abstract: Rhetoric has traditionally enjoyed a close connection with ideals of citizenship. Yet, the rhetorical traditions of the medieval period have generally been described as divorced from civic life, concerned instead with theories of composition in specific genres (such as letters and sermons) and with poetics. This view is the product of historiographical approaches that equate rhetoric either theories and practices of speech and writing intended for state-sponsored civic forums, or alternatively with rules governing future speech or literary production. Consequently, the prevailing view of the medieval period in rhetorical studies is a simplified one that has not evolved with changing practices of analysis in the field of rhetorical studies. This dissertation contends that by employing alternative modes of historiography, historians of rhetoric gain a more accurate conception of medieval rhetoric’s civic roles, revealing the discipline’s role in shaping the individual and their relationship to civic and political institutions. Organized around an introduction, a broad discussion of later medieval rhetoric and political thought (950-1390), four case studies, and a conclusion, this dissertation begins by identifying historiographical trends that have associated medieval rhetoric with technical treatises, minimizing connections to civic life. Challenging these assessments through a close reading of texts of rhetorical theory, political philosophy, and technical treatises, it contends that medieval rhetoric influenced activities such as grammatical education, didactic art, and political theory to inform practices of citizenship. Focusing specifically on representations of labor, this dissertation show that these venues idealized the political participation of manual laborers within an otherwise discursive theory of civic life that drew from both Aristotelian and Ciceronian sources. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2017

Social problems emerge when a behaviour, individual, or group is collectively defined as problematic. Online child solicitation is explored as a behaviour that has been defined as a social problem. This paper analyzes and explores the claims and claimsmaking process of one advocacy group, Perverted Justice. Their use of rhetorical strategies designed to persuade are of particular importance. In addition, the definitions, examples, and estimates they use to construct the problem are explored. Perverted Justice constructs the Internet as an inherently dangerous space, asserts that all children are at risk, and that online solicitation is a significant social problem. Furthermore, law enforcement, parents, and advocacy groups cannot protect children. Criticisms are rendered illegitimate through the use of rhetorical strategies. The way in which Perverted Justice constructs online child solicitation and their role in solving this issue incorporates elements of neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, and vigilantism, reflecting the wider regulatory framework.

Due to the public turn in Composition and Rhetoric, many teachers look beyond the academy in order to give students a "real" writing experience for social change purposes. However, as Bruce Horner notes, this denigrates the real work that is done within the classroom. In this dissertation, then, I argue that we can find ingredients for writing for social action in our courses, and we can do so by studying activist students who are already writing for just change. Using a case study methodology, I learn from activist students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I find that these students' activist positionalities are co-constructed by their work as students and as activists. Rather than a political space as opposed to an academic space, these students combine them. We can reconceptualize a reductive "student writer" position to an "activist student writer position" where students have agency to make rhetorical decisions to support their activism and use activist practices to strengthen their academic work. With this finding, we can re-conceive of academic space as political and open to "real" writing for social action. My major finding is that of an affective writing process as necessary for social action writing. This complex textual production takes material life experience and affective investments into account as they interact with students' writing choices to construct a rhetorical situation where change is possible. It is the writing process itself that allows students to make the necessary decisions to reconstitute their emotions to form a socially active text that they take satisfaction in and would want to circulate. I suggest that students writing outside of the classroom can engage in this process and arrive at a sense of affective agency. However, students inside the classroom do not have access to the full affective writing process due to their sense of being more limited in the academic rhetorical situation. This contrast indicates that teachers may support students' social action writing by creating conditions for students to craft their own rhetorical situations to engage with the full affective process that gives rise to social action.

