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1429 articlesSeptember 2005
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Reviews 403 faith not only to sustain the congregation but also to encourage it to confront social injustice and work for racial uplift. Collectively, these women's spatial and rhetorical strategies point to an alternative method for crafting effective ethos and promoting Christian community. The epilogue addresses whether or not the "populist" preaching prac tices employed by O'Connor, Hill, and Moore are "feminine" ones. While acknowledging that a number of male church leaders (including Henry Ward Beecher, post-Vatican II priests, and African American preachers) have used similar methods, Mountford argues that women's abandonment of the pul pit, disclosure of the personal, and efforts to level hierarchy represent a significant "ritual transgression of sacred space" and tradition (156). In other words, women preachers choose alternative discursive methods and de livery styles in order to create ethos in a place and position traditionally antithetical to them. The Gendered Pulpit represents an important step toward understanding how gender affects discourse and rhetorical performance. Mountford con cludes by inviting other feminist rhetoricians into the new theoretical home afforded by a refigured fifth canon of delivery, and she encourages them to build upon her foundation and undertake further studies of women min isters in sacred spaces. Mountford's fine work makes a convincing case for the fifth canon as a promising site for investigating gender and rhetoric and, ultimately, for making the entire discipline inclusive and comprehensive. Lindal Buchanan Kettering University Cheryl Glenn, Margaret M. Lyday, and Wendy B. Sharer, eds., Rhetor ical Education in America. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. 245 pp. This volume reconsiders contemporary rhetorical education from the perspective of the history of rhetoric. The editors provide a helpful intro duction (Glenn) and afterword (Lyday and Sharer). Many of the essays were plenary presentations at a Penn State Rhetoric Conference organized by the editors. The volume's most successful essays link a study of how rhetoric was historically taught with how it might be taught today. In "Lest We Go the Way of the Classics: Toward a Rhetorical Future for English Departments," Thomas P. Miller reviews the history of composition teaching as a history of crises of literacy, and suggests that we now need a curriculum that will move us from the traditional interpretive stance of the critical observer to the rhetorical stance of the practical agent involved in negotiation. Shirley Wilson Logan, in "'To Get an Education and Teach My People': Rhetoric for Social Change," examines the self-help schooling of nineteenth-century African 404 RHETORICA Americans for clues to help today's disenfranchised communities. Logan calls for "consilience," that is, a linking of knowledge across disciplines, and a rhetorical education that concentrates as much on critiquing and evalu ating contemporary discourses as on producing writing. With meticulous scholarship, in "Parlor Rhetoric and the Performance of Gender in Postbellum America," Nan Johnson reveals the conservative réinscription of gender roles in the potentially liberating growth of manuals for parlor rhetoric after the Civil War. Gregory Clark reminds us of the range of American rhetorics in his examination of the national park as a public experience establishing a shared sense of national collectivity, a training ground for citizens who need to respond to public conflict with transcendence. Essays by William Denman and by Sherry Booth and Susan Frisbie are not as strong. Denman argues that rhetoric lost its civic purpose during the nineteenth-century expansion that attempted to keep out the vulgar and the foreign by policing the borders of oral and written communication, but he ignores the growth in specialized textbooks and conduct-book rhetoric that offered rhetorical education to working class and female students. Booth and Frisbie argue that metaphor should be central to rhetorical education and analyze their qualified success in teaching metaphor to their students, but they mistakenly suggest that Aristotle did not find metaphor important to rhetoric and their claim that Renaissance rhetoric emphasized style not content has been significantly revised in recent scholarship. Other essays offer perceptive variations on the collection's theme of the history of rhetoric as a guide to future teaching. Susan Kates links James Raines's revision of the history of English to include respect for Appalachian English...
