The Writing I: Re-Articulating First-Person Narrative in the Composition Classroom

This project analyzes the ways in which concepts of the student-writer have been politicized and pedagogically polemicized as either primarily personal or social categories. The pedagogical rhetoric of the personal narrative as a genre has followed the same divisive path with expressivist and social-epistemic teaching models appearing to be at odds with each other, and this terminological fragmentation of teaching philosophies and the ideological framing of the personal narrative have constructed false pedagogical binaries. Given the politics of personal writing within contested pedagogical perspectives, this thesis examines the perception of the divided student-writer, exploring how postmodern epistemologies and poststructural linguistics affect the way rhetoricians and composition theorists view the place of the student-writer within a larger social network. The thesis concludes with an investigation of student writing in one first-year composition course and puts forth a rhetorical model using personal narrative to mediate fractures between expressivist and social-epistemic approaches to composition instruction.