Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education, 1885-1937

Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education, 1885-1937
Author: Susan Kates
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2001
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780809323401

In this study of the history of rhetoric education, Susan Kates focuses on the writing and speaking instruction developed at three academic institutions founded to serve three groups of students most often excluded from traditional institutions of higher education in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century America: white middle-class women, African Americans, and members of the working class. Kates provides a detailed look at the work of those students and teachers ostracized from rhetorical study at traditional colleges and universities. She explores the pedagogies of educators Mary Augusta Jordan of Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts; Hallie Quinn Brown of Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio; and Josephine Colby, Helen Norton, and Louise Budenz of Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York. These teachers sought to enact forms of writing and speaking instruction incorporating social and political concerns in the very essence of their pedagogies. They designed rhetoric courses characterized by three important pedagogical features: a profound respect for and awareness of the relationship between language and identity and a desire to integrate this awareness into the curriculum; politicized writing and speaking assignments designed to help students interrogate their marginalized standing within the larger culture in terms of their gender, race, or social class; and an emphasis on service and social responsibility.

Democratic Vernaculars

Democratic Vernaculars
Author: J Michael Sproule
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2020-02-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000038513

Democratic Vernaculars is a comprehensive, culturally inclusive, and thematically unified history of the communicative, audience-centered rhetorical vernacular that occupies the “middle range” of English, bounded on the one side by expressive structure (grammar and linguistics) and on the other by aesthetics (literature). Broadening the history of rhetoric by considering a vast collection of vernacular resources such as elementary grammars and readers, popular guidebooks, textbooks, and rhetorical treatises, this book advances the history of the rhetorical theory and pedagogy since the 17th century by examining ways in which diverse vectors of the rhetorical vernacular coalesced to produce an English language sufficiently idiomatic for practical social exchange while being, at the same time, suitable for higher literary, scholarly, and cultural pursuits. Democratic Vernaculars is essential reading for scholars in rhetoric and the histories of language and education, and can serve as a text for upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric.

Rhetorical Theory by Women Before 1900

Rhetorical Theory by Women Before 1900
Author: Jane Donawerth
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2002
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780742517172

This anthology is the first to feature women's rhetorical theory from the fifth through the nineteenth centuries. Assembling selections on rhetoric, composition, and communication by 24 women around the world, this valuable collection demonstrates an often-overlooked history of rhetoric as well as women's interest in conversation as a model for all discourse. Among the theorists included are Aspasia, Pan Chao, Sei Shonagon, Madeleine de Scudéry, Hannah More, Hallie Quinn Brown, and Mary Augusta Jordan. The book also contains an extensive introduction, explanatory headnotes, and detailed annotations.

The SAGE Handbook of Gender and Communication

The SAGE Handbook of Gender and Communication
Author: Bonnie J. Dow
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2006-07-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 145221476X

The SAGE Handbook of Gender and Communication is a vital resource for those seeking to explore the complex interactions of gender and communication. Editors Bonnie J. Dow and Julia T. Wood, together with an illustrious group of contributors, review and evaluate the state of the gender and communication field through the discussion of existing theories and research, as well as through identification of important directions for future scholarship. The first of its kind, this Handbook examines the primary contexts in which gender and communication are shaped, reflected, and expressed: interpersonal, organizational, rhetoric, media, and intercultural/global. Key Features: Brings together the expertise of leading scholars: Esteemed scholars edit each section and leading researchers in the field author each chapter. The distillation of scholarship in each area by seasoned scholars clarifies what is and is not known in that area of research. Offers historical and theoretical perspectives: Authors discuss the development of gender and communication research during the past three decades and examine the theories, questions, and issues about gender and communication that are ascending to define the next stage of work in the area. Provides comprehensive reference lists: Each section summarizes existing theory and research related to an area of gender and communication scholarship and guides readers to the central works in the field, as well as directs future scholarship toward the most urgent, important, and promising topics, methodologies, and/or perspectives.

Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric

Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric
Author: Michelle Ballif
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2013-02-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0809332116

During the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, historians of rhetoric, composition, and communication vociferously theorized historiographical motivations and methodologies for writing histories in their fields. After this fertile period of rich, contested, and impassioned theorization, scholars busily undertook the composition of numerous historical works, complicating master narratives and recovering silenced voices and rhetorical practices. Yet, though historians in these fields have gone about the business of writing histories, the discussion of theorization has been quiet. In this welcome volume, fifteen scholars consider, once again, the theory of historiography, asking difficult questions about the purposes and methodologies of writing histories of rhetoric, broadly defined, and questioning what it means, what it should mean, what it could mean to write histories of rhetoric, composition, and communication. The topics addressed include the privileging of the literary and the textual over material artifacts as prime sources of evidence in the study of classical rhetoric, the use of rhetorical hermeneutics as a methodology for interpreting past practices, the investigation of feminist methodologies that do not fit into the dominant modes of feminist historiographical work and the examination of archives with a queer eye to better construct nondiscriminatory narratives. Contributors also explore the value of approaching historiography through the lenses of jazz improvisation and complexity theory, and the historiographical method of writing the future in ways that refigure our relationships to time and to ourselves. Consistently thoughtful and carefully argued, these essays successfully revive the discussion of historiography in rhetoric, inspiring fresh avenues of exploration in the field.

George Washington's Enforcers

George Washington's Enforcers
Author: Harry M. Ward
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 490
Release: 2006-03-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780809326884

Ward relates how the enlisted men, who had a propensity for troublemaking and desertion, not only were victims of the double standard that existed between officers and regular troops but also lacked legal protection in the army. The enforcement of military justice afforded the accused with little due process support. Ward discusses the duties of the various personnel responsible for training and enforcing the standards of behavior, including duty officers, adjutants, brigade majors, inspectors, and sergeant majors. He includes the roles of life guards, camp guards, quarter guards, picket men, and safe guards, whose responsibilities ranged from escorting the commander in chief, intercepting spies and stragglers, and protecting farmers from marauding soldiers to searching for deserters, rounding up unauthorized personnel, and looking for delinquents in local towns and taverns.

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement
Author: Linda Flower
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2008-07-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0809386992

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement explores the critical practice of intercultural inquiry and rhetorical problem-solving that encourages urban writers and college mentors alike to take literate action. Author Linda Flower documents an innovative experiment in community literacy, the Community Literacy Center in Pittsburgh, and posits a powerful and distinctively rhetorical model of community engagement and pedagogy for both marginalized and privileged writers and speakers. In addition, she articulates a theory of local publics and explores the transformative potential of alternative discourses and counter-public performances. In presenting a comprehensive pedagogy for literate action, the volume offers strategies for talking and collaborating across difference, forconducting an intercultural inquiry that draws out situated knowledge and rival interpretations of shared problems, and for writing and speaking to advocate for personal and public transformation. Flower describes the competing scripts for social engagement, empowerment, public deliberation, and agency that characterize the interdisciplinary debate over models of social engagement. Extending the Community Literacy Center’s initial vision of community literacy first published a decade ago, Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement makes an important contribution to theoretical conversations about the nature of the public sphere while providing practical instruction in how all people can speak publicly for values and visions of change. Winner, 2009 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award

Girls and Literacy in America

Girls and Literacy in America
Author: Jane Greer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2003-05-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1576076679

An exploration of the fascinating and controversial history of girls' education in America from the colonial era to the computer age. Girls and Literacy in America offers a tour of opportunities, obstacles, and achievements in girls' education from the limited possibilities of colonial days to the wide-open potential of the Internet generation. Six essays, written by historians and focused on particular historical periods, examine the extensive range of girls' literacies in both educational and extracurricular settings. Girls from various ethnic and racial backgrounds, social classes, religions, and geographic areas of the nation are included. A host of primary documents, including such items as an 18th century hornbook to excerpts from girls' "conversations" in Internet chat rooms allow readers an opportunity to evaluate for themselves some of the materials mentioned in the volume's opening essays. And finally, an extensive bibliography will be invaluable to students expected to conduct more extensive primary research.

In the Archives of Composition

In the Archives of Composition
Author: Lori Ostergaard
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2015-10-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0822981017

In the Archives of Composition offers new and revisionary narratives of composition and rhetoric's history. It examines composition instruction and practice at secondary schools and normal colleges, the two institutions that trained the majority of U.S. composition teachers and students during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing from a broad array of archival and documentary sources, the contributors provide accounts of writing instruction within contexts often overlooked by current historical scholarship. Topics range from the efforts of young women to attain rhetorical skills in an antebellum academy, to the self-reflections of Harvard University students on their writing skills in the 1890s, to a close reading of a high school girl's diary in the 1960s that offers a new perspective on curriculum debates of this period. Taken together, the chapters begin to recover how high school students, composition teachers, and English education programs responded to institutional and local influences, political movements, and pedagogical innovations over a one-hundred-and-thirty-year span.