Mark Garrett Longaker

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Who Reads Longaker

Mark Garrett Longaker's work travels primarily in Technical Communication (45% of indexed citations) · 11 total indexed citations from 3 clusters.

By cluster

  • Technical Communication — 5
  • Rhetoric — 4
  • Other / unclustered — 2

Counts include only citations from indexed journals that deposit reference lists with CrossRef. Authors whose readers publish primarily in venues without reference deposits will appear less central than they are. See coverage notes →

  1. Archiving Our Own: The Digital Archive of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Texas at Austin, 1975–1995
    Abstract

    As the discipline of rhetoric and composition engages archival studies, we must not only theorize and narrate primary-source research, but also build archival exhibits. Describing our effort to construct a digital exhibit of primary source material relevant to the history of writing instruction at the University of Texas at Austin 1975–1995 (RhetCompUTX, rhetcomputx.dwrl.utexas.edu), we explain how this project speaks to current historiographic debates about the status and the shape of the discipline. We argue that, to make the shift towards an institutional-material perspective, historians and scholars in rhetoric and composition will need to build our own archives of primary-source material, archives that feature four types of items: items relevant to classroom practice, items documenting the institutional circumstances, items recording the disciplinary conversation, and items capturing the political situation. RhetCompUTX not only features all four types of items, but also encourages the user to see the relations among these layers of practice. By describing this exhibit, by summarizing its argument, and by explaining how we described and assembled its items, we encourage other researchers to build similar archival exhibits and to move towards institutional-material historiography.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202232018
  2. Rhetoric and Economics, Analysis and History
    Abstract

    In the 1980s, Deirdre McCloskey argued that economists should look beyond their mathematical formulas and their positivist methodologies. If “economic style appeals in various ways to an ethos wort...

    doi:10.1080/15362426.2018.1474042
  3. A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution by Carolyn Eastman, and: Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic by Jeremy Engels, and: Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic by Sandra M. Gustafson, and: Founding Fictions by Jennifer R. Mercieca
    Abstract

    Reviews 113 to emergent communities, heretical selves: mystics or Ranters, for instance. Instead, lapses into heretical selfhood are signaled by the emergence of affect, which requires subvention by the inarticulate, as if emotions had to wait for the inchoate in order to appear. For example, as both character and play, Hamlet "foregrounds" the inarticulate as a "cultural construct," as a "means by which 'feeling' could surface," and as a principle of inter-subjective vulnerability (176). Perceiving this counterintuitive pulsion at work, seeing the inarticulate in a "more positive light," requires an exploration of a Tudor "aesthetics of feeling," Mazzio contends (180). Nowhere does she offer such an aesthetics. Rather, she relies on contemporary literary theory for many of her historical arguments, and readers are frequently directed to Eve Sedgwick or Lacan, Jean-Luc Nancy or Hegel in lieu of evidence from the period. Yet The Inarticulate Renaissance succeeds: Mazzio focuses our attention on the suitability of English for worship and ceremony, scripture and poetry, on the fortunes of theatrical mumbling and print polemic, on audiences as 'assemblies,' above all on what Tomkis in Lingua calls a "tunes without sense, words inarticulate." However, in some ways, Mazzio's inquiry is reminiscent of the decline of rhetorical engagement late in the period she studies, of the ways in which past thinkers distrusted rhetoric as a guide to both speech and practice, of the ways oratio was emptied of ratio. In this ambitious, learned work, Mazzio is equally wary: a focus on the inarticulate is symptomatic of distrust. But it also signs a trend in contemporary scholarship. Boredom, ennui, anxiety, and now the inarticulate are experiencing a renaissance, in part because current perceptions of (early) modernity are conditioned by its failures, by its perils not its promises. One promise was transparency—of both method and communication—and 'words inarticulate' court opacity. But as 'feeling' rather than 'telling,' as a rhetoric that develops and refines a deepening commitment to pathos, inarticulation necessarily assumes the eloquence of the age. Stephen Pender University of Windsor Carolyn Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. xi + 290 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-18019-9 Jeremy Engels, Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010. xi + 316 pp. ISBN 9780087013980-2 114 RHETORICA Sandra M. Gustafson, Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. x + 271 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-31129-6 Jennifer R. Mercieca, Founding Fictions. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. xi + 274 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-1690-7 In 1690, as the Enlightenment was just glimmering on the English hori­ zon, John Locke calumniated rhetoric (Essay Concerning Human Understand­ ing III.10). In 1790, as the Enlightenment's dusk settled over Koenigsberg, Immanuel Kant similarly decried the art (Critique of Pure Judgment 1.53). Though a century and a continent apart, they expressed a common disdain for rhetoric. Notably absent from this account are the American continents. Recent scholarship, however, finds that the American Enlightenment yielded a wealth of innovative rhetorical practice, placing public argument at the heart (or rather in the agora) of healthy democracy. Brian Garsten's Saving Persuasion (2009) exemplifies a now common effort to catalogue the British and European hostility to rhetoric while lauding United States thinkers, such as James Madison, who celebrated free public debate. If the Euro­ pean Enlightenment philosophically counseled, sapere aude, then the Amer­ ican Enlightenment pragmatically retorted disputare aude. Four recent books, two by historians and two by rhetoricians, more fully chronicle this prac­ tical response to the philosophical penchant, a rhetorical contrast with the philosophes' critical Enlightenment. Sandra Gustafson's Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early Amer­ ican Republic charts the course of U.S. "deliberative democracy," which "emphasizefs] the political power of language and advancejs] a commit­ ment to dialogue and persuasion as the best means to resolve conflicts and forge a progressive tradition" (220). She highlights dueling conciliatory and prophetic traditions of public address. The conciliatory tradition dominated the United States circa 1815-1835. Paying particular attention to political and pulpit oratory, Gustafson contrasts the Hellenistic William...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2013.0032
  4. Rhetoric as Economics: Samuel Newman and David Jayne Hill on the Problem of Representation
    Abstract

