College Composition & Communication - Volume 51, Issue 2, 1999

I make the following moves in this article: (1) I briefly trace how rhetorical listening emerged in my thinking; (2) I explore disciplinary and cultural biases that subordinate listening to reading and writing and speaking; (3) I speculate why listening is needed; (4) I offer an extended definition of rhetorical listening as a trope for interpretive invention; (5) I demonstrate how it may be employed as a code of cross-cultural conduct; and (6) I listen to a student’s listening.

I want to suggest that an examination of rhetorical practices at the local bar is instructive for two reasons: (1) the barroom is predictably different from the university writing classroom; and (2) the barroom is surprisingly similar to the university writing classroom. A look at how neighborhood bars are qualitatively different from classrooms can teach us about our working-class students’ rhetorical motives, and a recognition of how they are functionally similar can teach us something about our own.

This article examines the work of Marian Wharton, a socialist and feminist who helped shape the English curriculum at the People’s College in Fort Scott, Kansas, from 1914 to 1917. While other historical projects on writing instruction have focused on women working at or in alliance with elite eastern colleges, Wharton operated outside the traditional academy at a site where the empowerment of the working class was the explicit goal of writing and language instruction. By exploring tensions in Wharton’s work, I hope to develop a rich, historically-situated conception of how the rhetorical activities of women and other marginalized people are a complex interweaving of alliance and antagonism, of free choice and restricted options, of accomplishment and failure.

At first glance, Assuming the Positions, which is subtitled Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Commonplace Writing, looks like a work of archival historical research. This book is not really, however, a work of history or historical research. The purpose of this book is emphatically not to describe the contents of these commonplace texts as they reflected external historical events or indicated large shifts in general lifeways. This book is, instead, a record of one brilliant mind reading historical materials that happen to fall within its gaze.

The two volumes under review make strange companions in many ways, but they share a concern for this perennial student who thinks of “course simply as credit.” They both deplore the mercenary and the expedient in higher education, particularly in writing instruction. They both are for learning, foremost and last. But their remedies to the credit syndrome are quite different, even antithetical. In part this is because their frames of reference are so different, the one never looking beyond course itself, the other holding to a longer view. This difference in frame of reference deserves some thought.

In short, Cheryl Glenn’s Rhetoric Retold asks nothing less than that we consider what the history of rhetoric is and (more importantly) what it ought to be.

Susan Wells’ Sweet Reason: Rhetoric and the Discourses of Modernity is an often brilliant but at times frustrating book. It undertakes a project that has been suspended by those who want to re-validate rhetoric (and rhetoricians) within hermeneutics, especially by following the laborious normalizing work involved in Richard Rorty’s anti-foundational relocation of “truth” in the play of interpretative methods. Wells would herself suspend the competitive and entirely disciplinary contest between Aristotelian classical rhetoric (on her account, modernized by Brian Vickers and Jasper Neel, for instance) and hermeneutic rhetoricians who prefer reading the Phaedrus.

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