Hartman, JamesWilliams, Erin Ann2012-11-262012-11-262011-05-312011http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:11515https://hdl.handle.net/1808/10430Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory and John Bender and David E. Wellbery's description of rhetoricality, I offer a reconceptualization of literature as a conceptual metaphorization of the experience of the cognitive concept of LIFE. I demonstrate the value of such a rhetoricized reconceptualization of literature and literary study by applying them to four American autobiographies written after 1970: Bill Clinton's My Life, James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, Audre Lorde's Zami, and Walter Dean Myers' Autobiography of my Dead Brother. I also speculate about what a rhetoricized English studies in contemporary American higher education - one that sees (what Pierre Bourdieu describes as) heteronomy rather than autonomy as its primary organizing principle - might entail.211 pagesenThis item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.LanguageLinguisticsAutobiographyConceptual metaphor theoryLife writingMetaphorRhetoricRhetoric and compositionDissertationopenAccess