Date of Award
12-2025
Culminating Project Type
Creative Work
Styleguide
apa
Degree Name
English: M.A.
Department
English
College
College of Liberal Arts
First Advisor
Dr. James Heiman
Second Advisor
Dr. Judith Dorn
Third Advisor
Dr. Michael Dando
Fourth Advisor
n/a
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Keywords and Subject Headings
Language, Rhetoric, Ideology, Poetry Analysis, Rhetorical Analysis, Unified Thinking
Abstract
Through the site of my own poetry collection, this thesis demonstrates a new framework of literary investigation and critical reflection, coining a reimagined approach to rhetorical analysis called Unified Thinking. This method uses a new conceptualization of rhetoric to uncover not simply what is said or how it is said, but rather, how the meaning of it is constructed through language itself—and particularly in the context of my poems, how systems of language perpetuate gaslighting, patriarchal structures, and neurotypical standards through ideological binaries. This project challenges conventional models of writing and rhetoric that treat language as a neutral channel, or rhetoric as simply persuasion. Instead, language, rhetoric, and writing become ontological and epistemological tools for discovering, shaping, and understanding human experience.
Because language structures everyday life, I approach analysis as a way to uncover how we actually live. As dominant ideologies set norms, standards, and expectations, our world is filtered through the language that is constructed by them. Therefore, we essentially act through predetermined systems that fix meaning in our interpretations, controlling not only what we say but how we understand. This creates reductionist conditions that don’t honor the ambiguity of language or the complexity of human nature. I examine this phenomenon within my poetry, revealing how language shapes identities and relationships through the very ways that we think.
At its core, this work approaches language not as a static system of fixed symbols but as a generative, living medium through which thought is developed. Rather than assuming words contain stable, predetermined meanings, I examine how language mediates between perception and thought, shaping the ways we interpret ourselves, others, and the world.
Within this project, rhetoric becomes an aware experience of how language functions, where the goal is the development of humanistic insight. I expand rhetoric beyond persuasion into a practice of meaning-making, one in which the self is inseparable from the rhetorical environment. In this sense, the emotional, psychological, and experiential dimensions of the self are not “unacademic” intrusions into rhetorical analysis but part of the rhetorical situation itself. I discover what I mean through the very acts of writing and analyzing, where personal context, emotional honesty, and introspective reflection become not departures from scholarship but methodological tools essential to it. If rhetoric is the imaginative and interpretive process that transforms language into knowledge and understanding, then my inner world is not an add-on to rhetorical meaning but its precondition. My personal approach to this thesis is what enables engagement with the human dimensions of rhetoric that reveal, question, and develop who we are.
Rooted in understanding rather than judgment, possibility rather than assumption—my lens of Unified Thinking uses critical inquiry to unify humanity in the presence of difference and ambiguity rather than resorting to binary thinking and assumptions that shape impulses within us to divide. I do not use Unified Thinking as an act of resistance toward ideological binaries, as this would ultimately go against its purpose and reinforce further division. Instead, I use it as an operation of awareness, conscious of conditioned thought patterns that provide insight in the way we interpret. By enabling a way to move beyond the limits of what feels instinctual when making meaning, Unified Thinking cultivates an understanding that fosters connection with others and the self.
Ultimately, I combine the academic and the personal—the emotional and the intellectual—to offer rewired ways of seeing that extend beyond the page, demonstrating through this project how careful attention to the construction of language can unify, challenge, and reimagine humanity.
Recommended Citation
Fitzpatrick, Samantha, "Unifying a Self Fractured by Language: A Critical Examination of Poetry that Rethinks Rhetorical Analysis" (2025). Culminating Projects in English. 68.
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/eng_etds/68
Comments/Acknowledgements
I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Dr. James Heiman, who has allowed me to introduce my own synthesized version of the UT theory and put his framework into public practice for the first time. He is a foundational figure who informs every idea in my thesis, giving me the knowledge and inspiration needed to make this project possible. His valuable insight and mentorship have profoundly shaped my growth as a thinker and writer, leaving a lasting impact on how I approach my writing, myself, and the world around me. Thank you, Dr. Heiman, for the enriching and transformative graduate experience. For putting meaningfulness behind academia and reminding us what it means to study in the field of the humanities.