University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 8-2016 The va ailable means of imagination : personal narrative, public rhetoric, and circulation. Stephanie D. Weaver University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Part of the Rhetoric Commons Recommended Citation Weaver, Stephanie D., "The va ailable means of imagination : personal narrative, public rhetoric, and circulation." (2016). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 2551. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/2551 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The nivU ersity of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The nivU ersity of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE AVAILABLE MEANS OF IMAGINATION: PERSONAL NARRATIVE, PUBLIC RHETORIC, AND CIRCULATION By Stephanie D. Weaver B.A., Middle Tennessee State University, 2009 M.A., Miami University, 2011 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English/Rhetoric and Composition Department of English University of Louisville Louisville Kentucky August 2016 Copyright 2016 by Stephanie D. Weaver All Rights Reserved THE AVAILABLE MEANS OF PERSUASION: PERSONAL NARRATIVE, PUBLIC RHETORIC, AND CIRCULATION By Stephanie D. Weaver B.A., Middle Tennessee State University, 2009 M.A., Miami University, 2011 A Dissertation Approved on July 18, 2016 By the following Dissertation Committee: ___________________________________________ Dissertation Director Dr. Bronwyn T. Williams ___________________________________________ Dr. Karen Kopelson ___________________________________________ Dr. Mary P. Sheridan ___________________________________________ Dr. Beth Boehm ___________________________________________ Dr. Jason Palmeri ii DEDICATION For Georgia Wilkerson who funded my dreams, even when she didn’t understand them. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Dr. Bronwyn Williams not only shaped this project with his ideas and input, he also trusted me enough as a burgeoning scholar to know what the project should be, and I would like to thank him for his support and occasional cheerleading in word and deed. I want to thank Dr. Karen Kopelson for putting up with an excruciatingly bad seminar paper that was my opening foray in the ideas presented here and for her realistic view of the project along the way. I want to thank Dr. Mary P. Sheridan, for the attention she asked me to pay to my terms, and Dr. Beth Boehm, for suggesting Savannah Dietrich as a case study (and a fruitful one it proved to be). Thanks to Dr. Jason Palmeri for offering helpful advice for navigating the whole process. I’d also like to thank my family, Stephen, Deborah, David, and Ashton, for being interested and invested just because I was interested and invested. Finally, much thanks to my husband Ben, who talked these thoughts to death with me, who helped me find the right word, who everyday fights my imposter syndrome by believing that I am incredibly smart. iv ABSTRACT THE AVAILABLE MEANS OF IMAGINATION: PERSONAL NARRATIVE, PUBLIC RHETORIC, AND CIRCULATION Stephanie D. Weaver July 18, 2016 This dissertation examines the digital circulation of personal narratives by non- celebrity individuals that become part of larger public and political debates. I posit the “available means of imagination” to describe the ways that narratives – cultural, fictional, and personal – influence our ability to understand the many facets of a given public debate before tracing the interactions among narrative, emotion, and circulation in a series of case studies using new materialist methods. I argue that emotion plays a key role in structures of participation of social media and in how we subsequently engage with contemporary political issues, especially with regards to what we choose to circulate. The dissertation is divided into five chapters, including three case studies. Chapter 1 offers an overview of rhetorical approaches to the public debate, circulation – digital or otherwise – and narrative. The second chapter, which covers Liza Long’s article “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” establishes the relationship between emotion and circulation, arguing that Long’s post traveled widely because of the wide range of emotions it evoked. Chapter 3 analyzes the circulation of the story of Savannah Dietrich, a teenage sexual assault victim who violated a court order by posting the names of her underage v attackers on Twitter, via its uptake into preexisting ideologics, demonstrating the ways rhetors may adapt another’s personal narrative to serve as evidence of their own claims while also having their own interpretations of the story mitigated by their worldviews. Chapter 4 examines the case of GamerGate, a movement purportedly devoted to ethics in games journalism which began with programmer Eron Gjoni’s blog post about his relationship and break-up with game designer Zoe Quinn. This case provides further insights into how a personal narrative may be interpreted to fit a preexisting world view, as well as demonstrating how competing narratives develop surrounding the same event, including accounts of the motivations of participants, critiques of opponents, and moves to bolster the ethos of the group with which the rhetor identifies. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iv ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ v CHAPTER I ........................................................................................................................ 1 Public and Political Rhetoric ........................................................................................... 3 Publics and Audiences in Public Rhetoric ................................................................... 3 Emotion in Public Rhetoric ......................................................................................... 8 Identification and Ethos in Social Media .................................................................. 11 Circulation ..................................................................................................................... 15 Narrative ........................................................................................................................ 21 The Narrative Paradigm ............................................................................................. 21 Personal Narratives .................................................................................................... 26 The Available Means of Imagination ............................................................................ 31 Narrative and New Materialist Methods ....................................................................... 39 CHAPTER II ..................................................................................................................... 44 “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother”: Circulation and Reception .......................................... 45 Strategies of Circulation: Narrative and the Generation of Controversy ...................... 53 vii Emotional Engagement and Expressions of Outrage .................................................... 60 The Available Means of Imagination and Conceptions of Success .............................. 66 CHAPTER III ................................................................................................................... 69 Thick Description of the Case ....................................................................................... 70 Competing Narratives, Competing Ideologics .............................................................. 75 What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape: God-Terms, Ideographs, Nodal Points, and Narratives ................................................................................................... 85 Circulation, God-Terms, and Ideologics ....................................................................... 96 CHAPTER IV ................................................................................................................... 98 The Zoe Post................................................................................................................ 101 Early Reactions ........................................................................................................... 104 Red Pill/Blue Pill: Conspiracy Narrative and Social Reality ...................................... 109 The Death of Gamers .................................................................................................. 116 #NotYourShield .......................................................................................................... 119 Controlling Narrative, Controlling Image ................................................................... 122 The Stakes of the Game .............................................................................................