| The dissertation deals in the history of rhetoric, film theory, and a renewed pedagogy empowered by both—demonstrating and encouraging the reprioritization of film as a teaching tool, thereby reconciling the text-based world of higher education and the multi-media driven world outside of academics.; This dissertation depends on varying approaches to metaphor and mythology, and on the many levels of message and meaning which come from these. The Introduction focuses on the tragedies of September 11, 2001 and investigates the roles and influence of media in general, and film specifically, in American society. As Barthes indicates in his Mythologies, these influences are rhetorical: linguistic, symbolic and communicative. They relate stories and events, and create collective senses of society and an individual's place there.; Chapters Two through Four are film-specific. There is the history of rhetoric from its origins (“Aristotle and The Blair Witch Project ”) through its permutations during the Dark Ages, Renaissance and Enlightenment (“3…2…1…Contact”), and into the flowering of voice and message that marks rhetoric's modern age (“Marxism in Cameron's Titanic”). These chapters are demonstrative and theoretical: they mirror moments in rhetoric's history as they prove that film is an effective medium with which to teach that history.; Chapters One and Five address trends in the study of rhetoric and in the evolution of higher-education, from the elite, interactive, self-perpetuating systems they were to the more vast, market-driven, and distanced interactions they now are. Citing critics as wide-ranging as bell hooks, Mikhail Bakhtin, Thomas Kuhn, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, Paulo Freire and Kenneth Burke, and incorporating examples from Aristotle, Miguel de Cervantes, Henry James, and James Joyce, I highlight in these chapters the trend from teaching in the classical, Aristotelian, model, through the changes wrought by World War II, and as the infusion of multimedia resources now alters the purpose and practice of higher education. These highlights are also rhetorical, considerations of how power and influence are communicated, and with film as the next step in this evolution and its ultimate salvation. |
