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Publication Writing Across the Curriculum Program Development as Ideological and Rhetorical Practice(2009-09) Fulford, Carolyn J.Few research studies have focused on WAC program development. Those that exist do not examine the ideological grounds for programmatic changes. This dissertation explores the dynamics of such changes through a four-year ethnographic study of WAC program development at a small, public, liberal arts college. The study employed extensive participant observation, interviewing, and document collection to trace how curricular and cultural changes around writing take shape and what ideologies and rhetorical practices come into play during that complex change process. The site for the study is of special interest because WAC there was in transition from an informal coalition focused on changing culture and pedagogy to a potentially institutional program equally invested in curricular reform. My study documents the interactions that characterize the change process, using Jenny Edbauer's conception of rhetorical ecology for its explanatory power in non-linear discursive environments. I analyze rhetorical encounters between a wide range of institutional constituents, including administrators and faculty from multiple disciplines. In these encounters, higher education's historic ideologies surface and interact in complex ways with WAC's ideologies. Using critical discourse analysis, I unpack these interactions and ideological multilectics, examining how language and values circulate among multiple users, texts, and sites within the rhetorical ecology of one college, influencing the shape of program developments. WAC scholars suggest that contemporary practitioners need to forge alliances with other cross-curricular initiatives in order for WAC to continue as a viable educational movement. My analysis of how WAC advocates at one college positioned their efforts in relation to other curricular changes reveals both benefits and costs resulting from such alliances. Although alliances can produce significant reforms, working with groups that have divergent ideological premises risks positioning WAC in subordination to others' ideological priorities. Two intertwined strategies appear to mitigate this problem: 1) ideological recentering on WAC's core theoretical commitments and 2) formation of recombinant multilectics by identifying the ideologies in play and considering how, or whether, core WAC ideological commitments align with them. Acts of recentering that incorporate deliberate multilectics may be key survival strategies for WAC programs as they interact with other cross-curricular initiatives.Publication Writing for Social Action: Affect, Activism, and the Composition Classroom(2013-09) Finn, SarahDue to the public turn in Composition and Rhetoric, many teachers look beyond the academy in order to give students a "real" writing experience for social change purposes. However, as Bruce Horner notes, this denigrates the real work that is done within the classroom. In this dissertation, then, I argue that we can find ingredients for writing for social action in our courses, and we can do so by studying activist students who are already writing for just change. Using a case study methodology, I learn from activist students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I find that these students' activist positionalities are co-constructed by their work as students and as activists. Rather than a political space as opposed to an academic space, these students combine them. We can reconceptualize a reductive "student writer" position to an "activist student writer position" where students have agency to make rhetorical decisions to support their activism and use activist practices to strengthen their academic work. With this finding, we can re-conceive of academic space as political and open to "real" writing for social action. My major finding is that of an affective writing process as necessary for social action writing. This complex textual production takes material life experience and affective investments into account as they interact with students' writing choices to construct a rhetorical situation where change is possible. It is the writing process itself that allows students to make the necessary decisions to reconstitute their emotions to form a socially active text that they take satisfaction in and would want to circulate. I suggest that students writing outside of the classroom can engage in this process and arrive at a sense of affective agency. However, students inside the classroom do not have access to the full affective writing process due to their sense of being more limited in the academic rhetorical situation. This contrast indicates that teachers may support students' social action writing by creating conditions for students to craft their own rhetorical situations to engage with the full affective process that gives rise to social action.Publication A Multidirectional Memory Approach to Representations of Colonization, Racism, and Genocide in Literature(2013-05) Williams, Pamela LagergrenDirected by: Professor James E. Young This dissertation explores where historical memories concerning colonization, genocide, and racism intersect, merge, and overlap in multidirectional ways. The text opens by exploring the possibilities of using a multidirectional model of world history and then moves to a discussion of certain aspects of world political history that