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theses

Kenneth Burke’s theory of orientations, grounded most thoroughly in Permanence and Change, posits that each of us is trained by the rhetorical stimuli of our environment and subject to be conditioned to a dominant ideological orientation. And on September 11th, 2001, the dominant orientation toward the 9/11 attacks—our way of looking at that reality—was fully constructed within hours of the collapse. The rapidity with which this rhetorical construction occurred was enough to have Robert Ivie declare that the Bush speeches had left “[n]o space for critical thinking” (227). However, according to Burke, the orientation must have had “space for critical thinking” and contestation, as all orientations are subject to ideological correctives. The attempted correctives to the 9/11 orientation, the counter-rhetorics intended to correct the way we viewed that reality, revealed the precise rhetorical performance of orientation-correction, including the navigation of the orientation’s “piety,” “the sense of what properly goes with what” (Permanence and Change 74). The dominant orientation toward 9/11, far from being a rhetorical blockade with little space for contestation, was a site for discovering the interaction between Burkean piety and “the ‘stealing back and forth’ of symbols” (Attitudes Toward History 103). As dissenting rhetors infiltrated the orientation, stole one or more of the component symbols, and attempted to reconfigure them in a way that read more truthfully, they triggered a rhetorical domino effect predetermined by the orientation’s pious configuration. As each piece of the dominant orientation was altered symbolically according to the corrective, this rhetorical action subsequently destabilized others that the initial component was connected to, rendering the corrective too impious.

ETD_4830

M.A.

Includes bibliographical references

by Patrick Danner

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10005600001.ETD.000068549

doi:10.7282/T3TB15JM

ETD graduate

The author owns the copyright to this work.