Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism

This tropological analysis of “On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790) argues that Judith Sargent Murray deployed a series of ironic reversals, including an example of Kenneth Burke's “dialectical” irony, to make her famous case for women's capacity to reason. As such, the article elucidates this trope's peculiar rhetorical potential within the context of eighteenth-century debates on female education and investigates how it can function in conjunction with romantic irony. Significantly, Murray deployed romantic irony in order to question her era's commonplace ideas about women's intellectual capacities and conventional female education. She then employed dialectical irony in order to sidestep relativism, playing off and departing from the expanded field of possibilities that romantic irony opened up. In so doing, she cast doubt upon commonly held doubts themselves, questioning the subversiveness normally associated with learned ladies. Through this series of ironic turns, readers were invited to change their previous beliefs and then presented with a clear means of moving forward—thereby opening a path for elite European American girls to be educated in traditionally masculine domains.     

Review Essay: Mourning Humanism,or, the Idiom of Haunting

LINCOLN THE PRESIDENT: LAST FULL MEASURE. By J. G. Randall and Richard N. Current. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1955; pp. vii+421. $7.50.

THE METALOGICON OF JOHN OF SALISBURY. Translated with Introduction and Notes by Daniel D. McGarry. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955; pp. xxvii+305. $5.00.

THE HUMANISM OF CICERO. By H. A. K. Hunt. Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1954, and London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1954; pp. viii+215. $4.50.

LIBERTY AND REFORMATION IN THE PURITAN REVOLUTION. By William Haller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955; pp. xv+410. $6.00.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN THE UNITED STATES. By Richard Hofstader and Walter P. Metzger. New York: Columbia University Press; pp. 527. $5.50.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN OUR TIME. By Robert M. MacIver. New York: Columbia University Press; pp. 329. $4.00.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN LITERARY CRITICISM. By Harry H. Clark, Richard H. Fogle, Robert P. Falk, John H. Raleigh, and C. Hugh Holman. Edited by Floyd Stovall. Chapel Hill, N. C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1955; pp. ix+262. $4.00.

ONE MIGHTY TORRENT: THE DRAMA OF BIOGRAPHY. By Edgar Johnson. New York: Macmillan Co., 1955; pp. 591. $6.50.

THE THEATRE ANNUAL, 1955. Edited by Blanche A. Corin. Vol. XIII. New York: Theatre Annual, Inc., 1955; pp. 89. $1.50.

THE FLOWER IN DRAMA AND GLAMOUR: THEATRE ESSAYS AND CRITICISM. By Stark Young. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1955; pp. xiv+223. $3.00.

THE TEMPEST. By William Shakespeare. Edited by Frank Kermode. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954; pp. lxxxviii+167. $3.50.

CYMBELINE. By William Shakespeare. Edited by J. M. Nosworthy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955; pp. lxxxiv+224. $3.85.

KING JOHN. By William Shakespeare. Edited by E. A. J. Honigmann. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955; pp. lxxv+176. $3.85.

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. By William Shakespeare. Edited by J. R. Brown. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955; pp. lviii+174. $3.25.

PRESENT DAY PSYCHOLOGY. Edited by A. A. Roback, with the Collaboration of Forty Experts in the Various Fields. New York: Philosophical Library, 1955; pp. xiv+995. $12.00.

THE SANE SOCIETY. By Erich Fromm. New York: Rinehart and Company, Inc., 1955; pp. 370. $5.00.

SPEECH IN THE ELEMENTARY CLASSROOM. By Charles Van Riper and Katherine G. Butler. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955; pp. 150. $2.50.

HEARING THERAPY FOR CHILDREN. By Alice Streng, Waring J. Fitch, LeRoy D. Hedgecock, James W. Phillips, and James A. Carrell. New York: Grune and Stratton, 1955: pp. 371. $6.75.

LISTENING FOR SPEECH SOUNDS. By Empress Y. Zedler. New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1955; pp. xi+145. $3.00.

THE ART OF COMMUNICATING. By Thomas Pollock, Marion Sheridan, Frances Ledbetter and Ronald Doll. New York: Macmillan Company, 1955; pp. ix+438. $2.88.

SPEECH AND YOUR PERSONALITY. By Theodore F. Nelson and W. Kirtley Atkinson. Chicago: B. H. Sanborn &; Company, 1955; pp. vii+454.

ORAL COMMUNICATION IN BUSINESS. By David C. Phillips. New York: The McGraw‐Hill Book Co., 1955; pp. x+223. $3.75.

HOW TO WIN THE CONFERENCE. By William D. Ellis and Frank Siedel. New York: Prentice‐Hall, 1955; pp. x+214. $3.95.

THE STAFF ROLE IN MANAGEMENT. By Robert C. Sampson. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955; pp. xii+226. $4.00.

GROUP‐CENTERED LEADERSHIP. By Thomas Gordon. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955; pp. 366. $5.00.

SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SHAKESPEARE. By Ernest Marshall Howse. New York: Abingdon Press, 1955; pp. 148. $2.50.

SENT FORTH TO PREACH. Studies in Apostolic Preaching. By Jesse Burton Weatherspoon. New York: Harpers and Brothers, 1954; pp. 182. $2.50.     

Seeding subversion and the Christian reformed church’s study report on “homosexuality”

ABSTRACT

This essay develops and uses a critical lens of “seeding” to read the Christian Reformed Church’s 1973 report on “homosexuality.” Although the report maintains a seemingly conservative stance and has been used to marginalize GLBTQ people, it contains and promotes affirming beliefs about same-sex relationships that constitute the groundwork necessary to argue for denominational transformation. The report invites and empowers resistance against its own ostensible conclusions. This essay deepens understanding about how evasive rhetorics enable change and how critics can intervene to promote the transformation invited by subversive seeds.     

Cultivating consubstantiality with the land institute: Organizational rhetoric and the role of place-making in generating organizational identification

This essay examines the organizational rhetoric of the Land Institute in order to address the ways place-making contributes to the inducement of organizational identification (OI). In addition to defining place-making as a practice of cultivating arrangements, the essay unpacks two ways in which a strategically arranged place facilitates OI: (a) materializing the places and times imagined in textual materials, and (b) generating encounters with OI targets. By analyzing the Land Institute’s Prairie Festival alongside discursive materials, the essay also demonstrates how organizations take control of place’s inherently inventive character and thoroughly distributed rhetoricity in order to achieve organizational ends. In order to make these arguments, the essay employs a critical method that operates through both field immersion and textual criticism.     

“More alike than different”: learning about diversity from people with disabilities

Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Health Communication, Intercultural Communication

Objectives: After completing this semester-long activity students, should be able to (1) apply course concepts (i.e., stereotypes, identity, listening, language, and conflict) to diverse real-world scenarios; (2) explain the utility of intergroup contact theory in relationship to communication and social diversity; (3) critically reflect on social diversity explored through communication behaviors; and (4) develop communication competence toward diverse others, specifically persons with disabilities (PWDs).