Ragged Dicks: Masculinity, Steel, and the Rhetoric of the Self-made Man

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SIU Press, 2001 - Business & Economics - 280 pages

Portraits of self-made men are rife in Western culture, as James V. Catano observes. Positive and negative, admittedly fictional and ostensibly factual, these portraits endure because the general rhetorical practice embodied in the myth of the self-made man enacts both the need and the very means for making oneself masculine: verbal power and prowess. The myth of the self-made man, in short, is part of ongoing rhetorical practices that constitute society, culture, and subjects.

To explain those practices and their effectiveness, Catano argues that the basic narrative achieves much of its effectiveness by engaging and enacting the traditional psychological dynamics of the family romance: preoedipal separation, oedipal conflict, and "proper" postoedipal self-definition and socialization.

To focus on the combined social, psychological, and rhetorical dynamics that constitute the ongoing activity he calls masculine self-making, Catano emphasizes a particular strand: masculinity and steelmaking. Pursuing that strand, he argues that these representations of masculine self-making are rhetorical enactments of cultural needs and desires, and that they are ongoing and formative arguments about what society and its individuals either are or should be.

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Contents

V
16
VI
17
VII
24
VIII
35
IX
36
X
45
XI
50
XII
58
XXIV
122
XXV
131
XXVI
139
XXVII
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XXVIII
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XXIX
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XXX
159
XXXI
165

XIII
60
XIV
62
XV
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XVI
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XVII
89
XVIII
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XIX
94
XX
102
XXI
105
XXII
115
XXIII
121
XXXII
171
XXXIII
176
XXXIV
187
XXXV
190
XXXVI
199
XXXVII
203
XXXVIII
207
XXXIX
219
XL
259
XLI
271
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About the author (2001)

James V. Catano, professor of English at Louisiana State University and a member of the women's and gender studies program, is the coordinator of the Writing and Culture Concentration. He is the author of Language, History, Style: Leo Spitzer and the Critical Tradition.