Rhetorical Gardening: Greening Composition
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Rhetorical Gardening: Greening Composition A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School Of the University of Cincinnati In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences by Carla Sarr June 2017 Master of Science in Teaching and Secondary Education, The New School Committee Chair: Laura R. Micciche Abstract Rhetorical Gardening: Greening Composition argues that the rhetorical understanding of landscapes offers a material site and a metaphor by which to broaden our understanding of rhetoric and composition, as well as increasing the rhetorical archive and opportunities for scholarship. An emphasis on material place in composition is of particular value as sustainability issues are among the toughest challenges college students will face in the years to come. Reading landscapes is an interpretive act central to meaningful social action. The dissertation argues that existing work in rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy has set the stage for an ecological turn in composition. Linking ecocomposition, sustainability, cultural geography, and literacy pedagogies, I trace the origins of my belief that the next manifestation of composition pedagogy is material, embodied, place-based, and firmly planted in the literal issues resulting from climate change. I draw upon historical gardens, landscapes composed by the homeless, community, commercial, and guerilla gardens to demonstrate the rhetorical capacity of landscapes in detail. Building from the argument that gardens can perform a rhetorical function, I spotlight gardeners who seek to move the readers of their texts to social action. Finally, I explore how the study of place can contribute to the pedagogy of composition. ii © Copyright 2017 iii Acknowledgements During the first year of my graduate study I invited Jason Palmeri, who was a stranger to me except through his writing, to dinner. During that meal he said the words “rhetorical gardening” and my dissertation was born. Before that pivotal event, Laura Micciche’s course, Theories of Composing, had wooed me to the study of rhetoric and composition at the University of Cincinnati, where she, Russel Durst, Jim Ridolfo, and Chris Carter have unfailingly supported me in the years since. Others in the English Department, particularly my friend Michelle Holley, have inspired my teaching and kindly admired my garden. I credit the warmth of the rhet/comp faculty at U.C. for the tight-knit group of graduate students who contributed enormously to my successful completion of the PhD. I particularly want to thank Janine Morris, who has been an official and unofficial mentor from my first day to my last. Others, including Hannah Rule, Kelly Blewett, Christina LaVecchia, Rich Schivener and Ian Golding have been a scholarly inspiration and a solid band of cheerleaders. I would be remiss to omit the trusting and generous role the undergraduates in my 1001, 2089 and 1012 courses have played in my graduate study. Their participation in my evolving efforts to teach composition, their writings, their conversation, and their course evaluations have helped keep me imaginative and grounded. I am grateful to Cindy Onore, who has been my generous reader on two occasions, twenty years apart. iv Gardening was the inspiration for this project, and the garden has remained a constant companion to my scholarly tasks. Without Andrea Wulf, Robert Pogue Harrison, Thomas Rickert, Margaret Morton and Diana Balmori, and, last but not least, Lorraine Johnson, I could not have completed this project. Many other scholars and writers contributed their wonderful ideas, and I am grateful to all of them. Thanks to my parents, Elaine Sullivan and Bob Sarr, who taught me that if you really want to do something, it’s not impractical, and my sister, Debra Sarr, who always, always, responds to my text messages. Particular, loving thanks to Holbrook Sample, who literally supported me through graduate school, and took me to eat at Salazar as often as I wanted to go. v Rhetorical Gardening: Greening Composition Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Preface 1 Introduction 7 Composition, Rhetoric, and Gardening Chapter One 27 Literal Ecologies Chapter Two 64 Rhetorical Gardens: Plants, Power, and Politics Chapter Three 102 Activist Gardens: Resistance by Pansies and Kale Chapter Four 136 Greening Composition: Rhetoric and the Study of Place Conclusion 167 From Gardens to Cities: Teaching Students to Compose the Future Bibliography 184 vi Preface Narrating a dissertation process should offer a writer structure. Start at the beginning. Instead, this narrative became an exploration of how my struggle with structure interacts with my methods of teaching and my relationship to gardening. My first