This dissertation is a combination of three loosely connected projects: First it discusses the disciplinary history of genre traced back to literary, linguistic and rhetorical studies to argue that this diverse body of knowledge contains valuable elements of articulating knowledge about writing. This portion of the dissertation postulates that genre is both a metaphorical and a rhetorical concept, which implies that all genre concepts whether they are defined as classifications, strategies, or descriptions can only partially grasp the nature of discourse. Nevertheless, all genre concepts provide useful guidance for writers and readers about texts in so far as they are applied for a valuable purpose to highlight and articulate the rhetorical, linguistic, or discursive features of texts. Second, two chapters discuss the relationship between genres and disciplinary knowledge, arguing that this diffuse and wayward connection provides valuable insight into the nature of writing and knowledge making, and that genre is a concept that can help writers better grasp the nature of relevant discourse in their disciplinary areas. Finally, the dissertation illustrates the potential of genre analysis as a combination of linguistic, literary, and rhetorical analysis to highlight the discursive and epistemological preferences of disciplinary texts by analyzing two significant articles from the field of rhetoric and composition. The pedagogical implications of these explorations are stated in the first and last chapters of this work implying that the complex analysis of texts as socially embedded patterns of knowledge making can be an important component of writing instruction both on elementary and on advanced levels, and need not be seen as an outmoded alternative or a purely theoretical supplement to the currently dominant process model of composition pedagogy.

Composing Containment speaks to the paradigm shift in composition studies that has been codified in a number of ways, such as the post-process movement, social-epistemic rhetoric, and cultural rhetoric. Integrating concerns in reception theory, textual and cultural analysis, rhetorics of difference, queer theory, and critical composition pedagogy, each chapter includes an investigation of the rhetorical construction and ideological function of difference in a particular social site: the disciplinary practices in composition, the pop-culture program, Will & Grace, and the discourse advocating the legalization of same-sex marriage. Admittedly, these are substantially different sites of inquiry with their own distinct rhetorical, generic, and political expectations; each site deploys difference as it participates in the production of dominant social values, however. Moreover, as the critiques presented in this project reveal, these sites produce similar ideological effects that secure racist, sexist, classist, and heterosexist ideology. Articulating this discursive resonance extends scholarship in rhetoric and composition in multiple ways. First, it engages the discourse of sexuality in order to further chart its rhetorical terrain. Second, while doing so, it identifies and critiques a dominant rhetorical strategy of this discourse, the rhetoric of incorporation. Third, it models a process of critique to demonstrate how this rhetoric works in contradictory ways. While it creates an image of progressive politics through its inclusion and apparent advocacy on behalf of the Other, for instance, the rhetoric of incorporation actually functions to contain the potentially disruptive power of difference---whether that difference is associated with queerness, basic writing, or liberatory pedagogy. Finally, this project suggests that the social prominence and efficacy of this rhetorical strategy can be countered only with methods of critique that link studies of rhetoric to theories of ideology and materiality.

Working Assets, a long-distance phone service company, often markets its services by telling customers that buying the company's products/services will contribute to social progress ("Help save rainforests, defend reproductive freedom and house the homeless while you save money on long distance calls"). This claim is based on the company's philanthropic and political practices, such as donating 1% of its long distance revenue to "progressive" nonprofit organizations, and alerting customers to current political, environmental, and social issues in its monthly mailings and through email. Working Assets' rhetorical representations of itself, its customers, and the act of consumption epitomize one moment in a dialectical process that is redefining economic, social, and political boundaries in the contemporary U.S. In this project, I term this process the "politicization of consumption" and define it as rhetorical practices that represent consumption as an exercise of social or political power. This project analyzes Working Assets' marketing rhetoric, as well as other samples of marketing texts that merge consumption with citizenship, for internal and external tensions that demonstrate ways that the politicization of consumption influences and is influenced by U.S. post-Fordist capitalism. Analyzing a variety of texts using Marxist dialectical inquiry as a theoretical framework and the concept of post-Fordism as a historical framework reveals the role of rhetoric in social and cultural production and reproduction and, more specifically, in redefining notions of "consumption" and "citizenship" in the contemporary U.S. This project concludes that, while the rhetoric of Working Assets and other companies that market "civic consumption" largely support capitalist structures, this rhetoric also cracks open the always already political nature of consumption, offering critical scholars opportunities for exposing the contradictions of capitalism.

