Responding to the political and educational crises over cultural literacy, multiculturalism, and expanding the canon of literature, I present case studies of eight first-year college students and their attitudes about literature. These are students who have scored 4s or 5s on the Advanced Placement English Examination and who represent a discourse community well versed in a traditional canon of literature. In first-year composition, I offer them a multicultural curriculum, presenting contemporary Native American and Mexican American literatures in dialogue with more traditional literatures. Specifically, I examine their responses to the politics of aesthetics, setting up a contrast between canons of texts and canons of methods in Advanced Placement English and a first-year college composition course stressing multicultural literatures. I pay special attention to their "cultural literacy" and to their awareness and acceptance of cultural differences. Chapter 1 gives a background and overview of the study. Chapter 2 examines the literature on cultures and its effect on canons of literary texts and methods of teaching and responding to them. Chapter 3 describes the ethnographic methods of this study, traces the history of Advanced Placement English, and lays out the multicultural curriculum of this study. Chapter 4 is a case study of one student before, during, and after the multicultural curriculum. Chapter 5 examines the past histories--families, high schools, and Advanced Placement English--of seven other students. Chapters 6 and 7 describe the responses of these seven students to a multicultural literature curriculum. Chapter 8 reviews the findings, offering interpretations and commentary on Advanced Placement English, the Advanced Placement English Examination, cultural literacy, and multiculturalism, concluding with recommendations for curricula of the future.

This project is an analytical history of the discourse of media panics that have affected comics-like forms in the mid- to late-1800s, comic books in the mid-1900s, and comics media in 1990s and the contemporary moment. The study of these media panics shapes a theory of nerd culture in general and comics culture specifically in order to better understand the delicate and foundational dialectic that sustains a consumer identity that is paradoxical in its indulgence in and animosity towards popular culture. With its historical formation in mind, this project explores the formation of geek chic as a consumer identity that, in many ways, troubles and even threatens the status quo of nerd culture.

This dissertation applies a mixed-methods model across three cases of climate risk in order to examine the rhetorical dynamics of uncertainties. I argue that a rhetorical approach to uncertainties can effectively scaffold civic agency in risk communication by translating conflicting interests and creating sites of public participation. By tracing the networks of scientists and their artifacts through cases of climate risk, I demonstrate how the performances of scientific ethos and their material-discursive technologies facilitate the personalization of risk as a form of scientific prudence, and thus a channel to feasible political action. I support these claims through a rhetorical model of translation, which hybridizes methods from discourse analysis and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in order assemble a data-driven and corpus-based approach to rhetorical analysis. From this rhetorical perspective uncertainties expand on our notions of risk because they reveal associations between scientific inquiries, probability assessments, and the facilitation of political dialogues. In each case, the particular insight of the model reveals a range of rhetorical potentials in climate risk that can be confronted through uncertainties.

In 1493 Johann Trechsel published in Lyons a Latin edition of Terence's six comedies, generally known today as the "Lyons Terence." The volume is illustrated with 160 woodcuts. The first woodcut, on the title page, shows the author in his library; the second, a full-page frontispiece titled Theatrum, pictures a building with a stage and audience; the remaining woodcuts, half-page illustrations distributed throughout the text, depict figures on stages, a different stage for each of the six comedies. Chapter 1 introduces the woodcuts both as book illustrations and theatre documents. As book illustrations, the woodcuts are striking partly because of their size, their quantity, and their artistic merit and partly because they comprise the earliest series and narrative illustrations to accompany a printed Latin text. Commissioned for this particular edition to Terence's comedies, the woodcuts suggest a pedagogical concern with illustrations that provide a running commentary on the text. As theatre documents, the woodcuts are significant because they represent the first instance in which an editor has illustrated a dramatic text by depicting characters on stages. Chapter 2 analyzes the composition and distribution of the woodcuts by comparing each illustration with the text it introduces. Marking each traditional scene division, the woodcuts depict the characters who participate in the dialogue to follow. By manipulating the characters' placement on the stage, their use of curtains, and the number of times they are depicted in a single picture, the artist establishes conventions to identify (1) the major character group comprising a scene, (2) characters who speak apart before joining in conversation with those already on-stage, (3) characters who remain apart throughout a scene and speak only asides, and (4) characters whose voices are heard but who never appear on the stage. The artist does not portray nonverbal stage business. Chapter 3 investigates the possible influence of narrative art on the conventions identified in Chapter 2. First, I argue that the woodcuts were directly influenced by the miniatures in the Terence manuscripts; this influence accounts for errors and idiosyncracies in representing characters and the priority of character depiction over stage action. Second, I show that the woodcuts adopted conventions for representing narrative action, especially transitional links, from narrative art in general. Chapter 4 distinguishes between staging and the stage. Although the woodcuts do not represent characters so as to suggest the staging of Terence's plays, they do depict those characters upon stages. The Andria stage, moreover, appears to be indebted to the contemporary booth stage. The compartment labels I take to be a literary rather than a staging feature. Chapter 5 summarizes the findings of the dissertation. It concludes that the woodcuts, innovative illustrations which supplement a classical text, function primarily as a pedagogical aid to help the reader follow the Latin dialogue of the comedies.

