Graduation Year
2019
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree
Ph.D.
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Degree Granting Department
Communication
Major Professor
David Payne, Ph.D.
Co-Major Professor
Jane Jorgenson, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Fred Steier, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Nathan Johnson, Ph.D.
Keywords
community, god-term, Jane Addams, John Humphrey Noyes, society, Southern Agrarians, communication
Abstract
This study examines the functions of the term “community” in American social and political rhetoric. I contend that community serves as a god-term, or expression of value and order, which rhetors use to motivate actions, endorse values, include/exclude persons, and compensate for modern losses. Informed by the philosophy of Kenneth Burke, I explore the general features of “rhetorics of community,” including community’s ambiguity and status as an automatic good, the relationship between community and modernity, the myth of communal loss, and the uses of community as a site of political unity and contest. I analyze the writings of John Humphrey Noyes, Jane Addams, and the Southern Agrarians as paradigm cases of utopian, progressive, and traditionalist rhetorics respectively, and I discuss how community is constructed in order to navigate the tension between self and society, correct for the failures of modern individualism, and propose competing visions of the social order.
Scholar Commons Citation
Hawley, Cody Ryan, "The Uses of Community in Modern American Rhetoric" (2018). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/7680
