Revising the story: A rhetorical perspective on revisionary fiction by women writers (Jean Rhys, Dominica, Christa Wolf, Germany, J. M. Coetzee, South Africa)

Revisionary fiction---texts which specifically appropriate from and rework the texts of other authors---occur throughout the history of literary production. But while texts have always been allusionary, intertextual or referential, texts such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Christa Wolf's Cassandra or J. M. Coetzee's Foe have become more common in the twentieth century. Such revisions might be considered emblematic of a culture mired in postmodern pastiche; they might be criticized as nostalgic works that merely imitate. I argue that these revisions are not sterile repetitions but are, rather, critical works that seek to reexamine---and make their readers reexamine---familiar texts and established ideas about authorship, originality, and literary history. This dissertation establishes a rhetoric of revisions that examines how these texts make their meaning and how they can be read as arguments.; In particular, this dissertation focuses on revisionary fiction by women writers. Since Adrienne Rich drew attention to the idea of "re-vision" as "an act of survival" for women readers and writers, revision has become a central term for feminist criticism. Using Rich's term, I examine revisionary fiction by women as a particular example of revisionary fiction, and I consider how women writers, in revising literary texts, have made arguments about literature, literary history, and the acts of reading and writing. In Chapter Two, I analyze Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea by considering how memory and arrangement, two canons of rhetoric, are at work in the novel, and how we can read these canons as invention strategies. In Chapter Three, I examine a number of revisions from the science fiction and mystery genres and consider how we can read the revisionary acts of the novels by considering the rhetorical issues of kairos and ethos.; As a rhetoric of revisionary fiction, I offer both an analysis of these texts and discuss how they can serve as models for composition in the classroom. Chapter Four focuses on what I term a pedagogy of revision. This pedagogy of revision makes connections between analysis of texts and composition of texts by focusing both tasks on rhetorical strategies and constructs.