This dissertation seeks to understand the role gender plays or not in the ministry of African American pastors. This project takes a wider approach, asking given the growing numbers of black female preachers in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, if, and if so, how the pulpit has welcomed African American, gendered bodies, and more importantly, if, and if so, how pastors have considered or been influenced by their own gendered bodies in this role. To take up this question, this project explores the intentions and behaviors of pastors—both men and women—in the AME Church, in terms of their goals as rhetoricians. Using two lenses, "rhetoric as word," accounting for the ways in which pastors use words to strategically build community, and "rhetoric as body," accounting for the ways in which pastors use their bodies to occupy and perform in the pulpit space, this study examines the techniques and methods used in preparing and delivering a sermon, and investigates the role gender may play in these sermonic tasks. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester 2016. / November 9, 2016. / Black Church, Gender, Pulpit, Rhetoric / Includes bibliographical references. / Kathleen Blake Yancey, Professor Directing Dissertation; Felecia F. Jordan Jackson, University Representative; Rhea Lathan, Committee Member; Maxine Montgomery, Committee Member.

The problem prompting this study is that historically the woman rhetor has been marginalized by virtue of her gender, and indeed still is. Yet, despite their marginalization, women have always found ways to make their voices heard and their ideas known. The question that prompted this study is: how do women rhetors gain access the public sphere when they are barred from participation, or when their interventions are culturally restricted? This dissertation is a feminist historical investigation of a rhetorical strategy used by disenfranchised populations to gain access to a prohibited public sphere, a strategy I call rhetoric on a slant. In examining the rhetorical performances of one eighteenth-century woman writer, Sarah Fielding, during one historical era when women's rhetorical options were severely restricted, this study isolates the strategy of rhetoric on a slant, which heretofore existed only as a concept. Rhetoric on a slant is a strategy by which a marginalized rhetor engages with genres and enacts agency in order to participate in discourses from which she is otherwise restricted or outright barred. It is a subversive strategy, which, in Fielding's case, consists, of two techniques and their tactics, and its use is necessitated by a rhetorical situation that constrains a marginalized rhetor in ways that demand it. To that end, this study of rhetoric on a slant is informed by current theories of genre and agency, and, in revealing how and in what ways they intersect, it offers new insights into theories of genre and agency in turn. This investigation of rhetoric on a slant establishes a set of critical terms specific to Fielding by which to delineate how her performances manifested evolving agency co-constituted with her environment, and therefore it offers fresh insights about women's rhetorical agency. Using these newly established terms and the newly isolated strategy of rhetoric on a slant as a lens to analyze Fielding's rhetorical behavior allowed for discoveries in her writing as to the ways she invents and implements techniques and tactics of rhetoric on a slant in written genres. In doing so, it offers insights into women's rhetorical practices that have heretofore remained un-theorized by scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition. By offering insights into the performances of a specific rhetor, this dissertation helps us not only to identify and document a culture's influence on genre trends and within the rhetor's environment, but also to observe and understand how, in a culture that keeps diligent watch over genres and decorum alike, a disenfranchised rhetor is able to use rhetoric on a slant to enact agency to navigate through genre restrictions and thereby change her environment. Ultimately, this study shows how and by what means, despite the rhetor's marginalized subject position, her intervention is possible with the use of rhetoric on a slant. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / March 26, 2018. / agency, eighteenth century, feminist strategies, genre, rhetoric, women / Includes bibliographical references. / Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Professor Directing Dissertation; Donna Marie Nudd, University Representative; Tarez Samra Graban, Committee Member; Candace Ward, Committee Member; Kathleen Blake Yancey, Committee Member.

