A rhetorical analysis of Goodbye to a River for the composition classroom

Abstract

This dissertation advocates utilizing Graves's text for the Rhetoric and Composition classroom because it is a rhetorical masterpiece--the river is treated as a trope; it is imaged as woman. All of Nature is imaged as feminine, and the reading experience is highly pleasurable due to the masterful and mastering use of sensuous, seductive language. The text indeed focuses on pleasure, the pleasure of language in the high style of poetry and the physical pleasure of an attempt at perfect, erotic immersion of the artist into nature. What the author seeks is a melding, an overcoming of the separation of mind and matter, of what is human and what is natural. The text, through its highly artistic use of language, becomes a seductively dazzling exemplum or product of this unity--accomplished by the artistry of its many rhetorical devices and the numerous intimate physical acts of the narrator-in-nature. Chapter I explains the empowerment of Classical and Modern Rhetoric for students' lives and writing. Chapter II shows literary precursors and influences on the text. Chapter III discusses the narrative's pastoral impulse and shows that women (as Discord or Evil), even though nature-is-woman, are decidedly unwelcome in the wilderness--they don't "go with the river." Chapter IV examines the order of the elitist utopia which the author has created. Chapter V shows the Romantic tendencies of the text. Chapter VI advocates a rereading of women's narratives, made possible by the concept of nomos, for the text excludes the vast majority of all of society in its acceptance only of "the old ones" or the "real ones" of the Brazos River frontier settlers and their progeny. Chapter VII offers classroom exercises and writing assignments based on Goodbye to a River.