Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

12-2024

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph. D.

Department

English

Degree Program

English Rhetoric and Composition, PhD

Committee Chair

Kopelson, Karen

Committee Co-Chair (if applicable)

Schneider, Stephen

Committee Member

Schneider, Stephen

Committee Member

Kelderman, Frank

Committee Member

Young, Amy

Author's Keywords

food; public chef intellectual

Abstract

This dissertation project explores the motivation of chefs to become Public Chef Intellectuals and how they cultivate and engage with an audience that will never taste their food. Using a case study approach, this dissertation analyzes the intellectual missions of Anthony Bourdain, Sean Sherman, and Mahsama Bailey as told through their television shows, memoirs, cookbooks, and restaurant menus. I argue that for each chef, their cultural identity is inextricably tied to their ultimate purpose – the use of food as a Trojan horse to promote their vision for a collective American culture. This project underscores that this process happens dialogically through ethos cultivation and constitutive rhetoric. Throughout this dissertation, I offer an understanding of ethos – an understanding I call ethos as buffet – that blends the relational approaches of feminist and Michael J. Hyde’s “ethos as dwelling place” definitions. Likewise, the project blends Maurice Charland’s interpellation-driven definition of constitutive rhetoric with James Boyd White’s more relational approach, extending a version of M. Elizabeth Thorpe and Bryan Picciotto’s “constitutive character”. In redistributing the power and agency between rhetor and audience, these approaches to ethos and constitutive rhetoric provide a way to interpret the rhetoric of chefs, artists, presidents, and other public figures. In Chapter One of the dissertation provides an overview of relevant scholarship on the figure of the public intellectual in Rhetoric and Composition, ethos, and constitutive rhetoric. In the second chapter, the project explores Bourdain’s presentation of White masculinity, turning his discussion of organ meats and oysters into an evaluation of his performance on a “junkie Byron” ethos that merges elitism with blue-collar sensibilities. The third chapter investigates Sherman’s Indigenous rhetoric, analyzing his distinctly Oglala Lakota ethos in his push against frybread and all postcolonial ingredients in his advocacy for decolonization. In the fourth chapter, the project focuses on Bailey’s award-winning Southern cuisine, using her Blackness and femininity as well as her New York upbringing to rearticulate the South’s relationship to the larger US. To conclude, Chapter Five advocates for more studies within food rhetorics, highlighting how other identity markers such as class, religion, and sexuality may also inform a PCI’s mission.

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