Aesthetic and Affective Experiences in Coffee Shops: A Deweyan Engagement with Ordinary Affects in Ordinary Spaces

Can everyday spaces, such as coffee shops bustling with rapid activity, promise an aesthetic experience that remains untapped and undertheorized? If so, what kinds of communicative habits make the coffee shop experience aesthetically wholesome? To this end, I engage and extend American pragmatist John Dewey’s mission of recovering aesthetic experiences in habituated processes of living in his Art as Experience and interweave it with contemporary thought on affective experiences in ordinary activities. Ultimately, I present coffee shops as exemplars of everyday third spaces (spaces other than home and work) promising the qualitative immediacy of artful, affectively rich and embodied communicative experiences

Rhetorical Agency in the Bhagavad Gita

This M.A. thesis presents a rhetorical analysis of the Indian philosophical and religious text, The Bhagavad Gita. Utilizing Kenneth Burke's Pentad of act, scene, agent, agency and purpose as a primary interpretive lens for uncovering universal human motivations, this rhetorical critique conceptualizes the idea of rhetorical agency as a model for action in the Gita's dialogical progression between Krishna and Arjuna. Rhetorical agency in the Gita differs from a traditional understanding of agency in that the former amalgamates competing yet co-existing pragmatic and consummatory agencies that Arjuna may utilize to act in the here and now but also relinquish the control on the fruits of his act, to ultimately transcend all human action by breaking the cycle of birth and death. In that sense, by virtue of rhetorical agency, the Gita may be considered in Burke's words Equipment for Living, because it provides a template for life across the universe

Quotidian rhetoric : an impasse of Deweyan aesthetics and affective encounters

My work is an exploration of quotidian rhetoric which I argue involves the examination of mundane experiential contexts of communicative exchanges among bodies and ecologies in a democracy. Instead of just focusing on language use which has traditionally been the realm of rhetoric, this study focuses on those extra-cognitive refrains, i.e. largely underexplored routines, habits, means, and bodily rhythms that affect and are affected by how we interact with the sentient processes of living. Such experiences range from but are not limited to ordinary conversations at a get together, the same old commute to work, a walk to a coffee shop, an unarticulated glance shared with a pet, a nervous darting of eyes in front of someone familiar, a punctuating nostalgic feeling about a past technology/gadget, a moment of intense attachment shared with a pet or plant or an uncertain moment shared between two strangers on a bus. The point behind quotidian rhetoric is that it champions an embodied attention to the cognitive and somatic/extra-cognitive encounters of communication in the democratic commonplace that I discuss under the respective frameworks of American pragmatist John Dewey’s work on aesthetic experience and affect theory. My work provides the communicative bridge to bring the diverse disciplines of affect studies and pragmatism in conversation since both fields return to the body to build sensate theories of everyday experiences. Through the study of quotidian rhetoric, I flesh out the rhetorical implications of somatic experiences underlying aesthetics and affects.Communication Studie