Global conflict presents an interesting visual (or lack thereof) for scholars of the humanities, for in these contests, the human is hard to see. Much like many philosophical dualities, when one culture runs into another in a space of contestation, one but most often both disappear. Through an intercontextual approach, my project responds to a need to further recover the human in such spaces—the multicultural, transnational discourse that gets erased by convenient interpretations of such global tragedies as conflicts, genocides, and ethnic cleansings. As Spiegelman's novel demonstrates, global conflicts do not remain fixed in their past temporalities. Those who attempt recovery often find themselves caught up in the conflict, and their cultural logics and rhetorics face the same risks of those they seek to unsilence. In response to this epistemic challenge to rhetorically listen and lean in, my thesis will offer an analytical model for scholars of rhetoric who are working with graphic texts that demand a kind of unfamiliar engagement as a way of reading (and listening) without imposing or silencing. This model will consist of a four-part matrix, which I will use to analyze three graphic texts that give accounts of global conflicts. I hope to show how the rhetorical functions of silence and listening in the graphic novel can challenge the conventional paradigm of interlocutor as one that privileges visible discourse and its reception and instead to present interlocutor as one who dwells within semiotic, contextual, ethical discomfort and tension, and create new epistemic possibilities for rhetorics that have been pushed to the silent margins—both textually and visually. Uncovering these silences and circumventing the privileges typically ascribed to the reader/viewer/listener not only aids in epistemological endeavors in these texts, but it also provides a heuristic for scholars of similar conflicts—postcolonial and otherwise. My corpus consists of three representative postcolonial conflicts: The Rwandan Genocide through Jean-Philippe Stassen's Deogratias; the Bosnian Ethnic Cleansing through Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde, and the Iranian Revolution through Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. Each novel, through its incorporation of traumatic, historical events, presents culture in a conflicted state, one characterized by destruction and erasure. This erasure enacts a silence that, if left unread or unnoticed in a position of rhetorical insignificance, extinguishes cultures and their narratives. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the Master of Arts. / Spring Semester 2017. / April 12, 2017. / Graphic Novel, Rhetoric, Rhetorical Listening, Rhetorical Silence, Visual Rhetoric / Includes bibliographical references. / Tarez S. Graban, Professor Directing Thesis; Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Committee Member; Rhea E. Lathan, Committee Member.

Scholarship in writing center studies has not yet fully examined the ways in which writing center professionals engage with writers with disabilities. Throughout the history of writing center studies, disability has functioned either as a metaphor to distance the writing center from disability, or as an obstacle to overcome. Though recent work has begun to extoll the consequences of such approaches to disability, there remains little systematic or sustained inquiry into practices that benefit, or are developed for, writers with disabilities. Collectively, this scholarship provides the exigence for this study: the need for systematic, inquiry-driven research that illuminates the position of disability in writing centers. Thus, this study asks how do writing center administrators understand, perceive, and accommodate writers with disabilities? To answer this question, I draw from writing center studies, writing studies, and disability studies to develop two interrelated continua that serve as a framework for this dissertation: the Dis/Ability Continuum and the Exclusion/All continuum. I engage these frameworks in a mixed methods research design that combines survey and case study methodologies. The findings of this dissertation include the following: 1) a social understanding of disability is on the rise in writing center studies; 2) social understandings of disability are the result of a complex assemblage of context-specific factors; 2) a social understanding of disability does not necessarily lead to a social perception of disability; 3) social perception of disability is best achieved through recursive and reflexive praxis; 4) a social understanding of disability, when implemented in a writing center setting, may encourage the use of Universal Design approaches to accommodation. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / April 10, 2017. / accommodation, disability studies, rhetoric and composition, universal design, writing center studies / Includes bibliographical references. / Kristie Fleckenstein, Professor Directing Dissertation; Donna Nudd, University Representative; Kathleen Blake Yancey, Committee Member; Rhea Estelle Lathan, Committee Member.