Having worked on a major rhetoric and composition journal, I have found that in order to authorize an argument through publication, one has to make all the right moves. This notion of making all the right moves is what I refer to as gesturing. Gesturing is a critical tactic that "shifts interpretive authority out of the context of everyday human and social activity (our professional practices) and into a timeless, independent, already constituted and structured realm of subjects, works, ideas, and linguistic patterns" (Epstein 65). Scholars who desire to contribute to composition's marketplace of ideas must therefore deny their local epistemology, that is, the material sites of their activities that ground their professional practices: the classroom, department hallways, universities. Instead, they must gesture to an already established set of rules to authorize their argument. Based on Michel Foucault's theory of discourse, gesturing becomes a method for controlling the production of knowledge. Using Foucault as a framework, I illustrate how scholarly journals function as a means of restricting the discursive resources available to create new knowledge. Although Foucault would never assign agency to individuals, I argue that editors and peer referees formalize the gestures required of a writer. They restrict our discursive resources by maintaining the conditions under which discourse may be employed. The purpose of my project, therefore, is to consider how these gestures function as a discursive convention within rhetoric and composition studies. Although recent research has begun to look at and critique the publishing system, no one has addressed or challenged the boundaries of our discursive conventions that authorize editors' and peer referees' practices in the selection and dissemination of knowledge. My project fills this gap by (1) mapping the perimeters of our discourse, and (2) exploring what gestures might persuade reviewers and editors to recognize what and who authorizes their reviews, reviews that otherwise interpreted as standard scholarly criteria used in adjudicating an essay's merits.

In 1990, Linda Brodkey designed "Writing about Difference," a sophisticated first-year composition course at the University of Texas at Austin, where she served as director of lower-division English. The topic of the course was difference, and several of Brodkey's colleagues, inside and outside the English department, publicly criticized the course. Before long the local press and national publications, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, had picked up the story. The controversy was a defining moment for composition studies, characterized by a collision of competing discourses regarding the identity, authority, and ethos of composition studies and compositionists. This dissertation locates the controversy at the moment in the field's history when composition studies had achieved the status of a serious discipline, yet was increasingly vulnerable to media attacks. In analyzing the discourses associated with the controversy, this study argues that a pragmatic perspective might have empowered Brodkey to alter the dynamics of her situation. Moreover, it establishes that the discourses of the Writing about Difference moment resonate with the discourses circulating in composition studies today, suggesting that today's compositionists might similarly engage a pragmatic approach in order to create compromise and change when faced with seemingly irreconcilable discourses about their role and the nature of their work. Chapter I grounds the controversy historically by discussing the intellectual and cultural trends that led up to the Writing about Difference moment. Chapter II introduces pragmatism as an approach that can help composition studies to alleviate some of its problems with identity, authority, and ethos. Chapter III presents a narrative of the controversy, a description of Brodkey's syllabus, and an analysis of the ideological assumptions underpinning the discourse of her critics. Chapter IV examines Brodkey's response to the assault on her identity, authority, and ethos and explores how a response grounded in pragmatism might have altered the dynamics of the situation to produce more favorable outcomes. Chapter V explores how pragmatism can empower teachers of first-year composition to become activist intellectuals who honor their own desires for innovation while simultaneously honoring the expectations of the "others" who constitute their local contexts.

This dissertation examines a fundamental concern in rhetoric and composition and across academic disciplines---the notion of context. Theories of context create practical problems because the term refers to potentially everything around a text. This complexity manifests in four ways: (1) Context first appears in publications as unexplained evaluations of speech and writing. These assumed contexts are problematic because evaluation, or judgment, should follow invention, not proceed it. The term appears as a given, not as an invention. (2) Writers must reduce contexts to define the specific dimensions of particular cases and issues. Kenneth Burke details these reductions when defining contextual thinking as a paradoxical process, an "alchemic moment," one where "transformations" occur (Grammar 23-24). Other writers later refer to the 'transformative' power of context without acknowledging these paradoxes and reductions. (3) Many writers claim that contexts determine the meaning of words and the appropriateness of particular rhetorical strategies. If contexts determine meaning, what choices do rhetoricians have to determine meaning in contexts? (4) Anthropologists, linguists, and historians develop ideas of contexts that do not account for the rhetorical origins of the term. Composition scholars in turn borrow from disciplines other that rhetoric when explaining context. I explore these issues with an etymology of context in classical, professional, and curricular discourse. This etymology shows how compositionists use context to do three things for writing instruction: evaluate discourse; suggest situations; arrange details and intentions. I argue that these three categories of context can be better understood in terms of an active rhetorical style: Cicero and Quintilian offer style as decorum, perspicere, and ornare. Teachers rely on these styles to evaluate writing, to render situations clearly, and to configure details and intentions. This active sense of style mediates notions of context that emerge from the social sciences and provides rhetorical background for the important work that context does in composition and other disciplines. I end this dissertation by returning to Giambattista Vico's etymological work on classical rhetoricians. I identify from him a triangular invention: how memory, imagination, and perception combine with style to construct contexts.