interrogates why some nations have dominated others. The focus then shifts to England's attitude toward perceived "others" in the crucial late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by examining contemporary theater drama. From there, the text moves on to current voices that have spoken out against the racism and genocide that have emerged as byproducts of empire building. Finally, possibilities for where we, as citizens of the world, can go from here in thinking through framing justice and equality for all its occupants is given the final voice in this text. My approach may be thought of as somewhat philosophical.Publication The Reflexive Scaffold: Metatheatricality, Genre, and Cultural Performance in English Renaissance Drama(2013-05) Leonard, Nathaniel C.The critical discussion of metatheatre has historically connected a series of reflexive dramatic strategies - like soliloquy, chorus, dumb show, the-play-within-the-play, prologue, and epilogue - and assumed that because these tropes all involve the play's apparent awareness of its own theatrical nature they all have similar dramaturgical functions. This dissertation, by contrast, shows that the efficacy derived from metatheatrical moments that overtly reference theatrical production is better understood in the context of restaged non-theatrical cultural performances. Restaged moments of both theatrical and non-theatrical social ritual produce layers of performance that allow the play to create representational space capable of circumventing traditional power structures. The Reflexive Scaffold argues that this relationship between metatheatricality and restaged moments of culture is central to interrogating the complexities of dramatic genre on the English Renaissance stage. This project asserts that a great deal of early modern English drama begins to experiment with staged moments of cultural performance: social, cultural, and religious events, which have distinct ramifications and efficacy both for the audience and in the world of the play. However, while these restaged social rituals become focal points within a given narrative, their function is determined by the genre of the play in which they appear. A play or a feast inserted into a comic narrative creates a very different sort of efficacy within the world of the play from that which is created when the same moment appears in a tragic narrative. These various types of performance give us a glimpse into the ways that early modern English dramatists understood the relationship between their works and the audiences who viewed them. I argue that the presentation and reinterpretation of early modern social ritual is utilized by many of the major playwrights of the English Renaissance, including Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, and Philip Massinger to redefine genre. These moments of reflexivity construct efficacy that, depending on the genre in which they appear, runs the gambit from reinforcing social order to directly critiquing the dominant cultural discourse.Publication Representing the Biblical Judith in Literature and Art: An Intertextual Cultural Critique(1994-05) Curry, Peggy L.The Biblical Judith was written over 2,000 years ago and has become elemental material for artists and writers who struggle with male and female identity. Questions about how beauty has been defined, and who has defined it, as well as the subject of violence as gender-specific territory arise out of the intertextual study of the many reworkings of Judith and Holofemes' "romance." A rich array of Judith characters are developed by artists and writers that reveal cultural values about women. Judith as chaste widow is visually presented in the stone archivolt of the Chartres Cathedral and in Alfred Stevens Victorian painting. She is present in the literature by way of the Old English epic; through Christine de Pizan's allusion in The Book of the City of Ladies and Guillaume Salluste du Bartas' epic, La Judit (1574). Christina of Markyate's chaste sexuality is due to her reverence for Mary and Judith articulated in her twelfth century autobiography. In some of Chaucer's Canterbury tales, Judith, like Custance is upheld as the essence of virtue and purity, while in other tales, she appears suspect. In the tradition of the "woman worthy" or femme forte there is Donatello's statue (ca. 1456-60), Giorgione's sixteenth century painting, and a multitude of works by Botticelli, Mantegna and Cranach. But the strength of the artist and her figures are felt in Artemisia Gentileschi's five paintings of Judith and her cohort, A bra. In studying Artemisia I found myself standing with Mary Garrard, Artemisia, Judith and the Handmaid in a newly formed collage of strength. And soon Shelley Reed, a Cambridge artist, joined us with her revision of Hans Baldung's sixteenth century painting in which she again removes the head and leaves the figure of a woman defending her right to bodily integrity. Judith's sexual provocativeness is a favorite image in art as she becomes stereotyped as the femme fatale. Hans Baldung (1525), Saraceni (1615-20), Valentin de Boulogne (ca. 1626), Vouet (1621), Caravaggio (1598-99), Rubens (1630s), Correggio (1512-14), Vemet (1831) and Klimt (1901, 1909) present us with a riveting portfolio on this theme. Contemporary literature is saturated with the sexual nature of power provoked by Judith and Holofemes. Plays by Hebbel, Giraudoux and Barker provide Judith with a far from heroic finish. But Nicholas Mosley's Judith