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exploded, as more works by writers of color and white women writers have entered it (while very little work by white male writers has exited-the dire predictions of opponents of multiculturalism notwithstanding). In turn, syllabi, anthologies, curricula, and scholarship have changed to include a far more diverse array of writers, texts, voices, and experiences than had been included even ten, let alone thirty or forty years ago. Most universities' student bodies have become much more diverseculturally, ethnically, linguistically, experientially, socioeconomically. Although faculty diversity has not increased nearly as much and while not all teachers and disciplines have been equally influenced by multiculturalism, for the most part, what is taught-to whom and by whom-is very different in 2005 than it was in 1960.1 For some, these changes signal the victory of multiculturalism-although its supposed victory is greeted with sorrow or anger by some, and with gladness by others. For some, multiculturalism has gone too far; for others, multiculturalism has
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This essay attempts to demonstrate how transgender theories can inspire pedagogical methods that complement feminist compositionist pedagogical approaches to understanding the narration of gender as a social construct. By examining sample student writing generated by a prompt inspired by transgender theories, the author’s analysis suggests how trans theories might usefully expand and extend—for both instructors and students—our analysis of the stories we tell personally, socially, and politically about gender. Ultimately, the author argues that trans theories and pedagogical activities built on them can enhance our understanding of gender performance by prompting us to consider gender as a material and embodied reality.
July 2005
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This article analyzes the statements on plain style made by Royal Society writers and seventeenth-century women writers. Using scholarship in feminist rhetorical theory, the article concludes that Royal Society plain stylists constructed scientific discourse as a masculine form of discourse by purging elements that were associated with femininity, such as emotional appeals. The article also discusses how women writers, particularly Margaret Cavendish, embraced a plain style more out of concern for their audience than out of a desire to eliminate undesirable feminine attributes. The implications of this historical study for understanding of current practice are noted.
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Abstract This essay explores how recipes and associated text validate African-American women's self-image and resist dominant cultural memory in three cookbooks produced by the National Council of Negro Women in the 1990s. The aim is to establish how these cookbooks function rhetorically as memory texts: to memorialize both individuals and community, to invoke "memory beyond mind," and to generate a sense of collective memory that in turn shapes communal memory.
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When writers plan a document together, they rely on gestures as well as speech and writing in constructing a common representation of their group document. This case study of a student technical writing group explores how group members used gestures to create a conversational interaction space that they then treated like a physical text that they manipulated, wrote on, and pointed at. These gestures suggested a group pretext that helped group members translate abstract goals into concrete plans. However, the close proximity of gesture to the physical act of writing may mislead students into thinking that the tricky work of translating abstract ideas into final written form had already been completed. Gestures and adaptor movements (such as fidgeting with a pen) also seemed to conspire to help individuals control the conversational space and call attention to themselves as writers. Implications for future research on gesture and collaborative writing, gender, and writing technologies are discussed.
June 2005
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Contradicting and complicating feminization of rhetoric narratives: Mary Yost and argument from a sociological perspective ↗
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Abstract This article adds to the growing body of feminist scholarship critiquing Robert J. Connors’ assertion that the entrance of women into higher education in the nineteenth century contributed to the decline of oratory and debate. It contradicts and complicates Connors’ claim by highlighting the efforts of Mary Yost, who taught English at Vassar College during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Yost promoted debate both in the classroom and in extracurricular activities, and she crafted a feminist theory of argument quite distinct from the traditional type of argument that Connors argues was displaced after women entered higher education.
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Abstract “Survival Stories” examines the Chicana sterilization abuse case Madrigal v. Quilligan by taking up four historiographic approaches— three are recognized in feminist rhetorical scholarship; the fourth offers a methodological strategy to the field. Through this process, this essay makes several contributions to rhetorical study. It presents an example of Chicana feminist rhetoric and an inroad to this rhetorical tradition. It contextualizes the arguments made by the women in Madrigal v. Quilligan and exposes the strategies used by the judge to dismiss their claims. Finally, this essay proposes a historiographic practice that presses the limits of the rhetorical situation and investigates how these Chicanas’ rhetorics survived.
May 2005
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Disrupting Dichotomies for Social Change: A Review of, Critique of, and Complement to Current Educational Literacy Scholarship on Gender ↗
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March 2005
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Abstract This study provides substantive evidence that in composing / Corinthians Paul made conscious use of the Complete Argument as reported in the Rhetorica ad Herennium. This cross‐cultural strategy of reasoning, in combination with Semitic structures of symmetrical reasoning, is employed to analyze the argument of / Corinthians 14, providing methodological criteria for accepting the modern tradition‐critical thesis that the admonition silencing women in Corinth (/ Cor. 14 33b‐35) is not original to Paul's epistolary argumentation. The study suggests the need for greater attention to the role of the Complete Argument as a strategy of cross‐cultural persuasion in Greco‐Roman epistolary literature while also providing an example of rhetorical criticism employed in the evaluative task of tradition‐textual criticism.
