This project responds to the discourse of crisis in literacy and large-scale literacy assessment by demonstrating how unexamined deployments of literacy erase the complexity of literate acts. Utilizing archives of nineteenth-century student writing as well as disciplinary and institutional histories, this study recovers student writing as material social practice, foregrounding, rather than effacing, cultural contradictions at three institutional sites. Drawing on scholarship in literary, cultural, and New Literacy Studies, this project returns to the literacy crisis at nineteenth-century Harvard and asks the critical question: what were Harvard examiners reading when they were reading illiteracy? Harvard scholars A. S. Hill, Barrett Wendell, and LeBaron Russell Briggs evaluated student writing according to its literary value, identifying two key elements of stylecommonplaceness and sentimentalityas indicators of subliteracy that signified dependence. The exclusionary effects of these unexamined assumptions are brought into relief by then examining, as primary texts, student compositions at Illinois Industrial University and Radcliffe College. My reading of the coursework done by two populations previously excluded from higher education, farmers and women, indicates that they appropriated local discourses and negotiated the contradictions of their own institutional sites in order to enact independent subjectivities. While literary appreciation does not currently carry the same kind of weight in assessing literacy, I find that the conflation of literacy and republican independence functions to efface the complexity of literacy and disguises what Brian Street calls ideological models of literacy as autonomous. As deeply political decisions regarding access and placement constitute so much of our work, this project suggests that all of us in English studies reevaluate how our own construction of value and our large-scale assessment practices may function to reinforce, rather than complicate, autonomous models of literacy.

WORKING KNOWLEDGE: COMPOSITION AND THE TEACHING OF PROFESSIONAL WRITING Jean A. Grace, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2008 The curricular and research project called professional writing in the academy is currently held at some remove from the institution. This dissertation argues for a reconsideration of professional writing as advanced composition, a move that can invigorate both composition studies and the teaching of professional writing. I argue that professional writing, an area of instruction that developed alongside composition in the 19th and 20th centuries, can benefit from an infusion of the theory that shapes some of the notable trends in composition studies today. Doing so makes possible a professional writing pedagogy that is centered on students and student writing, that offers a rich understanding of the writing process and the ways that writing works, that explores intertextuality, and that allows student writers to connect with what can be at stake for professional writers. In return, the teaching of professional writing offers space to think through some of the current tensions in composition, such as the continuing resistance to teaching what some see as service courses. The teaching of professional writingas advanced composition rather than as a course that is only connected with preparation for the workforceis one path toward defining and enacting the relevance of composition studies and can allow the field of composition studies to carve out an interesting and rich area of work and inquiry at the undergraduate level. By offering a study of the textual presence of 19th and 20th century business and technical writing textbooks in the U.S., this dissertation documents the remarkable stability of some moves in the teaching of professional writing. I argue that textbooks are significant artifacts that both represent and shape ways of approaching the teaching of professional writing. This study also discusses persistent tensions in composition studies that tend to marginalize professional writing and explores the ways in which some prominent features of current composition theory and practice can productively inform the teaching of professional writing. Finally, the dissertation explores the implications of the preceding chapters for defining a pedagogy of professional writing and for creating and administering a professional writing program.

Marking the invention of cinema as a point of entry and consequent filmic narratives about Jesus as aesthetic documents, this study will demonstrate how movie-going, due to its similarity to the devotional exercise of "worship" and the motion picture's continual co-option for perceived religious purposes as readily indicated by the recent reception of The Passion of the Christ, complicates what otherwise might be the obvious distinction between the sacred and the profane. Examining the way in which the spectator is prompted by certain traditions of cinematic language and interpretation, this dissertation demonstrates how the representation of the Jesus in cinema must by definition always insinuate the sacrosanct, even if the symbol or image is presented in a context perceived to be secular. In this way, the Jesus film works as a hybrid text that through its study makes possible new ways of understanding both space and power. As a medium commonly engaged in public, cinema that represents Jesus is difficult to distinguish as exclusively sacred or profane, as these texts inevitably borrow from the tradition of both spaces. This study also investigates how the claims of directors of Jesus films inform the perceptions of both audiences and critics, and how the use of certain key terms situate a language of exchange between artist-commodity and consumer that only suggests more thoroughly what Bazin described as the inescapable historical combination of circumstances that institutionally and ideologically frame the auteur. Through careful film analysis, this study argues that throughout the twentieth-century the cinematic choices that filmmakers have made seem to be limited not by artistic sensibilities, but by the politics of the image itself, especially in terms of casting. Spanning from Sidney Olcott's From the Manger to the Cross (1912) to more recent works like The Passion of the Christ (2004), this study challenges certain so-called auteur filmmakers like Martin Scorsese's own claims regarding the difference of The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) from other films about Jesus, while carefully examining many other films in an attempt to determine how democratically Jesus can be represented in mainstream cinema.

