Dissertation Abstract
Writing and Experience:
A Constructive Postmodern View
of Writing and the Writer
by
Daniel Joseph Royer
Degree: PH.D.
Year: 1995
Pages: 00224
Institution: UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS;
0099
Source: DAI, 56, no. 11A, (1995): 4375
This
dissertation explicates the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead as a way of
addressing problems related to the writer-subject and invention in the field of
composition study.
The pragmatic-process tradition in
American philosophy--especially the work of C. S. Peirce and Whitehead--is
presented as a constructive postmodern alternative to the prevailing postmodern
influence on the field. I claim that process philosophy provides the groundwork
for a philosophical theory of rhetoric that surmounts the challenges against
metaphysics and philosophy stemming from the antimetaphysical doctrines of the
prevailing postmodernism. I also claim that problems related to the instability
of the subject and the loss of agency encountered by the prevailing
postmodernism are overcome when analyzed from the constructive postmodern point
of view of Peirce and Whitehead. Furthermore, I show that the dynamic structure
of the self Peirce and Whitehead posit is compatible with a phenomenological
and metaphysical description of creativity and invention. Finally, by using
phenomenology and metaphysics to illumine each other as fundamental modes of
inquiry, I demonstrate two ways that the field of composition studies would
benefit from the further application of both: (1) I show that Whitehead's
metaphysics offers writing professionals a fuller appreciation of phenomenology
and phenomenological descriptions of composing experience, and (2) I show that
Whitehead's metaphysical theory of experience helps explain recent
psychological research on creativity and suggests its own theory of originality
and invention compatible with those findings. There is a dual aspect of
speculative metaphysics: its aim is the elucidation of immediate experience;
its starting point is the analytic observation of components of this
experience. From a philosophical perspective, this dissertation aims not at the
refinement of the metaphysical theory, but with the second aspect, the
elucidation of immediate experience, in this case, the experience of the
subject-agent as an inventive writer. From the perspective of composition
studies, my theoretical concern is with the nature of the subject and invention
and with the practical concerns of teaching writing. This dissertation is an
effort to show that Whitehead's metaphysics offers writing professionals a fuller
appreciation of the subject, invention, and the phenomenology of composing
experience.
SUBJECT(S)
Descriptor: LANGUAGE, GENERAL
PHILOSOPHY
Accession
No: AAI9609558
Provider: OCLC
Database: Dissertations