Composition scholars who have written about trauma have typically focused on creating classrooms that are conducive to healing and learning. In doing this work, however, they have considered neither how PTSD nor other people’s responses to it can impact one’s perceived rhetoricity in the college classroom. In other words, they...
This thesis explores the ways in which creative placemaking, a neighborhood-based practice for building community, can offer community-building and civic action wisdom as a model for composition. This model brings attention to spatial metaphors for rhetoric and teaching that have persisted for millennia; it re-focuses us on community; it encourages...
My mother named me after Hollywood icon Katharine Hepburn, but what made a working-class girl grow to love this posh celebrity so much? The obvious answer is that my mother aspired to be posh herself; but lack of money or sophistication were not the only things impacting her potential— there...
Recent work in moral philosophy has displayed a renewed interest in ethics and ontology that consider the social constitution of the subject. However, these approaches to ethics, exemplified in Judith Butler’s work in Giving an Account of Oneself, often neglect the problem of antiblackness, which Afro-pessimist scholars argue operates at...
One reading of the post-postmodern literary period argues that as formal aesthetics have (re)engaged with ethics there has been a concomitant move to treat literature as a space of ethical potential. Adam Kelly has called this attitude, when combined with the appropriation of certain metafictional and postmodern techniques, the “New...
Hypermediation, as described by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin in their book Remediation, is a style of writing, recording, presenting, etc. that “makes us aware of the medium or media and (in sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious ways) reminds us of our desire for immediacy” (34). This mode of production...
A majority of eighteenth-century novels remain in regular print over two hundred years since their inception. Yet with the possible exception of Robinson Crusoe, they have largely fallen out of popularity, rarely appearing on "The Summer's Hottest Reading" lists or receiving celebrity endorsement. I consider Ian Watt's foundational study, The...
This collection of personal essays, inspired by Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, raises questions about the separation that becomes apparent through writing, education, and transitions between class. The author uses her personal experience of writing in, and attending a private university to explore the interactions of class, literacy, and education....
Within literacy and composition studies, writing, as a
social act, is believed by many to have the potential to effect
change in and transform situations of injustice. Community literacy,
as an emergent practice within composition studies, embraces
and stretches this notion of linking literacy to social
change. Community literacy also...
Traditional interpretations of James Joyce's Dubliners have often focused on the pervasive "paralysis" of the city, covered in the stories' range of "childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life." However, these approaches have limited their focus on the women in the stories, often spotlighting the male characters--and the author--through a Freudian...