Making ordinary writing: One woman's diary.

By considering ordinary writing as a site of complex and strategic negotiations between the writer, the form of writing, and dominant cultural scripts, my dissertation makes visible the work of the ordinary writer. It takes as its center the ordinary diary of my great great great aunt Annie Ray, a woman who homesteaded in the Dakotas in the late 19th century and includes two years of her diary. Diary scholarship has largely ignored ordinary diaries like Annie's preferring instead to focus on diaries with literary features. Reading diaries through a literary lens privileges those that are coherent and crafted, ignoring ordinary diaries---the very diaries that define the diurnal form. In Chapter I, after detailing these recovery efforts, I suggest that reading an ordinary diary requires a lens that takes its shape from the object it studies. Given the form's connection to dailiness, I propose a diurnal lens. Chapter II begins by examining Stuart Sherman's argument---that changes in 17th century horology---specifically the invention of the pendulum---led to the rise of the diurnal form as the form of writing that could capture most effectively the new experience of time. I demonstrate how Annie physically maps her page space (e.g., her use of margins) in ways congruent with her chosen form of writing and her own, gendered experience of dailiness. Chapter III turns the focus of the diurnal lens onto the rhetorical decisions Annie makes (e.g., her use of parataxis). I suggest that Annie capitalizes on the opportunities created by dailiness to make order by reducing possibility---strategies that replicate and resist social and historical constraints. In the final chapter I return to the making of ordinary writing broadly conceived and consider how such writing informs the composition classroom, another site for the making of texts. Having made visible the work of the ordinary writer, I suggest that ordinary writing provides students with a terrain that puts in greater relief the work all writers undertake, work not easily discerned in more crafted texts. With a new vocabulary, students can then examine the making of their own and others' texts.Ph.D.Language, Literature and LinguisticsRhetoricSocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132684/2/9977260.pd