This dissertation investigates the material conditions that produced modernist literature by interrogating male-female literary mentoring relationships; it considers the prefaces written by T. S. Eliot for Marianne Moore and Djuna Barnes, and by Ford Madox Ford by Jean Rhys, as well as the circumstances that gave rise to those prefaces. The Introduction argues for a feminist and deconstructionist treatment of biographical materials, and establishes the ontological and political connections between prefaces and books. Chapter Two focuses on Marianne Moore's mentoring by T. S. Eliot. It places that relationship within the contexts of Moore's familial bonds, and the institutionalization of modernist poetry through the big and little magazines which promoted and critiqued it. It also considers Eliot's preface to Moore's Selected Poems and its influence on later readers, and reads Moore's 1930's poetry against her earlier poems in order to gauge the impact of Eliot and of the politics of modernist poetry on her work. Chapter Three places Djuna Barnes's relationship with Eliot in the context of Barnes's early family life, noting how issues of consumption (especially as regards forms of familial nurturance and abuse) pertain in both. My readings of Nightwood and The Antiphon trope Barnes's language of reproduction and nurturance in order to explore her vexed relationships to these issues. Jean Rhys's best known novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, describes the relationship between a white West Indian woman and an English man in terms that powerfully echo Rhys's own affair with Ford Madox Ford and the issues of autonomy that were central to her reading of it. Chapter Four takes up that relationship as reflected in Ford's and Rhys's writings about each other--especially in Ford's orientalizing preface to Rhys's first book, and her multiple responses to it. As is true in all cases treated here, the master's prefaces marks the woman's text in crucial ways that have previously been overlooked. My conclusion calls for an approach to modernist literature that includes the biographical as a destabilizing element and that takes up Deleuze and Guattari's notion of a minor literature as a promising conceptualization of "non-masterful" work.

This dissertation examines the problem of narrative closure in Hawthorne's major romances in the light of the unfinished manuscripts he was working on immediately before his death. Despite the sense of formlessness the mass of material itself sugests, these manuscripts bear striking similarities to his earlier works. The problems of reading and writing, of concealment and revelation, of searching for one's origins and being shaped by one's past, the figure of the storyteller whose manner and difficulties usurp the story itself in importance--these are materials Hawthorne returned to time after time as if unable to locate precisely or exhaust completely their implications. The majority of Hawthorne's tales and romances are fragmentary. For Hawthorne, reality is always beyond man's ability to perceive except as bits and fragments. Throughout his work he asserts his awareness that man can perceive and express only a minuscule part of the immense, inexhaustible reality within and outside of his own mind. Every expression is, therefore, incomplete, and the artistic process becomes one of piecing together, by retelling and reshaping, the fragments of both imagination and perception. To study the problem of closure in narratives that have grown out of this view of the relationship between human experience and its artistic expression is to consider not only the formalistic dimension of the problem (how stories end) but the relationship between the narrative's ending and the ending of human experience in death. It is to consider the relationship between the forms of closure and the formlessness and absence of death. In viewing Hawthorne's romances retrospectively one repeatedly encounters his ironic sense that death both gives meaning to life and renders it ridiculous and that death both generates narrative and demands its ending. Hawthorne's allegory causes him to place himself within his texts in a way that makes them expressive of the design of his own life artistically woven into the texts of his career. By thus inverting the glass and reversing the cycle as suggested in "The Dolliver Romance," the reader effects the reliving of the author's life through art. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)

This dissertation contributes to the discipline by demonstrating successful and productive incorporation of feminist research methods and methodologies in rhetorical studies and the application of the rhetorical arts to feminist projects. Specifically this dissertation examines the history of state-sanctioned marriage in the US and its contribution to normative discourses of family that problematically inform public policies and mainstream arguments directed at some working and parenting women struggling to care for their families and provide for them economically. Through feminist rhetorical analyses of congressional testimony on welfare; feminist rhetorics on women, work, family, and economics; and narratives of women's lived experiences derived from an interview-based study, this project renders visible and disrupts mechanizations of privilege and oppression deployed through hegemonic discourses on marriage and family. It concludes that feminist rhetorical scholars are uniquely trained and therefore called upon to address inequities promulgated through national attachment to state-sanctioned marriage and normative models of family.

