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The Rhetoric of Comparison in the YMCA: Belletristic Rhetoric and the Native Speaker Ideal

Cummings, Lance

Abstract Details

2014, Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, English.
The recent “translingual” turn in composition demonstrates how language difference is a valuable resource, rather than a problem to be solved, challenging composition and rhetoric’s “tacit language policies” of monolingualism that often rely on stable and discrete notions of language (Canagarajah 1999; Horner and Trimbur 2002; Kachru 1990; Matsuda 1998). Multilingual writers are too often isolated institutionally, disciplinarily, and even historiographically by notions of an ideal native speaker. Though this native speaker ideal has often been criticized, it has rarely been historicized (Bonfiglio 2010). In this dissertation, I argue that informal theories about second language acquisition emerged through the synthesis of classical and belletristic rhetoric with faculty epistemologies of the mind in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a result, the native speaker ideal became sedimented, or reified through habits of thought, within comparative methodologies that later formulated disciplinary and institutional knowledge about language instruction in the twentieth century. Through archival research into the early Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), I show how translingual moments within the extracurricula of composition provide unsedimented approaches to comparison that can contest and rearticulate cognitive constructions of a masculine, Anglo-Saxon native speaker ideal.
LuMing Mao (Committee Chair)
Yu-Fang Cho (Committee Member)
Jason Palmeri (Committee Member)
James Porter (Committee Chair)
Elizabeth Wilson (Committee Member)
209 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Cummings, L. (2014). The Rhetoric of Comparison in the YMCA: Belletristic Rhetoric and the Native Speaker Ideal [Doctoral dissertation, Miami University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1406038505

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Cummings, Lance. The Rhetoric of Comparison in the YMCA: Belletristic Rhetoric and the Native Speaker Ideal. 2014. Miami University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1406038505.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Cummings, Lance. "The Rhetoric of Comparison in the YMCA: Belletristic Rhetoric and the Native Speaker Ideal." Doctoral dissertation, Miami University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1406038505

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)