| In this dissertation I share my literacy narrative and practices with others, and I argue that my literacy narrative and practices are only possible because of others. There have always been and will continue to be arguments for monolinguistic literacy practices. These practices, however, create artificial distinctions between language practices that are “good” and those that are “bad”; and monolinguistic literacy practices are often aligned with an agonistic narrative of progress in which new texts “master” the work of past texts and individuals. In arguing against monolinguistic literacy practices, I do so because I have discursive inheritances and debts to others I must acknowledge and struggle with. To this end, I argue for and enact a literacy theory and practice that is dialogic, reflective, and recursive, that listens to past texts, while critically responding to or reading these texts in relation to subjective experiences and other texts. Throughout this dissertation, moreover, I emphasize the creation of agency by returning to three key terms: beginnings, memories, and participation . These terms locate and give shape to my literacy practices, and they also help my readers to study in detail sites of struggle or agonia—the subjective, the textual , the pedagogical, and the scholarly—that show how agency is created when an individual engages with an existing structure or truth. Each site is given its own chapter, and each chapter works as a piece of memory or a beginning that help me to narrate and participate within my literacy practices. Accordingly, readers witness how my dialogic practices begin ethical participation within composition and rhetoric. Monolinguistic literacy practices must be struggled against, I contend, lest composition and rhetoric deny the beginnings, memories, and participation of others. |
