Shevaun E. Watson
5 articles-
Abstract
Historical and heritage tourism is a booming industry across the United States, and southern states in particular offer tourists the chance to walk the streets where some of the United States’ most dramatic racial conflicts unfolded. In these contexts, publics are invited to remember slavery in strategic ways. This essay enriches rhetorical studies’ understanding of the relationship between place and public memory by offering a robust consideration of tourism as a constitutive component of memory environments. We do so through a closer look at the memories of urban slavery and rebellion that circulate in Charleston, South Carolina’s historical tourism industry.
-
“Good Will Come of This Evil”: Enslaved Teachers and the Transatlantic Politics of Early Black Literacy ↗
Abstract
This essay offers an earlier chapter in the history of African American literacy by examining colonial literacy campaigns within the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. The discussion focuses on one such transatlantic effort spanning from London to Barbados, South Carolina, and West Africa, which used enslaved teachers as agents of literacy.
-
Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States by Janet Carey Eldred, Peter Mortensen ↗
Abstract
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...
-
Review of Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States, By Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen ↗
Abstract
Book Review| January 01 2003 Review of Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States, By Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen Shevaun E. Watson Shevaun E. Watson Miami University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2003) 21 (4): 312–314. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2003.21.4.312 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Shevaun E. Watson; Review of Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States, By Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen. Rhetorica 1 January 2003; 21 (4): 312–314. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2003.21.4.312 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. © The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
-
Abstract
Abstract This article examines two texts important in American rhetorical history, Caleb Bingham's 1794 American Preceptor and Eliphalet Pearson's 1802 abridgment of Blair's Lectures. These schoolbooks challenge accepted historiographies of late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century rhetoric in two ways: they demonstrate that neoclassicism encompassed a much greater variety of ancient figures and texts than is usually presumed, and they suggest that neoclassical rhetorics operated within a more complicated sociopolitical milieu than is commonly understood. Bingham and Pearson emerge as key figures in early American rhetorical history and their books prompt reconsideration of American neoclassicism.