| This dissertation offers a rabbinic-psychoanalytic rhetorical model as both complement and corrective to Greco-Christian assumptions about causation ranging from early hermeneutics to the contemporary composition classroom. Humanities disciplines have been heavily informed by a tradition of thought grounded in classical Greek descriptions and their Christian descendants. Certainly, one cannot be a "good rhetorician" without having studied Aristotle's treatment of the subject. And one recent and popular freshman composition reader proclaims its Platonic allegiances in its title, Seeing and Writing. While trying to facilitate student engagement with their world through writing, the authors also point back to Plato's complaint about the paucity of the written in comparison to the material world (though, one imagines, with some irony, since it is a writing text).{09}Such assumptions have lead to much surprising, innovative, and pleasurable writing. Saint Augustine wrote and argued and explained beautifully. So did Vladimir Nabokov. Greco-Christian assumptions about the natures and relations of the material world and writing are, however, assumptions supported by any number of other assumptions at last pinned to an extrinsic cause called alternately the Prime Mover, God, or (more recently) the Other. We might also suggest that there are alternatives---even relatively old alternatives---that are also capable of producing beautiful, worthwhile, meaningful writing while allowing investigations of the world and the speaking/writing subject foreclosed by standard approaches. The Jewish/Greek dialectic is central to the development of postmodern thought (Derrida, Bloom, Levinas, etc.), so that dialectic is central to the development of rhetorical thought inspired by postmodernism. This dissertation, then, seeks to begin to fill the yawning gap of "Jewish rhetoric" and to discover what its inclusion might mean for contemporary rhetorical studies, for the composition classroom, and for pedagogy in general. It draws not only from classical rhetoric and rabbinic hermeneutics, but from psychoanalytic insights, from classical and continental philosophy, from treatments of language and interpretation by Rene Girard, Julia Kristeva, Soren Kierkegaard, and Slavoj Zikˇek, and from recent work in composition pedagogy in order to offer a template for, if not a new rhetoric, at least a more nuanced place from which to teach. |