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Reviewed are The Selected Essays of Robert J. Connors,edited by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford; Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History, by David R. Russell; Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States, by Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen; and Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910, by Nan Johnson.
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Rereading the work of Letitia Elizabeth Landon in light of Hugh Blair’s 1783 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, the author suggests that current disciplinary definitions of the sublime that separate its aesthetic heritage from its rhetorical foundations suppress those of its aspects that were the particular province of women writers in the nineteenth century, and limit our current understanding.
January 2005
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Abstract This paper examines the historical processes that spurred the Cuban feminist movement to articulate positions on suffrage, property rights, reproductive rights, marriage and divorce, children's issues, welfare, and education. It also discusses the changes in Cuban society during the Castro years and how the communist alignment of Cuban society influenced Cuban feminism. Finally, this paper suggests that one of the most interesting spaces to excavate women's history, women's voices and feminist activism is in exile. In exile, we see the hybridity and doubleness that has characterized Cuban life, particularly since the Soviet collapse. Writings by Castro's daughter, Alina Fernandez, help us understand where Cuban women are positioned at the beginning of the 21st century and the subject positioning of women writing in exile.
December 2004
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Review of Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women in Prison by Paula C. Johnson. New York: NYU Press, 2004. Paperback $19.00.
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Review of Wall Tappings: An International Anthology of Women’s Prison Writings 200 to the Present, Second edition, ed. by Judith A. Scheffler, foreward by Tracy Huling. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2002. 329 pp., $18.95
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This article discusses a service-learning project for an English Composition class, focusing on the theme of incarcerated women. Through class projects, which included a book drive and research for the group Prison Watch, the students and teacher learned to negotiate the tricky demands of audience and worked to develop a new model of successful service learning.
November 2004
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The Lady's Rhetorick (1707): The Tip of the Iceberg of Women's Rhetorical Education in Enlightenment France and Britain ↗
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Abstract The Lady's Rhetorick is a well-developed rhetorical handbook for women that appears in print at a surprising time and place in British rhetorical history, when there were few precedents for rhetorical treatises addressed to women. This rare and relatively unknown handbook includes a feminist argument for the inclusion of women within the realm of rhetoric, through addressing its instruction to women, defining rhetoric in gender-inclusive ways, and including examples of women's rhetorical practice. It adapts Classical and French rhetorical traditions through strategies that are potentially effective with its female, English audience. Thus its publication was a bold and strategic contribution to women's and men's rhetorical culture within the context of contemporary gender ideology and educational change. The handbook's uniqueness and rarity should be viewed by scholars as the tip of an iceberg, signaling that a significant amount of women's informal rhetorical practice and education could have been acknowledged in its own time as “rhetorical.”
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Sexual Outlaws and Class Struggle: Rethinking History and Class Consciousness from a Queer Perspective ↗
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The essay argues that the homophobia that persists in some leftist thinking results in an impoverished and undialectical understanding of class and class consciousness. Through attention to works by John Rechy and James Baldwin, the author illustrate that categories of oppression such as class, gender, sexual orientation, and race cannot be used as analogies of one another but rather are mutually imbricated and mutually constitutive.
October 2004
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This study investigates the roles of biological and psychological gender, as well as assigned discussion topic, in the written language use of nonprofessional writers. University students wrote passages on three specific topics—one socioemotional and descriptive, one functional, and one involving political debate. Effects of biological gender were minimal. Psychological gender played a greater role, particularly when measured explicitly rather than implicitly. Passage topic played the greatest role in language use. Rather than enacting their own gender through their writing, writers used language befitting the passage topic. More female-preferential devices featured in passages involving socioemotional descriptions and more male-preferential features were employed in passages involving political debate. The study demonstrates the relative impacts of gender and contextual constraints on communication.