Aemilia Lanyer subverted traditional understandings of poetic subjectivity and altered received generic forms in order to construct herself as poet in a culture that reserved that vocation to men. She did so by creating in her poems a tradition of female poetic subjectivity through the imaginative construction of a community of empowered women. Lanyer fashioned herself a poet within this community and claimed a premier place by virtue of her alliance with the paradoxically humbled yet omnipotent Christ. She announced her poetic vocation through a remaking of the initiatory pastoral poem, transforming the position of women in the orphic genres of lament and epithalamium. In the country house poem, as well, Lanyer altered generic material that served to objectify and silence women in classical precedents and seventeenth-century models. (An appendix discusses Lanyer's use of the Geneva Bible and material from the Book of Common Prayer.)

Rachel Calof's Story. Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains (Ed. J. Sanford Rikoon, Indiana University Press, 1995) is a first-person memoir of homesteading in North Dakota from 1894-1917, based on Rachel Calof's Yiddish manuscript. I traced this text from inception to publication, especially the translation and editing process, comparing a new translation of the Yiddish manuscript with the English publication. Since the differences proved significant, my research investigated issues of oral history transmission and collaboration. In light of new scholarship in autobiography theory, particularly Paul Eakin's "proximate collaborative autobiography," I consider Rachel Calof's Story a hybrid text, integrating both oral histories and written texts to portray a more complete picture of homestead life. Rachel's son, Jacob, compiled the English version for publication, bringing a comprehensive knowledge of her life, and yet complicating objectivity because he was, indeed, her son. Recent scholarship in women's and western studies focuses on situational context; investigation of diversity supplements an increasingly multi-faceted picture. Contemporary scholarship in immigrant literature emphasizes ambivalence rather than assimilation and changed how I considered the Calof story. I apply the Personal Narratives Group's conceptualization of context, narrator-interpreter relations and multiple connotations of "truths." The oral nature of the Yiddish language is also considered as influencing the translation. I analyze specific themes at length: Rachel Calof's physical environment of home, prairie and transitional spaces; the rhetoric of frontier settlement; home in physical and religious terms; and finally, Americanization as an editorial emphasis which reduced ethnic and religious distinctions. Other multi-authored works, including those of Anne Frank, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Black Elk, reveal parallel collaborative tensions. Neither generational nor gender differences entirely explain alterations families and ethnographers make in editing transmitted works. Barbara Myerhoff's concept of the "third voice" particularly influenced my understanding the dialogic nature of manuscripts and oral histories. Finally, I question whether publishers and audiences are complicit in the demand for success stories even at the expense of stifling an author's voice. The English publication of Rachel Calof's Story was polished and unaccented; the original Yiddish manuscript was a stream of consciousness that might not have been published.

This dissertation examines the lives and material production of the early modern women known as the Nuns of Little Gidding, Mary Collett Ferrar (1603-1680) and Anna Collett (1605-1639). The religious community at Little Gidding, Huntingsonshire (now Cambridgeshire), founded in 1626 by Mary Woodnoth Ferrar and her son Nicholas, housed forty-some members of the extended Ferrar, Collet, and Mapletoft family and their retainers. They devoted their lives to prayer, Bible study and memorization, contemplation, acts of charity, and the production of several unique Bible concordances or harmonies (as well as some Bible histories) of which fifteen are extant. Women were central to the spiritual life of the community, in particular, Mary and Anna who took vows of chastity. They were also the primary creators of the concordances, a task that entailed cutting up printed Bibles, reorganizing the text according to a complex scheme devised by Nicholas Ferrar. The resulting harmonized Gospel suppressed the discrepancies and differences in the four canonical accounts and produced a single, seamless narrative that preserved every detail of the originals. Close study of the relationship between image and text in the Gospel harmonies shows that the women sometimes chose particular images not to illustrate but rather to undermine the authority of the biblical narrative. Images might restore women to an account that minimizes, trivializes, or elides their importance in the life of Jesus. Thus, while their explicit task was to harmonize the Gospel accounts, the women were surreptitiously "deconstructing" them to reveal their discord.