    This article compares economic and rhetorical writings by examining two nineteenth-century American rhetorician-economists, Samuel Newman and David Jayne Hill. Both men directed both their rhetorical and their economic writings toward a common purpose—making citizens comfortable with new and uncertain instruments of (monetary and linguistic) representation. Considering the economic and rhetorical writings on representation, we come to understand how rhetoric (both theory and pedagogy) fits into the emerging and quickly morphing capitalism of industrializing and financializing America.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2012.683994
  5. Why History?
    doi:10.1080/07350198.2011.581960
  6. John Locke's Monetary Argument: An Analysis with Methodological and Historical Implications
    Abstract

    Abstract Rhetorical analysis of John Locke's monetary arguments reveals that Locke relied on a core enthymeme that deployed several rhetorical devices (including a narrative diegesis, a dissociation and hierarchization of terms, and several metaphors) to synthesize two contradictory and common beliefs about money's value—money's value is determined by supply and demand; money's value is determined by substance. Moreover, this analysis revitalizes the conversation between economists and rhetoricians by presenting rhetorical analysis as a way to discover causal mechanisms. Finally, locating causal mechanisms allows an historical understanding of how debates have been shaped by the available means of persuasion. Acknowledgments Special thanks to James Aune, Martin Medhurst, and the editor and anonymous RSQ reviewers for their feedback at various stages in this article's production. Notes 1The stalled nature of the conversation is nowhere better captured than in Fabienne Peter's “Rhetoric Vs. Realism in Economic Methodology.” 2For another social-scientific discussion of causal mechanisms, see Sayer 105–117. 3My description of a “deep-seated” mechanism depends on the assumption that a social formation can be productively imagined as a stratification of numerous causal powers, some deeper and more pervasively effective. What we immediately witness at the top of a formation is thus “overdetermined” by the causal mechanisms layered beneath. For a fuller exploration of this concept, see Andrew Collier's “Stratified Explanation and Marx's Conception of History.” 4For a fuller explanation of how England's various parties formed into a “military-financial state,” see Dickson (chs. 1–3) and Carruthers (chs. 2–3). 5Aristotle asserts that “an ability to aim at commonly held opinions [endoxa] is a characteristic of one who also has a similar ability to regard the truth” (33). Pierre Bourdieu differentiates between orthodoxy and heterodoxy (Outline 164–171). According to Bourdieu, crises can disrupt all the rhetorical resources available to a population, both the heterodox and the orthodox, creating a space for an allodoxia, a new, potentially revolutionary, set of assumptions (Language 132–133). 6For more on the term “crisis of representation” and its relation to seventeenth-century England, see Poovey 6. 7Although they disagreed about recoinage, Locke and Nicholas Barbon believed that commodities' values are set by the intersection of supply and demand (Barbon Trade 15–19; Locke Some Considerations 66). 8James Thompson contends that Locke made an “ontological” appeal to the “ineluctable being of silver,” thus strictly emphasizing its substance value (63). Thompson, on the other hand, also notices that Locke accredited the socially constructed forces of supply and demand with value creation (61). He therefore concludes that Locke contradicted himself. 9Vaughn dubs Locke's model a “proportionality theory of money,” but given the overwhelming use of the term “quantity” in post-Lockean monetary theory, I choose this term to emphasize the model's persistence in subsequent arguments. 10James Thompson rightly notices the central importance of security in Locke's monetary theory. Locke wanted a stable monetary system that guaranteed transmission of value: “The return is always the same, for the ideal is an exchange system, or a system of debit and credit, in which one receives what he gave” (58). Karen Vaughn notes that Locke was an unusual metalist because he did not believe in money's ontological value, while he did believe that the substance (silver) was necessary to guarantee stability (35). 11For further treatment of Locke's economic writings and his theory of natural law, see Appleby; Finkelstein 165–170; and Vaughn 131. For a dissenting perspective, an argument that money had no place in Locke's imagined state of nature or in his theory of natural law, see Tully 149. 12In this paragraph, I rely on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's explanation of dissociation, hierarchy, and the topic of order (80–83, 93–94, 411–415). 13For a fuller review of the Bill, its enactment, and its effects, see Horsefield (61–70) and Feavearyear (135–149). 14Marx contended that Locke emphasized one side of money's contradictory composition, its substance (Contribution 159). Eli Heckscher similarly contended that Locke accepted the mercantilist equation of metal and value, saying that Locke confused Juno for the cloud, money for what money represented (209). Additional informationNotes on contributorsMark Garrett Longaker Mark Garrett Longaker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, PAR 3, Mailcode B5500, Austin, TX, 78712, USA.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2010.533148
  7. Idealism and Early-American Rhetoric
    Abstract