September 2004
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The Lady’s Rhetorick (1707): The Tip of the Iceberg of Women’s Rhetorical Education in Enlightenment France and Britain ↗
Abstract
The Lady’s Rhetorick is a well-developed rhetorical handbook for women that appears in print at a surprising time and place in British rhetorical history, when there were few precedents for rhetorical treatises addressed to women. This rare and relatively unknown handbook includes a feminist argument for the inclusion of women within the realm of rhetoric, through addressing its instruction to women, defining rhetoric in gender-inclusive ways, and including examples of women’s rhetorical practice. It adapts Classical and French rhetorical traditions through strategies that are potentially effective with its female, English audience. Thus its publication was a bold and strategic contribution to women’s and men’s rhetorical culture within the context of contemporary gender ideology and educational change. The handbook’s uniqueness and rarity should be viewed by scholars as the tip of an iceberg, signaling that a significant amount of women’s informal rhetorical practice and education could have been acknowledged in its own time as “rhetorical.”
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Focusing on the rhetorical work of definition in the writings of Maria Rentería, Sara Estela Ramírez, and Astrea, contributors in the early years of the twentieth century to the Spanish-language newspaper La Crónica, this essay argues that these writers redefined who the Mexican woman was and what her role in the borderlands of Texas and Mexico could be. Its exploration of their definitional claims historicizes Chicana feminist rhetoric, and examines how their work infuses rhetorics of/from color with concerns of gender and class.
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n 1910 and 1911, Maria Renteria, Sara Estela Ramirez, and Astrea3 redefined who the woman4 was and what her role in the borderlands of Texas and Mexico could be. As contributors to La Crdnica, a Spanish-language newspaper based in Laredo, Texas, these three women called their female readers to refuse essentialist definitions that described women as second-class, subservient, and apolitical.5 The writings of Renteria, Ramirez, and Astrea stood in contrast to such constructions as they inscribed women as intelligent and honorable-as women who could, and indeed should, engage in and change the world around them. Renteria, Ramirez, and Astrea wrote to shift old and shape new definitions, but even as they shared this goal, each writer composed a different Mexican woman for her readers. Astrea persuaded her readers to reassess their education and their place outside the home in her two articles To the Woman Who
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Reviews: Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Gesa E. Kirsch, Faye Spencer Maor, Lance Massey, Lee Nickoson-Massey, and Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau ↗
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August 2004
July 2004
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Intellectual Quotient (IQ) has long been considered in education as the deciding factor in a person's success but have we overlooked emotional intelligence (EI) in determining one's success in life? In my attempt to reexamine the acceptance of EI, I studied the difference in EI between different groups of undergraduates in Singapore in terms of their field of study, gender and university. The sample comprised undergraduates from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and National University of Singapore (NUS), with a fair mix of gender and field of study. From their responses to an EI questionnaire, it was found that there was no significant difference in EI between undergraduates who study technical and non-technical courses, as well as between undergraduates of NTU and NUS, although male undergraduates achieved higher EI scores than female undergraduates.
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Reviewed are: A Communion of Friendship: Literacy, Spiritual Practice, and Women in Recovery, by Beth Daniell; Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir, by Lillian Faderman; and Gut Feelings: A Writer’s Truths and Minute Inventions, by Merrill Joan Gerber.
June 2004
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While there have been measurable improvements in the technical development of multimedia, research from a socio-technical viewpoint suggests that the benefits of multimedia technology, especially in fulfilling user requirements, do not always live up to initial promises. This paper aims to address one of the fundamental but often neglected areas in user requirements, i.e., gender-related issues. The paper identifies and discusses gender differences in multimedia communication and recommends how the differences can be addressed. It proposes a model for accommodating gender differences in multimedia communication.
April 2004
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Abstract The elusive and enigmatic Catherine of Siena was a woman ahead of her time, the first woman writer in the Italian literary tradition of women writers. A consummate letter writer, she wrote with extraordinary power and bluntness to the political and religious leaders of her day, as well as to ordinary citizens. Not only was she a savvy rhetorician and radical thinker, but she used an androgynous rhetoric that helps to answer why she attracted so large a following during her life, why high and low alike sought her advice, and why her letters and prayers remain so intriguing today.
February 2004
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This essay turns to feminist ethnography and postcolonial theory to address how the figure of “the stranger” haunts the project of community service learning. By explicating the immediate and broader relations of power that structure these “strange(r) encounters,” we are more likely to produce the kind of agitated pedagogy that creates opportunities for progressive practices and effects.
