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 project explores digital media productions based specifically on food and cooking in order to demonstrate that new communication technologies are increasingly incorporating all five of the bodily senses. In doing so, they contribute significantly to the emergence of new ideological apparatuses appropriate for a global community. These apparatuses – including the formation of a posthumanist subject, the use of technology to support embodied cognition, and the establishment of entertainment as an ideological institution – have become the harbingers of a rhetorical evolution. Based on the work of Gregory Ulmer, along with Jacques Derrida, N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, and Cary Wolfe, this evolution expands the work of Plato and Aristotle by overcoming the privileging of mind over body and abstract reasoning over concrete physical experience. As such hierarchies become turned on their heads, a renewed emphasis on materiality and embodiment demands virtual products that stimulate the body. As such, a phenomenon I have named disembodied consumption takes place whereby users' chemical senses can be incited through participation with digital technologies. Through the stimulation of these physical senses, and in turn the connected emotions, today's digital citizens are practicing the rhetorical method referred to by Ulmer as conduction. By examining sites, blogs, and postings that include references to food and flavor, I reveal examples of conduction and show how this method is necessary for the development of well-being, and the defeat of compassion fatigue in digital society.

Research in writing studies has focused on students who make the traditional transition from high school to first year composition, to the entry level discipline specific courses in their chosen majors (Wardle, 2007, 2009; Sommers and Saltz, 2004; Beaufort, 2007; Carroll, 2002). Very little scholarship addresses those students who "skip" first year composition and find themselves in entry level discipline specific courses classrooms. With three former students, I conduct a case study over the course of eight months via a series of face to face, facetime, skype and email interviews. Each of these students, through earning high test scores in high school, forego first year composition and move directly to entry level discipline specific courses. Using third generation activity theory as a lens (Engeström, 1996, 1999, 2001; Roth and Lee, 2007; Russell, 1995, 1997; Kain and Wardle, 2002), I examine these students' understanding of what they have experienced in high school writing—specifically high school English class—what they think college writing will demand, and finally what, in fact, they find the college writing demands to be. Not only do I find that each of the students felt very prepared for the demands they will encounter, but they remained confident. The study does, however, illuminate unforeseen challenges for both students and those who teach them: student literate lives are incredibly complex, and there is a real potential for a writing gap between formal writing instruction and when students will engage in intensive discipline writing tasks.

This study traces the transfer of writing-related knowledge and concepts from the composition classroom into the writing assignments composed by students within the same course. Working in a first-year-composition classroom taught through a writing-about-writing curriculum, the researcher observed students as they navigated from the initial learning of concepts such as rhetorical situations, writing processes, and discourse communities, into an application of these concepts in various writing assignments, including rhetorical analyses and discourse community profiles. By analyzing a composition instructor's objectives for her assignments and observing the interaction between students and their instructor in a single composition course for the duration of one semester, the researcher traced how students operationalized knowledge from the classroom and applied it in their own writing. After tracing this operalization through interviews with the instructor, observation of class activities and analysis of assignment sheets and student papers, the researcher proposes that instructors may encourage transfer within their composition classrooms by adequately presenting assignment objectives to students, and by allowing sufficient scaffolding of writing tasks. In this way, the researcher explains that students may be able to understand the objectives of their writing assignments in a way that may encourage them to apply the knowledge they learned in the classroom to the writing tasks assigned by their instructor.

Grounded in my interests in the possibilities presented by digital distribution and composition's focus on the public turn, this project questions what a move to the public means for writing students. Building on the work of compositionists, such as Bruce Horner, John Trimbur, and Amy Lee, who question the ways in which teaching practices and contexts position our students, I examine the public turn to better understand the implications of the assumption that going public itself leads students to value their texts more highly. To this end, I conducted a teacher-research project to study the relationships among student texts, valuation, and distribution through the lens of circulation--an understanding of the interconnected nature of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption grounded in Marxist thought. Circulation stresses not only the ways student texts move, but also how such movement shapes the ways student writers approach the act of composing and the relationships they establish with their labor. Only by investigating such relationships can we truly assess what kind of "value" accrues in writing that "goes public" for both the writer and the larger textual economies in which she is working. Although my findings support the publication of student writing, they also show that assuming value comes with publishing alone is problematic. Instead, I argue that a move to the public must be grounded by students' active decision making as well as a materialist view of the classroom. That is, a pedagogical approach grounded in the notion of circulation--an approach that invited students to consider the significance of distribution and to make their own decisions about how and why their texts might be made public--positioned students as decision makers who frequently "felt like writers" as they questioned the ways in which their texts are valued and the relationships they form with their labor. "Going public" alone does not, as a practice, necessarily lead students to revalue their writing. Instead, I argue that it is only the meta-critical awareness of circulation, audience, and distribution (and their effects on one's writing) that lead to such a rethinking of value.

This dissertation focuses on the potential for circulation studies to provide composition studies with a new means of examining the spread of pedagogical approaches to rhetoric and composition and writing studies (RC/WS). In this dissertation, I have used some of Gries's (2013) "iconographic tracking" methods and Mueller's (2017) network sense alongside more traditional rhetorical analysis to understand the distribution and circulation of the Writing About Writing (WAW) pedagogy. In addition to tracing an approach to teaching writing to see how it evolves over time, including how it was initially received and how the term "writing about writing" has been used on the social web, this dissertation includes my reflections on a circulation studies unit I taught in my own writing courses and the potential pedagogical implications of incorporating circulation studies into a first-year composition (FYC) course.

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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.