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TOWARD A THEORY OF NARRATIVE RHETORIC by EDWARDO RAUL PEREZ Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON May 2012 Copyright © by Edwardo Raul Perez 2012 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As children we dream, play, and pretend – innocently aware of the future, hopeful and optimistic that we can be anything we want to be. Regardless of what we become or what we do when we grow up, one constant that binds us all together is the power of story. From childhood to adulthood we cherish the telling of stories: we read them, watch them, create them, and live them. Indeed, all the memories of our lives are organized into stories and this dissertation is as much a celebration of stories as it is an academic application of a particular narrative theory and writing this dissertation has perhaps taught me more about myself (my story) than about the theories and sources I explored. Working on this dissertation over the course of many years and seeing it grow into its present form I have come to realize that it was always leading me down the path it took even if I didn‟t know it; it was always telling its story. Of course, I could not have traversed this terrain without the love and support of my family and the help and guidance of my teachers. But there is no one who has been more supportive or more helpful (in numerous and immeasurable ways) than my wife, Suzanne – this is for you “babe.” December 15, 2012 iii ABSTRACT TOWARD A THEORY OF NARRATIVE RHETORIC Edwardo Raul Perez, PhD The University of Texas at Arlington, 2012 Supervising Professor: Kevin J. Porter This dissertation suggests that the question of whether or not America should employ torture as a means of fighting a post-9/11 War on Terror was not so much debated as it was asserted (in the affirmative) by the presidential administration of George W. Bush and the news media contemporary to his administration. Building on an observation by media researcher Sasha Torres, who recognized a representation of thinking on television that served to counter the Bush Administration and the media, this dissertation investigates how television functioned as an alternate forum for a debate on torture by examining the narratives of three serialized television programs which largely aired during the years contemporary to the Bush Administration: FOX‟s 24; ABC‟s Lost; and the SyFy Channel‟s reimagined Battlestar Galactica. Building on various theories from the fields of rhetoric, narratology, and critical theory, this dissertation proposes a theory of narrative rhetoric (TNR) designed to trace a narrative‟s progression and function; TNR is then utilized to analyze the three television programs to demonstrate how each program effectively advanced and maintained an anti-torture stance. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................... ……………..iii ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................... iv Chapter Page 1. DEBATING POST-9/11 TORTURE……………………………………..………..….. ............. .1 2. DRAMATIZED ARGUMENT ................................................................................................. 21 3. THE NARRATIVE OF TORTURE ON 24 .............................................................................. 46 4. THE NARRATIVE OF TORTURE ON LOST ...................................................................... 113 5. THE NARRATIVE OF TORTURE ON BSG ......................................................................... 150 6. THE FUNCTION OF NARRATIVE RHETORIC.................................................................. 194 APPENDIX A. COMPARISON OF CRITICAL THEORIES .......................................................................... 206 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................................... 208 BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION .......................................................................................................... 217 v CHAPTER 1 DEBATING POST-9/11 TORTURE 1.1 Introduction In an examination of the “intellectual culture” of George W. Bush‟s presidential administration, media researcher Sasha Torres observes five “troubling elements” or patterns of behavior seen during the course of Bush‟s tenure. As Torres claims: First, ignorance: Bush himself doesn‟t know much about key policy areas and shows little interest in learning more; more troubling, this know-nothing attitude seems to pervade the West Wing. This element is closely related to, and sustained by, the second: a breathtaking intellectual laziness, both on the part of the President and those around him. Also closely related is the third element: Bush‟s low tolerance for detail, complexity, or nuance. Bush‟s detail-intolerance is reflected in the fourth element: his administration‟s remarkable contempt for empirical evidence, and its well-documented willingness to manufacture evidence to support ill-conceived political or ideological positions. Not surprisingly, fifth, the Bush White House has consistently displayed a concomitant suspicion of experts and expertise. This element is related as well to Bush‟s discomfort with debate and disagreement, a discomfort that is reflected in the small circle of advisors to whom he grants access, and supported by his administration‟s apparent lack of interest in engaging its opponents (276). Torres expands on Bush‟s discomfort for debate explaining that Bush‟s group of advisors essentially functioned as buffers so that Bush could “maintain his surroundings as a fact-free, idea-free, debate-free, and thus contradiction-free zone” (284). Citing Ron Suskind, Torres notes that Bush‟s “intolerance for debate” was disturbingly seen in cabinet meetings, which were apparently scripted and referred to not as cabinet meetings but as “cabinet meetings,” implying that the meetings were more theatrical and staged than they were substantive (284). Torres ultimately concludes that “reasoned argumentation based on evidence has been rejected in favor of policy decisions grounded in assertion, “faith,” “instinct,” and “guts”” (285). Yet, Torres critically and interestingly notes: “Against the backdrop of this historical moment […] U.S. network television has become […] unprecedentedly interested in thinking” (285). 1 Torres acknowledges that television history is replete with examples of programs that are “interested in knowing,” but suggests that “it is new for television to be so interested in thinking, and so favorably disposed to it” (285). Torres tests this hypothesis by examining three television programs (House, Criminal Minds, and Numb3rs) that she claims “pay as much narrative attention to the process of thinking as they do to the moments when the products of that process are revealed” (286). As Torres further explains: Each of these shows is obsessed with rendering the process of cognition visible, an imperative I read as not only part and parcel of the medium‟s desire to render everything visible, though it is that, but as also a pedagogical impulse, as a desire to say, over and over every week: in case we‟ve forgotten, or become confused while watching too much Fox News, this is what thinking looks like (286). Through her examination Torres finds that thinking is represented as a “collective endeavor”; is shown both diegetically (in the fictional world characters) and extradiegetically (to the real-world audience); and is “rigorously empiricist in that [the television programs] depict thinking as a process of interpreting and accounting for different kinds of evidence” (290). As Torres concludes: These shows are significant for the ways in which they try to imagine – or even to reproduce – a national intellectual life in America at a moment in which intelligence, critical reflection, expertise, and the engagement with empirical evidence have been radically devalued in the interests of political expediency and the accumulation of raw power (293). Torres‟ conclusions regarding both Bush‟s presidency and the representation of thinking on television raise at least three questions worth investigating further: (1) If debate was indeed suppressed during Bush‟s administration, did the representation of thinking on television (and television itself) function as an alternate forum for debate? (2) If so, what does this “narrative rhetoric” or “dramatized argument” suggest with regard to the fields of narratology, rhetoric, and critical theory? (3) And what does viewing television as an alternate forum for debate suggest about America‟s cultural identity in a post-9/11 world? Perhaps no issue is more significant to America‟s post-9/11 identity than the issue of torture, especially in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal.1 Following Torres‟ examination and the questions posed above, this dissertation will show that the question of whether or not America should torture so- 1 The scandal was made public in January 2004 by an embarrassing array of explicit photographs showing American soldiers degrading, humiliating, and torturing middle-eastern “enemy combatants.” 2 called “enemy combatants” as it waged a retaliatory “War on Terror” was not so much debated as it was asserted, by the presidential administration of George W. Bush as well