Through an examination of contemporary texts featuring arguments about the relationships between literacy and work, this dissertation explores literacy and work as mutually influencing forms of cultural participation. Increasingly, scholarship in literacy studies--from research in composition and literature within English Departments to scholarship from sites across the academic disciplines--analyzes texts as products and agents of social forces. Among the many manifestations of these forces are the rhetorical choices that authors make in an effort to persuade their audience. Emerging from the arguments analyzed in this dissertation are efforts at persuasion that build on metaphors of fitness, appealing to particular constructions of a broader cultural identity--an identity defined in terms of specific literacy and work practices. Among the texts under consideration in this study are judicial opinions regarding employment practices and literacy requirements on the job, government publications surrounding the establishment of the National Workplace Literacy Program, and novels featuring the inter-relationships of literacy and work including Julia Alvarez's 1991 novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, and Ben Hamper's 1991 memoir, Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line. Juxtaposing these arguments and the discursive practices of public policy, literature and law, this dissertation explores not only competing constructions of literacy and work embodied in these texts but their articulation through (and against) different kinds of discursive authorities.Ph.D.English and EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/105124/1/9635572.pdfDescription of 9635572.pdf : Restricted to UM users only
