Computers, composition, and rhetoric: Rethinking the subject in the digital writing environment

This dissertation conducts a rhetorical study of contemporary computer-composition scholarship, handbooks, and lore and argues that while the field promises to make students better writers, it still often takes students themselves as the subject of the writing course and represents them as in need of social empowerment or moral salvation through the rhetorics of fear, loathing, and promise. This study analyzes the ways in which current scholarship unevenly deploys the rhetoric of loathing student inadequacy, the rhetoric of fear over what may happen to students as a result of their deficiencies or their inability to survive in this increasingly complicated world, and the rhetoric of promise that computer technologies can help give students the vision finally to see the various types of oppressive economic, social, political, or educational forces that blind and control them. Furthermore, when otherwise valuable scholarship focuses on the student subject and draws upon narratives of social turmoil or postmodern crisis, its conclusions often become diluted into something more along the lines of a moral salvation tract and contribute little to the research on using Internet technologies to improve student writing or enhance writing instruction.; The introduction explores the ideological underpinnings of the field's problematic focus on the student subject and lays the theoretical groundwork for an alternative antifoundational rhetorical approach to computer-composition. Chapter 1 reviews the history of U.S. writing instruction and suggests that computer-composition's tendency to frame students as intellectually inferior or in need of social guidance is indebted to earlier models of composition theory and pedagogy. Chapter 2 explains how the field's pervasive deployment of the rhetoric of the student subject can thrust students and scholars alike into a type of purgatory where modernist ways of knowing and writing conflict with liberatory narratives of newer technologies. Chapter 3 identifies the primary types of fear and “evil others” from which students must be redeemed, ranging from the degenerative forces of popular culture, to homogenizing capitalism, to the infective nature of computer technologies and cyberculture. Chapter 4 analyzes the promises that are often evoked in the scholarship, including claims that using newer Internet technologies can help students gain social or political empowerment, achieve a type of vulgar Marxist correct sight, or conquer new and potentially dangerous cyberfrontiers. The conclusion argues that it is important for scholars to understand better how these perspectives may create demeaning images of the student subject and suggests directions for future research.; By being mindful of the rhetorics we employ and the representations of students that we construct in our scholarship, the field can avoid debilitating visions of the student subject and move toward focusing more on student writing, on ways newer technologies can enhance writing instruction (i.e., encourage collaboration, facilitate peer-response, emphasize the value of visual literacy, information architecture, and web usability for producing user-centered texts), and provide students with more opportunities to produce context-specific and audience-appropriate traditional, online, and digital texts. This study also suggests that the field could benefit by developing alternative scholarly genres that take writing itself and the pedagogical activities enhanced by newer Internet technologies as the subject of research and debate.