January 2004
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Private Practice: Thomas De Quincey, Margaret Oliphant, and the Construction of Women's Rhetoric in the Victorian Periodical Press ↗
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Abstract In the nineteenth century, traditional paradigms for rhetoric became increasingly outmoded as industry, technology, and cultural disruptions reshaped printing practices, and rates of literacy improved, problematizing classical rhetorical and writing practices. Victorian rhetoric became fragmented as control of and access to print to disseminate attitudes and ideas became less centralized among an educated male elite. Thomas De Quincey and Margaret Oliphant illustrate ways that rhetoric was theorized and practiced in the Victorian periodical press as the terms of authorship, gender, and culture fluctuated.
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The court, child custody, and social change: The rhetorical role of precedent in a 19™ century child custody decision ↗
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Abstract In the late 19th century the United States experienced a shift in presumption from paternal custody following divorce to maternal custody. This paper examines one child custody decision in the midst of this shift and finds that, ironically, rhetorical appeals to precedent and tradition were used to change precedent and tradition. More specifically, social change was grounded in the court's implicit gender hierarchy and rhetorically justified by appealing to precedent and tradition in particular ways, demonstrating that precedent is a rhetorical device that has force when used persuasively.
December 2003
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Students can draw from their own knowledge of gender to become more aware of stereotypes of gender and language.
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The project Andrea Greenbaum attempts in EmancipatoryMovements in Composition is both worthwhile and ambitious. The project is worthwhile because introducing newcomers, particularly graduate students, to the multiple disciplines that have been incorporated into critical pedagogy in the last decade can be daunting, and there is certainly room in the field for text that names and organizes them. The project is ambitious because it attempts to do this in mere one hundred pages, with additional pages devoted to an appended syllabus, notes, and citations. Greenbaum opens her book with personal narrative of the Passover story, drawing from it the lesson that human beings need to experience oppression-even if it is relived only mythically-in order to understand our social responsibility to counter and resist those forces that seek to dominate, repress, and disempower individuals (xi), setting the polemical tone she maintains through the rest of the work. She organizes the book around what she identifies as four key approaches to critical pedagogy for the writing classroom: neosophistic rhetoric, cultural studies, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies, examining each for what they offer writing teachers seeking to enact critical pedagogy in their classrooms. Her first two chapters offer brief historical development of sophistic and cultural studies approaches. Greenbaum begins with the reclamation of sophistic rhetoric, drawing particularly on Susan Jarratt, Thomas Kent, John Poulakos, Sharon Crowley, and handful of others. She proposes that this neosophistic contributes to rhetoric of possibility by drawing attention to the indeterminacy of language, an empowering shift from logos privileged in Western philosophy to mythos that invites disruptive stoof the frontier is reconstrued as collabo ative zone of cultur l and linguistic contact, a historical moment of meeting, clashing, and cooperating ulticultura encounters (66).
November 2003
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Preview this article: Distributed Authorship: A Feminist Case-Study Framework for Studying Intellectual Property, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/66/2/collegeenglish2828-1.gif
October 2003
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In the spring of 2000, following the completion of a Ph.D. specializing in rhetoric and composition, I taught my first literature course: a writing-intensive survey of African American literature. The course, open to all students, regardless of major, used both traditional literature assignments, such as close readings, and more rhetorical assignments that asked the students to “join a conversation” on issues such as gender relations and African American education. After years of teaching argument in rhetoric and composition courses, I was excited about bringing some of the methods that had proved successful in this environment to the literature curriculum: peer review, audience analysis, guidance through the writing process, intensive revision, writing conferences. These were elements of writing instruction that I felt had been missing from my own undergraduate study in English literature, and I was eager to share them with my students. I envisioned transforming the lower-level writing course in literature by guiding students through the writing process and encouraging them to think of their writing in terms of the impact it would have on specific readers. The result was a disaster. Strategies that had elicited thoughtful revision from my rhetoric students fell flat in the literature classroom. For instance, I had had wonderful success with a peer review technique developed by Barbara Sitko (1993) in which students read a peer’s paper aloud and paused at the end of every sentence to summarize the main point of the essay and to predict what would appear next. My composition students had found this
