English Doctoral Work

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Browsing English Doctoral Work by browse.metadata.program "English"

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    Carl Sagan's Cosmos: The Rhetorical Construction of Popular Science Mythology
    (North Dakota State University, 2013) Sorensen, Karen Jane
    Using Carl Sagan's Cosmos as a case study, this dissertation explores the intersection of science with popular culture and builds a new framework for rhetorically analyzing popular science programming. The arguments and research focus on the ways in which popularizing scientific information for the masses can create a type of science fiction rather than merely being a transferal of information. This metamorphosis of fact into fiction occurs as a result of the convergence of three rhetorical concepts, kairos, ethos, and aethos. Kairos is the placement of Cosmos in time. Historical and political elements (including education and entertainment) contribute to a science program's kairos. Ethos is the appeal (or credibility) of the narrator. The audience is receptive to the information presented only if the narrator is able to establish this appeal. Personality traits that are popular outside of stereotypically educational or scientific environments are often used in popular science programs to establish ethos. Aethos is the haunt or the environment created for the program; it lays the groundwork for narrative control. The haunt--which is carefully and purposefully constructed through the use of dramatizations and sensory elements--creates the viewpoint from which an audience examines and evaluates the information or arguments presented. A program's kairos, ethos, and aethos intertwine to determine its potential for attracting and retaining a broad audience. However, these elements carry with them an unintentional side effect. In combination, they create a mythos that can assist in the popularity and longevity of the program but they also carry with them a fictionalizing effect.
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    Coercively Compromised Authorships: Risk Factors in Spaces of Writing Practice
    (North Dakota State University, 2016) Laughlin, Mary Kateri
    This dissertation project explores the potential for coercive interactions to shape collaboratively authored, singularly credited textual productions. Building on the work of Composition Studies, which reflects a sustained history of engagement with issues pertaining to coercion (e.g., authority; hierarchy), and grounded by the argument that all authorship constitutes at least some degree of collaboration, the driving inquires of the project explore multiple sites of writing practice to identify factors that may act as doorways for coercive pressure, including worst-case scenarios of coercive collaboration that find an individual facing punitive consequences for a text substantially authored by unacknowledged collaborators. The dissertation ultimately offers a heuristic tool designed for pedagogical use: a framework identifying five risk factors of coercively compromised authorships. These factors include: external stakes; interactions with authority; loss of control; changed relationship with a text; and the erasure of collaborative influences. The rhetorical continuum created by the framework encourages users to see collaborative interactions embedded within texts, and to then strategically consider the potential for coercion situated within them. Ideally, the heuristic and the continuum-like view of coercive risk it creates will foster more nuanced critical evaluation of textual authorship; additionally, explicit attention to coercive risk factors may function as a safeguard against future acts of coercive collaborations.
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    Energetic Space: The Affect of Literature in a Composition Classroom
    (North Dakota State University, 2015) Steinmann, Heather Marie
    Rhetorical and critical theory have both prescribed and proscribed the way scholars view affect. With the exception of Reader Response Theory, literary and rhetorical theory tend to use a more long-term and permanent frame of reference when addressing the emotional relationship between reader and writer. This disquisition explores a framework where the reader and writer find emotional connection in particular and emergent times and spaces. This work extends the import of Kairos, as a rhetorical figure and theory, to contemporary research and theories like Maria Takolander’s “Energetic Space” and Louise Rosenblatt’s “Aesthetic Reading,” theories that link writer to reader. Rather than returning to the stagnating debate regarding the societal import of literature and its inclusion in or exclusion from university course curriculum, this work will use grounded theory to qualitatively examine students’ affective responses to a novel over a period of 4 years to describe how the emotional relationship between an author and audience can be located and marked in the transformative moment.
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    Reclaiming the Place of Translation in English Composition and Technical Communication: Toward Hospitable Writing
    (North Dakota State University, 2016) Verzella, Massimo
    The defining characteristic of a pedagogy informed by philosophical cosmopolitanism is a focus on the dialogic imagination: the coexistence of rival ways of life in the individual experience which incites us to interrogate common sense assumptions on culture, language, and identity, and combine contradictory certainties in an effort to think in terms of inclusive oppositions while rejecting the logic of exclusive oppositions. One of the goals of the Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Project (TAPP), an educational network of bilateral writing-translation projects that establishes links between students in different countries, is to invite students to mediate between languages, cultures, and rhetorical traditions with the goal of transcending differences and find common ground. Students who participate to TAPP understand what is at stake when they write for a global audience by cultivating an attitude of openness that invites hospitable communication practices. The goal of the explorative study illustrated in the second part of the dissertation is to identify regularities of translation strategies in the genre of technical instructions. The dataset consists of a corpus of 40 texts compiled by pairing up 20 instructions written in English by students majoring in different areas of engineering in an American university and their translations into Italian (19,046 words), completed by students majoring in English in an Italian university. The research questions are: With reference to the translation strategies explicitation, implicitation, generalization, and particularization, what evidence is there of uniformity of practice in the translation of instructions from English into Italian? What are the most typical causes of zero shifts? Why do translators resort to rhetorical shifts? Results show that nonprofessional translators tend to resort more to implicitation than explicitation, and more to particularization than generalization. Due to the limited size of the corpus, it was impossible to identify typical causes for zero shifts, but further studies should focus on how writers can facilitate translation by using the topic/comment structure. Finally, translators resort to rhetorical shifts for reasons that have to do with cultural appropriateness in the target locale. The most common type of rhetorical shifts are context-related shifts in emphasis.
