Reviewed by: A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886 by Amy J. Lueck Jason Maxwell Amy J. Lueck. A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886. Writing Research, Pedagogy, and Policy. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3742-2 Historians of composition have long understood their work as a necessary corrective to reductive accounts of English Studies that focus solely on literary studies and critical theory. In their efforts to provide a more capacious understanding of the discipline, however, compositionists have themselves produced significant exclusions, offering a rather limited understanding of the history of college writing. As Amy J. Lueck explains, the field of Rhetoric and Composition, perhaps in an effort to fortify its standing within the research university, has tended to overlook the role that high schools have played in shaping college writing pedagogy. In A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886, Lueck does not merely seek to document points of overlap and contestation between high school and college writing curriculum. Instead, her work aims to call into question the very boundaries between designations like “high school” and “college.” These boundaries, Lueck maintains, are responsible for producing a standardized academic hierarchy that limits the range of pedagogical possibilities within any given level of the system. For instance, high school becomes conceived as little more than a preparatory vehicle for college, and its curriculum becomes defined negatively—that is, high school is understood as not providing college-level instruction. History has shown that this reification and subordination proves detrimental for both high schools and colleges. While we take these distinctions for granted today, Lueck turns to the nineteenth century, a point when the current academic system had not yet solidified (in this regard, her work shares much with Laurence Veysey’s [End Page 415] landmark The Emergence of the American University [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965], which similarly documents a period of intense fluidity and contestation). Prior to the establishment of research universities, which precipitated the creation of our broader contemporary hierarchy, the middle of the century boasted a landscape populated by a wide array of educational institutions whose relations to one another were anything but clear. Consider the name “high school.” While the term might suggest an institution that serves as a capstone to the “lower” primary schools, it just as easily might be read as belonging under the banner of “higher learning” that we usually reserve for colleges and universities. Much of the ambiguity surrounding various schools’ status and function can be attributed to the larger conversation about the role of education in American life during this time. For example, many were calling into question the hegemony of the traditional college’s “classical curriculum,” which privileged learning languages like Greek and Latin in order to produce distinguished gentlemen. Critics of this curriculum suggested replacing it with a “modem curriculum” that would better prepare students for the practical concerns of work and citizenship. Because the transition to this modern curriculum was uneven at best, many high schools adopted it long before their college counterparts, making them an attractive option for many in the community. Indeed, practically-oriented high schools were not merely viable alternatives to classically-minded colleges. They also constituted sites of pedagogical innovation that colleges and universities would later draw upon in their own reform efforts. Lueck grounds her analysis in A Shared History by studying the developments of a number of schools in Louisville, Kentucky during the second half of the 1800s. She dives into the archival record and finds a range of institutions, instructors, and students that challenge long-held assumptions about the educational system and the kinds of work students are expected to produce at any given site within that system. Admitting that it would be impossible to produce a comprehensive account of the changes unfolding during this time, Lueck argues that the city nevertheless engaged meaningfully with almost every larger educational trend of the era, and several educators who worked in Louisville went on to have an impact shaping educational policy at the national level. Moreover, her...

Book Review| November 01 2019 Review: Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940, by Sarah Walden Sarah Walden, Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 220 pp. ISBN: 0822965135 Paige V. Banaji Paige V. Banaji Paige V. Banaji Assistant Professor, English Director of First-Year Writing English & Foreign Languages College of Arts & Sciences Barry University 11300 NE 2nd Ave Miami Shores, FL 33161 pbanaji@barry.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (4): 422–424. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.422 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Paige V. Banaji; Review: Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940, by Sarah Walden. Rhetorica 1 November 2019; 37 (4): 422–424. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.422 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Although highly innovative in its blend of medieval Aristotelian with Horatian and Ciceronian doctrine, the Poetria by the fourteenth-century Swedish writer Mathias of Linköping survives in only one manuscript copy and appears to have had little or no influence outside Sweden. Likely reasons for its failure to gain traction among late medieval teachers of Latin composition are (1) its sharp separation of prose from poetry, (2) its implication that verse composition is a more advanced subject than prose composition, and (3) its disproportionate reliance on theoretical precepts rather than illustrative examples.