Undertaking a genealogical study of contemporary Hindu nationalism in India, this dissertation demonstrates how a new, metropolitan, and largely Anglophone version of cultural Hinduization is signaling a transformative shift in postcolonialism as political and aesthetic self-representation. The primary archive for the study ranges from foundational scriptural texts of the 'canon of Hinduism' and the writings of late 19th and early 20th century Hindu nationalists to traditions to the Anglophone political journalism of new-age Hindu intellectuals like Jay Dubashi, television productions of epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and contemporary Indian writing in English. This constellation of texts reveals that if an important phase of global postcolonial culture was founded in the difference between center and periphery, then we are now witnessing new aesthetic forms which recode national peripheral space as in fact coterminous with the space of the metropolitan-center. It is precisely such a recoding that the contemporary literature of the Indian diaspora writes itself into, democratizing differences between national and imperial contexts by inducting the urban hubs of the Global South into a continuum of supranational terminals for the mobility of virtual capital. The study demonstrates how such formations overlap with the language of contemporary Hinduization, as the latter in its own way equates neo-liberal economism, militarization, and technologism with the 'holy cows of Hindu scriptures.' Deploying religion as a flexible adjustment of linguistic and visual signs, rather than a scriptural tradition, this new 'rhetoric of Hindu India' violently yokes collusive neo-liberalism and cultural Hinduization on a single plane of normalized regularities. Such a plane of regularities promises a post-postcolonial culture which is no longer debilitated by theories of difference, whether between tradition and modernity, or nation and empire. In the face of this dangerous historical shift, my dissertation concludes that the task of the anti-imperial mind in our contemporary time is to destabilize such applications of political-cultural sameness. It is to return 'difference' to its philosophical beginnings in the indeterminacies of figurative language and to demonstrate how such indeterminacies are a refracting surface for the lived histories of capitalist-imperial unevenness.

THE LABOR THEORY OF CULTURE Stephen Tumino, Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2008 The Labor Theory of Culture is a rigorous inquiry into the commonsense of contemporary cultural theory and an effort to articulate a materialist cultural theory as an alternative to the commonsense. Cultural theory, I believe, in focusing on the immanence of culture separate from economics, has ultimately separated culture entirely from the labor relations and conflicts in which it is always involved. It has become so focused on the details of culture and cultural difference that it cannot address cultural difference except on its own immanent terms. It has therefore been increasingly unable, I suggest, to account for the new complexities of culture in relation to the emerging global class dynamics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. I argue that by developing a labor theory of culture based on the texts of classical Marxism it becomes possible to address not only the immanent specifics of culture but culture's relation to its outside, which I think provides for a more comprehensive analysis of culture. I realize that to argue for a labor theory of culture today is to write against the grain of cultural theory. I therefore spend some time closely analyzing some of the central assumptions under girding "culturalism" by reading specific texts of theorists such as Georg Lukacs, Stuart Hall, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek, and Antonio Negri, whose work have transformed the vocabularies and interpretive strategies of contemporary cultural theory. The self-situating of the labor theory of culture is important because almost all contemporary cultural theories regard themselves to be material, if not materialist. The question of what makes materiality in cultural theory is therefore a central question of my project. I for the most part focus on (post)modern North-Atlantic cultural theory and look at the way that the relation of culture to materiality has been deployed in the texts of Immanuel Kant, Roger Scruton, Tom Cohen, Fredric Jameson and Antonio Negri, as well as provide detailed readings of literature (Kafka), art (Matthew Barney), film (The Butcher Boy), and the "culture wars," to make my argument for a labor theory of culture in the contemporary more concrete. iv

