'Raid[s] on the inarticulate': Modernist scene[s] of rhetoric (Gertrude Stein, Kenneth Burke, Marianne Moore)

Modernist studies and composition studies both frequently involve constructing coherent readings of texts that initially appear incoherent and unreadable. Moreover, both fields find in their objects of study responses to the changing contexts of literacy in the twentieth century. However, these two fields often occupy dichotomous positions between the larger field of English Studies. Scholars of modernism rarely regard student writing as worthy of the kind of close readings lavished upon modernist texts. Conversely, compositionists like Linda Brodkey, Sharon Crowley and Steven Schreiner tend to regard modernism as the epitome of the solipsism and alienation from which they hope rhetoric will free teachers and students.; Compositionists' critiques of modernism, I argue in my introduction, tends to focus on modernist criticisms, and especially on the New Criticism and other formalist approaches to literature. Focusing on modernist literary production, on the other hand, offers insights into the writing process that are compatible with the insights of modern composition. Moreover, recognizing the scope of modernisms uncovered by contemporary scholarship belies any reduction of modernism into a monolithic, rear-guard or anti-rhetorical movement.; This dissertation reads a diverse range of American modernists—Gertrude Stein, Kenneth Burke, Langston Hughes and Marianne Moore—as theorists of many of the rhetorical issues that have preoccupied American teachers and students of writing. In the first chapter after the introduction, Stein figures as both student and author; her work, from student themes to mature “explanatory writings,” anticipates critiques of “current-traditional rhetoric” later launched by compositionists. The next chapter reads Burke's Towards a Better Life as a critique of the kind of “rebirth” to “authentic voice” often propounded by the expressivists who supplanted current-traditional rhetoric. In this and subsequent chapters, the pairing of literary figures with student writers produces a form of what Burke calls “perspective by incongruity.” Langston Hughes' “Theme for English B,” in which a student resists a teacher's appeal to authentic voice, serves as an incongruous answer to contemporary students who have been taught to resist rhetoric and difference. Finally, Marianne Moore's poetry offers perspective on emerging issues of intertextuality in student writing, including plagiarism and parody.