Browsing by Subject "postmodern"
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Item A Rhetoric of Moral Imagination: The Persuasions of Russell Kirk(2010-07-14) Jones, Jonathan L.This rhetorical analysis of a contemporary and historical social movement, American conservatism, through a prominent intellectual figure, Russell Kirk, begins with a description of the author's work. Ideologies, arguments, and sentiments are considered as implicit rhetoric, where social relations are defined by persuasion, ideas, historical appeal, persona, and various invitations to shared assumptions. First, a descriptive historical context is the foundation to explore the beliefs, communicative strategies, and internal tensions of the conservative movement through the development of various identities and communities during its rise as a formidable political power. Second, an analysis of the author and the author's texts clarifies argumentative and stylistic choices, providing a framework for his communicative choices. The thesis of this discussion is that the discourses implicit and explicit in the author's writing and conduct of life were imaginative and literary products of what he termed "moral imagination." How this imagination developed, and its impact upon his persuasion, was a unique approach not only to an emergent intellectual tradition but also to the disciplines of history, fiction, policy, and audience. This work argues there were two components to Kirk's rhetoric of moral imagination. First, his choosing of historical subjects, in biographical sketch and literary content, was an indication of his own interest in rhetorical efficacy. Second, he attempted to live out the sort of life he claimed to value. I argue he taught observers by an ethos, an endeavor to live a rhetorical demonstration of what he genuinely believed was good. As demonstrated by what many who knew Kirk identified as an inner strength of character and conduct, his rhetorical behavior was motivated by a love for and a curiosity toward wonder and mystery. By an imaginative reading of history, his exemplars of more properly ordered sentiments of a moral order sought to build communities of associational, relational persons that found identity in relation to other persons. His ambition was to explore and communicate what it meant to be human - in limitation, in promise, and in the traditions and customs that provide a framework for "human" in a culture.Item The Mystery of the Situated Body: Finding Stability through Narratives of Disability in the Detective Genre(2013-07-15) Foreman, Adrienne CThe appearance, use, and philosophy of the disabled detective are latent even in early detective texts, such as in Arthur Conan Doyle?s canonical Sherlock Holmes series. By philosophy, I am referring to both why the detective feels compelled to detect as well as the system of detection the detective uses and on which the text relies. Because the detective feels incompatible with the world around him (all of the detectives I analyze in this dissertation are men), he is driven to either fix himself, the world, or both. His systematic approach includes diagnosing problems through symptomatology and removing the deficient aspect. While the detective narrative?s original framework assimilates bodies to medical and scientific discourses and norms in order to represent a stable social order, I argue that contemporary detective subgenres, including classical disability detective texts, hardboiled disability detective texts and postmodern disability detective texts, respond to this framework by making the portrayal of disability explicit by allocating it to the detective. The texts present disability as both a literary mechanism that uses disability to represent abstract metaphors (of hardship, of pity, of heroism) and a cultural construct in and of itself. I contend that the texts use disability to investigate what it means to be an individual and a member of society. Thus, I trace disability in detective fiction as it parallels the cultural move away from the autonomous individual and his participation in a stable social order and move towards the socially located agent and shifting situational values.