In the eighteenth century, Russia passed through a period of sweeping social reforms. Russia was modernized, and modernization was viewed as westernization. Russia had to accomplish the modernization as quickly as possible and catch up with the rest of Europe, a formidable task requiring transfers of Western European knowledge and values on a massive scale. Translation became the sole means of carrying out these transfers in the least time-consuming fashion. My research focuses on the social role of translation. I applied Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory as well as some concepts from works by Pierre Bourdieu and Lev Gumilev. Luhmann's theory provided a stimulating theoretical basis for analyzing major translation flows, the place of translation in the overall social system of the Russian Empire as well as the contribution translation made to the process of Russia's unfolding westernization. Bourdieu's concepts helped consider the role of agency in the translation 'field' and explain the distribution of symbolic capital in society that led to foregrounding translation as a major means of westernization. Gumilev's ideas about ethnogenetic evolution made it clear that the eighteenth century was the acmetic stage of the evolving superethnos and that is why became such a pivotal period in Russian history. Translation was regarded as a boundary phenomenon of the system (in this case, the Russian Empire). Serving as the system's boundary, translation opened the system to influences from the environment. In eighteenth-century Russia, intrasystemically, translation became a crucial means of introducing new ideas, helping to change the official discourse by introducing a heterodoxa (an alternative social discourse). Translation came to the fore of the social stage and became a principal means of renegotiating the systemic communication. Intersystemically, translation also was instrumental for the system's projecting information about itself into the environment. Finally, translation played a crucial global-systemic role. Europe integrated into a global functional super-system (Luhmann) where law, economy, science, and art formed international functional subsystems, no longer divided by national frontiers. Translation was a sine qua non enabling Russia to become part of this global system.

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This dissertation theorizes and applies what I term revisionary rhetoric, a rhetoric that emerges at the intersection of feminism and revision. I define revisionary rhetoric as a rhetoric of relationship, thereby drawing attention to the fact that all human relationships, including those that exist between readers and writers, enjoy moments of intimacy, closeness, and connection, but they also involve inevitable separation, loss, disappointment, and pain. However, theories and practices of revision within the discipline have focused on a writer's attempts to revise in order to connect with her audience through achieved consensus. The assumption is that to be persuasive writers should revise in order to remove those textual moments that might offend or confuse potential readers. In privileging clarity and connection in our work on revision, I believe we've failed to theorize how readers/writers contend with the inevitable disconnections that permeate their experiences with texts. We can, of course, simply ignore that these moments exist; we can teach our students to delete them from their drafts all in the name of "effective" revision. But to do so sends a troubling message to our students: that when they can't relate to or connect with something they read, they can simply skip it, ignore it, forget about it, and move on. Revisionary rhetoric responds to the reality of disconnection by describing strategies writers can use to make themselves heard as they demonstrate their commitment to listening to others. Such a paradox demands a revisioning of silence as it deconstructs a voice/silence binary, for listening demands participatory silence. After revising silence through three disciplinary contexts, I identify key textual features of revisionary rhetoric--metadiscursivity and intertextuality--and, through an examination of sample texts, I describe how these features reveal the constructed nature of all texts and thereby create gaps, or silences, out of which readers can respond. I specifically analyze the ways in which multigenre texts enact revisionary rhetoric, and I argue for more of them, both in the field and in the classroom, for they demand the kind of rereading that is necessary to practice a relational rhetoric.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Communication and Culture, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Feb. 10, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Carolyn Calloway-Thomas.

This dissertation develops out of an extensive program of research investigating the intersection and apparent contradictions of two trends: the expansion of community-based activities and activist rhetorics in higher education, and the growing critiques of the university as functioning primarily for corporate and dominant interests. Employing Marxist critique, I examine the ways institutionalized higher education perpetuates problematic dominant socio-economic structures as well as the possibilities available from sites of higher education for challenging those structures through critical pedagogy and community-based programs. I contextualize my analysis of current practices in community-based learning by deconstructing the rhetoric of liberal ideology embedded within both the current and historical discourse surrounding the mission and development of public higher education with extensive analysis of the Land Grant Act in chapter one. In my discursive analysis of the discourse and history surrounding the creation of land grant colleges, I explicate the importance of a theory of cultural hegemony as it relates to universities functioning under dominant cultural logic. In chapter two, I analyze specific university-based community outreach programs in order to deconstruct and situate the rhetoric and practices of these programs in a broader socio-economic context. I draw out theories of cultural hegemony from Marx and Gramsci to identify and characterize American liberal capitalism as a system which depends upon perceived freedom and equity while requiring inequity and exploitation. I situate higher education within that system as a cultural institution that provides necessary means for capitalism (in the forms of technology, knowledge, and trained labor) as well as creates ideological apparatuses to contain possible resistance to the dominant system. I deconstruct and re-theorize the ways in which voluntarism and community service enable contemporary capitalism to remain hegemonic, and I look specifically at such activities generated from and institutionalized in higher education to critique the implications of this relationship. In the third chapter, I argue that although the tendencies of dominant institutions are to contain "radical" or transformational practices, no system is an utterly closed system. Consequently, the critical enactment of community-based activities in higher education may provide an opening for counter-hegemonic responses, but only through a carefully articulated theory of critical pedagogy. Drawing on Paulo Freire, Paula Allman, and others, I lay out the principles of critical pedagogy. I also outline what I understand to be necessary limitations on institutional work and institutionalized critical pedagogies based on the analyses of the previous chapters. Based on that critical pedagogy, in the final chapter I outline a practical method of enacting critical community-based work by looking at the issue of accountabilities, outcomes, and measurements in order to identify practices that may serve to create conditions for counter-hegemonic, transformative activities to occur. I conclude the dissertation with some reflection on activities in the university other than community-based learning programs where critical pedagogy has a significant role to play.