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Focusing on the references to women and the feminine in The Second Philippic Against Antony, I argue that Cicero's female allusions open up a rhetorical space that exposes the subtle tensions within the Roman social dynamic of men and women. This historically contextualized rhetorical analysis offers a complex understanding of Roman women as both historical entities and rhetorical representations. The article illustrates the importance of understanding not only women in the rhetorical tradition but also mythical portrayals of women as an argumentative strategy. 1
September 2003
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Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States by Janet Carey Eldred, Peter Mortensen ↗
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312 RHETORICA for Hume than for his moderate opponents. In his response, consistent with Common Sense philosophy, Campbell argues that the contest is not between two types of experience because our belief in testimony is prior to experience: we naturally accept witnesses' accounts in the absence of evidence that they are deceived or deceiving. As a philosophical point, Campbell's argument deserves the respect it has received. The problem is that Campbell does not consistently advance this view. As Suderman points out, Campbell dismissed Roman Catholic accounts of contemporary miracles—a blatant example, but hardly the only one, of Campbell's sacrificing philosophical consistency to defend his religious positions. I would argue for something closer to the reverse of Suderman's thesis. Campbell was an accomplished scholar, but he took as his mission defending and spreading the Word. As a thinker, he is most interesting when he feels most free of his mission. This explains why his relatively secular Philosophy of Rhetoric—a coherent synthesis of classical rhetoric with eighteenth-century empiricism—is his best and most important work, the one on which is reputation quite properly rests. My dissent does not, however, lessen my respect and gratitude for Sud erman's book. Suderman's exhaustive archival research and his intelligent reading of Campbell's works make Orthodoxy and Enlightenment a must read for scholars interested in Campbell. Arthur E. Walzer University ofMinnesota Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen, Imagining Rhetoric: Com posing Women of the Early United States. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. xi + 279 pages. Imagining Rhetoric is a welcome addition to the scholarship on Amer ican rhetorics. Truly a first, this book provides the only full-length study of early American women's rhetorical education and composition practices. In attempting to "glimpse how composition came to be situated in the lives of the women in the new nation," Eldred and Mortensen achieve two im portant tasks: they draw upon a wide range of sources, some rhetorical and pedagogical, others fictional and personal; and they resist a seamless or heroic interpretation of women's use of neoclassical civic rhetoric, al lowing instead for the discontinuities and disappointments that accompany liberatory struggles and revisionist historiography. This study focuses on six women, some well known, others more ob scure, but all grappled to make liberatory civic rhetoric their own: Han nah Webster Foster, Judith Sargent Murray, Mrs. A. J. Graves, Louisa Car oline Tuthill, Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, and Charlotte Forten. Eldred and Mortensen recover an array of these women's "schooling fictions" from the Reviews 313 1790s to the 1860s, including female textbooks, anthologies, theoretical texts, practical writing guides, and syllabi, as well as novels, novellas, diaries, political essays, and reflective narratives. The authors demonstrate that ex panding the scope of sources of women's rhetoric is crucial to revising history, and in this particular case they effectively challenge the standard thesis of neoclassical rhetoric's decline. Just as "schooling fictions" imagine the roles of writing in women's post-Revolutionarv lives, Imagining Rhetoric compels readers to contemplate the possibilities of historiography. The introduction outlines the primary argument that liberatory strains of neoclassical civic rhetoric were "indispensable" to these women's visions of female education. The first chapter also raises the book's central question: were these women's uses of this rhetoric liberatory? The following chapters do not answer this question directly but illustrate the complexity of the issue and maintain a productive tension between possible responses. Chapter two discusses how female textbooks and didactic novels, both appearing after the Revolution, conceive of women's education quite differently. Whereas Donald Fraser's schoolbook, The Mental Flower-Garden, dresses up a restric tive and superficial education for women in liberatory garb, Foster's The Boarding School imagines an ideal education that teaches women to use liber atory rhetoric themselves to shape the new nation. Yet for Murray, the subject of the next chapter, a vision like Foster's is complicated by fears of sophistry, nonstandard English, and poor teachers. To temper the seductive aspects of misguided liberatory rhetoric, Murray develops a classically oriented "com monplace rhetoric," a system of instruction based on literary borrowings, which Eldred and Mortensen...
