The Annie Prey Jorgensen papers: Nineteenth-century writing instruction and women\u27s rhetoric on the Plains

This dissertation examines the college and professional writing of Annie Prey Jorgensen, who attended the University of Nebraska during the 1890s as both an undergraduate and graduate student. Annie\u27s collection of papers, housed in Archives and Special Collections at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, offers composition and rhetoric significant insights about women college students\u27 rhetorical practices at the end of the nineteenth century. Specifically, Annie uses personal experience and narrative techniques to deploy a feminist rhetorical strategy that allows her to inscribe gendered experience into academic writing. Annie\u27s collection offers a cross-section of writing from three sites of inquiry—the papers she wrote as an undergraduate student, the master\u27s thesis she wrote as a graduate student, and a published essay she wrote as a teacher at Thrall Academy in South Dakota. Close readings and critical analysis of Annie\u27s papers at these sites of inquiry allow me to consider the rhetorical strategies that Annie employed at diverse moments during her student life and teaching career. I locate my research and methodology in archival documents, including campus newspapers, yearbooks, curriculum reports, university bulletins, and Annie\u27s writing to draw conclusions about women students\u27 understandings of their own identity and the availability of occasions for writing about gendered experiences within the academic curriculum. I situate Annie\u27s papers within broad patterns of nineteenth-century writing instruction and the more specific context of the University of Nebraska\u27s English curriculum during the 1890s. This study also merges nineteenth-century writing pedagogy with women\u27s rhetorical theory. The dissertation thereby participates in a feminist project of recovery which underscores the connection between writing instruction that theorizes gendered experience and women students\u27 development of rhetorical agency