I center my analysis on Amazon’s recent foray into alternative history The Man in the High Castle premised on Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel of the same name. Amazon Studio’s production The Man in the High Castle builds upon the premise of an alternative history where World War II ends differently. Here, the diegetic narrative depicts a United States split into three distinct regions: the east coast, now part of the German Reich; the Neutral Zone, or most of the Midwest and the Rocky Mountains; and the west coast, controlled by Japanese Empire. The film version debuted in 2015 as a series extending to four seasons of 10 episodes a piece by 2019. I argue that the show takes cues from modern political tensions, the rise of the alt-right and “post-truth” media manipulations, to intentionally destabilize viewers’ memories of the historical past. By blurring the boundaries between the diegetic reality of the show and our accepted version of history, The Man in the High Castle disrupts the facility in which the viewer assumes alignment with memory and past, opting instead for a complicated refiguring of the political present. Here I articulate how film as a medium tampers with the viewer’s ontological understanding of image by collapsing history and fiction together. Additionally, the capacity of film to provoke empathy from viewers complicates the universal condemnation of Nazism we are familiar with and permits viewers to see the banality of evil in this reimagined history. Finally, I discuss how film as a medium capitalizes on the incompleteness of memory and the loopholes of history to fabricate viewer memory.

This dissertation explores the discursive construction of work and family identities in the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) regulatory rulemaking process. It uses dramatism and public sphere theory along with the critical legal rhetoric perspective to analyze official FMLA legal texts as well as over 4,600 public comments submitted in response to the United States Department of Labor's 2008 notice of proposed rulemaking that ultimately amended the existing FMLA administrative regulations. The analysis in this dissertation concludes that when official and vernacular discourses intersect in a rulemaking process facilitated by the state, the facilitated public that emerges in that discourse is bounded by official discourses and appropriated language. But individuals in the process are able to convey and contest a range of work and family identities that include characteristics of public, private, abuse, accountability, sacrifice, and struggle. It further demonstrates that different circumferences for crafting work and family identities exist in the regulatory rulemaking process, including national, international, and time-bounded circumferences. Because the law is a discourse that has far-reaching rhetorical implications and the intersect between vernacular discourses and legal discourses is an underexplored area in both communication and legal studies, this dissertation offers a contribution to the ongoing work of scholars thinking about work and family identities, the material consequences of the intersect of work and family, and the rhetorical implications of legal discourse.