Content area
Abstract
The dissertation revises cultural studies methodology by incorporating components of contemporary rhetoric and composition scholarship. The project uses the epistemological basis of rhetoric and the subject-construction strands of composition theory in order to map a way for cultural studies to return to its self-articulated goals of interrogating subjectivity and exploring political potential. I argue that adopting a postmodern feminist perspective and subsequently focusing on sites and acts of cultural production is an effective mode of inquiry currently overlooked by the majority of cultural studies theorists. I include the results of a three-year study of contemporary mass-market romance writers in order to illustrate the results of the alternative mode of inquiry I propose. The study of romance writers uses ethnographic methodology and focuses on a national organization called the Romance Writers of America (RWA). In addition to attending national meetings, conducting interviews with members, and studying published documents, I spent nearly eight months with a local RWA critique group, sitting in and audiotaping their weekly sessions.
The project characterizes RWA as a (feminist) writing community and as a site of public discourse and political potential; the critique group is examined in relation to the composition classroom and the ways multiple identities are negotiated through writing. One major goal of the project is to address the pedagogical implications of cultural theory by illustrating how the concerns and work of rhetoric and composition are the praxis component of cultural studies' theorization; additionally, the dissertation broadens the relevance of composition studies from a theorization of the classroom to include the world outside the strictures of formal education as it argues the importance of the writing process in the construction and understanding of subjectivity. The final section of the dissertation examines future production processes as it discusses electronic discourse and writing communities, rounding out the consideration of writing as a social act--a discursive practice which contains within it a microcosm of the cultural forces that inscribe and circumscribe our lives.
