| Description |
This dissertation argues that scholarship on ethos in first-year writing courses overlooks important articulations in the relationship between teacher and student and between peer students. I apply a theory heretofore little known in the American writing studies conversation called critical friendship. In short, critical friendship is the medium in a pendulum between total friend and total critic. I apply this theory in the context of the philosophical tropes from Emanuel Levinas, whose theorizing begins in the Levitical notion: Love your neighbor as yourself. He calls for responsibility to the other in the form of a continuous response to the ongoing call of the other. Chapter 1 defines critical friendship and offers a rationale for using such a theory. This chapter also defines and explains my use of ethos, which has layers of complexity and competing histories. The chapter concludes with an introduction to my understanding and use of Levinasian theory as a matter of critical friendship. Chapter 2 examines how teachers respond to student writing. I argue against a historical preference for agonistic practices, suggesting instead that teachers should be reflexive about their understanding and application of critical distance by offering in equal measures thoughtful critique and friendly mentoring. After Chapter 2 asks, "how should teachers respond to student writing?" Chapter 3 asks the question, what should students write? Here I turn to Michel de Montaigne to mitigate the contemporary discussion in writing studies about personal writing and academic writing, often identified in opposition to one another. I propose Montaigne's practice of essaying as an example for first-year writing students as a useful way of looking and observing in order to experiment with thinking, reading and writing the world. Like Chapters 2 and 3, Chapter 4 examines proximity, but this time in relation to technology. Here I argue that students can benefit from an historical perspective on what counts as technology in order to understand their own performance of ethos in highly mediated environments. |