Employing ethnographic and case study research methods, this study attempts to examine student attitudes toward, and senses of purpose about, a first-year college writing course and their roles as students and writers within it. The study argues that students possess clear and highly articulated conceptions of writing classes, of writing's place both within and outside academia, and of themselves as students and writers. These conceptions, like all theories, exhibit both strengths and weaknesses. However, students rarely have the opportunity to engage in dialogue about their views on writing. Because of this, the students in this study generally accommodate themselves to, but compartmentalize, the writing course and the strategies they are exposed to in it. The study suggests, therefore, that writing teachers approach their students not as novices to be corrected concerning the "true" ways of writing, or rejected for their unwillingness to accept these truths. Rather, we should consider writing students an audience to be persuaded to a concept of writing both different from, and similar to, the concepts they already hold. This means that writing teachers must elicit, listen to, and engage with the writing conceptions of their students. Means for fostering this dialogue include having students create narratives of their writing development, asking students to develop mini-ethnographic language projects, and historicizing with and for them standard academic English style.

This study contributes to the growing body of research on gender and writing and extends previous research suggesting that women adapt diverse discourses as they write for the academic discourse community. This study asserts that college women writers attempt to present themselves as more powerful writers by suppressing gender-typical linguistic features in their writing. This tendency to suppress linguistic politeness strategies, which are associated with female-typical language use, provides specific evidence in support of this assertion. In the introductory chapter, I indicate the source of my personal interest in the issue of women writing for the academy. I then review the literature that depicts women literary writers as a muted group and attests to the suppression of women's voices in the academy. Chapter 2 provides a critical review of the essentializing tendencies of the research on gender and language. In this chapter, I also review studies on women's epistemology and present an alternative metaphor for representing gender differences. Finally, I review the research on linguistic politeness theory. In Chapter 3, I indicate the purpose and limitations of the study, and I describe the methods and procedures for this study. In Chapter 4, I discuss my findings, which reveal only limited evidence of gender differences in the use of politeness strategies. I interpret these results in light of current reviews of research in gender and writing that report similar disparate results. I conclude my study with a discussion of the various theories that may account for gender differences in written discourse as well as some suggested pedagogical implications for these theories of gender difference. The significance of this study is that it provides a functionally oriented analysis of gender and writing; that is, it describes the social functions indicated by gender-typical syntactic features. In this way, it provides insight into the ways that discursive practices construct gender identity.

This dissertation contains three major arguments. First, teaching ethics in technical communications courses is worthwhile. Chapter One, a review of literature on ethics in technical communication maps books and articles into three categories: theoretical, case study, and pedagogical approaches. It summarizes ways in which major textbooks address ethics and calls for a pedagogy that combines the benefits of all three approaches. Chapter Two provides the theoretical and philosophical groundwork for a "pedagogy of action," based on an ethical stance called "specific feminism" located in a conversation among feminine, feminist, and discourse ethics perspectives. The chapter addresses work by theorists such as Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Judith Butler, Iris Marion Young, Jurgen Habermas, and Alisdair MacIntyre. Specific feminism emerges as an ethic of deliberation and action. The second major argument is that in order to effectively "teach" ethics in technical communication and fulfill their social responsibilities, instructors must be involved in their communities as local intellectuals. Chapter Three begins with an argument about the nature of the public intellectual, drawing on ideas from Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, and Paulo Freire. The chapter ends with a case study of the author's own work as a technical writer for a local AIDS prevention program. The final major argument is that the best way for teachers to bring ethics into the technical writing classroom is through service learning. Chapter Four includes an overview of service learning in composition and describes "the seduction of empathy," a dangerous pattern of substituting emotional response for action in service experiences. This chapter includes case studies of students who used a specific feminist perspective to help them move beyond personal reactions to their service learning experiences, converting their empathy into social action. Chapter Five includes an analysis a popular approach to teaching ethics in technical writing, the hypothetical scenario/case study method, and argues that this model is not as effective as one based on service learning. It describes a semester-long method for bringing ethics into the technical writing classroom and argues that service learning gives students opportunities to apply ethical frameworks they articulate through discussions of theories and case studies.