University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

This study suggests, through a rhetorical analysis of the role of orators and oration in Ralph Ellison's <em>Invisible Man</em> and N. Scott Momaday's <em>House Made of Dawn</em>, that literature can be a valuable resource for the study of comparative and contrastive rhetoric; conversely, it also demonstrates that a knowledge of culturally-specific rhetorical and narrative practices is important for understanding ethnic-American novels and their social significance. Written during periods of intense racial upheaval in the United States, <em>Invisible Man</em> and <em>House Made of Dawn</em> are, to use a term coined by George Kennedy, metarhetorics: works that explore, from cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives, the ends and means of rhetoric and the ways in which rhetoric is linked to the formation of individual, ethnic, and national identities. This exploration is undertaken through the diegetic rhetoric of the novels, the depiction of rhetorical practice within their fictional worlds. Ellison's young orator, who vacillates between accommodationist, communist, and African American vernacular rhetorics, and Momaday's alienated protagonist, who is healed through the postcolonial rhetoric of a Peyotist street preacher and the ritual rhetoric of a displaced Navajo chanter, both illustrate how the recovery of traditional rhetorical practices is an integral part of cultural empowerment. The interaction of culturally-specific systems of rhetoric is also embodied in the extradiegetic rhetoric of the novels, the means by which the novels themselves influence their readers. Central to the novels' own rhetorical effectiveness is their authors' strategic appropriation of modernist techniques, which allowed the works to negotiate multiple literary traditions or social contexts, to penetrate and transform the American canon, and to accommodate and affect readers from a broad range of cultural backgrounds.

This study suggests, through a rhetorical analysis of the role of orators and oration in Ralph Ellison's <em>Invisible Man</em> and N. Scott Momaday's <em>House Made of Dawn</em>, that literature can be a valuable resource for the study of comparative and contrastive rhetoric; conversely, it also demonstrates that a knowledge of culturally-specific rhetorical and narrative practices is important for understanding ethnic-American novels and their social significance. Written during periods of intense racial upheaval in the United States, <em>Invisible Man</em> and <em>House Made of Dawn</em> are, to use a term coined by George Kennedy, metarhetorics: works that explore, from cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives, the ends and means of rhetoric and the ways in which rhetoric is linked to the formation of individual, ethnic, and national identities. This exploration is undertaken through the diegetic rhetoric of the novels, the depiction of rhetorical practice within their fictional worlds. Ellison's young orator, who vacillates between accommodationist, communist, and African American vernacular rhetorics, and Momaday's alienated protagonist, who is healed through the postcolonial rhetoric of a Peyotist street preacher and the ritual rhetoric of a displaced Navajo chanter, both illustrate how the recovery of traditional rhetorical practices is an integral part of cultural empowerment. The interaction of culturally-specific systems of rhetoric is also embodied in the extradiegetic rhetoric of the novels, the means by which the novels themselves influence their readers. Central to the novels' own rhetorical effectiveness is their authors' strategic appropriation of modernist techniques, which allowed the works to negotiate multiple literary traditions or social contexts, to penetrate and transform the American canon, and to accommodate and affect readers from a broad range of cultural backgrounds.

This thesis involves both editorial practice and literary analysis. In order to establish an editorial framework for the electronic scholarly edition of Dr. Ralph Barnes Grindrod's pamphlet <em>Slaves of the Needle</em>, I examine current issues in electronic textual editing. In the electronic scholarly edition, approximately twelve of the pamphlet's thirty-five pages are transcribed and encoded using TEI-based code. The second aspect of my master's thesis concerns the depiction of seamstresses in nineteenth-century British literature. <em>Slaves of the Needle</em> provides a non-fiction counterpart to the fictional seamstresses of mid-nineteenth-century literature. Using <em>Slaves of the Needle</em> as a basis for evaluating the accuracy of mid-nineteenth-century characterizations of seamstresses, I show that authors such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ernest Jones, and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna were familiar with the working conditions of seamstresses. By conducting a close reading of certain representations of the seamstress in both fiction and non-fiction, I develop a theory of why the depiction of some aspects of the seamstress story are more accurate than others.

English Studies began in Canada in 1884 at Dalhousie University; Canadian literature was first taught at the post-secondary level in 1907 at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph. Arnoldian humanism dominated the outlook of early professors of English in Canada. Their feeling that Canadian literature was not among "the best" explains why so few courses appeared in Canadian universities, despite nationalist pressure from students. About 5-10% of courses then were devoted to Canadian literature in the English curriculum and this (except in Quebec) remains the case today.