This thesis approaches the work of American avant-garde composer John Cage from an unconventional perspective by utilizing rhetorical theory to examine the intellectual history informing his collected writings in the text ...

This dissertation studies the earliest years of photography’s invention. Attention to the earliest conceptions of photography reveals a more complex and contested understanding of the nature and significance of photographic ...

This study argues that the American citizen’s choice to perform or not perform sacrificial national duties has been heavily mediated by sentimental representations of sacrifice in popular narratives. Through an analysis ...

This project explores visually experimental poetry as a particular trend in Caribbean poetry since the 1970's. Although visual experimentation in Caribbean poetry is immediately recognizable – for example, its play with ...

This dissertation applies to the study of adaptation principles of rhetoric, transtextual analysis and visual semiotics. It posits that adaptations are imitations-with-variations and that rather than existing in binary, ...

This thesis examines how context in Derridean signature theory is taboo and underutilized, and calls signature theory to embrace the contaminating mark of context. Signature theory, as proposed by Jacques Derrida and Peggy ...