This dissertation explores how first-year students use the feedback they receive from others as they revise their writing. Of particular interest is the feedback that students receive from writing center peer tutors. Through analysis of the feedback students received from various individuals (classroom peers, peer tutors, and teachers) in two sites (first year composition classrooms and the writing center), I clarify the effects responses from these individuals have on students revision. To determine the role tutorials, specifically, play in students development as revisers, I conducted a semester-long study of writing at a liberal arts university. I used two major research strategies: (1) a questionnaire about students practices of revision and (2) case studies of nine first-year composition students. Data has been collected from interviews, writing center tutorials, first-year composition class meetings, and drafts and revisions of students papers. This dissertation challenges several established claims within composition studies: that first-year students revise in limited ways; that they usually focus on word-level issues when they do revise; and that the most effective revisions are more reader- than writer-based. In fact, students I studied report that they do have strategies for dealing with their whole texts. Moreover, though many have argued that experienced writers revise in a reader-based way, this data suggests that students revise most substantially when readers find a way to help the writers control their words and convey their intentions. Finally, this dissertation challenges the assumption that because writing centers help make better writers, not better writing, writing center scholarship should exclude student writing as an object of study. Sustained study of the drafts students bring with them to the writing center and the revised versions they produce after a tutorial offer writing center and composition studies scholars alike a fuller understanding of the role that collaboration generally and peer tutoring specifically play in students development as writers and revisers.

In the middle of a 1945 review of Bucklin Moons Primer for White Folks, Ralph Ellison proclaims that the time is right in the United States for a new American humanism. Through exhaustive research in Ralph Ellisons Papers at the Library of Congress, I contextualize Ellisons grand proclamation within post-World War II American debates over literary criticism, Modernism, sociological method, and finally United States political and cultural history. I see Ellison's American humanism as a revitalization of the Latin notion of litterae humaniores that draws heavily on Gilded Age American literature and philosophy. For Ellison, American artists and intellectuals of that period were grappling with the countrys primary quandary after the Civil War: an inability to reconcile Americas progressive vision of humanism with the legacy left by chattel slavery and anti-black racism. He saw writers like Mark Twain, Stephan Crane, Henry James, George Washington Cable and others attempting to represent a different version of the human in literature while confronting the various forces that the Civil War unleashed upon American life. As the Cold War and Civil Rights era reached their crescendo, Ellisons attachment to the Gilded Age ossified. By the late 60s, it took the romantic form of aesthetic and political conservatism. This process is part of his participation in what Francis Saunders called the Cultural Cold War against communism. For many including Ellison this participation made their aesthetic investment in modernism commensurate with their anti-communist ideology. In foregrounding the Cold War, I want to emphasize that the US States intervention into the sphere of culture is a watershed moment in Americas conceptualization of Western humanism. The CIA and the State Departments role in funding academic literary and cultural periodicals, art festivals, fellowships and other institutions of knowledge during the Cold War is a chapter of American intellectual life that shaped Ellisons world as well as those of his contemporaries. Just as importantly, this moment illuminates the key roles African-American intellectuals played in Americas pursuit of humanism.

