Now that the student-professor relationship has been confirmed, I’m anxiously awaiting what tomorrow’s media coverage will look like. Since we don’t seem to know anything concrete about the shooter...

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments This essay is an outcome of a workshop on the topic of "Sound Studies and Rhetoric" at the 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute, created at the behest of Ph.D. candidate and workshop participant Jon Stone, held in Lawrence, Kansas, last June. The authors thank Jon for his advice and keen insights, as well as workshop "sounders": Katie Fargo Ahern, Gina L. Ercolini, Lisa Foster, Andrew Hansen, Jamie Landau, Martin Law, Amy Patterson, and Anne Shea. This essay is better read as a "report" collaboratively authored by the workshoppers.

The condition of our public discussions about literary and cultural works has much to say about the condition of our democracy and the author argues for more public discourse--in classrooms, newspapers, magazines, etc. to reclaim a public voice on national artistic matters. In this revealing study of the links among literature, rhetoric, and democracy, Rosa A. Eberly explores the public debate generated by amateur and professional readers about four controversial literary works: two that were censored in the United States and two that created conflict because they were not censored. In Citizen Critics Eberly compares the outrage sparked by the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer with the relative quiescence that greeted the much more violent and sexually explicit content of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psychoand Andrea Dworkin's Mercy. Through a close reading of letters to the editor, reviews, media coverage, and court cases, Eberly shows how literary critics and legal experts defused censorship debates by shifting the focus from content to aesthetics and from social values to publicity. By asserting their authority to pass judgments--thus denying the authority of citizen critics--these professionals effectively removed the discussion from literary public spheres. A passionate advocate for treating reading as a public and rhetorical enterprise rather than solely as a private one, Eberly suggests the potential impact a work of literature may have on the social polity if it is brought into public forums for debate rather than removed to the exclusive rooms of literary criticism. Eberly urges educators to use their classrooms as protopublic spaces in which students can learn to make the transition from private reader to public citizen.

(1999). From writers, audiences, and communities to publics: Writing classrooms as protopublic spaces. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 165-178.

These notes are my recollections of a trip to see Kenneth Burke on February 19, 1993, in Andover, New Jersey, where Burke has lived for more than 70 years. The visitors were Jack Selzer, who is studying Burke's early work; Charles Mann, a longtime friend of Burke and curator of the Rare Books Room at Penn State's Pattee Library, where a substantial collection of Burke papers is housed; and Rosa Eberly, a graduate student in rhetoric at Penn State. The visitees: Burke and his friend and housekeeper, Ginnie.