finds a way to survive with Holofemes: heads do not roll, they connect. Such deep and moving dialogs are formed between art and literature in the study of Judith that I hope the annotated bibliography of 480 works of literature, art and music included in the Appendix invites further study.Publication Technologies of Racial Formation: Asian-American Online Identities(2012-09) Dich, LinhMy dissertation is an ethnographic study of Asian-American users on the social network site, Xanga. Based on my analysis of online texts, responses to texts, and participants' discussions of their writing motivations, my research strongly suggests that examining digital writing through participants' complex and overlapping constructions of their community and public(s) can help the field reconsider digital writing as a site of Asian-American rhetoric and as a process of constructing and transforming racial identities and relations. In particular, I examine how community and public, as interconnected and shifting writing imaginaries on Xanga, afford Asian-American users on this site the opportunity to write, explore, and circulate their racial and ethnic identities for multiple purposes and various audiences. Race and ethnicity, as many scholars argue, are shifting and unstable concepts and experiences. Therefore, writing about race and ethnicity may be done best in environments that can accommodate complex and multiple acts of racial and ethnic formations. While my research demonstrates how participants "want to be heard" on their own terms, whom they imagine (or want to imagine) as listening/reading significantly informs their writing. That is, participants' conceptions of their writing goals and their audiences are multiple and simultaneous--these racial and ethnic writing acts are often inflected by intersecting issues of gender, sexuality, class, culture, and intergenerational tensions--and, hence, traditional writing genres that limit such goals, audiences, and complexity do not always reflect how writers conceive of their own racial and ethnic experiences and their writing in the world. This study, then, examines Xanga as a flexible writingecologythat affords Asian-American users opportunities to compose their continuously transforming and complex racial and ethnic identities across multiple niches of representational sites and, specifically, in public and community spaces.Publication A 'Living Art': Working-Class, Transcultural, and Feminist Aesthetics in the United States, Mexico, and Algeria, 1930s(2012-05) Morgan, Tabitha AdamsThe cultural productions of Katherine Anne Porter, Anita Brenner, Tina Modotti, Maria Izquierdo, and Juanita Guccione represent a distinctive interweaving of gender and class consciousness, national identification and political resistance, as represented in their artistic work. These five women became transnational carriers of a radical realist and modernist thought, culture, and ideology that became transported through their art when their gendered and classed bodies were left otherwise silenced and boundaried. These women, their cultural productions, and the ways in which their art generates a counter discourse to the dominant and institutionalized conceptions of transculturalism, aesthetics, and re-production, are vital to understanding the co-construction of nationhood as well as the self-determined creation of the individual self. From this overarching framework, I will explore how these women negotiated political conceptions of nationhood, artistic genres such as realism and modernism, and then created their own feminist, transcultural and working-class aesthetics to counter otherwise limited conceptions of individual agency.Publication How Should I Act?: Shakespeare and the Theatrical Code of Conduct(2012-05) Garner, Ann E.This dissertation examines the intersection of English Renaissance drama and conduct literature. Current scholarship on this intersection usually interprets plays as illustrations of cultural behavioral norms who find their model and justification in courtly norms. In this dissertation, I argue that plays present behavioral norms that emerge from this nascent profession and that were thus influenced by this profession and the concerns of the people who worked in it, rather than by the court. To do so, I examine three behavioral norms that were important to courtiers, specifically Disguise, Moderation and Wit through the work of the English Renaissance theater’s most celebrated professional, William Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s plays evince a theatrical code of conduct that, rather than being an illustration of courtly norms, was sometimes in direct contrast to them and sometimes formed an alternate or lateral code. This code shows a distrust of disguise, a lack of interest in moderation and a belief in the need to eschew wit in favor of a happy ending. The modern theater has retained many of these essential behavioral norms, including the value of community above the self, the need for sympathy and compassion, and the willingness to risk.Publication The Guerilla Tongue": The Politics of Resistance in Puerto Rican Poetry(2012-02) Azank, NatashaThis dissertation examines how the work of four Puerto Rican poets – Julia de Burgos, Clemente Soto Vélez, Martín Espada, and Naomi Ayala – demonstrates a poetics of resistance. While resistance takes a variety of forms in their poetic discourse, this project asserts that these poets have and continue to play an integral role in the