hurdle was choosing when and where a dissertation begins. It could be in the woods behind my childhood home where one of my favorite companions was a tree. On the front step of my grandparents’ fishing cabin, where I realized the neighbors did not see my grandmother’s landscape as I did. In the mid-nineties, perhaps, when I wrote a thesis about the need for public schools to adopt systems theory. Or in Montessori training, ten years later, when my final paper compared the classroom to a garden. On the other hand I remember a moment of clarity after my comprehensive exams when my dissertation project solidified abruptly. During the last three years, as I explored the parallels between forms of composing, I have analyzed myself as a type of gardener for the first time. Before this period, I was merely an organic gardener, or a novice gardener: a hobbyist. Now I see how the way my brain takes in and uses information is particularly suited to gardening, and not especially suited to writing. A fact that has value to me as a teacher of writing. I’m sure, in retrospect, that I have been teaching from my disadvantages as a writer, but I’ve done so unconsciously. What the dissertation has permitted me to do is see the origin of the tensions that exist between how I want to teach composition and how it is often taught. These tensions moved me to form influential alliances – with Jane Tompkins; Donald Murray and Thomas Newkirk; Mina Shaughnessy. These figures are the ancestors to my text. My manner of writing it, however, is best described by the garden. Gardeners, in general, are passionate about revision, and at ease with the indefinite postponement of large-scale gratification. Gardeners are excited by moments, and by small pieces: the brief bloom of a flower; the peak day of ripe raspberries; a praying mantis. The whole is expected to be an imperfect, evolving, lifelong project. In the garden, I spend a lot of time looking: at views, at combinations of color and foliage, at the pairing of plants with one another in terms of access to space, light, and water. When it’s too hot to be outside, or too cold, I look from the windows to study and rearrange. Patterns reveal themselves to me slowly, in increments; I respond to information better than I plan. I write that way. For the dissertation, I spent a year typing notes into documents labeled by chapter. The ideas converged into groups; I saw the arc, from kairos to ethos. And then I puttered, looking at how vocabulary from different fields overlapped, moving things around, and looking for the patterns that pleased me. The last stage is the one when I know where to impose myself, when it’s time to add the layer of my ideas and connections. Considering gardens rhetorically has given me, among other insights, a way to think about the role time plays in composition courses and how the role of time shapes our other decisions and understandings, such as the importance of structure and the preference for completed texts. I am bothered, every semester, by the certainty that my courses privilege those students who arrived as the strongest writers, who came to me with the most 2 standardized strengths. Those students, however, do not necessarily have the most to offer rhetorically. No matter how I adjust my assignments, grading, and framing of courses, the pattern recurs. This may be why both the dissertation and this narrative have insisted, through many revisions, on being about the relationship between gardens and teaching, when they could have been more strictly about the rhetorical quality of places. It is more clear to me that gardens are rhetorical than it is clear how to make composition an environment in which students create pieces and moments that feel relevant to their whole lives. In trying to make my rhetorical gardens not only persuasive as rhetorical players but also as a new frame for the teaching of composition, I found my 4th chapter an unexpectedly far-reaching and unwieldy task. I was both working out for myself how the rhetorical activity in gardens might be applied to the work of the classroom, and, in theory, trying to do so in a way that was accessible and appealing to the great variety of individuals who teach composition. And yet I have only gone so far as to teach one course with a research emphasis on place. I cut almost everything I wrote about that course because it was simply too sparse for evidence. It’s possible that teaching hijacked that chapter, to the detriment of what I might have said, in an alternate version, about women’s gardens, or rooftop gardens, or how painters and other artists contribute to the conversation about rhetorical landscape. Yet, I had to wrestle with teaching, because over the course of almost 20 years, nothing I’ve done or seen or read has been able to convince me that we 3 actually teach writing.