Graduation Semester and Year
2022
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in English
Department
English
First Advisor
Timothy Richardson
Abstract
This dissertation gives an account of and expands upon Stacy Alaimo’s term, “trans-corporeality,” in order to reconsider the rhetorical situation, through conceptualizations of how rhetorical bodies become embodied and traverse one another in various humanities. From “trans-corporeality,” what arises is a “trans-corporeal rhetoric,” which becomes an interdisciplinary rhetoric that speaks to the futures of rhetoric within the boundaries of various humanities, involving notions of embodiment, materiality, corporeality, and what Alaimo calls “bodily natures.” These futures of rhetoric not only wrestle with what embodiment is and can be for rhetorical bodies in various humanities, and what sort of ethics and aesthetics present themselves in rhetorical situations of “bodily natures,” but they also consider genres where trans-corporeal subjects reside. The triangularities of genre, ethics, and aesthetics are grounded on what is materially significant to various humanities, with this dissertation concerning itself with two: journalism and Christianity. As they respectively appear in Kenneth Burke’s The War of Words (2018) and Michel Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh (2021), Burke and Foucault provide for two post-factum studies of trans-corporeal rhetoric respectively in terms of the genres of journalism and Christianity, the ethics of news and the flesh, and the aesthetics of the body.
Keywords
Rhetoric, Kenneth Burke, Michel Foucault, Stacy Alaimo, Rhetoric of science, Science of rhetoric, Confession, Trans-corporeality
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Woodson, Hubert, "Post-Factum Studies in Trans-corporeal Rhetoric: Triangularities of Genre, Ethics, and Aesthetics in Kenneth Burke and Michel Foucault" (2022). English Dissertations. 92.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/english_dissertations/92
Comments
Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington