Date of Award
Spring 2019
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Communication Studies
School
Communication
Committee Chair
Wendy Atkins-Sayre
Committee Chair School
Communication
Committee Member 2
John Meyer
Committee Member 2 School
Communication
Committee Member 3
Casey Maugh-Funderburk
Committee Member 3 School
Communication
Committee Member 4
Laura Stengrim
Committee Member 4 School
Communication
Committee Member 5
Paul Strait
Committee Member 5 School
Communication
Abstract
This dissertation seeks to explicate a rhetorical conceptualization from C. S. Lewis’s notion of longing, or sehnsucht, in hopes of extending its employment to two other contemporary contexts—Christian Hedonism and American Humanism. To do so, I utilize the method of rhetorical criticism to analyze Lewis’s most famous sermon entitled The Weight of Glory. Following this paradigm chapter, I then compare uses of longing within the contemporary evangelical philosophy called Christian Hedonism initiated during the eighties through the seminal text entitled Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. In doing so, I uncover distinct aspects of longing within a metaphysical framework of rhetorical transcendence. Through the lens of Betz’s (1985) Theology of Hope, the sacred substance of joy emerged as a form of immanence offering sustenance to participants for their continued progression to the Christian Other. Finally, I rhetorically analyzed the three manifestoes of the American Humanist Association (AHA) as a means to discover uses of longing within a philosophical framework totally absent of supernaturalism. Distinctively, humanists, like Christian hedonists, utilize longing in relation to imagining a futuristic world community. Through this rhetorical vision, the humanistic discourse of the manifestoes is shown to be a form of religious rhetoric in that it reveals the world as already in transition through constitutive rhetoric. The ultimate finding of this dissertation demonstrates that the employment of longing as a rhetorical motive in these three scenarios all inherently aim for a place, or topos, thus innovating past perceptions of rhetorical transcendence.
ORCID ID
0000-0001-5322-9472
Copyright
2019, G. Brandon Knight
Recommended Citation
Knight, G. Brandon, "Tracing Sehnsucht to Place: Mythopoeia, Visions, Transcendence, and the Journey of the Rhetorical Refugee" (2019). Dissertations. 1636.
https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/1636