Major scholars of the literary production of Rebecca West (1892-1983), English journalist, critic, biographer, historian, and novelist, universally cite the generic range of her writing as the primary impediment to a unified critical view of her work. For seventy-one years, from 1911 to 1982, her career as journalist, political analyst, theater critic, and literary reviewer was the stable matrix from which emerged her fiction, literary criticism, biography, and history. A growing body of scholarship is working toward the construction of a unified view of West's vast body of work, which includes eight books of fiction, twelve books of nonfiction, numerous lectures printed as monographs, perhaps one thousand newspaper articles and review-essays, and more than 10,000 letters. By far the greater portion of her work is her nonfiction prose, yet extended critiques of her nonfiction are surprisingly few. The present study considers the contexts to which West's major works of nonfiction respond, their central propositions, their formal organization, the images and metaphors that characterize her accounts of ideas incarnate in the experience of individuals, classes, and nations, the critical reception of these works at the time of their publication, and, where possible, more recent critical views. Comprehensive survey of West's nonfiction uncovers not a single unifying theme but rather a circuit of secular ideas indebted to the scientific-rational thought of Herbert Spencer, which was enormously persuasive among the educated classes of late Victorian and Edwardian England. According to Spencer, who is credited with having constructed the materialist body of thought known as Social Darwinism, the slow working of evolution finds a parallel in the evolution of social organization in human society. This broad view of the social organism, which was an article of faith with West's intellectual predecessors and mentors--her father, Charles Fairfield; her sister, Letitia Fairfield; her lover and colleague H. G. Wells--confirmed in West a hardy empiricism, a consciously scientific perspective on history, an uncompromising and lifelong feminism, and a progressive politics which inform her examination of complex social and political relationships among individuals, classes, and nations and which are everywhere evident in her literary criticism, political analysis, biography, and cultural history.

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 study examines women's narratives about their experiences on successive American frontiers. It analyzes exemplary texts from Puritan women's captivity narratives to the early 20th-century letters and memoir of Mary Hallock Foote. Close readings of those texts reveal how they were influenced at the time of their production, or later appropriated for other purposes, by white male authority figures, reflecting an attitude that women's stories are fair game for reinterpretation and that women's concerns about such reinterpretations are irrelevant. Examples of influence include the captivity narratives of Mary Rowlandson (1682) and Hannah Swarton (1697). The composition and publication of their narratives was encouraged and approved by Puritan leaders Increase Mather (Rowlandson) and Cotton Mather (Swarton) as effective religious and political propaganda. Examples of appropriation include Cotton Mather's representation of the captivity of Hannah Dustin (1697), a story later revised by both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau; Frederick Manfred's Scarlet Plume (1964), based on Sarah Wakefield's Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees (1864); and Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose (1972), which draws on and quotes extensively from--but never credits--the memoirs and letters of writer and illustrator Mary Hallock Foote. Analyses of these texts and of sensationalized representations of "Bandit Queen" Belle Starr explore the purposes and results of such influence and appropriation. Women's voices were encouraged when they served approved purposes, such as justifying religious faith and encouraging anti-Indian sentiment, characteristics of most captivity narratives. However, some women's behavior was deemed unacceptable or problematic: Hannah Dustin's killing and scalping of her Indian captors, Sarah Wakefield's outrage at U.S. government Indian policies which triggered the 1862 Dakota Uprising, the unjust execution of her captor/rescuer, and the impugning of her chastity; Belle Starr's unorthodox lifestyle and marriages to outlaws and Indians; and (in Stegner's view) Mary Hallock Foote's alleged snobbishness. Whether they valorized conventional attitudes and beliefs, invoked questions of conscience with regard to recognized authority, or were deliberately provocative and rebellious, these women's attempts at self-representation through words or actions were mediated in various ways by their relationships to male-dominated power structures.

This dissertation includes a contextual analysis of two female Diné poets who use storytelling and writing and includes a chapter on the pedagogical implications of Native American student storytelling and writing. I first examine poetry written by two Diné women, Luci Tapahonso and Laura Tohe to understand the ways these poets, particularly the poetry, reclaim and revive Diné literacies and rhetorics. My analyses are informed by the historical and cultural contexts that shaped Diné philosophy, particularly, the philosophy that informs and is shaped by the practice of Diné literacies and rhetorics. I draw from mythical, historical, and contemporary Diné, Native American, and other minoritized scholars for lenses of analysis to show how these poets define and reclaim the female Diné voice and identity. Colonial and neocolonial changes in Diné lifeways and traditions and the encounters between Diné and other groups and the imposition of the English language (written literacy) are pertinent to these contextual analyses and pedagogical implications.

In my dissertation, “Pathology and Performance: The Female Body in the Romantic Era,” I examine the cultural practice of medical authorities pathologizing the female body in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I specifically focus on depictions of madness, depression, and hyper-femininity in representative texts that demonstrate the influence of medical discourse on authors of the Romantic Era. Borrowing Mary Poovey’s concept of the “proper lady,” I argue that women during this time were categorized as pathological if they deviated in any way from a proscriptive definition of “natural” womanhood, which itself was normalized through social conditioning rather than biological fact. Despite this larger practice of pathologizing female bodies as inherently sick, I have found moments of resistance and critique. The personal correspondence and biographical depictions of Mary Lamb demonstrate Lamb’s ability to manipulate characterizations of madness in her own favor, effecting her mastery of language despite her pathology. The tragic consequences of rigid gender roles in Joanna Baillie’s Count Basil illuminate the absurdity of hyperfeminine “romantic” behavior and the contagious threat of the “weak” female body. Matthew Lewis’s description of “sane” physical gesture in The Captive’s dramaturgy reveals the failure of feminine performance in a pathologized setting and the apathetic complicity of his audience. The gothic hauntings and thematic fragmentation in John Keats’s Isabella signal the violence of patriarchal authority on the female body and mind. Together, these works indicate the literary, theatrical, and cultural tensions established by the pattern of Romantic female pathology.

