This dissertation examines the feminist intersections of composition studies, visual rhetoric, and comics studies in order to identify a rhetorically interdisciplinary approach to composition that moves beyond composition studies’ persistent separation of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, rhetoric and ideology, and analysis and composition. Chapter one transgresses the qualitative/quantitative divide using keyword analysis and visualization of 2,573 dissertation and thesis abstracts published between 1979 – 2012 to engage in what composition studies scholar Derek Mueller terms a “distant reading” of the extent and contexts of composition studies’ self-identified interdisciplinarity. Complementing my more traditional literature review, the results of this analysis validate the necessity of my analytical and pedagogical interventions by suggesting that composition studies has not yet addressed comics through the feminist intersections of visual rhetoric and critical pedagogy. Chapters two and three develop a rhetorical analytical approach to comics that moves beyond comics studies’ persistent separation of rhetoric and ideology by positing conflict as an identifiable form of rhetorical persuasion in the Martha Washington comics. These comics were collaboratively created by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons between 1989 – 2007. Following feminist rhetorician Susan Jarratt’s case for rhetorical conflict as a pedagogical tool and extending Chicana feminist Chela Sandoval’s conceptualization of meta-ideologizing in which oppressive ideologies are re-signified via recontextualizations that juxtapose ‘old’ and ‘new’ signs of ideological meaning, I explore the rhetorically persuasive conflict arising from visual, conceptual, and embodied juxtapositions of race, class, and gender made visible in these comics. Chapter four outlines a feminist, critical, visual rhetorical – what I call prismatic – approach to composition pedagogy that requires (1) contexts in which differences and conflicts can be identified and engaged, (2) explicable sites of intersection between ideological perspectives and rhetorical construction, and (3) models for the transition from ideological critique to (re)composition. This is not an add-pop-genre-and-stir approach to composition pedagogy; rather, it intentionally deploys comics’ inherent multimodality as a challenge to students’ often narrow definitions of rhetoric and composition.

The place of the research paper in first-year composition (FYC) courses is often debated in composition forums. Many argue that the a-disciplinary nature of FYC doesn't allow instructors to teach the research paper in a way that will be transferable to disciplinary writing tasks, while others say that it is possible, as long as we have a thorough understanding of the kinds of writing tasks students will face in the disciplines and specifically teach writing skills that will be transferable. To identify these more generalizable writing skills to be emphasized, I interviewed 14 professors at Brigham Young University from different disciplines about the research papers they teach within their upper-division disciplinary courses and the kinds of researching and writing skills they expect students to have mastered before enrolling in these courses. I collated the results of the interviews and categorized 22 skills into four categories: writing process knowledge, genre knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, and researching knowledge, finding correlation between the 22 skills I identified with skills identified by both John Bean and Carra Leah Hood, lending credence to the value of my identified skills as worthwhile to be focused on in FYC. I draw on Amy Devitt's idea that the school genres we teach in FYC are antecedent genres to assert that teaching a research paper in FYC outside of the constraints of any one discipline can provide a viable and valuable learning experience, provided that it is taught with an emphasis on these writing skills that are most valued across the disciplines, and provided it is taught as a step along the way to later mastery of disciplinary genres.

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