Reflecting the belief that learning is best fostered by encouraging students to read, reflect, and write about serious issues, this book is designed to help students argue on behalf of their beliefs so that other people will take them seriously. The 85 readings gathered in the book (60 of which are new to the fourth edition) give students adequate…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 19 titles deal with the following topics: (1) cinema, culture, and the social formation; (2) going beyond historical-critical dualism in the analysis of theoretical discourse; (3) empathy in instrumental communication; (4) a…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 31 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the rhetoric of confrontation in Northern Ireland; (2) rhetorical arguments in public health regulations; (3) epideictic discourse in the founding of the…

Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin has been instrumental in efforts to curtail pornography by defining it as a violation of women's civil rights and allowing individual women to sue the distributors for damages. Dworkin's position derives from the tension between "what should be" and "what is." Her conception of the difference…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 11 titles deal with the following topics: (1) the credibility of the sources of public information during the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant crisis; (2) the anticorporation rhetoric of New York reformer Samuel Seabury; (3)…

Proposes that different versions of moral decision making emerged in the narrative patterns of Ferraro and members of the Catholic church during the 1984 Presidential Campaign. Discusses these visions of morality using Kenneth Burke's terms and examines them as illustrative of differences in feminine and masculine constructions of reality. (JD)

The symbolic presence of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) has been and continues to be the pivot point in all summitry rhetoric between the American President and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. To examine some of the rhetorical choices made by Gorbachev to dramatize his vision of why Ronald Reagan refuses to…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 14 titles deal with the following topics: (1) the rhetoric of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; (2) the rhetorical strategies employed in the political speaking of George C. Wallace in the 1968 United States presidential…

Designed initially as a way of understanding the often anomalous rhetoric of movement leaders, the Requirements-Problems-Strategies (RPS) framework for analyzing the rhetoric of social movements has been applied in recent years to analyses of other collective rhetoric and leadership roles in collectivities. RPS has also been used in conjunction…

Examines the increasingly Orwellian inaugural addresses of the last two decades and how these speeches make use of the mythical principle of "unification," leading to a sacralization of American society and its placement into a cosmic order. Offers these mythic elements as an example of the pervasiveness of Oldspeak and mythic rhetoric…

Offers a rationale that can be used to defend the assignment of Alice Walker's controversial novel for class reading. Indicates four issues that might evoke calls for censorship: (1) subject matter, (2) vocabulary, (3) grammar, and (4) the epistolary form of the work. (RBW)

Examination of the relationship between academic learning and group relations suggests that the study of each can inform the other. A partnership between the study of group relations and the study of literary theory could give new insights into teaching and learning as discursive practices, power relations in the college classroom, and sources of…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 20 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the rhetoric of the Moral Majority, (2) epideictic rhetoric in the works of 16th cntury humanist John Colet, (3) rhetoric and the Equal Rights Amendment, (4)…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 13 titles deal with the following topics: (1) a paradigm for the study of communicative style; (2) the rhetoric of conversion in Ohio's abolitionist campaign; (3) a generic approach to the rhetoric of the United States Supreme…

A college-level Southern studies course, team-taught by a history professor and a speech communication professor and designed to integrate the study of history with the study of public address, is described in this paper. After pointing out the interrelation of public address and its historical and political context, the paper lists the topics of…