This study is an examination of the rhetorical concept of the dialectic as it is realized in selected works of North American dystopian literature. The dialectic is one of the main factors in curtailing enlightenment rationalism which, taken to an extreme, would deny man freedom while claiming to bestow freedom upon him. The focus of this dissertation is on an analysis of twentieth-century dystopias and the dialectic of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor parable which is a precursor to dystopian literature. The Grand Inquisitor parable of The Brothers Karamazov is a blueprint for dystopian states delineated in anti-utopian fiction. Also, Dostoevsky's parable constitutes a powerful dialectical struggle between polar opposites which are presented in the following twentieth-century dystopias: Zamiatin's Me, Bradbury's Farenheit 451, Vonnegut's Player Piano, and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The dialectic in the dystopian genre presents a give and take between the opposites of faith and doubt, liberty and slavery, and it often presents the individual of the anti-utopian state with a choice. When presented with the dialectic, then, the individual is presented with the capacity to make a real choice; therefore, he is presented with a hope for salvation in the totalitarian dystopias of modern twentieth-century literature.

Terlingua includes a scholarly foreword on illusion and reality in the writing of fiction. Five short stories are contained in this thesis. "Terlingua" relates the story of two students on a road trip who give a ride to a mysterious woman. "Zoology" is the first person narrative of a zoology graduate who picks up a socialite. "What about Sonoma?" is the story of two misfits whose affair comes to an end. "Losing Ground" examines a couple's relationship that changes because of the man's bowling injury and the woman's unexpected pregnancy. "The Jury Remembers Everything" is about a woman who becomes hesitant to marry her fiancé when she learns her mother may have once run away with a mortician. "Losing Ground" is a drama, and the other four stories are comedies.

Public Image is a screenplay which traces the lives of Joanne Tate, her husband, Mitchell Tate, and her sister, Marie Vaughn. Joanne decides to search for her sister after the death of their mother from breast cancer. Marie, who broke from the family after a bitter fight more than a decade before, is living in a shelter and facing eviction. Mitchell, meanwhile, is campaigning for re-election to his position as mayor of a large city. A major subplot in the script deals with the homeless issues in his city and the unscrupulous methods that Mitchell and his staff use to try to solve them. The characters must all learn the importance of family as they grapple with the obstacles they must overcome to find each other.

The purpose of this thesis is to determine whether the setting of the verb movement parameter in L2 is dependent on agreement acquisition. The Optionality hypothesis (Eubank, 1994) is tested by examining the L2 grammar of Chinese learners of English. To test this hypothesis, the sentence matching procedure originally described in Freedman and Forster (1985) is used. It is found that no current theory truly accounts for the results that are obtained.