Although highly innovative in its blend of medieval Aristotelian with Horatian and Ciceronian doctrine, the Poetria by the fourteenth-century Swedish writer Mathias of Linköping survives in only one manuscript copy and appears to have had little or no influence outside Sweden. Likely reasons for its failure to gain traction among late medieval teachers of Latin composition are (1) its sharp separation of prose from poetry, (2) its implication that verse composition is a more advanced subject than prose composition, and (3) its disproportionate reliance on theoretical precepts rather than illustrative examples.

Reviews Mats Malm, The Soul of Poetry Redefined: Vacillations of Mimesis from Aristotle to Romanticism, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012. 238 pp. ISBN 9788763537421 The Soul ofPoetry Redefined is a book that may be of interest to students of poetry and rhetoric, especially those invested in Aristotle's Poetics. Its central claim is that Aristotle is ambiguous in his conceptualization of mimesis, the "soul [psuche] of tragedy" (Poetics, quoted p. 12), if not of poetry in general. Malm presents the ambiguity in this way: When someone—be it Aristotle or any interpreter of his—says that poetry is mimesis or imitation of characters, actions, passions, etc., what is meant by "imitation"? Is it that actions and passions are composed, in the sense of construing [i.e., constructing?] a story, similar to how the historian arranges his account but with the freedom of invention, or that they are represented through words, just like the painter represents things and persons through colours? (Pp. 12-13) In Malm's account, this tension between content and form—muthos and lexis— gives rise to various adaptations of the Poetics over time, from Averroès in the twelfth century to Charles Batteux and Johann Adolph Schlegel in the eighteenth. From Averroès onward, Malm finds mimesis-as-representation stres­ sed over mimesis-as-plot-composition. The soul of poetry thus becomes visual imagery (p. 19) and metaphor (p. 45). Exceptional, in Malm's account, are Corneille and Racine: "The French classicists focus not on mimesisrepresentation but on mimesis-composition, so the 'verisimilar' here comes close to that of Aristotle" (p. 103). Yet this strikes me as unsurprising, given that Corneille and Racine were writing and theorizing on tragedy, just as Aristotle was, while Averroès and those who he influenced through Latin translation in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance addressed literature, and the arts, more generally. There are several basic problems with Malm's study of mimesis and its reception. First, with respect to Aristotle's Poetics, it is not clear to me that "mimesis-representation" and "mimesis-composition" are conceptually separable: I would think, rather, that composition involves representation, and vice versa. Second, I am not sure what's at stake in Malm's study. Could anyone disagree that some poetic theorists have stressed content over Rhetorica, Vol. XXXIV, Issue 3, pp. 324-335. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541. © 2016 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: 10.1525/rh.20l6.34.3.324. Reviews 325 form, or form ox er content? Malm's work is not really situated in relation to extant criticism on Aristotle and his reception, despite the eighteen pages on which the eminent Classics scholar Stephen Halliwell is cited. In the end, I have no clear sense of either Halliwell's arguments or how Malm's account of mimesis may or may not relate to them. Other scholars are cited with still greater opacity: for example, in a not uninteresting excursion on the sublime and its relation to visualization (phantasia), we are told, "The evolution of aes­ thetics can be tied to the ev olution of a new kind of social subject, as Peter de Bolla has demonstrated" (p. 139). No explanation follows. To my' mind, the best chapter of The Soul of Poetry Redefined is its tenth and last, "Emotions and the system of genres" (pp. 171-85). Here Malm advances, however tentatively, a real argument with explanatory force. Addressing the question of whv Aristotle stresses content over style and dra­ matic poetry over lyric, Malm writes that in the Poetics, "The pleasure of poetry. . .comes mainiv from understanding, and from pity and fear which are means of understanding. In this way, Aristotle distances poetry consider­ able' from the Platonic critique of linguistic voluptuousness and decadence. . . . Defining the soul of poetrv as lexis, mimesis-representation would have been to subject it to Plato's critique of rhetoric and representation. The soul of poetrv being muthos, content and structure, poetry...

