- Title
- Another Philosophy, Another Composition
- Author
- Micer, Dominic
- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University,
Composition and rhetoric, 2004.
- Advisor
- Cindy Lewiecki-Wilson
- Pages
- 174p.
- Abstract
- This dissertation explores ontological issues, the real conditions of experience, and their relation to contemporary composition studies. Given the shifting terrain of contemporary socio-cultural practices concerned with issues of experience, affect, and labor, I explore alternative ways of thinking about and understanding these concerns. In order to develop this concern, I argue for a relational ontology that is normative rather than absolute and which speaks to the real conditions of experience and transforming the double binds that capture students, teachers, and institutions in oversimplified modern and postmodern ontologies. In Section One, I raise three concerns about the way students and composition scholars typically treat experience. I argue that composition studies would be best served by making relations, rather than student agency, the subject matter of composition. I then explore two attempts that try to develop the idea of experience and relations pointing out that these attempts need to go farther. In Section Two, I argue that a model of composition studies generated by an understanding of relations needs a different model of critique. Such a model of critique emphasizes the study of bodies and emotions and recognizes that the point of critique is to transform persons’ feelings about and sensibility of experience. I use what I call the Spinozist assemblage to reconstruct thinking about affect, experience, and bodies along radical monistic lines that develop the thought of difference. In Section Three, I turn to the issue of labor—particularly the work composition studies asks its students to do. I take the insight of composition scholars that what students produce by their labor are social relations and push this insight to a radical conclusion: I theorize writing as a kind of becoming—a symbiotic process whereby multiple bodies interact on affective, perceptual, and conceptual levels to think differently and beyond the boundaries of a simplistic ontology.
- Subject Headings
- Language, Rhetoric and Composition
Document number: miami1090254160.
Bookmark this page as
<http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1090254160>.