cultural decolonization of Puerto Rico, which has been generally unacknowledged in both the critical scholarship on their work and the narrative of Puerto Rico’s anti-colonial struggle. Chapter One discuses the theoretical concepts used in defining a poetics of resistance, including Barbara Harlow’s definition of resistance literature, Edward Said’s concepts of cultural decolonization, and Jahan Ramazani’s theory of transnational poetics. Chapter Two provides an overview of Puerto Rico’s unique political status and highlights several pivotal events in the nation’s history, such as El Grito de Lares, the Ponce Massacre, and the Vieques Protest to demonstrate the continuity of the Puerto Rican people’s resistance to oppression and attempted subversion of their colonial status. Chapter Three examines Julia de Burgos’ understudied poems of resistance and argues that she employs a rhetoric of resistance through the use of repetition, personification, and war imagery in order to raise the consciousness of her fellow Puerto Ricans and to provoke her audience into action. By analyzing Clemente Soto Vélez’s use of personification, anaphora, and most importantly, juxtaposition, Chapter Four demonstrates that his poetry functions as a dialectical process and contends that the innovative form he develops throughout his poetic career reinforces his radical perspective for an egalitarian society. Chapter Five illustrates how Martín Espada utilizes rich metaphor, sensory details, and musical imagery to foreground issues of social class, racism, and economic exploitation across geographic, national, and cultural borders. Chapter six traces Naomi Ayala’s feminist discourse of resistance that denounces social injustice while simultaneously expressing a female identity that seeks liberation through her understanding of history, her reverence for memory, and her relationship with the earth. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Burgos, Soto Vélez, Espada, and Ayala not only advocate for but also enact resistance and social justice through their art.Publication Milton's Visionary Obedience(2011-09) Watt, Timothy IrishThis dissertation is a study of the work of John Milton, most especially of his late poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. The early poetry, the prose tracts, and Christian Doctrine are considered in their developmental relation to those late poems. The question my study addresses is this: What does Milton mean by obedience? The critical approach used to address the question is as much philosophical-theological as it is literary. My project seeks to understand the shaping role of Milton's theology on his poetry: that is, to attempt to recreate and understand Milton's thinking on obedience from Milton's perspective. To this end, I focus on providing contextualized, attentive readings of key poetic moments. The contexts I provide are those derived from the two great heritages Milton had at his disposal--the Classical and Christian traditions. The poetic moments I attend to are most usually theologically and conceptually difficult moments, moments in which Milton is working out (as much as reflecting on or demonstrating or poeticizing) his key theological concerns, chief among them, obedience. Milton's concept of obedience is not just an idea developed within given interpretive frameworks, Classical, Christian, and a specific historic context, England in the seventeenth century. It is a strangely practical structure of being intended by Milton to recollect something of the disposition of Adam and Even before the fall. In other words, Miltonic obedience is multifaceted and complex. To address the complexity and nuance of what Milton means by obedience, I suggest that Milton's idea of obedience may be understood as a concept. The definitional source of Milton's concept of obedience is the Bible, and various texts of the Classical tradition. The necessary mechanism of the concept is Milton's idea of right timing, derived from the Greek idea of kairos. The necessary condition of Miltonic obedience is unknowing. With Milton's concept of obedience fully established, the dissertation concludes by suggesting connections between Milton's religious imagination and his political engagements. If Milton's paramount value was obedience, it was so because his paramount concern was liberty, for himself and for his nation.Publication Writing the Local-Global: An Ethnography of Friction and Negotiation in an English-Using Indonesian Ph.D. Program(2011-09) Engelson, AmberSuresh Canagarajah, John Trimbur, Bruce Horner, and others argue that U.S. scholars must begin imagining their academic institutions as part of larger global English conversations, which would involve expanding Western perceptions of "good writing" to allow for the cultural and ideological differences implied by the term "global." Horner and Trimbur, for instance, urge compositionists to take an "internationalist perspective" to writing instruction, to ask, "whose English and whose interests it serves" in relation to the "dynamics of globalization" (624). To better understand what it means to write internationally in English, I conducted ethnographic research at the Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies (ICRS), a self-identified "Indonesian, international, interreligious Ph.D. program," in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. My ten-month ethnographic project, which drew from teacher research, interviews with students and faculty, and student