Reviews Janet Downie, At the Limits ofArt: A Literary Study ofAelius Aristides' Hieroi Logoi New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. pp. 1-223. ISBN 9780199924875 In this book Janet Downie displays an expert and intimate understand­ ing of Aelius Aristides, the eccentric second-century rhetor from Asia Minor. She focuses in particular on his Hieroi logoi (HL) and the relationship between religion and rhetoric. In his concern with the divine, Aristides pushed the rhetoric of religion to its limits. Asclepius was his inspiration, his teacher, and, to some degree, his co-author, and was at the center of the HL, which Aristides considered the fulfillment of his obligation to this god. Yet the real protagonist of the work is Aristides with his failing body, his dreams, his cures, his performances, and his powerful self-assertion. Downie argues that Aristides' purpose is rhetorical, and he uses his narrative of divine healing to create a portrait of himself as a professional rhetor. Whether Aristides succeeded in this purpose, and was able to commu­ nicate his vision to his audience is a question which persists throughout the book, but, basically, cannot be solved. No reaction from Aristides' contempo­ rary audience has been preserved. It is puzzling that in his Lives ofthe Sophists Philostratus recognized the rhetor's craft but did not mention the religious character of his rhetoric, ignored the presence of Asclepius, and dismissed Aristides' talent because of his lack of improvisation. Apart from Libanius and some of his friends in the fourth century, later reception of Aristides and the HL was decidedly cool, and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centu­ ries, utterly disdainful. Downie attributes this to the fact that the HL were not read in conjunction with the rest of Aristides' work. It is uncertain whether she is right, or if generations of readers simply considered the work too eccentric and odd. A merit of Downie's book, in any case, is that it puts the HL in dialogue with all Aristides' writings, his orations and Hymns in particular, so that the whole of this challenging author is illuminated. One of the difficulties in approaching the HL as a coherent literary work is the discontinuity in its style. Book 1 is in diary form, and books 2-5 proceed thematically and have narrative aims. With great literary sensibility, Downie shows that the different styles derive from various and deliberate layers of composition intended to throw into high relief the combination of the divine voice with the human voice. Aristides' dreams are many and so vivid that Rhetorica, Vol. XXXIV, Issue 1, pp. 106-118. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541. © 2016 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: 10.1525/rh.20l6.34.l.l0b. Reviews 107 they make an impact on the reader. Discontinuity is typical of dreams and Downie links the unique language of dreams to Aristides' desire to suggest dreaming as a cognitiv e process. This reviewer does wish that Downie had taken briefly into account the dreams of the sons of Glaukias in Ptolemaic Memphis who lived and slept in the temple of Sarapis. Their words and expressions on papyri were those of common people and so they could have prov ided a useful comparison. Undoubtedly' the most disconcerting parts of the HL are those in which the author appears to further weaken his body by endless vomiting or dipping in frigid waters. Aristides knew7 contemporary medicine and the medical tradi­ tion and sometimes first consulted doctors who appear as rivals of Asclepius who triumphs at the end. Downie rightly remarks that this is the first instance in which an author revealed the illnesses and cures he personally experienced. Yet, we can surmise that these passages were the most repulsive to his contemporaries and may hav e been the cause of their disregard of the whole work. While Aristides sometimes is a patient passive in the hands of his doc­ tors and Asclepius, at times he has...

Dionysius of Halicarnassus's account of ethopoeia at Lysias 8 is often cited as evidence of Lysias mastery of character portrayal, but the passage itself has received little in-depth analysis. As a consequence, Dionysius's meaning has at times been misinterpreted, and some of his insights on characterization have been neglected. When the account is examined closely, three unique points of emphasis emerge which, taken together, constitute a particular type of characterization: persuasive, as opposed to propriety-oriented, ethopoeia. Making this distinction promotes conceptual clarity with regard to ethopoeia while calling attention to Dionysius's insights on the role of style and composition in the creation of persuasive ethos.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s account of ethopoeia at Lysias 8 is often cited as evidence of Lysias’s mastery of character portrayal, but the passage itself has received little in-depth analysis. As a consequence, Dionysius’s meaning has at times been misinterpreted, and some of his insights on characterization have been neglected. When the account is examined closely, three unique points of emphasis emerge which, taken together, constitute a particular type of characterization: persuasive, as opposed to propriety-oriented, ethopoeia. Making this distinction promotes conceptual clarity with regard to ethopoeia while calling attention to Dionysius’s insights on the role of style and composition in the creation of persuasive ethos.

