This thesis asserts that Marcus Bruce Christian (1900-1976), a New Orleans, Louisiana, black poet, writer, and historian, used his diary and notes as a site of rhetorical education and as a space in which he constructed and reinforced a Duboisian ethos, a particular type of black identity and character shaped by the political rhetoric of W. E. B. Du Bois. Maintaining this ethos, Christian, an autodidact throughout most of his life, negotiated a society strangled by white supremacist ideology and resisted being interpellated into the negative black identity constructed by a hostile and stifling Jim Crow South.

While proponents of process saw a contradiction in the current-traditional pedagogy--teaching toward product marginalized valuable practices embedded in the processes of writing--post-process scholars sought to move beyond attempts to codify writing processes for easy instruction. Because it avoids resting upon foundations, the critical focus of post-process does not allow for easy pedagogical application. In order to navigate the post-process theoretical impasse, I argue for an approach to composition pedagogy that emphasizes a performative and sophistic aspect of topical reasoning that when practiced challenges Cartesian self-certainty and works to transform subjectivity. Through communicating judgments of similarity and difference within any given situation, the performance of topical reasoning serves to either reproduce or transform the customary understanding of the rhetor's community; the latter is the exception, the former the rule within our inherited rhetorical traditions. Derivative of the efforts of Plato and Aristotle to discipline rhetoric, and especially following the emergence of the Enlightenment project, rhetorical traditions that exclude sophistic perspectives have continued to understand topics as codified sets of rules a rhetor simply follows to invent discourse, making the topics easily dismissible because invention had become a matter of reporting on reality or of following inner inspiration. While several projects to employ topics in composition pedagogy have emerged during the late 20th century--spanning process, post-process, and new rhetorical pedagogies--the performative dimension of topical reasoning has been overlooked, or left to the realm of theory because of its radical nature vis-a-vis university composition courses. Building from a Heideggerian reading of the topics, and through an extensive analysis of the sophistic pedagogic practices employed in a weekend seminar called the Landmark Forum, I work to develop a full understanding of topical reasoning as primarily performative, where only in risky moments of performance can one undergo an experience with language and so develop a rhetorical subjectivity receptive to recalcitrance while maintaining integrity to one's commitments. I claim that to "learn" topical reasoning requires a program of rigorous dialogic exercise, an ontological paideia, which calls for performances that revise identity and the networks of rhetorical relationships that reinforce identity.

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"'(T)hey ought to mind what a woman says" : early Cherokee women's rhetorical traditions and rhetorical education," illustrates how Cherokee women reinvented a sovereign Cherokee presence in the face of colonial hostility toward their political authority. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Cherokee women used oratory, and later writing, to insist that they possessed a mandate to participate in and help shape public debate. In chapter one, I discuss the defining features of an eighteenth-century Cherokee women's rhetorical tradition. Chapter two uses Deborah Brandt's theories of literacy accumulation to examine Cherokee mission schools and to demonstrate how Cherokee women refashioned writing skills they learned to affirm belonging in Cherokee communities. Chapter three employs Kenneth Burke's and Gerald Vizenor's theories of identification and consubstantiation to explore how Cherokee women deployed the language of American civility in print, thereby countering the image of the Vanishing Indian. The conclusion examines the implications of this study for current research in rhetoric and composition studies: Cherokee women's English-language literacy accumulation is analogous to contemporary literacy pedagogy debates. / text

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A reexamination of John Donne's Holy Sonnet “Batter my heart,” especially one looking at the sonnet's relationship to Early Modern rhetoric, is long overdue. In this paper, I hope to show that a focus on Donne's relationship to Early Modern rhetoric yields several useful new insights. I argue specifically that Donne was probably exposed to Non-Ramist rhetorical methods and theory at many points in his education, from his childhood to his college years to his years at the Inns of Court. Furthermore, Non-Ramist rhetoric has moral implications, suggesting that aspects of an author's feelings, character, and desires can be analyzed by looking at the writer's rhetorical choices in relation to a specific audience in a specific situation. After discussing Donne's rhetorical education, I will look at how the rhetorical decisions of the poetic speaker in Donne's “Batter my heart” reveal his opinions of God and develop his attitudes toward God over the course of the poem. Indeed, the poetic speaker uses rhetoric that exerts power back on him, causing him to change: whereas at the beginning of the poem the poetic speaker thinks he controls his relationship with God, at the end he sees himself as God's humble subject. Ultimately, the poetic speaker's feelings of utter separation from God at the end of the poem actually yield a sense that he has found God and has gained a sense of awe surrounding the Divine.

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This study is, in part, a response to arguments that claim higher education fails to prepare students with fundamental communication skills necessary for everyday life and indicative of "educated" persons. Though the validity of such arguments is contestable, they nonetheless reflect fundamental inadequacies in current educational theories and practices that have evolved over centuries of curricular, cultural, and socioeconomic change. Current theories and practices in higher education, specifically general education, reflect a misunderstanding of both the purpose of education in a democracy and the role of the liberal arts, specifically rhetoric, in accomplishing that purpose. The consequences of rhetorically-impoverished general education curricula are manifested not only in the declining literate and communicative practices of recent college graduates but also in the declining civic and democratic practices of a growing number of Americans. By tracing the histories of and relationships among education, rhetoric, and composition instruction, this thesis highlights the purpose of education and the role of writing instruction and rhetoric in accomplishing that purpose. This review demonstrates that the introductory composition course, when informed by epistemic rhetoric, provides curricular coherence in general education while clarifying and accomplishing the primary purpose of education: to facilitate the development of autonomous citizens capable of participating in the democratic practices of their communities. This outcome relies on rhetorical education, or rhetorical training in the language arts, which allows students to understand and articulate their identity as individuals in relation to the various communities to which they belong and with which they interact. The misconception of rhetoric and relegation of writing instruction calls for a university-wide reconceptualization of the purpose of education and the complementary roles of general education and writing instruction in accomplishing that purpose. This thesis invites novice and experienced composition instructors to explore further the relationships among education, democracy, language, and rhetoric to recognize the central role of composition instruction in enabling individual autonomy and sustaining a healthy democracy while improving literate and communicative practices.