Mapping a mirage: Vitalism, forgetting and de/composition pedagogy

This dissertation uses current historiographical and cultural theory to investigate a set of common tropes that have concealed certain aspects of Postmodern Theory from our discipline's view. The disciplinary discourse of Rhetoric and Composition has been caught up in a set of related oppositions: writing cannot be taught/writing can be taught, Literature/Rhetoric, Romanticism/Marxism(s). These oppositions function as powerful terministic screens that have concealed the history of Vitalism and its implications for the questions these dichotomies create and attempt to answer. Perhaps our history in the English department is the history of these divisions. But even if this is the case, this dissertation calls to set aside the primary division these topoi create, to move beyond the opposition between rhetoric as reality and poetics as separate from Life, in order to move into other spaces from which to think about writing. The dissertation proposes Vitalism as one such space, one possible place to stand and view our discipline and its practices. Vitalism is a theory or philosophy that attempts to answer the question, "What is Life?" Historically, the answer has ranged from animistic notions of spirit and nature, to scientific attempts to deal with physico-chemical processes, to current attempts to understand Life as a complex, emergent component of linguistic, social, historical, physical, and technological processes. Life is located in the relationships among these bodies and their forces. Rather than seeing Life as an autonomous force, as caused by physico-chemical processes, or determined by history and economics, this latter view I term Postmodern Vitalism locates Life within the interactions among them all---not as an autonomous force but as a power that results from complex movements through time. Such a view of writing would equally set aside the arguments that result from the above oppositions and attempt to see writing processes as equally complex---as neither autonomous nor determined, unknowable nor generalizable, unteachable nor teachable. This Postmodern Vitalist perspective on writing contributes to the move not simply from product to process but from process to post-process, and from human to posthuman.