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Defining a new kind of scholar, one who takes a holistic approach to his or her profession, involves examining models of writing that integrate personal and professional parts of one's life. As a vehicle towards holism, the essay is a superb model. It can integrate critical thought and personal expression organically and intelligently, inviting readers in rather than alienating all but a narrow readership. Because personal expression is integral to this model, I briefly examine a historical chronology of theories of epistemology and expressive discourse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Next, I look at other writing models--therapeutic, philosophical, journal-oriented, and spiritual--for their integration of formative experiences in the writing process. These two contextual explorations lead to a chapter in which I propose my theory of the critical/personal essay as a scholarly vehicle that integrates theory and lived experience. To demonstrate the essay's flexibility and power, I then examine the writing of Nancy Mairs and several nature, medical, spiritual, and pedagogical essayists. Throughout the dissertation, I interweave excerpts from personal experience. These sections anticipate the final chapter, which is a personal essay examining the role of expressive writing and the sacred in my teaching history.

This dissertation is a rhetorical study of mediation that theorizes ways in which people can use language to consistently achieve peaceful resolutions of conflicts. In this study, I analyze community mediation at the Our Town Community Mediation Program, which provides free or low cost dispute resolution services. Disputants engage in a conflict defined by a particular rhetorical situation with its own exigence and constraints. The major finding of this study is that once the disputants have entered into a mediation, they become engaged in a second rhetorical situation that is in a dynamic relationship with the first. Thus the mediation experience involves a "rhetorical system" of situations. The primary exigence is defined as the urgency that obliged the unresolved conflict. The primary constraints are those factors that determined the rhetorical discourse. Through interviews with four mediators and a case study of a mock mediation, I identify eleven new constraints in the secondary situation that give presence to a secondary exigence, namely, miscommunication. The secondary situation values conciliatory rhetoric, making a mutually satisfactory resolution possible. In this way, rhetorical situation is itself used as a rhetorical device to elicit a resolution. I begin by arguing that mediation is a rhetorical activity that resembles ideal public discourse as described by Chaim Perelman and Kenneth Burke. Qualities such as on going dialog and situationally specific justice make mediation a useful model for critiquing deliberative democratic discourse. In Chapter Two, I explain that my research methodology serves to acknowledge mediation as a living process. In Chapter Three I explore the rhetorics of mediation taking into account, for example, its unusual use of argument and its transformative goals. In Chapter Four, I analyze the data from my research, redefining concepts such as neutrality, agency, good communication and conflict. And in Chapter Five, I explore the possibility of a wider application for the concept of rhetorical system, concluding that while the discourse of mediation may be too situationally specific to apply whole cloth to other forms of public discourse, the concept of rhetorical system has wide ranging applications.

Public debate about how, and whether, to graze southern Arizona's desert grasslands has been ongoing for decades. Increases in ecological knowledge and the creation of public discussion forums have failed to build consensus about grazing and related land policies. One major line of public argument takes the form of identity politics, with valued cultural and social movement identities, such as rancher or environmentalist, pitted against each other. Another site for contention is contrasting ecological claims about the effects of cattle on grass cover. In this ethnography-based dissertation, I analyze: (1) the rhetorical construction and representation of identities, and (2) the forms of evidence that provide epistemic support for scientific claims about ecology. Both reified identities and decontextualized scientific argument hinder consensus-building. A more open discussion of conflicting desires and explicit acknowledgment of human agency to affect both cultures and landscapes can shift public debate to more productive grounds for collaboration.