UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the complex models of rhetorical ethos that minority writers and their literary speakers have developed to persuade diverse audiences to join them in resisting structural oppressions and creating more reciprocal forms of affiliation in the post-1945 United States.

While authoritarian politicians, from Adolf Hitler to Donald Trump, have aimed to consolidate mass audiences through the power of scapegoating and the deployment of “alternative facts,” writers such as Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gordon Henry, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Sherman Alexie have worked to cultivate a different, more flexible and horizontal relationship between writer and reader, or speaker and listener, through distinctive techniques in their fiction. These writers (along with their narrators, poetic speakers, and dramatis personae) forge connections with audiences through verbal expressions that illuminate shared rituals, iconographies, spiritual beliefs, locations, and ethical values—expressions, I argue, that represent neither a return to reason and rationality nor an accentuation of affect and sentimentality. In this way, literary works like Ellison’s Invisible Man, Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie, Henry’s The Light People, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, and Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian offer antiracist and queer revisions of Aristotle’s ancient theory of rhetorical ethos (persuasion through “character”), setting ethos as a vital alternative to logos (persuasion through reason) or pathos (persuasion through emotion).

Each of my four chapters analyzes a particular element of ethos and its development in one or more works of U.S. minority literature. Chapter 1, “Ethos as Consubstantiality,” explores the close relationship between Ellison and the rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke, illuminating their mutual effort to figure out how humans could use language to keep their communities intact and to prevent a resurgence of the scapegoating, violence, and genocide that typified Nazism and fascism during World War II. I argue that their respective books Invisible Man (1952) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950)—which the two men wrote while in frequent conversation—together draw upon Aristotle’s rhetorical theory to conceptualize a new form of ethos for the mid–twentieth century. Calling it “consubstantiality,” an “accord of sensibilities,” Burke and Ellison believed that this new form of ethos—a rhetoric that emphasizes the symbolic and stylistic “oneness” of speaker and audience—would allow members of differently positioned groups to communicate effectively across their social divides.

Chapter 2, “Ethos as Spi/rituality,” examines the central courtroom scenes of Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie (1964) and Henry’s The Light People (1994) to showcase the potentials of ethos for African American and Native American witnesses testifying in courts of law. Disapproving of both the purportedly logos-based realm of the law and the pathos-based realm of sentimental literature, Baldwin hoped that the space of the theater could create a sense of “ritual” and “spiritual communion” that led to social change. Similarly, Henry’s work critiques the normative rhetorics of U.S. settler-colonial law, satirizing the emotional appeals that attorneys use to win over judges and juries, and revealing what happens when legal “rules” and “rationality” are taken to such an extreme that they allow the bones and spirits of deceased Native Americans to be exhumed and repossessed by scientists and curators, who treat them as “objects” to adorn the walls of natural history museums.

Chapter 3, “Ethos as Com-position,” probes the deep connections between “attitude” and “location”—connections that the term “ethos” encapsulates and that we can see quite clearly in English word pairs like habit/habitat, civil/civic, and propriety/property. In this vein, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), along with a number of her other writings, conceives of ethos as a complex queer mode of “dwelling” that occurs through shifting artistic language, rather than in a stable geographic space. Straddling national borders and moving constantly from place to place, Anzaldúa’s narrators challenge the emphasis that feminist theories of “standpoint” and “postpositivist realism” put on “where one is speaking from,” by inviting readers to “be at home with them” not in a shared physical territory but, instead, on a shared book-page and in shared conversation. What creates, revivifies, and sustains community in Borderlands are the shared identifications that emerge through an ethos-based rhetoric of location, rather than (as some readers might expect) affinities based on a shared racial, gender, and/or sexual identity.

Finally, Chapter 4, “Ethos as Ethics,” takes Alexie’s young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) as a case study for exploring the ethics of social communication, of literary narration, and of literary criticism. The Absolutely True Diary’s form and narration directly concern, and even emphasize, ethical questions: about the relationship between speech and disability, about adults’ power over young people, about toxic masculinities and internalized homophobias, about addictions, and about the differences in norms and expectations across locations. In doing so, the novel and its young indigenous narrator follow recent contributions to ethical literary criticism in consistently asking us to reflect on what our ethics are and should be, while also challenging us to move away from the fear of disability, of indigeneity, of queer discourse, and of youth that are still all too common in the postwar U.S.

By bringing ethos to bear on postwar U.S. minority literatures, this dissertation works to mend longstanding divisions between “literature” and “composition” (and between literary theory and rhetorical theory), considering them as mutually constituting rather than disparate fields and practices. Moreover, it shows how minority speakers’ ethos-based appeals (not only in literature—but in law, politics, and many other realms as well) register an effective counter-response to the allure of “alternative facts” and similar rhetorical strategies that seek to reify disfranchisement and violence.