The Inverted Compass traces the influence of geography on early American writing. Maps, quadrants, and compasses are at the heart of America’s most celebrated stories, and these geographic tools shaped how Americans understood themselves and their relationship to the landscape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But the emerging discipline also provided writers a way to address the young Republic’s most pressing political and ethical problems. The word geography itself - from the Greek geo (earth) and graphia (writing) - articulates the central paradox. Mapping, even as it claims to represent the world, continuously produces it. Literary works follow a similar logic. The Inverted Compass argues that certain early American writers recognized the parallels between mapping and writing and confronted their political implications through narrative fiction. These writers imagined counter-spaces. They created alternate geographies. They inverted the compass. Their allegories, hoaxes, and satires sharpened readers’ awareness of the role of writing and rhetoric in law and government, directing attention to the often-obscured ethical responsibilities related to Westward expansion and the treatment of minority bodies in nineteenth-century America. The Inverted Compass examines the work of Jefferson, Poe, Melville, and Twain alongside exploration narratives, maps, journals, ship logs, field manuals, land surveys, city plans, political cartoons, spelling primers, court cases, land laws, and Congressional documents to uncover the patterns of reading that guide the spatial imagination and its material products.

This dissertation examines the anxieties that the contemporary genre of women’s fiction known as "chick lit" expresses about female sexuality, women and work, and the relationship between female identity and the global consumer marketplace. Furthermore, this project argues that chick lit can be productively traced to male-authored canonical texts that establish tropes and themes that chick lit novelists still grapple with at the turn of the twenty-first century. Chick lit heroines have benefitted from feminist progress, but they frequently participate in a backlash against the advances that empower them to pursue sexual pleasure outside marriage, find fulfilling careers, and challenge constructions of identity. Chapter 1 examines scholarship on constructions of gender and sexuality, affect theory, and Marxist theories. It also explores historical context through critiques of popular women writers. Chapter 2 argues that Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) establishes the first-person confessional narrative voice and a sexualized secondary female character who is punished for her non-normative sexuality. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada (2003) demonstrate that female sexuality must still be negotiated and contained in postfeminist culture. Chapter 3 explores how work contributes to female agency in literature. Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) depicts a heroine who successfully manages her gender, race, and class performances in order to thrive in an urban space, while Kate Reddy, from Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002), must pass as a non-mother in order to participate in the affective economies that prevail in the gendered workplace. Chapter 4 analyzes the role of consumer culture in female subject formation in a capitalist material culture. In Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and Blake Edwards’s film version (1961), heroine Holly Golightly’s proximity to the luxury retailer legitimates her identity. But in Sophie Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic (2000), heroine Becky Bloomwood struggles against a shopping addiction and strives to define herself outside of the discourse of consumerism. Overall, this dissertation provides an important contribution to the conversation on women’s writing and contemporary identity formation because it addresses literary criticism, contemporary culture, and constructions of female subjectivity.

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 brings an interdisciplinary methodology to bear on the rhetorical analysis of women's sport and health social movements in the twenty-first century. Specifically, I read "sports feminism" as a rhetorical discourse that engages ongoing feminist struggles for women's rights to both their bodies and public space. Drawing on transnational feminist rhetorics, I network sports feminist arguments to international policy documents, like the Brighton and Beijing Declarations, to illustrate how the topoi of sport, health, and fitness function as commonplaces in global gender mainstreaming policy. In applying the metaphor of the network to the communicative infrastructure of global sports feminist advocacy, I also draw on new media rhetorics to analyze the role of the wireless Internet and social networking in the rhetorical practice of networking sports feminist policy and arguments across transnational lines of difference. Yet, in reading the rhetorical practices of the Women's International Sports Movement and Nike's Girl Effect through transnational feminist rhetoric, I illustrate how sports feminism is neither a homogenous discourse nor singular feminist identity, and thus, must be analyzed as a pluralistic political praxis with competing rhetorical objectives and audiences. Thus, the final chapter situates sports feminist rhetoric locally in the context of US-based girl power media culture, analyzing the impact of sports feminist rhetoric on the embodied perceptions of gender and gender relations of adolescent American girls. The project thus demonstrates the importance of understanding sports feminist rhetoric's global sociopolitical and economic roles and its impact on gendered identity and labor in the twenty-first century.

