3,451 research outputs found

    About Authoring: Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons as a Semiotic, Narrative, and Rhetorical Text

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    I began my research with personal experience playing video games and a formal education in English studies. My interest and my education intersected to form a simple question: what tools does an education in English studies offer to someone trying to understand video games as texts? To answer that question, I brought scholarship from three English sub-fields—semiotics, narrative theory, and rhetorical study—into discussion with computer gaming scholarship. My research demonstrated three primary findings: 1) video games can considered as texts that communicate via visual, aural, and interactive (often tactile) modes; 2) video games are narrative and offer players varying degrees of authorship over narrative elements; and 3) video games are rhetorically designed, even down to inscribing meaning in the control schemes that players use to engage with the game. I brought those research findings to a thorough analysis of Brothers, a critically acclaimed video game released in 2013. The resulting analysis finds Brothers to be a carefully composed text, one which offers players control over narrative satellites (minor, connective events) but not kernels (essential plot events), and conveys its central theme and narrative (one of growing companionship) through an unconventional control scheme. My research demonstrates the values of applying the theoretical frameworks of English studies to the analysis of video games and bringing the new texts to the broad field of English studies.No embargoAcademic Major: Englis

    Mapping a Post-Process Dialogics for the Writing Classroom as Public

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    The broad goal of this study is to better understand the rhetorical tasks faced by student writers in composition studies' "public turn." Questioning the common assumption that publicness resides outside of the classroom and beyond academic discourses, I sought to understand the classroom as already and always public. My theory building is primarily influenced by work in public sphere theory to define publicness in rhetorical terms--with a particular focus on the discourse negotiations that form publics and the rhetorical competence individuals need to maintain sustainable, deliberative publics. The Habermasean public sphere theory most often invoked in composition studies' discussion of public writing is appropriately complemented by these discursive understandings of publicness that help us address questions of individual rhetorical agency. The value of discourse-based investigations into public spheres--including the classroom public--is that this knowledge "can be used to pursue a better public" (Stob 27), characterized by access, active participation, and reciprocity with the discourses of other publics. I integrate a range of theories including public sphere theory, post-process theory, and Bakhtinian dialogics to build this discursive understanding of the classroom as public. Investigating the rhetorical activities of an actual classroom public--a public-oriented first-year composition course--provides further insight into how the discursive realms of home, school, and public meet in these classrooms and how students uncover agency amidst these discourses. The resulting post-process dialogics for the writing classroom as public uncovers concepts potentially useful for fostering students' rhetorical agency in creating and navigating publics within and outside the academy. While the motivation for this project originated in a desire for greater facility in teaching public discourse, the end of my theory building is not a specific, desired model of public discourse for the classroom, but instead an argument for the centrality of discursive awareness to any well-functioning public. The provisional theory building I embark on in this dissertation attempts to bring into sharper relief some of the ways that we can build with our student writers a better classroom public. Emily Donnelli Department of English University of Kansas April 200

    Dramatistic User Experience Design: The Usability Testing of an e-Government System in A Non-Western Setting

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    This dissertation investigates rhetorical situatedness as a factor that culturally designates users’ motives in adopting a new technology. The application of Kenneth Burke’s dramatism extends the discussion about the situation where an interaction takes place to include acting and meaning-making in Non-Western settings as contextual and situated. This expansion is essential to reinforce the understanding of how cultural contexts impact users’ motives, specifically users from Non-Western settings, to adopt a technology. The traditional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research stresses mechanical and technical aspects between a user (agent) and a technology device (agency) in order to reduce user errors. This approach isolates the rhetorical situation of interaction in a computer interface, thus eliding the cultural situatedness by regarding the situation as something fixed, such as in a laboratory. Adding a cultural context provides a fuller picture of this interaction. Using a civic records online system called e-Lampid, which is administered by Surabaya City Government in Indonesia as a case study, I discover five elements of situatedness that contribute significantly to weave acting and meaning-making into a culturally informed interaction. User motives are shaped by internal and external situations that are collective, local, and both onsite and off. Dramatism is a tool for analysis and production that prioritizes cultural awareness. Dramatistic User Experience (UX) design offers analytical, comprehensive, and systematic perspectives on the design process. Dramatistic UX integrates three different approaches: usability testing, rhetorical awareness of situations, and needs analysis. The synergy of dramatism, user experience, and design thinking provides a holistic approach to construct a rhetorically grounded and culturally contingent user experience design

    A posthuman curriculum: subjectivity at the crossroads of time

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    This investigation is focused on three critical issues facing educators in the 21st century: how technology is reshaping what it means to be human, the shift from the human era to the posthuman era and the implications of that shift on subjectivity, and the purpose of undergraduate education in a posthuman era. The current shift towards a posthuman worldview is a radical break from the modern and postmodern 20th century, when identity was constructed in terms of possibilities and multiplicities. Instead, in the hyperreal 21st century, subjectivity is complicated by homogenization and the radical sameness of simulated technological experiences. Also, whereas the modern and postmodern eras were human-centered, the posthuman era brings with it a shift from a human-centered to a machine-centered worldview. To illustrate a comparable historical shift, the investigation revisits the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the transition from the medieval period to the Renaissance. In that shift, the focus turned from a theocentric (God-centered) worldview to a humanistic (human-centered) worldview. From a genealogical perspective, this historical glance can help demonstrate how notions of humanness were privileged in the face of radical social chaos. In the end, when theorizing about the purpose of undergraduate education in a posthuman era, a poststructural examination of modernity is undertaken that explores threads of the lives of young people and the implications of ubiquitous screen culture on their daily lived experiences. Finally, a posthuman curriculum is proposed, which seeks to reawaken attention of the human experience in a digital age

    The Rhetorical Turn in United States Diplomacy Praxis: Public Diplomacy 2.0

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    While discourse and rhetoric has always been a part of traditional diplomacy, rhetoric and communication theory has not enjoyed an active voice in the scholarship of foreign relations, and more specifically, public diplomacy. This project argues that a postmodern turn in public diplomacy was formalized in the State Department\u27s 2010 Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) and that two specific directives laid out therein--to expand and strengthen relationships between individuals and steer the narrative--can find theoretical ground in communication scholarship. After examining the mid-to-late 20th century shift from specialized modern policy training to a rhetorical public diplomacy that views diplomats as generalists engaging members of varied, local publics, Pearce and Cronen\u27s Coordinated Management of Meaning and the narrative work of Ricoeur, MacIntyre, Fisher, Arnett, and Arneson carve out a place for communication scholarship in the academic study of diplomacy and foreign relations. A case study of the State Department\u27s community diplomacy initiatives in Northern Ireland are examined as a core tactic of what I call public diplomacy 2.0 --postmodern public diplomacy attentive to rhetoric and communication. This work rests on the premise that philosophy of communication and rhetorical scholarship is central to good public diplomacy praxis in a postmodern world

    Bodily Vulnerability: Critical Phenomenology and an Examination of Gendered Motility

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