texts, suggests that English, though linked to Western cultural imperialism--and thus Western ideology-- can no longer be considered solely a Western language, useful only for Western purposes and audiences. The first section of this dissertation focuses on institutional and individual identity construction in relation to ICRS's local-global goals and what the program's language policy terms the "painful decision" to adopt English despite being "aware of the imperialism of English." By placing Indonesian language history in conversation with faculty and student interviews, this section suggests that language, whether local or global, is never entirely "authentic" or "imperialist"--that English, despite its imperialist implications, is also capable of representing Indonesian identities. The second section of this dissertation shifts from identity negotiation to frictions involved with the actual writing process, particularly in relation to culture, audience, and rhetorical choice. Drawing from Bakhtin's notion of diachronic audience, this section explores the complexity involved in determining "whose English" is appropriate given ICRS's Indonesian, yet international intentions and the multiple audiences, both local and global, suggested thereby. This section highlights cultural and material frictions students reported when moving between Indonesian and Western rhetorical traditions--and thus audiences-- while also highlighting how students re-articulate English as both local and global, Indonesian and international as they write to the multiple audiences suggested by English as an international language.Publication "Whether Writers Themselves Have Been Changed": A Test of the Values Driving Writing Center Work(2011-09) Deal, MichelleThis project questions a core value that writing center workers have long held about tutoring writing: that we change writers. Applying sociocognitive and Bakhtinian lenses, I was able to complicate theory-practice connections. Tutor-tutee negotiations during tutorials, tutees' perceived learning outcomes, and their revisions were compared with their reasons for revising so that I could investigate what tutees potentially learn from their tutors, how, and why. Data indicated if tutors' information/advice became, in Bakhtin's terms, internally persuasive to tutees. When the authoritative discourses tutors represent or endorse converge with students' internally persuasive discourses, they converge in students' revision choices as tutor-tutee interdiscursivity. I proposed that such a convergence can lead to "changed" writers, writers who alter their understanding of themselves as writers and/or modify their thinking about a given paper, concept, or process. Even though students granted their tutors considerable authority, most tutees examined their tutors' comments to see if they made sense and were worthy of internalizing as generalized concepts to help them meet current writing goals. In short, tutors do indeed change writers, as I have defined change in the context of this study. Work with specific papers can impact students in terms of their larger process and development as writers; tutors' strategies/concepts can become writers' strategies/concepts to be applied again in new contexts. However, even when tutees were internally persuaded and appeared to have changed as writers, analyses into their tutorials, revisions, perceived learning outcomes, and reasons for revising showed that some students took up their tutors' information/advice in ways beyond their tutor's control. What some students internalize can be situation-specific and may not necessarily translate to other writing projects, can be significant yet limited understandings of rhetorical concepts, and may not appear in their revised drafts. Students can also be resistant to rhetorical concepts and revision strategies, especially those they perceive as antithetical to their ideological views about process, content, or structure. Given the variety of reasons students revise, the multiple contexts and influences affecting tutorials, and the ensuing challenges inherent in assessing tutorials, I recommend that tutors do not measure their success based on the Northian idea of a writing center. Though we do change writers, I recommend writing center workers think about successful tutorials in more complex ways than our Northian goal might imply. Tutors' successes are not dependent on changes to writers but on their ability to collaboratively negotiate with writers. Instead of trying to prove the efficacy of writing center tutorials as direct cause and effect relationship, I recommend that writing center administrators try to demonstrate how tutorials foster several habits of mind that college students need to cultivate to become successful writers.Publication The Transparent Mask: American Women's Satire 1900-1933(2011-05) Hans, Julia BoissoneauAn interdisciplinary study of women satirists of the Progressive and Jazz eras, the dissertation investigates the ways in which early modernist writers use the satiric mode either as an elitist mask or as a site of resistance, confronts the theoretical limitations that have marginalized women satirists in the academic arena, and points to the destabilizing, democratic potential inherent in satiric discourse. In the first chapter, I introduce the concept of signifying caricature, an exaggerated characterization that carries with it broad social, political, and cultural critique. Edith Wharton uses a signifying