This dissertation charts the theoretical, pedagogical, and rhetorical possibilities of the essay in order to argue for essay writing as a central intellectual pursuit within the university. Although the term "essay" has often functioned as a placeholder for many types of writing and has been used to promote narrow, sometimes formulaic, writing, I articulate the ways that the essay illustrates thinking on the page and fosters genuine intellectual activity. This study thereby enriches theoretical scholarship on the essay, offers pedagogies that support critical essay-writing, and contends that we imagine both students and scholars as connected through the shared "intellectual arena" the essay creates. I coin the term "essayistic impetus" an epistemological drive toward critical and reflexive knowledge via thinking in and through writing to define the essay's guiding principle. The theory of the essay I construct spans several types of materials, all of which have been under-theorized within scholarship on the essay in composition studies: theories of essayistic prose authored by Theodor Adorno and M.M. Bakhtin; new critical textbooks by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; the hybrid prose essays of Joan Didion and Gloria Anzaldúa; the photographic essay After the Last Sky co-authored by Edward Said and Jean Mohr; and, finally, essay films by Chris Marker and Wong Kar-wai. The later chapters of the dissertation focus specifically on hybrid essays essays which draw on multiple genres and discourses, formal structures, and media. I argue that hybrid essays offer a particularly fruitful understanding of the essay, its goals, and its intellectual possibilities. Since hybrid essays present a range of rhetorical strategies and styles of writing, they can assist students in strengthening their repertoires as both readers and writers capable of sustaining complex, dialogic, reflexive inquiries and projects. Reading and writing hybrid essays, I contend, aids students in developing greater generic, stylistic, and rhetorical awareness, strategies which they can then effectively deploy for their own diverse purposes. Finally, I argue that hybrid essays can serve as a productive heuristic for better confronting and understanding the literacy demands that complex, emerging new media forms demand.

My dissertation argues that a number of novels published in the U.S. during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries work to reveal corporealitys contributions to knowledge and meaningful human action. Many critics have proposed that fictional treatments of bodies during this period provide a means for understanding the diminished capacities for human agency in modernity. However, my dissertation proposes that figurings of dynamic embodiment in some turn-of-the-century American writers works present corporeality as a shared condition of embodied beings, a condition that offers ethical insights into the nature of personhood. Even as bodies were being disciplined in military and civilian life to serve the states purposes, American novels were evoking the bodys complex resources for other forms of thought and action. The emphasis on physicality in literary works of the authors I examine has no doubt contributed to their notorious association with popular conceptions of late nineteenth-century determinist philosophies. My project suggests, though, that these writers philosophical interest in embodiment marks a serious engagement with a corporeal-centered epistemology. I propose that turn-of-the-century writers literary expressions of corporeality in many respects anticipates non-dualist theories of embodiment later elaborated by phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In these accounts, the body is conceived as an active entity itself that is inextricably bound up with consciousness, rather than an inert object directed by a controlling mind. Feminist and cultural theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, and Laura Doyle have recently worked to re-appropriate and supplement phenomenological accounts of the bodys role in human relations and action. In doing so, they have helped to elaborate the potential significance of these conceptions. Drawing on this theoretical work, my dissertation is an effort to rethink treatments of corporeality in some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. fictions by authors such as Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Frank Norris, and Edith Wharton.

This dissertation is an examination of particularity in Victorian fiction, biological science, and empirical philosophy. Focusing on works by Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Walter Pater, this study shows how Victorian writers sought to engage their readers with the seemingly insignificant details of ordinary lifeas a way of troubling conventions and habits of thought that deaden human existence and as a means of inciting human capacities of thought, feeling, and imagination. These writers, I argue, shared a common conviction that the challenges of modern social, political, and intellectual life could only be met through a closer engagement with the unnoticed specifics of everyday life. In some cases, these texts bring a heightened attention to the aesthetics of material life (as we see in Bleak House, Marius the Epicurean, or even The Origin of Species). In other cases, it is a greater sympathetic notice of the details of human nature (as in Bleak House and Daniel Deronda). In still other cases, it is a matter of bringing intellectual notice or scientific analysis to the seemingly irrelevant specifics of social and natural life (as we see in On Liberty or The Origin of Species). Recent literary critical scholarship on the Victorian period, shaped by twentieth-century poststructuralist thought, has shown a lack of interest in the eras own self-estimationin a sense of purposefulness integral to the major literary, scientific, and philosophical works of the day. In correction to this criticism, I read the primary texts of this dissertation as purposive, as seeking to have some effect upon the minds of their readers and the conditions of their historical present. At the same time, I read these works as textual performances, and argue that their discursive form is a central component of the moral, intellectual, or political interventions they aim to make in their contemporary moment.