised of our competing values and assumptions – constitute our divergent yet interconnected life narratives.
Sara Sliter-Hays
Narratives and Rhetoric: Persuasion in Doctors’ Writings about the Summer Complaint, 1883-1939
My dissertation focuses on the suasive use and evolution of narratives in medical discourse from 1883 to 1939. Using rhetorical principles and an interdisciplinary approach, I argue that narratives used in doctors’ writing negotiate professional boundaries between medical, technical, scientific, pedagogical, professional, and social forces, changing them while at the same time evolving in response to these forces. The dissertation’s first chapter discusses how scientific and biotechnical innovations impacted medicine. It also considers the social and historical factors that led to an emphasis on the professionalization and “scientification” of doctors and the practice and discourse of medicine. The second chapter argues that doctors’ knowledge about a disease, its diagnosis, and its treatment evolved with improving technology, while case narratives presented an opportunity for professional dialogue to continue despite the seemingly decisive diagnoses offered by new technology. Chapters three and four uncover implicit causal narratives in explanations of childhood disease and death, how scientific and social changes transformed these causal narratives, and the social and political implications of these discursive transformations. The fifth chapter considers doctors’ stories about encounters with patients who are not sick but physically deformed, narratives which appear to be about science but work at deeper levels to challenge or reinforce professional identity.
2005
Janice W. Fernheimer (co-directed with Linda Ferreira-Buckley)
The Rhetoric of Black Jewish Identity Construction in America and Israel: 1964-1972.
Analyzing primary materials uncovered at the Schomburg Center and interviews conducted in Harlem and Israel, I rhetorically analyze flashpoints of conflict over claims to black Jewish identity and argue that rhetorical theory provides means for better understanding, but not resolving conflicts when identity is precisely the issue at stake.