caricature in The Custom of the Country where the popular press, middlebrow literature, and the democratization of language is under attack. Several of Wharton’s satiric stories also ridicule the New Woman, revealing Wharton’s anxiety over women functioning in the public arena. The second chapter features recovery work of May Isabel Fisk, an internationally known comic monologist whose work has been lost to scholars. This chapter examines Fisk’s monologues, paying particular attention to her use of the eiron and alazon comic figures. The dissertation then moves on to Dorothy Parker’s biting satires of Jazz era decadence, the sexual double standard, and the oppressive norms of feminine beauty promoted in mass culture. The study concludes with an analysis of Jessie Fauset’s Comedy: American Style, a novel using a signifying caricature to chastise America’s failed racial policies and an essentialist theory of race. Comedy: American Style is an overlooked Depression era satire that challenges notions of a fixed American cultural nationalism even as it presages the idea of race as a floating signifier.Publication The Writer and The Sentence: A Critical Grammar Pedagogy Valuing the Micro(2011-02) Stanley, Sarah ElizabethLisa Delpit points out that when process pedagogues ignore grammar in their teaching of writing, they further the achievement gap between students of a variety of backgrounds. She then argues for a grammar/skills based pedagogy rather than process pedagogy in order to bridge the language differences students bring to the classroom. On the other hand, progressive-minded educators deeply question if skills pedagogy could ever transform unjust social conditions and relationships. Grammar pedagogy may potentially empower an individual's chance at social mobility, but what about the need for social change and respecting language diversity? Both sides of this important debate assume that grammar is a skill and that to teach grammar to writers is skills-based teaching. I challenge these assumptions in my qualitative teacher inquiry, prompted by this question: What difference would it make if the way I practiced grammar became more in tune with my beliefs about critical literacy practice? My dissertation takes up this question by arguing for a curriculum that links grammar and critical thinking and reporting on a qualitative study of this curriculum in action in my Basic Writing classroom. For this curriculum, I consciously engage theoretical micro-perspectives informed by a social semiotic view of grammar and language, explained in my dissertation as Critical Grammar. Such theoretical ground builds on the pedagogical grammars of Martha Kolln and Laura Micciche as well as the critical classroom and research practices of Min-Zhan Lu and Roz Ivanic. I then research Critical Grammar, my theoretical term, through a case study approach to my classroom, specifically through inductive, comparative analysis of how writers discuss sentence-level options and drawn on arhetorical, rhetorical, and critical reasoning in sentence workshops. My case study methodology helps me discover the effects of such discussions on a writer's final draft. Each case traces the process of composing and revising the sentence from first to final draft of an essay, drawing from the writer's process reflections, feedback from me and peers, and class workshop discussions of the sentence. In this way, the mini-cases capture how writers authorized themselves and responded to each other in ethical and resourceful ways. These case studies challenge notions that a teacher's knowledge of grammar should be in service of identifying error patterns and teaching editing skills. In sentence workshops, writers take responsibility for their sentence-level choices and authorize themselves through their ideas, often resulting in dynamic class discussions that inform their writing in a range of ways, the least of which is error reduction. In discussing choices of wording or arrangement, for instance, they would link to issues of a writer's ethos, questions of who/what has the authority for setting language standards, and cultural beliefs. At the same time, based in this research, errors were found to be implicit in Critical Grammar, leading toward further consideration concerning the function of error in Critical Grammar pedagogy. Finally, Critical Grammar was determined to be most successful when it complemented the ideological aspects to an existing curricular perspective on language.Publication Raiding the Inarticulate: Postmodernisms, Feminist Theory and Black Female Creativity(2010-05) Hennessy, C. MargotThis is an investigation into the ways that postmodern theories and feminist theories have both failed to learn from each other and yet also reveal the blindness' implicit in each other. Postmodern theory has consistently failed to engage gender in any significant way and feminist theory has consisted failed to find the usefulness of the methods and questions posed by postmodern theorists. Both approaches have failed to address the very real and important perspectives of the post colonial others who have been addressing the questions of race, gender, history, and agency for hundred of years. The second half of this investigation looks specifically at the work of three African American women writers, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor and Gayle Jones, in their most recent work. All three novels, Beloved, Mama Day and Corregidora are historical novels concerned with the