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Y'All Go Out And Make Us Proud: The Commencement Address And The Southern Writer, Dana J. Nichols

English Dissertations

The college commencement address is traditionally regarded as the low point of an otherwise auspicious occasion. An ephemeral form of ceremonial oratory, the commencement speech is reviled for its conventional platitudes, its easy piety, and its abstractions on the well-lived life, the sunny future, and the ethics of adulthood. The South may differ, however, in its approach to the commencement speech genre, especially in the years between World War II and the millennium, when one of the South’s most significant assets became the southern writer. Throughout this dissertation, I have tried to situate eight commencement addresses given by such prominent …