Part I: Changing Histories, Changing Lives: Revisiting the Rhetorical Tradition
As the title of this section suggests, the essays all "revisit" traditional histories and/or historiographies of rhetoric. The main question that drives this section is: What counts/has counted as "worthy of historical examination in rhetoric and composition" (15)? Like Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald do in their recent Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s), the authors in Part I engage in "the work of reclamation, recovery, and reconceptualization [...] for changing rhetorical theories and practices" (Ritchie and Ronald xvii, xvi). One can almost assign each of Ritchie and Ronald's categories to the three essays in this section. Catherine F. Smith reclaims Jane Lead’s writing as not only religious but also feminist. For example, Smith rereads Jane Lead’s rhetorical arguments that are "not stated directly" (17). Smith not only shows how Lead’s texts challenge the overwhelmingly male domain of interpreting and crating religious text, but she also implies that Lead’s indirect rhetoric challenges the classical notion of argument as direct, highly structured discourse. Kathleen A. Dehaan recovers Dutch immigrants letters, which had been heretofore considered private—and therefore arhetorical—documents, and reads them as rhetorical texts that disrupt the public/private dichotomy. And, Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, Valentina M. Abordonado, Barbara Heifferon, and Duane H. Roen reconceptualize the figure of the midwife as a metaphor for the multivocality of rhetors, including students, teachers, and cultures.
Best in Show midwife working within a hospital setting, trying to simultaneously critique the rhetoric of obstetrics even as she is surrounded by an apparatus that reinforces that view. The midwife-teacher, then, has to do more than co-construct knowledge with students; the teacher must also work with them to analyze how various perspectives are ‘always already’ constructed by the codes of a culture, to interrogate those perspectives, and to understand the ideology inherent in the language used to name them. (47) This very sophisticated consideration of three theoretically different pictures of the figure of the midwife, complicated by the material conditions of most readers of the book (read: situated constraints of composition teachers) allow this essay to stand out in the section of the book. The emphasis on the collaborative/multivocal role that teachers, students, and culture play in the construction of rhetorical theory and teaching practice give this essay—notably collaboratively written—both theoretical rigor and teacherly groundedness of which our field needs much more.
Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, Valentina M. Abordonado, Barbara Heifferon, and Duane H. Roen explore the public/private, professional/personal dichotomies that have served to define rhetoric and its historiography. They do this through examining the figure of the midwife in the Platonic, romantic-expressivist, and social-epistemic/postmodern traditions.
They present a discussion of the composition teacher as a midwife who must negotiate the roles of devalued midwife-nurturer and "intellectual contributor in English departments" (34). They assert that rhetorical theory and historiography must be informed by not only de-contextualized rhetorical theory (which they equate with medical textbooks), but also classroom teaching (which they equate to midwives’ practical experience), for the classroom is "a profound site of rhetoric" (37). They then go on to complicate their own equations and in so doing further complicate the three aforementioned epistemic traditions: Platonic, romantic-expressivist, and social-epistemic/postmodern.
Rather than envisioning rhetoric as captured by the lone, creative figure of the midwife or even as a collaborative figure with her patient/student, the authors assert that these instantiations do "not go far enough in examining the influence of culture on writing" (46). Therefore, they posit a picture of a writing teacher/scholar as a
They hit upon but do not fully explore the internal collaboration of the multiple roles that their readers most likely play: teacher/scholar/student/administrator/ rhetorician/compositionist/English studies professional. Their already pleasingly wide-ranging essay prompts me to ask even larger questions that pertain to our field. I extrapolate questions that (should) dominate rhetoric and composition studies such as: What do collaborative English departments look like/how do they function? How can and should we understand, teach, and theorize about the collaboration—or at least concurrence—of print and electronic text?
