Distributed Agency and the Rhetorical Work of Essay Contests.

This Dissertation Shows How Rhetorical Agency Is Distributed Among an Array of Actors Who Participate in Essay Contests.;English Language and Literature;Humanities;English & Education

Porter, Anne E.Schleppegrell, Mary J. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: This Dissertation Shows How Rhetorical Agency Is Distributed Among an Array of Actors Who Participate in Essay Contests.;    English Language and Literature;    Humanities;    English & Education;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/107216/aepor_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation shows how essay contests reveal the distribution of rhetorical agency among an array of actors who sponsor, judge, write for, and disseminate materials for these literacy events.Essay contests are an ideologically-inflected, cultural literacy practice that traverses school and community settings. Despite the fact that many libraries, schools, newspapers, civic organizations, literary societies and corporations regularly sponsor such contests, they have received little attention in the scholarly literature.This project draws attention to this previously unexplored literacy practice and to the social relations of writing that it illuminates.In addition to tracing the history of such contests, which emerged in the 1880’s in conjunction with the British colonial and U.S. expansionist projects, this project presents a model of the dynamically-interacting, key features of essay contests.It also draws on cultural and rhetorical theory to highlight the key role that institutional sponsors play in shaping writing subjects and the production of knowledge.To demonstrate how agency is distributed in a contemporary contest of the global, digital age, the project offers an in-depth examination of the World Bank’s 2009 Youth Essay Competition on ;;Green Entrepreneurship.”Using methods of discourse and rhetorical analysis, it considers the ways in which the contest prompt influenced the rhetorical choices made by the winning essayists -- who, hailing mainly from the Global South, conformed to specific expectations (related to genre, purpose, and identification), while simultaneously (1) taking up subject positions beyond those hailed by the contest announcement; (2) integrating concerns not explicitly raised by the prompt; (3) asserting their own rhetorical purposes; and (4) creating novel ;;intertexts” from both ;;center” and ;;periphery” in their work.Pedagogically, this project suggests that rhetorical awareness involves attending not only to the constitutive ways in which contest sponsors seek to direct the attention of writers, but also to the ways in which writers and other actors respond to this direction and positioning through rhetorical strategies of their own.Understanding the ;;push and pull” of these elements helps us to conceptualize the ;;rhetorical work” that such contests perform.