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Abstract An intricate network of collaborative relationships surrounded and supported nineteenth‐century American women's public discourse. Antebellum women worked closely with families, friends, and hired help to create and deliver rhetoric, negotiate conflicting private and public obligations, accommodate gender norms, and construct “feminine”; ethos. However, despite collaboration's central importance to women's rhetoric, scholars currently lack a model that accounts fully for its many forms and multiple functions. This article introduces a new model of collaboration capable of explaining how and why this cooperative method offers marginalized groups their most effective means to the public forum in resistant surroundings.
July 2003
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Pretty and Therefore "Pink":Helen Gahagan Douglas and the Rhetorical Constraints of US Political Discourse ↗
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This article combines feminist and historical rhetorical theories to analyze the rhetoric of US Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, who served in the House from 1944-1950 and was defeated by Richard Nixon in the 1950 race for US Senate. The article examines Gahagan Douglas's 1946 speech "My Democratic Credo" within the social and linguistic context of US political discourse of the late 1940s. Gahagan Douglas engaged in rhetorical "cross-dressing" to create a rhetorical space for herself in the male House by adopting a masculinist Enlightenment discourse to create her ethos as a rational, didactic representative.
June 2003
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Reviews 199 nitá della sua opera per attribuirla ad Aristotele, affidandogliela come ad un padre adottivo. Ed in realtá, come ben osserva il Velardi, la Rhetorica ad Alexandrum deve non soltanto la sua fama, ma molto probabilmente la sua stessa sopravvivenza fino ai nostri giorni, al fatto di essere stata ritenuta opera aristotélica. Il volume é corredato da una serie di indici: Indice dei luoghi citati, Indice delle cose e della parole notevoli, Indice dei nomi. Ferruccio Conti Bizzarro Universita Federico ÍI, Napoli Nan Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), pp. 220. Nan Johnson's first book, Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America (1991), has been called "the most comprehensive assessment yet published of the rhetorics that shaped the teaching of English composition and pub lic speaking in the nineteenth century" (Miller 1993). It is an admirably well-researched account of how American college and university students were taught the rhetorical skills necessary for careers in the courtroom, leg islature, and religious professions, and has proved an invaluable resource for both historians and teachers of rhetoric and composition. However, in Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America, Johnson is silent about women's relationship to this dominant male tradition of rhetorical instruction. It is this relationship which her second book, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, takes as its focus. Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910 is one of three inaugural titles in a new series, Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms, edited by Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan for Southern Illinois University Press. In part, the book is a project of historical recovery, reconstituting a separate tradition of rhetorical training for women in postbellum American society. In this respect, it fits into a body of feminist scholarship on the history of rhetoric that begins with Doris Yoakum's 1943 article "Women's Introduction to the American Platform" and includes Lillian O'Connor's Pioneer Women Orators: Rhetoric in the Antebellum Reform Movement (1954), Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's two-volume Women Public Speakers in the United States: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (1993, 1994), Andrea Lunsford's Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (1995), Shirley Wilson Logan's "We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women" (1999), and Jacqueline Jones Royster's Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (2000). However, while Johnson praises these texts for carrying out the vital and ongoing work of situating prominent and forgotten women speakers in rhetorical history, 200 RHETORICA she differentiates her own historiographical method from such remapping projects (7). Johnson's purpose is not to redraw the rhetorical map by restoring forgotten contributions to the rhetorical tradition, but to ask why it is that women's contribution had been—until the advent of these projects—so com pletely excluded from the twentieth-century canon (10). To answer this ques tion, Johnson examines a wide range of nonacademic rhetorical materials, including elocution manuals, conduct books, and letter writing guides, that comprised a late nineteenth-century pedagogy of "parlor rhetoric" (2). Draw ing upon terms and concepts established by feminist historians to describe the gendered ideology of nineteenth-century American culture—the "cult of domesticity," the "cult of true womanhood," "Republican motherhood"— Johnson argues that the parlor rhetoric movement, while purporting to offer rhetorical training for both sexes, prescribed separate and unequal roles for both men and women (4). Men were to exercise oratorical power in the political domain, while women were to use their rhetorical skills to exert influence in the domestic sphere. This popular pedagogy defined a very tra ditional role for women and effectively guarded "access to public rhetorical space in American life" (16). The history of the erasure of women from the rhetorical canon, Johnson suggests, began in the nineteenth century, since the parlor rhetoric movement's relegation of women to a subordinate rhetorical role legitimized their erasure from twentieth-century histories of rhetoric (10). Johnson's argument seeks to answer why it was that, in spite of their struggle for a greater public role, white middle-class women at the end of the nineteenth century were...
