Rhetorical motives in advertising: a theory of advertising genre as religious discourse
| dc.contributor.advisor | Moffatt, John | en_US |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Burton, Richard | en_US |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Phillips, Barbara | en_US |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Thompson, John | en_US |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Phillips, Kendall | en_US |
| dc.creator | Wills, Jeanie | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2013-01-03T22:27:18Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2013-01-03T22:27:18Z | |
| dc.date.created | 2011-09 | en_US |
| dc.date.issued | 2011-09-22 | en_US |
| dc.date.submitted | September 2011 | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | Variously argued to be information and news about products or studied to be made a more effective sales discourse, advertising, most especially national brand advertising, is ubiquitous and unrelenting in all public spaces in our society. We see and hear more advertising discourse than any other kind of discourse and it attempts to persuade us not only toward more consumption, but also toward a core value system based on consumption and commercial transaction. This study argues that, in fact, advertising functions as a kind of religious discourse and that it constructs a view of audience that has ethical consequences and implications for civility in society and for actions taken to be in the public’s best interest. The work is interdisciplinary in nature in that it draws on sociological theories of religion and identity, and qualitative studies of advertising, and it uses rhetorical critical methods to theorize generalities of brand advertising. The first chapter offers an interdisciplinary overview of critical studies of advertising, while the second chapter shows how rhetorical criticism contributes to advertising studies. The third chapter offers a rhetorical analysis of key texts written by the early men who shaped public opinion about advertising discourse. They relied on metaphors of religion to convince audiences for their memoirs that advertising could be a useful tool for American business. The dissertation contends that these strategies infused and shaped the advertising genre itself, enabling modern advertising discourse to use persuasive strategies inherent in the discourses of religion and the remaining chapters elaborate this argument. Rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke’s work that describes how language itself manifests the structure of the Christian guilt, mortification, redemption drama is used to show how advertising functions in a structurally similar manner. This study also makes use of sociologist Hans Mol’s contention that religion functions to sacralize identity, and uses his argument to posit that advertising, as a religious discourse, sacralizes individuality and, thus, makes the pursuit of individualism as crucial to identity. The dissertation shows how, as a result of advertising’s parallels with religious discourse and in its sacralization of individualism, the genre paradoxically implies that mass consumption is a way to express individualism. Advertising suggests this belief through its enthymemes, which rely on individual’s audience members to believe that each of them has an entelechial drive toward an idealized and attainable perfection of self. Advertising constructs its audiences as people who are narcissistic, and this focus on self-realization results in advancing a corollary of beliefs and ideologies that have repercussions for our understanding rhetorical civility. The unstated ideologies implicit in advertising are explained using Symbolic Convergence theory. This study has found that advertising’s persuasiveness is a result of its ability to speak to people about their deepest human needs in seemingly meaningful ways. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10388/ETD-2011-09-146 | en_US |
| dc.language.iso | eng | en_US |
| dc.subject | Advertising memoir | en_US |
| dc.subject | rhetorical theory | en_US |
| dc.subject | rhetorical criticism | en_US |
| dc.subject | Kenneth Burke and dramatism | en_US |
| dc.subject | Symbolic Convergence theory | en_US |
| dc.subject | advertising and religion | en_US |
| dc.title | Rhetorical motives in advertising: a theory of advertising genre as religious discourse | en_US |
| dc.type.genre | Thesis | en_US |
| dc.type.material | text | en_US |
| thesis.degree.department | Graduate Studies and Research | en_US |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Interdisciplinary Studies | en_US |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Saskatchewan | en_US |
| thesis.degree.level | Doctoral | en_US |
| thesis.degree.name | Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) | en_US |