Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
9-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Program
English
Advisor
Talia Schaffer
Committee Members
Jessica Yood
Amy Wan
Subject Categories
English Language and Literature
Keywords
disability, care, genre, veteran, digital, archive
Abstract
This dissertation uses digital methods to analyze a digitized archive of life writing by disabled Civil War veterans through lenses of care ethics and rhetorical genre theory. Autobiographical letters by more than 370 disabled men respond to a contest prompt open to Union veterans injured in their right arms who had to relearn penmanship. This dissertation introduces the hybrid genre of “specimens of left-hand penmanship” through several critical lenses. It critiques the rhetoric of vocational rehabilitation and examines this archive as a site for early examples of concepts from contemporary disability studies. Finally, it turns explicitly to care ethics, and uses the archive to inform a care-based reading of an understudied piece of veteran literature, Edith Wharton’s novella of the Civil War era, “The Spark.”
Recommended Citation
Dalton, Timothy, "Careful Compositions and Careless Constructions" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5937