Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThis research is a case study about the benefits and challenges of participating in a close-knit religious society. It uses oral history and rhetorical analysis to examine the lives of fifty-five young Latter-day Saint (Mormon) women who moved to Mormon homelands from 1975 through 2000. In this study, Mormon homelands primarily refers to regions of North America where Mormons settled from 1847 to 1910. Many of the young women interviewed found safety, belonging, and significant opportunities for personal growth in Mormon homelands; however, obtaining those positives sometimes required what narrators considered to be an unacceptable compromise of charity, self-worth, and individual agency because of the isolation, rules, and regimentation imposed upon them. For some narrators, Mormon homelands became totalizing, meaning they controlled many aspects of individual identity in the name of doing what was best for the group and its members. Narrators resisted this totalism both as adolescents and adults, observing that when they lived in Mormon congregations outside of homelands, they experienced better balancing of individual and community. The LDS church has had significant influence in the American West and is considered to be the largest and most enduring American-born religion. Few scholars have explored the lives of Mormon adolescents in the latter twentieth century. Using Mormon young women as a case study illuminates aspects of religious belonging for youth and fills a gap in women's religious history. Many adult women in contemporary society question the value of organized religion as they engage with issues of power, equality, and agency. This study provides historical context for that discussion because it asked adult women to examine the religious relationships, memberships, and allegiances they once had. As they connected past and present via oral history, these women were able to reflect on what they have gained and lost from participation in religious societies. This study is unusual in that it identifies mechanisms of totalism in ordinary rather than extreme religious contexts, it explores both adolescent and adult religious identity, and it approaches oral history rhetorically

Comedy: An Annotated Bibliography of Theory and Criticism

From Plato to Umber-to Eco comedy has been a subject of perennial interest. In the 1980s there have even been two attempts, one scholarly and one fictional, to recreate the "lost" book on comedy by Plato's pupil Aristotle: by Richard Janko in Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics II, which also returns us to the ancient "Tractatus Coislinianus"; and by Eco in The Name of the Rose, where murder fails to prevent disclosure of the treatise (see items 216 and 274 below). So the time seemed propitious to gather and annotate the best that has been published about comedy in a bibliography of larger scope than the one by E. H. Mikhail, Comedy and Tragedy: A Bibliography of Critical Studies (Troy: Whitston, 1972), which included only about four hundred items. This book is intended to provide a better guide through the maze of comic theory and criticism than has hitherto existed

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThis dissertation addresses the ways that students negotiate rhetorical constructions of subjectivity and agency, and how the logics of time work on subjectivity and agency within the context of a nontraditional high school. This work is necessary to elucidate a tension at the heart of not only mainstream high school education in the early 21st century, but also to lay bare a paradox of rhetorical theory: that the field has historically been premised upon the speaking subject, but that the subjects who may speak are not only bounded by race, gender, and class, as many other scholars have illustrated - but also by the material effects of time as a rhetorical phenomenon upon the speaker. Rhetoricians can address this gap in theory by examining subjectivity and agency through three rhetorical registers of time: language as time, learning as work/work as time, and developmental time. Using participatory critical rhetoric to examine live, in situ discourses, and critical rhetoric to investigate textual sources, this dissertation examines disparate discourses that construct studenthood, such as "official" discourses of education propagated by those in positions of power such as state school boards or school districts as well as students' own discourses

Pacific Review Winter 2014

https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/pacific-review/1009/thumbnail.jp

URI Graduate School Course Catalog 1977-1978

This is a digitized, downloadable version of the University of Rhode Island course catalog.https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/course-catalogs/1013/thumbnail.jp

URI Graduate School Course Catalog 1978-1979

This is a digitized, downloadable version of the University of Rhode Island course catalog.https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/course-catalogs/1015/thumbnail.jp

Pacific Review April 1964 (Bulletin of the University of the Pacific)

https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/pacific-review/1193/thumbnail.jp

URI Graduate School Course Catalog 1979-1980

This is a digitized, downloadable version of the University of Rhode Island course catalog.https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/course-catalogs/1017/thumbnail.jp

URI Graduate School Course Catalog 1976-1977

This is a digitized, downloadable version of the University of Rhode Island course catalog.https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/course-catalogs/1011/thumbnail.jp