Abstract

Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love and Illness, challenges scholars to see and write past the limits of their own methods and knowledges.She advocates for writing not only about what we know about rhetoric, but what we don't know.Restaino frames herself as a writer and researcher who is figuring out how to move forward after the loss of her friend Susan Lundy Maute to cancer, recognizing how experiences and people change us and deepen our understanding of ourselves and our ways of knowing and being.Restaino's writing values narrative in scholarly discourse, embracing the idea of emerging as a presence to readers; this idea manifests in her work because she writes as a witness to the declining health and death of her friend.Restaino draws on the works of Jim W. Corder often in her book, and her writing reminds me especially of his argument that emergence is a risk of going out alone in writing, an exposure of ourselves and our narratives to the other.He writes that this kind of writing "requires a readiness to testify to an identity that is always emerging, a willingness to dramatize one's narrative in progress before the other; it calls for an untiring stretch toward the other, a reach toward enfolding the other" (Corder 26).Restaino demonstrates Corder's idea of argument as emergence in her writing, but she also forwards a key concept attached to this process that comes from feminist theory, the notion of surrender.She explains that we have to let go of a facade of wholeness, to render our subjectivity and knowledge for what it always already is: fragmented.She further describes how, when we face illness and death, we reach the unknown, and we have to let go, or release, "not only of what we know how to do (practice) and what we think we know (epistemology) but also of our subjectivit(ies) as writers and researchers" (13).In her own release of these things, Restaino works to come upon a different way of knowing and being after loss that she communicates to us as readers in the themes of her book, which I outline in this review.