| This dissertation proposes that postmodern and liberation rhetorics are religious dialectics of pain and imagination which work toward new community. To demonstrate this, the thesis offers readings of four examples of postmodern and liberation rhetorics. Chapter one offers definitions of rhetoric, postmodern, liberation, pain, imagination, and religious, and places this study within its larger academic context. Chapter two fathoms the postmodern rhetoric theory of Kenneth Burke, a prolific United States academic rhetor who never graduated from college. The rhetoric practice of Thomas Merton, found in his poem The Geography of Lograire, is probed in chapter three. Merton, who was a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia and a professor at St. Bonaventure in western New York, left the academy in 1941 in order to take vows as a Trappist monk at Gethsemane, Kentucky. Chapter four delves into the work of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian university professor and rhetoric theorist who was jailed and exiled by a Brazilian junta in the 1960's for his work in adult literacy. The Pastoral Letters of the martyred Oscar Romero, who practiced rhetoric as the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador, are measured in chapter five. Romero was shot to death in 1980. Based on the discussions of the work of these four rhetors, the afterword proposes some directions for the future of rhetoric. |
