This dissertation investigates second language learners' knowledge of reconstruction in English and Chinese. To tap Chinese learners' knowledge of reconstruction in English, experiments included sentences that are underdetermined (not directly available) in Chinese, namely, sentences with a reflexive (himself/herself) inside a moved NP (noun phrase) or predicate that contains a wh-element. To tap English learners' knowledge of reconstruction in Chinese, an experiment included sentences that are underdetermined in English, namely, sentences with ambiguity of antecedence of ziji 'self' inside a moved predicate and in non-movement sentences. Results of a timed judgment task indicate that in judging the grammaticality of English sentences with singular reflexives (himself/herself) inside a moved NP or predicate, Chinese learners' error rates were below the chance level. Results of a multiple-choice task, a task with a preceding context and a truth-value judgment task involving pictures indicate that Chinese learners distinguished between ambiguity of antecedence of a reflexive inside a moved NP and no ambiguity of antecedence of a reflexive inside a moved predicate. Results of a truth-value judgment task with English learners of Chinese indicate that they had knowledge of ambiguity of antecedence of ziji inside a moved predicate. These results point to second language learners' access to Universal Grammar, although evidence of L1 effects was found with both Chinese learners of English and English learners of Chinese.

This dissertation examines commonplaces in influential Anglo-American women's activist rhetorics of the mid-nineteenth century. In contemporary rhetorical theory commonplaces refer to "opinions or assumptions...that people generally consider persuasive" (Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives 56). Because the persuasiveness of evidence depends on the assumptions that audiences hold, Cicero defines commonplaces as "the very homes of all proofs" (2.39.162). Social-activist rhetorics by nineteenth-century women literally relocated the homes of proofs to challenge previous assumptions. Nineteenth-century audiences generally considered persuasive the assumption that women should not speak or write on matters of public policy outside of the home. As a result, most audiences found evidence that corroborated this assumption to be true rather than simply more persuasive in a given set of historical circumstances. Women social-activists undertook the arduous task of convincing audiences that this evidence could not withstand every rhetorical situation, including social reform movements that extended women's homes into society. Homeplaces figure in how women could define social reform issues as well as their own characters as rhetors, in nineteenth-century America. Whether activist or nonactivist, nineteenth-century rhetorics commonly take character construction as an integral part of women's spiritual province within the home (see Barbara Welter). Female rhetors relocated homeplaces in effective ethos constructions, wherein character resides in discourse rather than in preconceived notions about the character of all women (Aristotle 1356a2-13). In this case women's embodied presence made these preconceived notions unavoidable, however. Widely held social beliefs about women's role in the home contested the ethos of women who engaged social issues in "the public sphere." While nineteenth-century conservatives posit a static conception of the public sphere as an indeterminate location opposed to the private sphere of home, even their arguments demonstrate the fluidity of the term public. Activists use this rhetoric to constitute multiple publics for women, publics that reside both inside and outside the home. The revised homeplaces of nineteenth-century female rhetors bequeath a rhetorical legacy to social-activists.

I theorize about cultural hybridity; specifically, I theorize about transcultural rhetorics to consider the positive capabilities those rhetorics encourage in students within composition classrooms. People in our society frequently ignore and devalue hybridity and multiplicity, which are facts in our culture. Therefore, minority students, who are more likely to display transcultural elements in their rhetorics, also face devaluation of their use of language. People associate minority members of society with poor language use because their rhetorics "differ" from the USAmerican standard. This contributes to dismissal of transcultural rhetorics in classroom settings. Teaching standard uses of language negates other possible language strategies. Yet transcultural rhetorics provide a means to encourage students to value their potential and contributions to the communities with which they engage. I argue that teaching language and writing skills should use multiple approaches and encourage students' abilities to negotiate multiple discourse communities. Allowing people to move and to fit into more than one or two cultures will enhance success and survival in both dominant and non-dominant cultural groups. I use discussions by and about women-of-color to illustrate some of the real and significant issues revolving hybridity and acculturation/assimilation practices. Doing so helps to illustrate the psychological, social, and other political issues surrounding hybrid-USAmericans as they engage with education. While an increasing number of writers and teachers value and use rhetorics that represent multiplicity, teachers and writers need to understand and address the political and psychological processes hybrid people experience. The fact that many teachers encourage the kinds of writing research that I advocate does not negate the need for broader use of transcultural rhetorics. I present various ways that teachers can teach and encourage transcultural rhetorics within the dissertation. Although transcultural rhetorics can work for all teachers and all students, I focus on Latina writers because they frequently need greater understanding of their literate foremothers and the value of their Latina skills in USAmerican education. The work that follows urges teachers of composition and their students to use the transcultural rhetorics as one of many possible ways of transforming the world of academia and beyond.