This dissertation examines the problem of women, marriage, and sexuality in Melville's work. The general absence of female characters in his stories, his frequent depiction of horrific marriages, and his seeming reticence about sexuality have all contributed to the long-standing critical view that his writing reveals a deep-seated hatred and fear of women. In disputing these critical commonplaces, the study argues that Melville always reinforces the importance of the sexual element in human relations. His ideas about women, marriage, and sexuality are informed by his perception of a disturbing tension between men and women in his society, and he makes the paradoxes of his culture concerning gender relations central to his work. The dissertation is organized thematically to isolate and explore the primary manifestations of sexualized human relations in Melville's work: desire, frustration, marriage, transgression, and homoeroticism. Close readings of specific stories, poems, and sections of novels suggest new interpretative trajectories based primarily on considerations of how culture influences gender and sexual meaning. The introduction surveys the tradition of Melville scholarship on the problem of women and sexuality. The sources of the prevailing negative impression concerning his attitudes are traced largely to the demands of the theoretical approaches which have dominated discussion of the sexual issues in Melville's writing. Evidence from Melville's marginalia is then offered to establish the ground for a more balanced view of his perceptions. The second chapter asserts that, for Melville, much of the difficulty of human experience can be attributed to sexual desire. Within his work he probes the psychological nature of these desires, and he interrogates the cultural codes by which desire is regulated. The next chapter, on the marriage theme, locates Melville within the nineteenth century turmoil in marriage ideologies, while chapter four is an analysis of the sexual transgression motif. The violation of cultural rules through which sexual pleasure is licensed and controlled is used metaphorically by Melville to represent the individual quest for personal or artistic freedom. The final chapter describes Melville's consistent use of figurative language associated with negative homoeroticism to dramatize disproportionate power relations between men.

This dissertation is a study of feminist research methodologies through which I analyze the results of an empirical study I conducted in 1994 in collaboration with Dr. Tilly Warnock and Julie Jung. This study, funded by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, began with a survey, sent to 900 female writing teachers at 100 US universities, asking questions about gender-specific problems and student-to-teacher harassment in the writing classroom. Nearly 60 percent of the respondents reported having experienced gender-specific conflicts with students. These problems range from disruptive behavior in class to sexual harassment and assault. While these conflicts are obviously common among female writing teachers, very little research has focused on these issues because traditional research methods tend to ignore women's unique subject positions. Drawing on the postmodern philosophies of Foucault and Derrida, and feminist theories of research methodologies (including Sandra Harding, Mary Fonow, Judith Cook, Gesa Kirsch, and Joy Ritchie), I argue that feminist research must begin with a personal location of the researcher within the research process, that feminist research is a collaborative effort among researchers and between researchers and participants, that feminist research is both about and for women, that feminist research focuses on the everyday experiences of women in their personal and public lives, and that feminist research resists essentializing the concerns of women, resists silencing multiple and alternative interpretations. I analyze these characteristics in various feminist research projects and attempt to exemplify them in my own study. Thus, my dissertation has a duel purpose. First, I want to argue that feminist research methodologies are valuable because they offer alternatives to traditional conventions of research, which often serve to perpetuate prejudice against women, people of color, and other oppressed groups. Second, I want to add to the voices of other feminist scholars who are creating multiplicities of truths, each situated within a specific context, each growing from situated subjectivities.