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Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910 by Nan Johnson Carbondale: SIU Press, 2002. 220 pp. Rhetoric In The Middle Ages And Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts By James J. Murphy. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance. 1974. “Foreword to the Reprint”; Jody Enders. Bibliography, not credited. MRTS Reprint Series, No. 4. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001. xii + 399 pp. Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts by James J. Murphy. 1971. MRTS Reprint Series, No. 5. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001. xxiii + 236 pp.
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Abstract
Nan Johnson demonstrates that after the Civil War, nonacademic or parlor traditions of rhetorical performance helped to sustain the icon of the white middle class as queen of her domestic sphere by promoting a code of rhetorical behavior for women that required the performance of conventional femininity. Through a lucid examination of the boundaries of that gendered rhetorical space - and the debate about who should occupy that space - Johnson explores the codes governing and challenging the American woman's proper rhetorical sphere in the postbellum years. While men were learning to preach, practice law, and set political policies, women were reading elocution manuals, letter-writing handbooks, and other conduct literature. These texts reinforced the conservative message that women's words mattered, but mattered mostly in the home. Postbellum pedagogical materials were designed to educate Americans in rhetorical skills, but they also persistently directed the American to the domestic sphere as her proper rhetorical space. Even though these materials appeared to urge white middle-class women to become effective speakers and writers, convention dictated that a woman's place was at the hearthside where her rhetorical talents were to be used in counseling and instructing as a mother and wife. Aided by twenty-one illustrations, Johnson has meticulously compiled materials from historical texts no longer readily available to the general public and, in so doing, has illuminated this intersection of rhetoric and feminism in the nineteenth century. The rhetorical pedagogies designed for a postbellum popular audience represent the cultural sites where a rethinking of women's roles becomes open controversy about how to value their words. Johnson argues this era of uneasiness about shifting gender roles and the icon of the quiet woman must be considered as evidence of the need for a more complete revaluing of women's space in historical discourse.
May 2003
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Exploring Literacy Performances and Power Dynamics at The Loft: Queer Youth Reading the World and the Word ↗
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This study draws on queer theory, critical feminism, Critical Race Theory, and New Literacy Studies to explore the ways in which queer youth read and wrote words and worlds in ways that both challenged and reinforced power dynamics in and beyond a youth-run center for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth.
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Preview this article: Rhetorics of Gender and Ethnicity in Scholarly Memoir: Notes on a Material Genre, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/65/5/collegeenglish1301-1.gif
April 2003
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This article explores the complexity in Rohan's observation that “although texts in progress create community, this function hasn't value; in the world of business works in progress must be free” [1, p. 130]. To do so, the article describes the history of the development of the paper sewing pattern, discusses the role personal communications with consumers played as the genre evolved, and offers observations on the kinds of instruction provided by sewing machine and pattern companies. The extent to which gender and authority are connected in communications between consumers and corporate authors is explored. The article concludes by observing that once a genre is sufficiently established to become a standard, two changes occur: industries adopt authority for only certain types of necessary information, and women's authorship becomes anonymous, corporate, and personal exchanges with consumers are curtailed to save the expense.
February 2003
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Reflecting the rich complexity of contemporary college composition pedagogy, this unique collection presents twelve original essays on several of the most important approaches to the teaching of writing. Each essay is written by an experienced teacher/scholar and describes one of the major pedagogies employed today: process, expressive, rhetorical, collaborative, feminist, critical, cultural studies, community service, and basic writing. Writing centers, writing across the curriculum, and technology and the teaching of writing are also discussed. The essays are composed of personal statements on pedagogical applications and bibliographical guides that aid students and new teachers in further study and research. Contributors include Christopher Burnham, William A. Covino, Ann George, Diana George, Eric H. Hobson, Rebecca Moore Howard, Susan C. Jarratt, Laura Julier, Susan McLeod, Charles Moran, Deborah Mutnick, Lad Tobin, and John Trimbur. An invaluable tool for graduate students and new teachers, A Guide to Composition Pedagogies provides an exceptional introduction to composition studies and the extensive range of pedagogical approaches used today.