legacy of slavery, and these narratives themselves exceed all the expectation for postmodern theory and feminist theory in inviting us to understand the relationship between history, memory and the now. In effect the work of these writers succeeds in "theorizing the present" in ways that both feminism and postmodernism fail.Publication Just Like Hitler': Comparisons To Nazism in American Culture(2010-05) Johnson, Brian Scott‚ÄòJust Like Hitler‚Äô explores the manner in which Nazism is used within mass American culture to create ethical arguments. Specifically, it provides a history of Nazism‚Äôs usage as a metaphor for evil. The work follows that metaphor‚Äôs usage from its origin with dissemination of camp liberation imagery through its political usage as a way of describing the communist enemy in the Cold War, through its employment as a vehicle for criticism against America‚Äôs domestic and foreign policies, through to its usage as a personal metaphor for evil. Ultimately, the goal of the dissertation is to describe the ways in which the metaphor of Nazism has become ubiquitous in discussion of ethics within American culture at large and how that ubiquity has undermined definitions of evil and made them unavailable. Through overuse, Nazism has become a term to vague to describe anything, but necessary because all other definitions of evil are subject to contextualization and become diminished through explanation. The work analyzes works of postwar literature but also draws in state sponsored propaganda as well as works of popular culture. Because of its concentration on Nazism as a ubiquitous definition of evil, it describes American culture through a survey of its more prominent, popular, and lauded works.Publication Gothic Journeys: Imperialist Discourse, the Gothic Novel, and the European Other(2010-05) Bondhus, Charles MichaelIn 1790s England, an expanding empire, a growing diaspora of English settlers in foreign territories, and spreading political unrest in Ireland and on the European continent all helped to contribute to a destabilization of British national identity. With the definition of ‚ÄúEnglishperson‚Äù in flux, Ireland, France, and Italy‚Äînations which are prominently featured in William Godwin‚Äôs Caleb Williams (1794), Ann Radcliffe‚Äôs The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797), and Mary Shelley‚Äôs Frankenstein (1818)‚Äîcould be understood, similar to England‚Äôs colonies, as representing threats to the nation‚Äôs cultural integrity. Because the people of these European countries were stereotypically perceived as being economically impoverished victims of political and ‚Äúpopish‚Äù tyranny, it would have been easy to construct them in popular and literary discourse as being both socially similar to the ‚Äúprimitive‚Äù indigenous populations of colonized territories and as uneasy reminders of England‚Äôs own ‚Äúpremodern‚Äù past. Therefore, the overarching goal of this project is twofold. First, it attempts to account for the Gothic‚Äôs frequent‚Äîalbeit subtle‚Äîuse of imperialist rhetoric, which is largely encoded within the novels‚Äô representations of sublimity, sensibility, and domesticity. Second, it claims that the novels under consideration are preoccupied with testing and reaffirming the salience of bourgeois English identity by placing English or Anglo-inflected characters in conflict with ‚Äúmonstrous‚Äù continental Others. In so doing, these novels use the fictions of empire to contain and claim agency over a revolutionary France, an uncertainlypositioned Ireland, and a classically-appealing but socially-problematic Italy.Publication Literacy and Religious Agency: An Ethnographic Study of an Online LDS Women‚Äôs Group(2009) Pavia, Catherine MatthewsThis dissertation is based on an ethnographic study of a discussion board and its 120-150 female participants, all of whom are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). My primary goal was to discover how the women‚Äôs religion influences their uses of and the rewards of their online literacy and how their online writing affects how they practice their faith and define themselves. Methods of inquiry included two years of participant observation, phenomenological interviewing, discourse analysis interviewing, and collection of discussion board threads. Participants‚Äô spoken comments and writing show how they created an enclave in order to communicate in ways driven by their religious beliefs and to discuss the multiple essences that emerge as they live their faith. Participants‚Äô literacy practices also demonstrate that the discussion board functions simultaneously as a private board and as a public LDS community, in which participants use intimate literacy to construct public voices that are in harmony with LDS teachings but that reflect their individual differences with those teachings. My analysis reveals that writing in this enclave often contributed to openmindedness and critical agency. The participants conscientiously engaged in both deliberative discourse and in a pragmatics of naming to claim religious essences and to negotiate their multiple relationships to their religious doctrine, even as they accept that doctrine. In doing so, they have found power to resist other cultural discourses. They also have become more open to difference within their community. This study shows that agency can occur within a fixed structure because there are choices within fixity and that religious discourses offered participants a position