Date of Award:

5-2026

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

English

Committee Chair(s)

Matthew Whitaker

Committee

Matthew Whitaker

Committee

Beth Buyserie

Committee

Mehmet Soyer

Abstract

“Reading Cache Valley Rhetorics: Towards a Composition Pedagogy of Place” proposes that place—one’s immediate locale—is an essential element of ecocritical writing pedagogy. There are constant interacting rhetorical constructions of meaning within any given place across texts from the different groups who have lived there. In these local texts, the evidence of a rhetorically mediated reality is evident in the stark differences between natures and cultures—meaning is rhetorically constructed, down to the meaning of place and people. This project reads texts local to the author’s immediate locale, Cache Valley, Utah, from white LDS settler and Indigenous Shoshone rhetors in order to analyze each text’s rhetorical co-constructions of place and people. Constructing place and people in way over another, through the use of select terms, narratives, and cultural rationales, prompts a different kind of action than another kind of construction. A culture that views landscape as beautiful once it has been developed, and another culture that proposes landscape as a provider to be listened to, treat land in different ways. Since place and people are rhetorically co-constructed, different treatments of land often reflect different treatments of people. These co-constructions, evident in cross-cultural local texts, lead to takeaways of reality’s rhetorical negotiation and the necessary rhetorical responsibility that follows. In the concluding chapter, proposals towards place-based pedagogy serve as a call to action for more composition classrooms, ecocritical classrooms, and curricula in general to consider the importance of place to student inquiry. Students have the opportunity to find new understandings of self-in-relation to their local environment and the groups who have lived within and reshaped that environment. Rhetorical awareness of a constructed reality—down to the meanings of people and their environment—leads to rhetorical responsibility and agency.

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