Mulvaney, Becky

This study articulates and accentuates the possibilities for women as suggested in Hillary Rodham Clinton's discourse on women's rights at the United Nation's Fourth Conference on Women. Such an endeavor is realized via ideological criticism, which emphasizes the ethical and political implications of discourse. Concepts which inform my analysis include constitutive rhetoric, the Second Persona, and the Third Persona. These tools help discover how Hillary constituted women while in China and expose the gender ideology that grounded her discourse. Her discursive fragments suggest that women's place in the world centers on their place in the family and men's place centers in the public domain. Traditional meanings of women and men are advanced and their rearticulation is hindered. If a meaningful emancipated community is to be realized, we must reconsider our conceptions of both women and men and evoke the power of subversive discourse.

While published current literature reveals how the inanimate figure, the action given by manipulation, and the voice performance are perceived by the audience, it does not show how the puppet functions as argument. This thesis seeks to determine if one dramatic form, the puppet play, "The Adventures of Peer Gynt" is an effective forum for argument. "The Adventures of Peer Gynt" is analyzed according to Walter Fisher and Richard Filloy's critical methodology for examining dramatic texts. This analysis reveals that Peer Gynt functions as an effective form of argument. The play argues, through the character of Peer Gynt, that we have choices when confronted with evil, either to follow evil or stay true to our good self. The play teaches us, but children especially, that one must develop the discernment to go beneath the exterior finish to the underlying substance.

Christian colleges have been accused of "watering down" their Christian principles in admissions materials to increase enrollments. In response to these arguments, rhetorical criticism, based on conceptions of organizational discourse such as symbolic convergence and unobtrusive control, is used to examine the rhetorical strategies, the relative prominence of Christian principles, and the organizational sagas in this rhetoric. This discourse shapes the organizations and their environments; therefore, this is a rich example to explore the rhetoric of organizations from an interpretive perspective. The strategies, priorities, and sagas identified are discussed in light of the ideals promoted by scholars of Christ-centered higher education. The colleges are unapologetically described as Christian, but they are ambiguously distinguished from one another. This rhetoric provides newcomers with premises for unobtrusive control, and the scene is emphasized. Implications of this strategy and the organizational sagas in these texts are discussed.

One of the key catalytic feminist works of our time is The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. Although acclaimed as a well researched artifact designed to help "American women" recognize and understand how and why they were being manipulated via a social phenomenon Friedan terms a "feminine mystique," upon close examination of this work we find that the preponderance of inductive examples Friedan uses to persuade her implied audience excluded another audience, specifically black women. The effect of this "rhetorical exclusion" (and other means of segregation) has been the disaffection of most black women from the contemporary women's movement. This study, therefore, provides a critical analysis of specific inductive examples found within The Feminine Mystique, demonstrates how such examples affected both Friedan's implied and excluded audiences, and suggests how such forms of "rhetorical exclusion" can be avoided in the future.

There is an ancient genre of discourse which has served primarily to rationalize masculine privilege. The aim of the authors of this discourse has been to establish the "natural" superiority of men by methodically certifying the "natural" inferiority of women. This genre of discourse is misogynous discourse. Designed to amplify and expose the degrading effect of misogynous discourse on the human psyche, this analysis of misogynous language and discourse is achieved through a critical technique known as defamiliarization, which allows the reader to examine the discourse from a new and incongruous perspective. In this instance defamiliarization is accomplished simply by reversing the gender of the language, making it seem as though it was written by women about men, instead of by men about women. The final goal of this study is to demythologize this language and thereby render it neutral.

Although Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe and William Wordsworth had no personal contact, and, in fact, were adversaries, several parallel passages show correspondences between the two artists. An examination of Faust and The Excursion reveals a strikingly similar attitude toward nature. A comparison of Faust and "Resolution and Independence" shows several significant resemblances: unusual verse measures, the use of personification, the bestowal of natural landscapes with consciousness, and the presence of images which suggest fluctuation and development. Finally, a close reading of Faust and the The Prelude reveals similar motifs such as veils, waterfalls, and mirrors; also common in both works is a satiric denunciation of scholarly learning. These parallels prove that incompatible poetic minds, without influencing each other directly, can share fundamental images, thoughts, and diction.

Magazine advertisements use various techniques in order to entice consumers to buy a product. One of those techniques is the use of enthymemes. I analyze the rhetorical effect of enthymemes in a select number of Oneida ads beginning in 1900 and continuing through the 1990s. This chronological progression demonstrates the gradual development of what I term, an enthymematic magazine ad. In this type of advertisement, the headline and the image work together to evoke certain emotions in readers leaving them to complete the message by providing information that is well-known by the target audience. The added effort on the part of readers makes the ad memorable and in fact induces readers to persuade themselves of the possible benefits of the advertised product---in this case Oneida silverware.