The rhetoric of experience, explorations in experience as a key term in feminist discourse

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to lay the groundwork for a theory of feminist rhetoric that recognizes the central and contradictory role of "experience" as a key term in feminist discourse. Following Kenneth Burke's example, it proposes to add "experience" as a key term to the "standard lore" of rhetoric. While "persuasion" and "identification" still play a primary role, they do not adequately represent the rhetorical strategies of feminist discourse. "Identification" is a term which emphasizes the need to create unity. Feminism, as this disdsertation argues, requires a term that can function equally well to create division and unity. "Experience" meets this requirement, for it offers the means by which women can distinguish their differences from others and the means by which women can identify similarities with others.

Chapter One examines the changing place of "experience" in feminist terministic screens. It specifically looks at the poststructuralist challenge to the use of "experience" in feminist discourse. Chapter Two examines the substance of "experience" in early discourses. The first section of the chapter begins with an account of the devaluation of the term in the discourses of Plato and Aristotle; it then analyses the medieval notions of the terms and the use of "experience" in Chaucer's "Wife of Bath." The second section investigates the corresponding use of "experience" in the arguments of John Locke and Mary Wollstonecraft. It illustrates how Wollstonecraft uses the principles set out by Locke in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding to argue for the rights of women in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The third section brings John Dewey's Art as Experience together with Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas to explicate Woolf's use of "experience." Chapter Three looks at the use of "experience" in defining moments of feminist literary criticism and the debates that follow. The debates center on Barbara Smith's essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," and the Canadian text "Language in Her Eye." Chapter Four examines the bringing together of theory and practice in the use of metaphor as experience in the work of Helene Cixous.