On February 21, 1871, Mrs. Cooper surrendered her one-month-old son Walter to the Foundling Asylum of the Sisters of Charity of New York, a Catholic institution designed to care for unwanted and abandoned infants, along with the letter in which she explains her circumstances and begs that her son Walter be cared for. While Mrs. Cooper’s affecting letter suggests much about the difficult circumstances faced by poor, single mothers in Victorian New York, it also stands as a persuasive text in which Mrs. Cooper makes a case for herself as a mother and a respectable woman. Moreover, Mrs. Cooper’s letter is not unique; rather it is one of many left with infants at the Foundling Asylum. This dissertation analyzes seventeen of these Foundling Letters in order to examine the ways in which the Foundling mothers construct maternal and respectable selves. I argue that the Foundling mothers balance rhetorical strategies of deference and assertion in order to 1) secure care for their children and 2) argue for their worth as women and mothers. To do so, I analyze the Foundling Letters through a braided lens consisting of three interrelated theoretical concepts. First is the context in which the letters are written, which I have conceptualized as three stories: that of single, working mothers in Victorian New York, of the Foundling Asylum as an institution, and of the Foundling mothers as individuals. Second is scholarship on rhetorical strategies of deference and assertion. The primary means through which the Foundling Mothers construct maternal and respectable selves is through the balance of rhetorical strategies of deference—or appeals to a perceived gender, class, and/or moral inferiority (Daybell; Fitzpatrick; Sonmez; Wall; Whyman; Milne; Tebeaux and Lay)—with rhetorical strategies of assertion—or refutations of such inferiority and appeals to equality. Scholarship on deference and assertion, though, focuses primarily on the writing of elite women, which the Foundling mothers certainly are not. Theories of everyday writing, the third concept, provide guidance in accounting for and valuing the everyday nature of the Foundling Letters and mothers. The Founding mothers’ balance of rhetorical strategies of deference and assertion in order to compose respectable and maternal selves illustrates a rhetorical sophistication in a population not often considered sophisticated: 19th century working mothers. In brief, the richness with which the Foundling mothers use writing to compose maternal and respectable selves has much to tell about how ordinary women use writing in their everyday lives. Thus, my analysis of the Foundling letters expands the field of Rhetoric and Compositions understanding of women’s writing, particularly by 1) providing a more nuanced view of deference and assertion as rhetorical strategies and 2) providing a method that future scholars can use to study archived everyday writing. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2018. / June 26, 2018. / Includes bibliographical references. / Kathleen Blake Yancey, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jennifer Proffitt, University Representative; Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Committee Member; Tarez Samra Graban, Committee Member.

This dissertation presents a writer-informed portrait and definition of everyday writing. The writers informing this portrait and definition represent five different age groups—one participant each in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s—and a range of demographic characteristics, including gender, race, occupation, education, and location. This dissertation brings together and expands on research on everyday writing, and related, phenomena in the fields of Rhetoric, Literacy Studies, and Composition. In particular this investigation has been inspired by David Barton and Mary Hamilton’s research on the ordinary literacy practices of a group of writers in a small community, and Dale J. Cohen, Sheida White, and Steffaney B. Cohen’s quantitative study on the everyday writing practice of adults. The are four questions guiding this research: 1)What everyday writing tasks are writers engaging in?; 2) What artifacts of everyday writing are these writers producing? 3) What are the social, historical, and/or personal influences present within these everyday writing practices? and 4) Which of these artifacts and practices are considered everyday writing by the writers themselves? And how/why do they classify them as such? To answer these four questions I collected three types of data: 1) a time use diary that cataloged a week of the participants’ writing tasks; 2) 10 different artifacts of writing created by the participants during the week they completed their time use diary; and 3) responses from one-on-one interviews with the participants. The first two methods, the time use diaries and the artifacts, were primarily designed to develop the portrait of everyday writing: an overarching look at what writing these five people are actually engaging in and a somewhat more detailed look at the individual acts of writing they are producing. The participant interviews were designed to accomplish two goals: 1) to construct the definition of everyday writing, including what the writers think everyday writing is and what they use it for; and 2) to find out what influences have exerted themselves on the participants’ understandings of writing and their everyday writing practices. The resulting writer-informed portrait and definition of everyday writing indicates that, for these participants, everyday writing is basically any type of writing that they compose every day, or at least on a regular basis. That said, the participants tended to focus their definitions of everyday writing on texts that were used to communicate with other people or to aid in keeping track of their lives. As such, the primary value of everyday writing for this group of writers lies in its ability to facilitate acts of communicating and keeping track of tasks. This definition of everyday writing, and its emphasis on communication and memory, is contrasted with the participants’ definitions of writing more generally, which tend to focus on texts that are not, or at least are not explicitly, communicative; this includes pieces of writing like school texts, genres related to or incorporating artistic writing, and also rational, or unemotional, texts. The participants’ definitions of writing seemed to be informed primarily by one or more of three factors: their occupations, their educational experiences, and the ways they actually use writing in their daily lives. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2018. / July 11, 2018. / everyday writing, ordinary writing / Includes bibliographical references. / Kathleen Blake Yancey, Professor Directing Dissertation; Paul F. Marty, University Representative; Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Committee Member; David L. Gants, Committee Member.

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