I argue that contemporary journalists paradoxically require a subjectivist epistemology to comply with the standards of what is known as "the ideal of objectivity." Because of this, these writers have lost much of the fact-claiming and meaning-making ability that makes their work so important. In order to understand how knowledge and meaning are constructed in journalism, we need to look past the surface rhetoric of the reporter and uncover the institutional rhetoric that has developed during the course of the 20th century. In this dissertation, I apply the classical rhetorical terms kairos and nomos to the political economy of the news industry and the professional conventions produced by that industry.

In this dissertation project, I focus on the ways scholars and teachers approach rural literacies in the field of rhetoric and composition, with a focus on engaging writing students in a rural literacies curriculum in composition courses. For this project, I conducted a multi-methodological teacher research study at a rural-area, Hispanic-serving community college. This study followed writing students through first-year English composition and technical writing classes and examined how these students practiced rural literacies or became explicit about literacy in class. Through presentation and analysis of data, I show how students may have had implicit ideas about rural or literacy concepts prior to our classes, but how each course developed a progression toward making literacy more explicit. Furthermore, I argue that modern technology and globalization have contributed to a shift in definitions and perceptions of rural life and rural literacies. Following my presentation and analysis of study data, I (re)define rural and rural literacies using my study and experiences with rural-area students as a basis for definition and, ultimately, I offer dimensions to rural literacy. In short, rural literacies are everyday literacies developed and practiced in rural areas and potentially relevant in urban areas. The close connection of rural and urban in our everyday lives, in combination with our everyday use of technology, brings new observations and understandings of rural and rural literacies. Based on the findings of this study, I argue that the combination of existing notions of rural literacies with modern technologies in a highly connected global society blurs the boundaries of rural and urban to create a new generation of rural literacies and students practicing rural literacies. Additionally, in this dissertation, I revise the rural literacies-based composition curriculum used in this study, and I identify best practices for teaching, particularly those for writing teachers who work with rural-area students. These best practices focus on what writing teachers can learn from studying writing students’ rural literacies and technology use to more fully and relevantly engage students’ existing knowledge in classroom practice.

In "Travels in the Glittering World": Transcultural Representations of Navajo Country, I compare how Dine (Navajo) writers and Euroamerican nature writers represent their experience of Dine culture and the place of the Navajo Nation. This project repositions the scope of analysis common to broader regional studies of the U.S. Southwest by engaging the many ways that representations of Dine Bikeyah (Navajo Country), as a nation linked to other political entities, have refracted the cultural concerns of several twentieth and twenty-first century writers and filmmakers. Centrally, I consider how representations stand in relation to the cultivation of cultural sovereignty. In doing so, I consider the limits and applicability of interpretive models, including "communitism," the "Peoplehood Matrix," and expansive imaginings of literary nationalism. Following scholars such as Lloyd Lee, I consider how elements of contemporary Dine identity--"worldview, land, language, kinship . . . [and] respect for their ancestors' ability to survive colonialism"--factor into twentieth-century texts (92). Responding to texts addressing several historical periods, I consider how artists address the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, stock reduction, integration into wage economies and the development of extractive industries, relocation, and periods of contemporary migration. Throughout, I consider how rootedness in culture and place allows Navajos to embrace paths of mobility and mindful alliances, which counteract forces which would confine them to the space of the reservation, to the status of a resource colony, or to the role as imagined font of exotic otherness. I consider how Euroamerican nature writers, with limited success, work against the impulse to tint Navajo Country in the sepia hues of primitivist nostalgia to embrace instead a restorative ethos that might support efforts to advance goals of cultural sovereignty. I consider how Dine authors call upon earlier Navajo literary traditions, as well as anti-colonial texts from other cultures, to negotiate the desire to "root" identity in a fixed place while traversing "routes" through and beyond Navajo Country, connecting that nation to larger networks of cultural exchange, urban relocation, economic necessity, travel, and pan-tribal, if not global, alliances working for the purposes of cultural sovereignty and environmental justice.

I am interested in locating assumptions about democracy and logos in the Greek democratic city-state which have been carried over into the modern, democratic national-state. The assumptions, I argue, offer insights into the hegemonic view among rhetoricians that antagonistic rhetoric is inappropriate in our contemporary democracies. In Chapters One and Two, I analyze the development of democracy in Ancient Greece in order to uncover the assumptions upon which that system was based. I argue that these assumptions are dominated by what I call "the ideology of sovereign right." In Chapter Three, I illustrate how this ideology has been carried over into contemporary treatments of democratic argumentation that have had influence in the field of rhetoric and composition. I argue that the Western tradition has privileged and continues to privilege the Aristotelian logic of non-contradiction, and thus, has left no legitimate place for antagonistic rhetoric. In Chapter Four, I return to ancient Greece to investigate the struggle over the construction of the rational that took shape in pre-Socratic philosophy. I argue that prior to the Socratics, another treatment of rationality developed, one based on the logic of contradiction, which provides a place in rhetoric for antagonism. In Chapter Five, I argue that dialectical materialism, as opposed to Aristotelian dialectics and post-structuralist notions of rationality, challenges the ideology of sovereign right embedded in democratic systems. In the Epilogue, I comment on the significance of this argument for the field of Rhetoric and Composition.