    17th- and 18th-century philosophical separation of the reflecting mind from reality often resulted in a hostility towards rhetoric. However, this article demonstrates that American idealism yielded a rich conversation about rhetoric's place in the search for divine knowledge. Using Kenneth Burke's theory of attitudes' linguistic dialectical constitution, this article closely analyzes two 18th-century idealist philosophies (those of Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Johnson of Connecticut) and their related rhetorical theories. Seeing the interaction between the American idealist philosophical and rhetorical traditions leads us to reconsider the impact of idealist philosophy on the entire tradition of American rhetorical practice and theory.

    doi:10.1080/02773940500511587
  8. Back to Basics: An Apology for Economism in Technical Writing Scholarship
    Abstract

    An economistic version of cultural studies is important to technical writing scholarship presently because capitalism's broad trends find manifestation in and are affected by local practices like scientific and professional communication. By examining their own field against the backdrop of macroeconomic eras and pressures, technical writing theorists can obtain a better understanding of the sociocultural context in which their discipline is situated, and they can better map methods of effective political action for technical communicators.

    doi:10.1207/s15427625tcq1501_3
  9. Market Rhetoric and the Ebonics Debate
    Abstract

    Using a method of topical rhetorical analysis, inspired by K. Burke, to discuss the Ebonics debate, this article demonstrates that conversations about education, particularly writing instruction, have adopted a market rhetoric that limits teachers’ agency. However, reappropriation of this market rhetoric can help writing teachers to imagine and actuate a more empowered and long-sighted agency for themselves. Rhetorical analysis can therefore help educators to understand how local language practices shape their interaction with the rapidly changing material environment of fast capitalism.

    doi:10.1177/0741088305279954
  10. The Economics of Exposition: Managerialism, Current-Traditional Rhetoric, and Henry Noble Day
    Abstract

    Through an examination of the work of the nineteenth-century American rhetorician Henry Noble Day the author suggests that the causal relationship usually identified between economic formations and genres such as exposition is not a purely one-way process. Day’s rhetorics, he argues, were not only shaped by the economies of Taylorism but also were themselves engaged in a sociohistorical process of class formation, suggesting that such a study of the connections among managerialism, current-traditional rhetoric, and class formation raises important questions for our own work today.

    doi:10.58680/ce20054086
  11. Beyond Ethics: Notes Toward a Historical Materialist Paideia in the Professional Writing Classroom
    Abstract

    By wedding a historical materialist understanding of class formation to pedagogical efforts at teaching ethics in the professional writing classroom, language-arts instructors can intervene at an important postindustrial juncture between culture and economics. They can take a vital role in the formation and political developmentof elite and influential knowledge workers, making them more critical of the links between diachronic economic developments and locally experienced institutions such as communication practices and organizational constructions.

    doi:10.1177/1050651904269729
  12. Reviews
    Abstract

    Riding the third wave of rhetorical historiography Lives of Their Own: Rhetorical Dimensions in Autobiographies of Women Activists by Martha Watson. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 149 pp. Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education 1885–1937 by Susan Kates. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. 157 pp. Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth‐Century Boston by Dorothy C. Broaddus. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 136 pp. The Resistant Writer: Rhetoric as Immunity, 1850 to the Present by Charles Paine. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 261 pp. Progressive Politics and the Training of America's Persuaders by Katherine H. Adams. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999. 169 pp. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique by Bruce Horner. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000. xxvi + 308. Rereading Aristotle's Rhetoric, edited by Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 2000. xi + 237 pp.

    doi:10.1080/02773940109391210
  13. Timothy Dwight’s Rhetorical Ideology of Taste in Federalist Connecticut
    Abstract

    Recent histories of early American rhetoric have not contextualized the rhetorics studied sufficiently, resulting particularly in an ahistorical portrait of Timothy Dwight as a “civic rhetor”. This essay situates Dwight’s rhetorical theory in the political, social, and economic environment of early America. Particularly, it argues that Dwight’s ideas about rhetoric, morality, politics, and theology were all tied together by his conception of “taste”, and in his career as a public minister, as a teacher at Yale, and as an active political figure in eighteenth-century Connecticut, Dwight pushed an ideology of taste that supported early American Federalism.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2001.0027
  14. Reviews
    Abstract

    Plato on Rhetoric and Language by Jean Nienkamp. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates for Hermagoras Press, 1999. 220 + ix pp. Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse by Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997. 381 + xii pp. Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth‐Century American Literature and Culture by Caroline Field Levander. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 186 pp. The Evolution of English Prose 1700–1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture by Carey McIntosh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 276 + xi pp.

    doi:10.1080/02773940009391184
  15. Sonic Book Reviews
  16. Review of Marjorie Woods's Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom