The Rhetoric of Domestic Advice: Ethos and Metaphor
Jennifer Courtney
- School: Purdue University (0183)
- Degree: Ph.D.
- Date: 2004; pp: 104
- Advisor: Weiser, Irwin
- Source: DAI-A 66/03, p. 981, Sep 2005
- Subjects: Language, Rhetoric And Composition (0681)
- ProQuest Document Number:
- ISBN: 0-542-02103-X
- UMI Number: AAT 3166606
Abstract:
-
This project extends current research in rhetorical studies and writing program administration
by examining a variety of popular prescriptive texts about cleaning, organizing and maintaining
the home. I examine a variety of popular and profitable texts, such as Martha Stewart Living,
Talking Dirty with the Queen of Clean, and Clean Like a Man, positioning them as arguments
and exploring the ways in which they build and promote competing notions of gender and work.
Using a rhetorical analysis framework, I analyze the ways in which the authors function as rhetors,
aiming to persuade readers, via skillfully constructed ethos, to adopt specific practices or
attitudes. I identify the personas sanctioned in the genre of domestic advice and suggest how
the texts reward specific practices and identities proffered to readers. My study then shifts
from a close analysis of domestic advice to the function of domestic metaphors in discussions
of academic labor. I argue that the prevalence of domestic metaphors in discussions of
writing program administration and composition studies, while intended to expose unfair
working conditions for contingent faculty, collapse domestic and academic labor in problematic
ways. I then provide alternatives that link cultural conversations about domesticity with more
precise ways of discussing under-appreciated academic activity.
Dissertations
We post the dissertation abstracts
our graduates enter into ProQuest's
database of Dissertations and Theses (and link to 24-page previews as available).
Those at Purdue can locate the full texts through the Purdue Library.