Post-Industrial Gatekeeping: A Rhetorical History of Disciplinary Composition

Abstract

This dissertation argues that composition’s ascendance to academic legitimacy in the mid-to-late twentieth century did not emerge as a challenge to FYC’s traditional gatekeeping function but rather represents the replacement of an outmoded formalist gatekeeping mechanism that served the dominant culture of industrial society with an identity-based mechanism that meets the needs of post-industrial capitalism.