How Social Trauma Affects How We Write: Post 9/11 Rhetorical Theory and Composition Pedagogy

This work utilizes concrete examples and includes a guide for instructors on bringing cultural artifacts into their writing classrooms. This work will appeal to scholars in Pedagogy, New Media, and Literacy Studies as well as Composition and Rhetoric. This study uncovers the common characteristics of ancient rhetorical traditions and modern composition pedagogies that best suit post-9/11 students while explicitly concentrating on their shared function of teaching citizenry. Next, the text explores historically rhetorically resonant artifacts to indicate the shifts in literacy practices that seem to correlate with traumatic social events. The text triangulates Critical Theory, Culture Studies, and the Post-Process Movement and builds a rhetorical theory and subsequent composition pedagogy. The result is a complex theory designed to utilize the intricate social and rhetorical situations derived from trauma events to provide students a commonplace by which to produce alternative compositions. Thereby, the theory and pedagogy developed here asks instructors to end the marginalization of students' ability to engage in an advanced citizenry when met with trauma and rather to encourage them to be more involved in their education, their communities and their democracy.