For many the study of rhetoric has become a study of dialogue and difference, of communication across metaphorical and literal borders, and of the ethics of such communication. Using letters written in French by my great-grandfather, Mordecai Ben-Ami, a Russian Zionist, journalist, and fiction writer, as a site for analysis, I argue that a dialogic ethic of response offers scholars and teachers of rhetoric and composition a way to move beyond identity politics in our writing classes and the oppression of the other in our scholarship. I suggest that some of this field's most common theoretical lenses and practical sites of analysis--historiography, identity construction, gender, and translation--can be complemented by the application of dialogic ethics. Using conceptions of discourse and dialogism in work by Bakhtin and the concept of an ethics of responsibility in work by Levinas, I demonstrate that an intersubjective understanding of ethics rooted in the necessity of response to the other can help us meet the challenges of multicultural dialogue. The letters date from 1924-1928 and originate from Milan, Berlin, Odessa, and Chaiffa, among others. The dissertation is organized in chapters that employ, examine, and problematize a different postmodern approach to rhetorical analysis. Each chapter begins with an examination of a theoretical approach in relation to the letters, then analyzes sample letters using that approach. Each chapter then examines the analysis to discuss particular strengths and flaws of the theoretical framework and to suggest how a dialogic ethics can complement it. The chapters discuss the following: the historical situatedness of the letters, the shifting constructions of ethnicity and identity in the letters and in the dissertation, the gendered aspects of the reading and writing processes of the author and the translator, and finally the cultural politics involved in the translation of Russian Zionist letters by a postmodern American.

This dissertation explores the processes that enable understanding of irony and parody, arguing that understanding of ironic and parodic discourse is grounded in socially-constructed knowledge, frequently through knowledge derived from mass media. Although parody and irony are often commodified products of mass culture, they can also help interpret and critique mass media. I also conceptualize a type of cultural knowledge for which I have coined the term "Wabbit Literacy" in recognition of the many parodies found in Bugs Bunny cartoons. Wabbit Literacy is a dialogic means of learning resulting when a reader encounters parodic references to a text before encountering the text being parodied. What is for the writer a parodic allusion to a given cultural artifact (text 1) becomes for the reader of the parodic text (text 2), the primary reference point for awareness of text 1. Wabbit Literacy offers a new perspective from which to consider the situatedness of dialogic interactions among readers, writers, and text(s). Wabbit Literacy examines the "temporal contexts" of discourse, the relations among a particular reader's earliest encounters with a text, later encounters with the text(s), and changes in the reader's interpretations over time. Wabbit Literacy begins with a moment that most conventional discussions of parody and irony might describe as a reader's "failure" to "get" an irony or parody. Such "failure" to interpret irony or parody is not always the terminus of the discursive event, and may often be the beginning of learning, a first step toward competence in particular socially constructed discourses. In addition, the dissertation examines similarities between the classical enthymeme and the process of understanding humor and parody. Humor and rhetorical enthymemes work because members of discursive communities make use of socially-constructed common knowledge; parody deploys enthymematic social and textual norms for humorous purposes. Because parodic frames involve deliberately playful perspectives, Wabbit Literacy can interrogate ideological underpinnings of knowledge systems. Parody can enable tactical, local resistance to corporate entertainment products. Fans' playful transformations of commodified entertainment can give them a measure of individual agency, constituting a form of "vernacular theory" that enables a critical approach to entertainment texts.

I examine particular characterizations of consciousness in the Western tradition of rhetoric that inform contemporary academic and professional discourse, characterizations built upon clearly gendered dichotomies. I begin by analyzing the metadiscourse of Enheduanna, (ca. 2350 B.C.E.), Marcus Tullius Cicero (d. 43 B.C.E.), and Carl Gustav Jung (d. 1961). Specifically, I examine the commentary concerning their composing processes as reflective of cultural conceptions of cognition. In all three cases they engender their creative process as sacred, other, and feminine. Focusing on Enheduanna, I analyze her works in terms of contemporary feminist theory. The contemporary rhetoric of feminist spirituality, particularly the discourse surrounding the concept of the goddess as an aspect of the feminine divine, I see as a growing phenomenon of popular culture and psychology. One way to investigate the rhetoric of this expanding popular interest is to examine it through the literary work of Enheduanna as the oldest known author. I compare her rhetoric and the modern discourse of the field of Assyriology which surrounds and interprets it. Within particular academic disciplines and their discourses, current perceptions of history effect theory and influence ideology with far reaching consequences. In rhetoric and composition, I analyze the work of three contemporary feminist rhetorical historiographers: Susan Jarratt, C. Jan Swearingen, and Kathleen Welch. I contend that their influence, as rhetorical Other, on the current perception of rhetorical historiography, influences composition theory. Their individual reinterpretations of classical rhetorical theory and history not only alter perceptions of the foundational past of rhetoric, but they exert an influence on current theories of the understanding and teaching of composition. Turning to popular culture, I then analyze how two modern psychoanalytic interpretations of the Other as feminine divine in contemporary Western society might also function to alter the teaching and understanding of rhetorical theory and composition. I look at two Jungian feminist psychoanalytic theorists (Sylvia Perera, and Marion Woodman) examining their theories in relation to the composing process. I conclude by proposing an expanded rhetoric, one that includes the Other as an aspect of the unconscious, a rhetoric also inclusive of a deepened, recursive, and reflective consciousness. This rhetoric, I postulate, might work itself out as a more comprehensive way to view composition: ethos expanded to a bicameral mind paradigm, pathos as body wisdom, and a logos of the sacred Other. I finish with a proposal titled, "Toward a Rhetoric of the Sacred Other."