This dissertation examines commonplaces in influential Anglo-American women's activist rhetorics of the mid-nineteenth century. In contemporary rhetorical theory commonplaces refer to "opinions or assumptions...that people generally consider persuasive" (Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives 56). Because the persuasiveness of evidence depends on the assumptions that audiences hold, Cicero defines commonplaces as "the very homes of all proofs" (2.39.162). Social-activist rhetorics by nineteenth-century women literally relocated the homes of proofs to challenge previous assumptions. Nineteenth-century audiences generally considered persuasive the assumption that women should not speak or write on matters of public policy outside of the home. As a result, most audiences found evidence that corroborated this assumption to be true rather than simply more persuasive in a given set of historical circumstances. Women social-activists undertook the arduous task of convincing audiences that this evidence could not withstand every rhetorical situation, including social reform movements that extended women's homes into society. Homeplaces figure in how women could define social reform issues as well as their own characters as rhetors, in nineteenth-century America. Whether activist or nonactivist, nineteenth-century rhetorics commonly take character construction as an integral part of women's spiritual province within the home (see Barbara Welter). Female rhetors relocated homeplaces in effective ethos constructions, wherein character resides in discourse rather than in preconceived notions about the character of all women (Aristotle 1356a2-13). In this case women's embodied presence made these preconceived notions unavoidable, however. Widely held social beliefs about women's role in the home contested the ethos of women who engaged social issues in "the public sphere." While nineteenth-century conservatives posit a static conception of the public sphere as an indeterminate location opposed to the private sphere of home, even their arguments demonstrate the fluidity of the term public. Activists use this rhetoric to constitute multiple publics for women, publics that reside both inside and outside the home. The revised homeplaces of nineteenth-century female rhetors bequeath a rhetorical legacy to social-activists.

This dissertation considers the way in which the figure of fashion expands and complicates the field of literary modernism. My project treats "fashion" as more than just clothing and other bodily adornment, broadening it to include certain spaces, locations, and objects organized by social hierarchies of performance and display. I focus on the way in which characters--often in the texts of authors on the margins of mainstream modernism--use fashionable dress and the manipulation of social spaces to defy constraining social positions. I argue that fashionable expression allows characters to revise personal history and represent a self in opposition to externally imposed perceptions of identity.The readings of fashionable "moments" I consider show how fashion, like the modernist aesthetic itself, allows authors to fragment and remake conceptions of self and persona, meaning and value, and past and present, all categories scholars now argue were at the heart of the aesthetics of modernism. In chapters on Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, and William Faulkner, I explore the production of womanhood as anti-modern, the generation of personhood through new relations to things, the relations of the signs of race to the more general fashion system, and the relation between the domestic, modernity, and the American South. Examining texts through the lens of fashion reveals the ways in which modernist moments are produced by characters, subjects and authors often considered to be outside the boundaries of the modernist movement through an engagement with concepts of the fashionable, and the remaking of the self it allows. Building on the history of scholarship on modernist aesthetics, and on recent work on the role fashion played in the production and growth of the spirit of modernity, I show how, at the fringes of the American aesthetic, the frictions that brought literature in contact with the fashion system allow us to rethink the history of the early twentieth century.

Using a transactional model of reading and writing, the dissertation discusses rhetorical aspects of the experience and representation of the American desert. The dissertations extends recent nonfiction scholarship that claims nature writing as literature by focusing on seven major nonfiction works: Some Strange Corners of Our Country (1891), by Charles F. Lummis; The Desert (1901), by John C. Van Dyke; The Land of Little Rain (1903), by Mary Austin; The Desert Year (1952), by Joseph Wood Krutch; Desert Solitaire (1968), by Edward Abbey; Desert Notes (1976), by Barry Lopez; and Secrets from the Center of the World (1990), by Joy Harjo and Stephen Strom. The Desert, by John C. Van Dyke, is treated in depth, in terms of its use of aesthetic experience to argue for conservation and for a particular philosophy of nature. Van Dyke's establishes his rhetorical stance (including the creation of the narrator and appeals he makes to particular audiences) and initiates his aesthetic and scientific delineation of the subject in the preface to the book, which is studied in detail.