SHORT REVIEWS Christopher Lyle Johnstone, Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) 196 pp. In many ways, this collection of articles on Ancient Greek rhetoric in English offers the best of what contemporary historiography and rhetorical theory have to offer. Rather than reading texts in isolation, or presuming interpretive clarity, these articles interpret their objects in relationship to the social, political, and even physical circumstances that influenced their production. Taken together, they summarize much of what is new in ancient rhetoric. Christopher Lyle Johnstone introduces the collection by rehearsing current rhetorical historiography, attributing the term rhetorike to Plato but acknowledging the creative significance of a set of prototypical rhetorical conditions such as the rise of democratic institutions, the spread of literacy, and the concomitant transformation of mythos into logos which made abstract categorization possible. These social, political, and intellectual conditions nurtured rhetoric as a distinct discipline. Johnstone's perspective clearly differentiates this work from earlier creation narratives that attributed rhetoric to the spontaneous genius of specific individuals. Continuing this line of reasoning, the first article, one of Father Grimaldi's last, "How Do We Get from CoraxTisias to Plato-Aristotle in Greek Rhetorical Theory?" is an excellent overview of the sophists' contribution to the development of rhetoric, and thus a contribution to their ongoing rehabilitation. While Grimaldi acknowledges that his task is synthetic and therefore not highly original, the article is nevertheless thorough and cogent. The second article dedicated to sophistic origins, John Poulakos's "Extending and Correcting the Rhetorical Tradition: Aristotle's Perception of the Sophists" argues that Aristotle acknowledged the 227 RHETORICA 228 sophists for inaugurating the study of rhetoric but went to great lengths to correct the logical and linguistic inadequacies that were the inevitable result of their imperfect epistemology. Thus he concludes that Aristotle followed Plato insofar as he critiqued the sophists but "marked out an independent path", for himself by including their efforts as among those founding the rhetorical tradition. In the third piece on the place of sophistry within the tradition, Schiappa argues for what he calls a "predisciplinary approach" to the study of the sophists, by which he means avoiding "vocabulary and assumptions about discursive theories and practice imported from the fourth century when analyzing fifth-century texts" (p. 67). He makes the case for rigorous historiography by rereading Gorgias's Helen in such a way as to prove that it "advanced the art of written prose in general, and of argumentative composition in particular" (p. 78) while in no way succumbing to the tendency to perceive the sophistic piece as somehow indicative of the philosophy/rhetoric split which was an intellectual artifact of later developments. Leaving the sophists but remaining firmly within the realm of current theoretical issues, Michael C. Leff questions the general applicability of Dilip Goankar's assertion that contemporary rhetorical theory differs from ancient theory in that it is hermeneutic rather than performative and dubious about the possibility of human agency fully explaining rhetorical decisions. Leff reads Thucydides's account of the Mytilene disaster as evidence that the ancients were, or at least Thucydides was, aware of how rhetorical discourse could be shaped by circumstances beyond participants' control. Leff ends his argument, however, by asserting that Thucydides' observations were intended to have a therapeutic effect in that "The readers of History...become better equipped to assume the role of agent, for they are better able to interpret that role not just at the moment of action but also from within an understanding of history" (p. 96). Christopher Lyle Johnstone's own noteworthy contribution combines archaeology with acoustics to challenge one of the idols of traditional rhetorical history. Whereas we have always argued that deliberative rhetoric must have played an integral part in Athenian democracy, Johnstone points out that we have never taken into account the physical circumstances of delivery in the open spaces of the ancient agoras. The Pynx, in particular, he argues, was constructed such that even under ideal climatic conditions, perhaps only "half of the 5000 Reviews 229 present could understand what speakers were saying" (p. 126). If this compelling argument is true, then we need to...