The working class, largely excluded from college life before the twentieth century, obtained access to higher education through the two-year college movement, which began in 1901. "Junior colleges," a name that education scholars at elite universities invented to denote the new institutions, grew out of a desire to put higher education in service to business interests. Junior colleges trained industrial workers and provided transfer to four-year colleges for the most qualified students. Through tools such as first-year composition curricula and active guidance counseling programs, junior colleges frequently attempted to teach students lessons in competition, individuality, and meritocracy. Leaders of the movement feared social unrest would result from burgeoning labor movements and the rapid influx of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and constructed disciplinary devices to squelch elements they perceived to be subversive and dangerous. Furthermore, leaders of the movement enjoyed support for their regressive ideology in the popular press, which legitimated the movement and helped to manufacture a need for the brands of education (e.g., vocationalism) the junior college came to promulgate.

This dissertation critiques the techniques used to market and distribute consumer electronics products in the United States. Using the wireless networking industry as a case study, I argue that the consumer electronics industry is at the cutting edge of the commercial, consumer nature of U.S. culture and that it operates according to the ideological moorings of what the Frankfurt School called "the culture industry." These moorings include the obscuring of contradiction and the politics of production behind a unified product image, the erasure of individual consumer choice in favor of efficient means of product distribution to an infinite consumer base, an exaggerated presentation of cultural values in product packaging that teach consumers what they should believe and how they should act, and a carefully constructed use of statistical data and quantified consumer behavior to maintain a mass, homogenized culture that opposes characterizations of diversity or heterogeneity that do not expand the consumer base or the target demographic. The rhetorical appeals of consumer electronics marketers depend upon recycled consumer values to create desire through a universal product image, through carefully designed product information, and through highly developed language. The dominant appeals in wireless networking products are to mobility, security, and entertainment. I explicate these appeals using a methodology derived from social-epistemic rhetoric, a rhetoric that examines sites of conflict and contradiction as the arbiters of culture. I explore the contradictions in what I call choicing, or the prediction and manipulation of consumer choice through the marketing, distribution, and use of mass-produced goods. These contradictions include several consumer tactics that confront choicing strategies.

Beginning with an inquiry into the tension between modernism and postmodernism, the dissertation claims that the essay is and always has been postmodern in its uncanniness--its refusal of generic and disciplinary boundaries, its capacity to bring together multiple voices and discourses, its skepticism, and its personal, experiential epistemology. Part I concludes with rhetorical analyses of late modern (in content and residual formal attributes) and postmodern essays. The affinities and contradictions between the normalized essay originating with Montaigne and feminist essays focuses the three chapters of Part II, "Gender and the Essay." In the first chapter, "Logos, Montaigne, and Feminism," I explore the tensions between the essay as Montaigne created it and the appeal of that form to contemporary feminist writers. In the second chapter, "The Essay's (Feminine?) Form," I show how the essay has functioned as both a vehicle for the oppressive logocentrism of its traditionally male, genteel authors and as a vehicle for women writers striving to disrupt or overthrow that tradition. In the third chapter, "Rhetoric and the Practice of Style: A Gathering of Essays by Women," I pursue the rhetoric of the other aesthetic into the realm of psychoanalytic theory, where the foundation of Lacanian symbolic order troubles the "other" aesthetic's claim to an alternative discourse. To close this extensive chapter I provide an array of essays written by women that are particularly innovative. My own creative nonfiction is the subject of Part III. "What Rhetoric Means" brings postmodern elements into an academic essay. On the other hand, "Life Drawing" does not address an academic subject or employ academic conventions. Instead it offers charcoal drawing as an analog to writing, with both acting as ways to revise and reclaim my life from my father's troubled legacy. Finally, in "Reflection," the third chapter of Part III and the dissertation's closing chapter, I claim that the essay, postmodernism, and rhetoric share a deep affinity for one another. In that the three terms signify freedom from absolutes, they also force us to contend with ethical responsibilities.

Reading Walden with an eye for contemporary issues in rheorical and composition theory, I contend that this work has much to offer a theory of dialogic pedagogy. Dialogic pedagogy advances a view that knowledge is situationally negotiated and contingent upon the limitations and exigencies of these situations. A pedagogy based on this theory should advance a self-reflective resistance to and critical awareness of socially organized knowledge and ideology; it should contribute to student awareness of knowledge as an "event" rather than static content. My thesis is that a re-reading of Walden can reveal another voice to add to the discussion of such a postmodern pedagogy. I read Thoreau as an advocate of an epistemology of qualified, experiential claim. This perspective claims a relationship between the authority of experience and that of specified, academic professional communities, relying on something like Burke's "identification" for rhetorical power rather than perceptions of the "air tight" logic of hegemonic discourse.