Time transfixed: Rhetorical dreams of the automobile

David G Albin, Purdue University

Abstract

The automobile is arguably the most influential technological and cultural development of the century just passed—only television and the computer might rival it, but these technologies certainly have not literally changed the geographic landscape of our lives in the same physical and material ways that the automobile has—and the automobile remains as influential today, in the new century, as it was in the old. Visually utilizing the classical notions of ethos, pathos, and logos to construct a persuasive appeal to fellow drivers to simply operate their vehicles more safely, so that its author might have an easier time commuting to his teaching job, this dissertation also offers a reflexive pedagogical component, as its author utilizes the multi-disciplinary methodologies of rhetoric and composition to consider some ways by which the automobile—both the discrete vehicles themselves and automotive culture as a ubiquitous presence in our lives—has informed his level of motivation to continue a career in teaching. The dissertation utilizes both images and words to articulate the nature of this career decision, even as its author reflexively considers the dissertation's own role as a piece of visual writing—an act of visual rhetoric—within the multidisciplinary field of rhetoric and composition. Both a composition teacher and a writer, the author draws on methodologies from literature, visual rhetoric, cultural studies, composition studies, and expressivist rhetoric to closely examine, or "read," a variety of "texts" and "sites" in automotive culture—photographs, paintings, pamphlets, drive-ins, scale models, national parks, world's fairs, and the author's own experiences with the automobile and automotive culture—to articulate these entities' roles in his own writing and on his own level of motivation to remain in the teaching profession. The concept of motivation is familiar to many fields of study. As the field of education, for example, considers the problem of student motivation, or linguistics looks at motivation as part of language acquisition, rhetoric and composition invites reflection as a key element of motivating teachers toward praxis, so that a teacher might come to better understand the connections between their own lives, their research, and their classroom practices. This first-person, image-informed dissertation thus positions itself within the field of rhetoric and composition as not only an ethnographic act of visual rhetoric but also as an attempt to articulate an intensely personal method of visual reflexivity, so that its author might come to better understand the automobile's influence on his own motivations as both a teacher and writer, and to help him better understand his own role in the field of rhetoric and composition.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Sullivan, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American studies|Rhetoric|Transportation planning

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