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    The Trial of Alice Clifton: Judicial Catharsis in Institutional Bias
    (North Dakota State University, 2016) Zaugg, Gary
    This is a critical introduction and rhetorical analysis of a moment of criminal crisis at a time of profound institutional bias: the 1787 infanticide trial of a young Philadelphia slave and rape victim named Alice Clifton. A dramatistic view of the case—in the tradition of Kenneth Burke—reveals the law’s inherent symbolic action in shaping social reality and its cathartic potential when resolving conflict and judging conduct. Judicial catharsis—the official apparatus for channeling the manifold cathartic pathways that converge upon a criminal crisis—is the procedural and ritualistic dramatism of the law. It provides the serial victimage necessary to feed the insatiable appetite of symbolicity’s categorical guilt. Accused persons stand for, or stand in for, generalized fears and tensions on the assumption that labeling and punishing them somehow remediates past events or external conditions. In that sense, the community treats criminals for its own benefit. Whether convicting or acquitting, punishing or pardoning, acting upon a defendant tends to purify the group. But ritual-induced unity is more of a temporary diversion of collective attention than a persistent change in collective attitudes or social conditions. Institutional bias—such as slavery or disparate treatment of unwed mothers—politicizes judicial catharsis by creating underlying circumstantial guilt that cannot be directly discharged through criminal adjudication. Nor is catharsis through judgment the same thing as justice; the ritualistic sacrifice of a scapegoat can bring a false sense of redemption to the community by masking bias and social division. Thus, the rhetoric of the law is compensatory, not curative—a perpetual cleansing of what can never be made clean. In the case of Alice Clifton, the law required a criminal scapegoat and the privileged hierarchy required a political scapegoat. To serve as both, the respective burdens had to be reshaped to match the scapegoat’s back. By condemning and then pardoning—symbolically taking her to the edge of death and then restoring her to life—the process hybridized the resolution, staking claim to the awesome power of justice and mercy to reaffirm the existing social order.
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    Writing (Dirty) New Media: Technorhetorical Opacity, Chimeras, and Dirty Ontology
    (North Dakota State University, 2014) Hammer, Steven
    Video summarizing Ph.D. dissertation for a non-specialist audience.
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    A Zoomable Assessment: Navigating the Ecologies of Writing Program Assessment
    (North Dakota State University, 2022) Warner, Matthew
    This dissertation project explores the potential for using an inferential statistics test (t-tests) within an existing writing program assessment design. The purpose of using inferential statistics is to provide several perspectives on a data set collected using the existing assessment design thereby improving what a writing program administrator can learn about the program. To demonstrate the use of statistical tests, I selected as a variable of interest participation in an international collaboration, the Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Project (TAPP). Based on this variable, I asked, can inferential statistics identify whether participation in TAPP created a difference in student portfolio scores for a program outcome? To perform the t-test, I calculated the mean portfolio scores for TAPP and for Non-TAPP groups. Then, after sorting the program data by course, two courses, a writing in the health professions and a writing in the technical professions, had enough sections participate in TAPP to conduct two more tests, one for each course. The tests posed the same question, whether participation in TAPP had a difference in portfolio scores for a program outcome, but had zoomed from the program level into the course level. The tests indicated that at the highest level (the program) participation in TAPP did not have a statistically significant difference on portfolio scores. The tests at the other level (the course) indicated that participation in TAPP did not have a statistically significant difference on writing in the health professions but did have a statistically significant difference on writing in the technical professions. Possible explanations for these results are examined in relation to existing writing studies literature. The approach of examining several levels is dubbed a zoomable assessment because the statistical tests allow for more nuanced examinations, that is, the tests zoom into the data set. Based on the findings, I propose further uses and possible limits of uses of inferential statistics as a complement to existing assessment designs. As part of the proposal, I advocate for assessment design, such as zoomable assessment, that is accessible, meaning the design does not require special software or extensive knowledge of advanced statistical analysis methods.