This is the name of my dissertation - Hospitable Texts. The basic argument is that web texts are hospitable, and the focus of the study will be Wikipedia. For me, Wikipedia is the quintessential hospitable text in that it "gives place" (Derrida's words) to both readers and writers. Or, better, completely blurs the categories of "reader" and "writer." My argument is that hospitable texts allow rhetoricians to refigure the key terms of the discipline: rhetorical agency, community, and intellectual property.

I take my prospectus exam a week from Friday, so I've been working through these ideas a lot over the past few weeks. I've also been trying to figure out how exactly to approach my C&W 2007 conference paper. The title is "Wikipedia: Modeling a Middle Way for Rhetoric" is one I'd like to change, but I guess that's just the nature of conference papers. My plan was to offer Wikipedia as a text that intervenes in the debate about "productive" and "hermeneutic" rhetorics. Folks such as Rosa Eberly argue for rhetoric as a productive art while Steve Mailloux focuses on the hermeneutic and interpretive (interpretative?) aspects of rhetoric. In his most recent book, Mailloux tries to answer these "rhetoric as production" critics by claiming that his rhetorical hermeneutics does offer strategies for productive rhetorical interventions. Mailloux claims that his hermeneutics is not just a mode of reading - it is a mode of production as well. I'm not sure Mailloux's answer really offers the productive art folks a satisfactory answer, and I've been trying to figure out why.

My paper will argue that texts like Wikipedia render the production/consumption binary problematic at best (possibly even obsolete). At first, I couldn't quite figure out where to go with this argument. I mean, what's new about saying that people on the Web are "prosumers." But then I revisited - an intervention that calls for the recognition of the "non-hermeneutic" aspects of rhetoric. While Eberly and Mailloux debate the hermeneutics vs. "productive art," Diane asks whether Mailloux's hermeneutics exhausts the possibilities for rhetoric. Diane's argument is that there are portions of the rhetorical situation that escape interpretation, and she wants to call these portions rhetorical as well. The very relation between two parties of the linguistic situation is rhetorical, before they say or do anything. This relation is the "saying" (performative) that happens before there is any "said" (constative).