Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1990

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Don Richard Cox

Committee Members

B.J. Leggett, Linda Bensel-Meyers, Chuck Maland, Bob Glenn

Abstract

John McPhee has just begun to be studied as a master of nonfiction. Part of the reason he has not received much attention may be his own modesty and reluctance to echo the claims of writers like Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Hunter S. Thompson who felt they had created new art forms when they began to write New Journalism articles and nonfiction novels in the sixties. Unlike these writers, McPhee aligns himself with the profile-writing tradition at The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer for twenty-five years. Despite his modesty, his works merit study because of their masterful handling of fact and detail, complex yet highly accessible prose structures, and subtle rhetorical impact and voice. A study of these elements may ultimately inform the teaching of writing by making teachers and students aware of the possibilities, complexities, and subtleties of contemporary nonfiction prose. One of the most intriguing features of McPhee's prose is its employment of a strategy enabling him to be journalistically fair-minded and yet have a rhetorical impact. McPhee accomplishes this balance through his handling of structure and his own persona. I investigate these elements by using several of Kenneth Burke's key concepts--symbolic act, dramatism, and identification--to analyze McPhee's rhetorical strategy in Coming Into the Country, his most acclaimed and complex book, which takes as its topic the challenges facing Alaska during the 1970's. Chapter II describes the symbolic act of Coming Into the Country by focusing on its architecture and key terms. The work is divided into three books, each with a circular narrative frame that indicates McPhee's reluctance to judge quickly or easily about Alaskan conservation, politics, and people. This continuously inwardly turning structure alerts readers to the complexity and significance of each book's key terms, which are, respectively, the myth of the Alaskan wilderness, the concerns of urban and political Alaska, and the pioneer spirit of its citizens. Chapter III discusses McPhee's use of a presentational rhetoric which functions through the accumulation and juxtaposition of synecdoches, introducing readers to a number of representative Alaskan voices and the range of opinions about the future of the state. McPhee's copious repertoire of organizational elements--including reconstructed scenes, anecdotes, descriptions, histories, biographies, surveys of opinions, and excerpts from other sources--becomes the foundation of a dialectic about Alaska that moves both author and reader toward a broad understanding of relevant issues as well as the concerns of Alaskans. As the value and limitations of many perspectives become apparent, the reader recognizes the attractiveness of McPhee's position, a position that advocates informed and empathic pluralism. Chapter IV analyzes how a reader is encouraged to identify with McPhee's perspective because of his formulation of an appealing persona both as a character struggling to discover his own attitudes toward Alaskan issues and as an author who is witty, intelligent, and humane in his characterization of the people he encounters and writes about. The fifth chapter illustrates how the architectural, organizational, and identification techniques of Coming Into the Country appear as patterns throughout McPhee's books and articles. These techniques typically enable McPhee to demonstrate and foster a pluralistic philosophy.

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