“From Private to Public: Narrative Rhetoric in Composition Pedagogy” argues for a rhetorical revision of narrative in composition studies. Informed by the interdisciplinary narrative turn, this project aims to move past counterproductive debates surrounding ‘personal’ writing in order to attend to the rhetorical nature and uses of narrative. To this end, I draw upon a year’s worth of classroom-based qualitative research at The Ohio State University in which students analyzed and composed autobiographical texts in multiple genres and modes. Based on this research, I suggest that narrative rhetoric offers an ethical, dialogic orientation toward communication with significant benefits for composition pedagogy and promise for public use.
The introductory chapter establishes the exigency offered by the narrative turn and suggests that composition studies has an opportunity to redress a neglect of production in these conversations. I then briefly rehearse the history of personal writing in composition studies, wherein scholars and teachers have debated the merits of narrative in terms of student-centered pedagogies, academic discourse, and critical consciousness. Without diminishing the value of these conversations, I suggest that they have resulted in a terministic screen that emphasizes psychological and personal concerns to the relative neglect of the rhetorical uses of autobiographical composition. To more fully attend to the richness of narrative communication, I propose an alternative set of terminology gleaned from humanistic and social scientific rhetorical theories of narrative. This narrative communication model becomes both a heuristic for analysis and heuretic for production of multimodal narratives in the composition classroom.
Building upon this foundation, the three case studies approach autobiographical narrative through different genres and modes. In the course documented in Chapter 2, students analyzed and composed graphic memoirs, examining comics’ capabilities for representing an author’s layered identity and perspective while demanding the active engagement of the audience. Chapter 3 engages the hybrid genre of autobiographical documentary, a process that complicated students’ epistemological assumptions and highlighted the ethical issues that attend narrative representation. The course under discussion in Chapter 4 considered the potential of literacy narratives for fostering students’ informed engagement in public discourses and furthering composition studies’ public turn. In each of these chapters, students’ critical framing and resulting compositions guide my developing argument about the affordances and constraints of a rhetorical approach to narrative in composition pedagogy.
The final chapter returns to my original questions—How does narrative rhetoric work? and What are the implications for composition studies?—to consider students’ contributions to these investigations. Ultimately, I suggest, we are in the midst of a kairotic moment for both composition and narrative studies, one that calls for critical, creative approaches to narrative design in the service of productive communication.