Dynamic Disclosures: Personal Writing, Relational Rhetoric, and Institutional Narratives
Open Access
- Author:
- Hsu, Vicki Chenyi
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 12, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Debra Hawhee, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Debra Hawhee, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Suresh Canagarajah, Committee Member
Ebony Coletu, Committee Member
Rosemary Jane Jolly, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Rhetoric
Composition
Diversity
Personal
Narratives
Multiculturalism - Abstract:
- This study explores how personal narratives are deployed in academic settings—at times as strategies of self-empowerment that shift institutional practices and procedures, and at others as evidence of multiculturalism in ways that continue to obscure systems of domination and institutional constraints on self-determination. Drawing from the work of sociologist Margaret R. Somers, I develop an approach to personal writing specifically attuned to how (re)contextualization can assign new value to one’s story in service of different individual or institutional goals—for example, how an autobiography that once changed a homogenous literary landscape might later be tokenized as evidence of multiculturalism in lieu of systemic change. Rather than speculating about the individual intents of authors and their stories, I examine how these narratives network into communal traditions, beliefs, and practices, and how their value is continually reassigned at different sociocultural moments. In examining personal writing as relational rhetoric, I build on rhetoric and composition’s historic commitment to deliberative democracy as well as its more recent return to issues of social justice. Through a commentary on the life writing of Gloria Anzaldúa and Richard Rodriguez, I examine how their (very different) narratives have been used to reshape normative conceptions of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and spirituality— and how critical responses to these narratives continually refigure their value for public debates surrounding institutional practices and discrimination. Turning from the professional discourse of English studies to its pedagogical practice, the fourth chapter asks and answers: what is the work we ask students to do with their personal narratives, and how does that differ from the work we do as writers and scholars? Finally, I narrativize my own experience within different institutional contexts in order to explore first the limitations of the genres we are given for self-articulation, and second how a relational view of personal writing might allow us to expose those limitations, and to connect our experiences with others who have also been isolated by those barriers. My conclusion then reflects on how we might discuss, write, and teach personal writing with an eye toward its relationality—with an understanding that the value of any given story is less an inherent trait than a product of its deployment, continually (re)constituted by evolving sociocultural contexts and conversations.