Kastely, James L.2016-09-052016-09-05May 20162016-05http://hdl.handle.net/10657/1526Rhetoric and composition studies addresses the problem of student self-presentation by appealing to the discourse of social roles: the “roles” of Writer and Reader, Rhetor and Audience. But this role- rhetoric is only vernacular, not theorized, so the concept remains too abstract to be practical for rhetorical analysis and invention. This dissertation analyzes the role-rhetoric in rhet/comp discourse to discover what it reveals about rhetoric generally and in order to develop a more rigorously theoretical rhetoric of role. I examine the evolution of Kenneth Burke’s role-rhetoric during the development of “dramatism,” arguing that it provides a foundation for developing a rhetoric of role that allows rhetors to draw, potentially, from the gamut of human social roles as commonplaces for self-fashioning, and I consider what this tells us about rhetoric and persuasion, and suggest some ways this rhetoric of roles might inform pedagogy.application/pdfengThe author of this work is the copyright owner. UH Libraries and the Texas Digital Library have their permission to store and provide access to this work. Further transmission, reproduction, or presentation of this work is prohibited except with permission of the author(s).RhetoricsCompositionPedagogyFirst-year writingBurke, KennethIdentityInvention2016-09-05Thesisborn digital