of resistance from which to speak. This study suggests the importance of qualitative research on private contexts for faith-based literacy because public contexts may not be deemed as ‚Äúsafe‚Äù for discussions of fluidity within faith. I argue that composition studies and literacy studies need to pay attention to the extent to which religion informs individuals‚Äô literacy practices, particularly students who struggle to reconcile the coexistence of religious and academic literacies. I also suggest pedagogical tactics for welcoming faith-based literacies in the composition classroom.Publication CATCH FEELINGS: CLASS AFFECT AND PERFORMATIVITY IN TEACHING ASSOCIATES' NARRATIVES(2017-05) Napoleone, Anna RitaIn this dissertation, I argue that a better understanding of class affectations in teacher identity and the social space of academia may lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the way class manifests itself in academic spaces. Previous research in Composition and Rhetoric has shown that social class, specifically working-class literacy practices, frequently challenges or is in direct opposition to academic literacy practices, and that teachers respond to such class interference negatively. Little research has been done on how teachers' attachments to certain class norms and/or backgrounds affects how they interact with academic literacy and/or how they respond to students. This study investigates how the performance and performative aspects of class intersect (or influence) teaching practices, teacher identity, and teachers’ perceptions of their students. Through a qualitative case study of graduate student teaching associates (TOs), I examine the ways in which the participants narrate their understanding of their classed identities in the social space of academia, and seek to understand the broader landscape of classed identities in academic space. In contrast to composition scholarship that largely looks at class identity as static, my study shows that we cannot predict behavior based on class identities but that class is always part of this negotiation. How class emerges in social space is not a simple cause-effect process; however, that does not mean that class analysis doesn’t reveal systemic issues. The expectations of academic social space produce different reactions/actions on the part of teachers based on their class background, exposing the classed nature of academic social space that usually remains invisible and, like whiteness, unnamed. The study revealed the need to think of class not only as an identity, but perhaps more along the lines of an epistemology. I went into the study thinking about the individual performances and class identities, but what became more important was the larger scope of understanding class as a way of knowing, acting, and feeling that responds to aspects of social space. Furthermore, the study revealed the need to pay attention to the language practices and position-taking that are part of academia, and to examine the ways that working-class students and teachers are coerced into performing white middle-class ways of being in order to become “legitimate.”Publication Latina Identities, Critical Literacies, and Academic Achievement in Community College(2017-05) Lynn, MorganThis qualitative case study research looks at the intersections of identity, literacy, and achievement for Latina community college students in the East Bay Area of California. The women that I center in this dissertation show how Latinas are multiply positioned within their communities, families, and schools, and how they negotiate damaging and reductive language and literacy ideologies in order to achieve their academic dreams. Following critical sociocultural theories on literacy, Critical Race Theory, and Latina Feminism, I emphasize a strengths-based, affirmation approach that positions the women as theorizers of their own lived experiences and highlights their resiliency. The data in this study show the intersections between ideology and agency, and the complex, and often contradictory attitudes, practices, and strategies the women use to achieve. They must negotiate the enduring impacts of racialized language and literacy ideologies and their histories of participation in the educational pipeline in California. This marginalization challenges their academic identities, and creates feelings of incompetency, not “belonging,” and, most importantly for those of us studying literacy in higher education, confusion about their language and literacy capacities. In addition, the data show that they have not had and continue to not have skilled help related to the intersections of language and literacy acquisition from instructors. Yet, while they experienced tensions in their gendered, ethnic, and academic identities, all saw their identities as Latina women as a strength or an asset, which I argue is a resistant strategy to the sexism in their communities and racist/sexist stereotypes in the educational system. But the women do not see these culturally resilient resources as academic strategies or connected to academics sufficiently to help build their confidence, nor does the system offer them ways to see their assets as academic in nature. For those in Composition and Rhetoric, this data means more work is needed to understand the language and literacy histories, practices, and attitudes of Latinas and effective pedagogies to tap their strengths and affirm their identities and cultures as the acquire academic literacy.