Ethical Rhetorical Practice: Theorizing Lévinasian Ethics in “Students’ Right to Their Own Language”

By calling Emmanuel Lévinas to the scene, this project troubles the inter-animation of the polis and the teaching of writing. Lévinas offers to writing studies a rendering of ethicality as a rhetorical condition which begins and ends in obligation to the face of an Other. Chapter One introduces and establishes the grounds for my inquiry, beginning with writing studies’ interest the polis, the limitations of that interest, and how the Students’ Right to Their Own Language movement is an appropriate case study for re-examining the ethicality of writing studies. Chapter Two begins by establishing the justifying role the polis plays in all sides of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language debate, and then problematizes the polis as an ethical warrant for rhetoric and composition. In Chapter Three, I turn my attention to Lévinas’s phenomenology and explore the ethical rhetorical as an ethical paradigm for rhetoric’s engagement with others. Chapter Four takes up the problem of violence, a problem none of the five topoi of Chapter Three adequately address. Chapter Five returns to SRTOL and considers how teachers of writing might position vulnerability as the primary condition for writers.