Revisionary rhetoric and the teaching of writing

Abstract

This dissertation theorizes and applies what I term revisionary rhetoric, a rhetoric that emerges at the intersection of feminism and revision. I define revisionary rhetoric as a rhetoric of relationship, thereby drawing attention to the fact that all human relationships, including those that exist between readers and writers, enjoy moments of intimacy, closeness, and connection, but they also involve inevitable separation, loss, disappointment, and pain. However, theories and practices of revision within the discipline have focused on a writer's attempts to revise in order to connect with her audience through achieved consensus. The assumption is that to be persuasive writers should revise in order to remove those textual moments that might offend or confuse potential readers. In privileging clarity and connection in our work on revision, I believe we've failed to theorize how readers/writers contend with the inevitable disconnections that permeate their experiences with texts. We can, of course, simply ignore that these moments exist; we can teach our students to delete them from their drafts all in the name of "effective" revision. But to do so sends a troubling message to our students: that when they can't relate to or connect with something they read, they can simply skip it, ignore it, forget about it, and move on. Revisionary rhetoric responds to the reality of disconnection by describing strategies writers can use to make themselves heard as they demonstrate their commitment to listening to others. Such a paradox demands a revisioning of silence as it deconstructs a voice/silence binary, for listening demands participatory silence. After revising silence through three disciplinary contexts, I identify key textual features of revisionary rhetoric--metadiscursivity and intertextuality--and, through an examination of sample texts, I describe how these features reveal the constructed nature of all texts and thereby create gaps, or silences, out of which readers can respond. I specifically analyze the ways in which multigenre texts enact revisionary rhetoric, and I argue for more of them, both in the field and in the classroom, for they demand the kind of rereading that is necessary to practice a relational rhetoric.