Abstract

Rhetoric, Composition, Life is written for teacher-scholars of rhetoric and composition who grapple with the following question: Can my teaching not only make a positive difference in the lives of my students but also, in so doing, contribute to making the world a better place? This dissertation argues that in order to be able to answer this question in the affirmative with a greater sense of possibility for the future, that a re-understanding of how the world and its populations or multiplicities of "actors" co-exist is necessary. Such conceptual work is needed because, under the influence of critical pedagogy, teacher-scholars in rhetoric and composition have placed too much emphasis on consciousness and its role in the dynamics of subjectivity, agency, and social transformation. In an effort to open a new space for thought and pedagogy in rhetoric and composition, Rhetoric, Composition, Life engages in a protracted performance of encounter and response with the work of Martin Heidegger. The dissertation argues that Heidegger's thought not only invites us to think of the aforementioned issues in more ecological and existential-affective terms, but does so in a way that is rooted in and extends a concept at the heart of Aristotle's ethics and politics: phronesis. What emerges from the project is an ethos of pedagogy and politics rooted in the phronetic dynamics of "question-ability" and "response-ability," one that attends to and works with-in dynamics and rhythms of power, life, temporality, agency, and social change from a non-representational, ecological, and existential-affective perspective