In the public I: Rhetoric and subjectivity in first -person writing.
Item
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Title
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In the public I: Rhetoric and subjectivity in first -person writing.
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Identifier
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AAI3063876
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identifier
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3063876
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Creator
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Ryden, Wendy Ann.
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Contributor
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Adviser: George Otte
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Date
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2002
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Rhetoric and Composition | Education, Language and Literature | Education, Higher
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Abstract
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This dissertation focuses on subjectivity in first-person writing and especially the treatment of this issue within the field of composition. The teaching of college writing has not only concerned itself with the adjustment of student texts but also of student lives. As a result, writing instructors have a tendency, as Judith Summerfield puts it, to "conflate text with life." This has had both positive and negative consequences for pedagogy and for understanding student work. On the one hand, such a view ensures that writing instruction is about human development and human lives. But on the other hand, this same view sometimes obscures the performative nature of student writing and deprives it of its potential as public text, especially writing that is viewed as "personal" narrative.;Chapter one, "Nothing Personal?," locates the debate surrounding "personal" writing in the college English class within larger cultural boundaries of public and private and calls into question the therapeutic lens of humanistic psychology to which so-deemed personal writing is often subjected. In chapter two, "Composing Literacy," I consider subjectivity in the genre of the literacy narrative and its relation to cultural representations of literacy. Using Frederick Douglass's Narrative as a kind of seminal literacy narrative, I discuss the bildung nature of the genre as it equates literacy acquisition with a progressive narrative of development and liberation, and I look at student writing that appears to resist such classification. Chapter three, "Confessional Healing?," discusses the ongoing interest in writing and healing within and outside the field of composition. Through my own work with conducting writing workshops for cancer diagnosees and their families, I consider the question of audience as an under-theorized aspect of much writing and healing scholarship and argue that attention to audience is important to the subjectivity that such narratives engender. In chapter four, "Comp, Kitsch, Cliche: Bourgeois Realism in the Writing Classroom," I invoke theorists of kitsch to provide an interpretive frame through which to understand the reception of the personal in the college classroom and the moralizing tendency with which such narrative is often received.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
