College English - Volume 62, Issue 1, 1999

Describes the successful public lectures of Frances Wright, and looks more closely at her career as a rhetorician trying to determine why she remains less known today than any other major female figure of the 19th century. Concludes that Wright was remembered with derision by her enemies and with regret by those who would have been her friends.

Offers a reading of “The Music Man” that traces the ways its charm and humor are undergirded by a parodic stance toward American values as rooted in turn-of-the-century discourses of literacy, education, morality, and in the simultaneously burgeoning national obsessing with buying and selling. Considers sexual and textual anxieties in the Progressive Era, “the repressed/repressive librarian,” and consumerist rhetoric.

Discusses how “I Have a Dream” is the product of African-American rhetorical traditions of ceremonial protest and jeremiad speech-making, rituals that had crystallized long before King was born. Describes the peaceful essences of the March on Washington and how it was a “Ceremonial Protest.” Considers the historical use of “I Have a Dream” over the previous 130 years.