Why authenticity matters.

摘要

This dissertation argues that authenticity is a powerful, though under-examined, rhetorical commonplace. By examining rhetors' citations of authenticity and the effects they create in different social fields, this project responds to the trans-disciplinary trend that dismisses authenticity as dated philosophy, mere essentialism, or naive identitarianism. Authenticity understood rhetorically offers a window into the everyday circulation of competing ideas of the self, tensions in liberal democracy, alternate conceptualizations of place, and means of persuasion in prevailing power structures. This project treats the language of authenticity as more than a justificatory mechanism rhetors use to describe something or someone they value by taking an interdisciplinary approach, but one with a rhetorical sensibility, it sees authenticity as doxa which individuals invoke but which also carries a generative force, one which savvy rhetors put to use in a variety of contexts. The contexts examined include blues tourism on Chicago's South Side, composition pedagogy, the 2007-2008 American presidential primary campaigns, and the political strife between the Cherokee Nation and the group known as the freedmen.