Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Approaches To Life Narrative: A Scholarly And Creative Thesis, Tanya Bomsta

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis includes both scholarly and creative approaches to women’s life narrative and rhetoric. The author first analyzes Terry Tempest Williams’ recently published memoir, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, through the lenses of writing and rhetorical theory. She examines how Williams’ hybrid genre negotiates the boundaries between journaling and autobiographical writing and between silence and voice. She argues that Williams employs a feminist rhetoric in her writing in order to negotiate these boundaries.

The second and third works are personal essays in which the author examines her journals and her marriage. These creative works meditate on the …

Silence And Self-Making: Black Lung Rhetoric And The Ken Hechler Letters, Jennifer De Pompei

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis combines history, rhetoric, and feminist identity studies to discuss the subject of black lung disease and the Appalachian coal miner. The first chapter examines the "evolution of mentalities" in historical and popular discourse surrounding the miner, which reflects James V. Catano's subversive form of the self-making identity in Ragged Dicks. The second chapter uses the feminist theory of silence as a form of control and power to understand the absence of black lung disease from the literature of coal. The final chapter is a case study of the correspondence between Congressional Representative Ken Hechler of West Virginia and …