You'uns: Toward Appalachian Rhetorical Sovereignty

200 Pages·2015·0.91 MB·English

by  Angela Mccutcheon

You'uns: Toward Appalachian Rhetorical Sovereignty

A dissertation presented to
the faculty of
the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
Doctor of Philosophy

Amanda E. Hayes
August 2015
© 2015 Amanda E. Hayes. All Rights Reserved.
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This dissertation titled
You'uns: Toward Appalachian Rhetorical Sovereignty

by
AMANDA E. HAYES

has been approved for
the Department of English
and the College of Arts and Sciences by

Mara Holt
Associate Professor of English

Robert Frank
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
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ABSTRACT
HAYES, AMANDA E., Ph.D., August 2015, English
You'uns: Toward Appalachian Rhetorical Sovereignty
Director of Dissertation: Mara Holt
“You'uns: Toward Appalachian Rhetorical Sovereignty” began as a consideration
of how Scott Richard Lyons's concept of rhetorical sovereignty (put forward in his essay
“Rhetorical Sovereignty: What do American Indians Want from Writing?”) might be
applied to Appalachia. While the field of rhetoric and composition has advanced a sense
of academic and social value for non-standard dialects, my sense is that Appalachian
dialects in particular continue to be evaluated as “wrong” rather than different. This
evaluation of linguistic error is tied with perceptions of cultural deficit, making some
teachers eager to correct both the language and the social values of Appalachian students.
What is often unseen in this is the rhetorical writing and communication styles that are
attached to that language and those values. Because Appalachian rhetoric as a shared
cultural dynamic remains unseen and unconsidered in the classroom, many Appalachian
students fail to see themselves as united with others in potentially empowering ways.
Thus, where Lyons defines rhetorical sovereignty as the right of a people, united by
shared language and cultural history, to create their own definition and have it respected,
the people of Appalachia must first learn to perceive themselves, and be recognized by
others, as a rhetorically-linked people. To this end, I use historical, cultural, and
rhetorical analysis to investigate Appalachian rhetoric as a potentially uniting factor.
Specifically, I put forward that elements of Celtic rhetoric and ideology have been
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inherited by Appalachian peoples throughout the region. These elements are discernible
in the ways Appalachians speak and write, although because these elements are
unrecognized as rhetorical practices within the academy, many students are simply given
the sense that they “don't know how to write.” I advocate bringing Appalachian rhetoric
as a concept into regional classrooms, asking students to investigate and record their
sense of Appalachian definition and discourse, as a stepping stone toward achieving a
critical sense of ourselves as both individual and linked. I also demonstrate my sense of
Appalachian rhetorical writing, through the inclusion of personal and family stories and
considerations of my process of thinking as illustrative of individualized, non-adversarial
argument.
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DEDICATION

For family, place, and all the ways they intertwine.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
If this work is anything worthwhile, it ain’t cuz a me. It’s because of the many
people who make my world and make me care about doing something good in it.
Thanks to my parents, grandparents, brother, aunts, uncles, cousins of all degrees,
friends and neighbors . . . naming them all would take up more space than the dissertation
itself. And to those family members who’ve come before me, and them as yet to come.
Special thanks to my teachers, not least of all the ones on my committee: my
director, Mara Holt, Sherrie Gradin, Jennie Nelson, and Jaylynne Hutchinson.
And thanks to the spirit of Manasseh Cutler, for his dream of a pioneer school that
became Ohio University, a research institution in the Appalachian foothills, where my
worlds could combine.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page

Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3
Dedication ........................................................................................................................... 5
Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... 6
List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... 8
Chapter 1: Introduction to Appalachian Rhetorical Sovereignty ........................................ 9
Chapter 2: Rootsystems of Appalachian Rhetoric ............................................................ 43
Chapter 3: Writing an Appalachian Rhetoric.................................................................... 77
Chapter 4: Removing Appalachia from the Classroom .................................................. 121
Chapter 5: Rhetorical Sovereignty for Appalachia ......................................................... 160
Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 191
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LIST OF FIGURES
Page
Figure 1: Quilt by Alta Carpenter .................................................................................160
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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION TO APPALACHIAN RHETORICAL
SOVEREIGNTY (OR, PIECIN' A QUILT)
Great-grandma Carpenter was a master quilter. She didn't need a sewing machine;
she pieced every one of her quilts by hand. Some of them was made for me, which even
when little I thought was incredible, as she had so many grandkids and great-grandkids
who would have loved to've had one of her quilts. I remember watching her quilt; I was
pretty young at the time, but I knew quilting was something I wanted to do, too.
Unfortunately, I was too young to have much patience. The stitches had to be so small
and so exact...I managed to knot up the thread a few stitches into my one and only solo
effort, and gave up the entire enterprise. It's up in my grandparents' attic now, that little
piece of batted cotton I was too impatient to quilt when I was five. It's in the cedar chest,
just like Grandma Carpenter's quilts are. It's like somebody knew better than I did at the
time how much I'd regret giving up. I did learn to crochet eventually, taught by the
mother of one of my brother's friends. But it's not the same. Crochet, unlike quilting, ain't
part of the family.
We don't need any other reason to love Grandma Carpenter's quilts but that they
was made by her. Still, it wasn't until within the last few years that I learned to see those
quilts in a new light, as something precious not just because of the messages of love and
artistry that they'd always conveyed for me. In fact, I've only recently been learning to
read them, to read quilting as a whole, as something even more deeply rhetorical than I'd
ever realized.
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The realization tracks directly to my discovery of Fawn Valentine's West Virginia
Quilts and Quiltmakers, wherein she explores the cultural roots of the Appalachian
quilting traditions. She demonstrates ways of reading the cultural traditions of quilts
through their designs and constructions. Scotch-Irish-influenced quilts regularly consist
of a traditional pattern, such as a starburst or rings, but within that pattern can lie a chaos
of apparently non-related colors and cloth patterns. The whole is over-layered by a
pattern of intersecting, wave-like stitching, giving the quilt an equal sense of order and
chaos, of circular and interlaced connections. Materials (“piece-goods” Grandma
Carpenter called them) are often chosen for sentimental or value-laden reasons; a scrap of
a quilter's wedding dress may be entwined with a piece of the blankets that swaddled
each of her babies. Thus, what might at first glance appear a disorganized mishmash of
clashing colors is actually an ode to the passages of a person's life. It is, as I see it, a
system that privileges styles of communication such as descriptive narrative (each piece
of the quilt is an opening to an interconnected body of stories) and proposes as an end-
goal the drawing of connections between both the similar and seemingly disparate
components to create a whole text, a text that speaks of the quilter perhaps more than it
speaks to the viewer. The resulting patterns require a sense of cultural literacy for best
interpretation, as they require the willingness of the viewer/listener/interpreter to both see
the quilt as more than an object, to look at it as a cultural insider might, and to consider
meanings beyond the surface materials. A quilt tells a story, but on its own subjective
terms.