Rhetorical Education in America, edited by Cheryl Glenn, Margaret M. Lyday, and Wendy B. Sharer.


	Book Reviews Issue 33.2 Fall 2005 (Online Exclusives) \| HTML Printer-Friendly Format \| *Rhetorical Education in America, edited by Cheryl Glenn, Margaret M. Lyday, and Wendy B. Sharer. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. 264 pages. Reviewed by Carol Lea Clark, University of Texas at El Paso When new acquaintances learn that you teach in higher education, they might ask, “What is your field?” You would answer “rhetoric” at your peril. Rhetoric, to the uninitiated, is a mysterious word with faintly negative connotations. This book’s plain blue cover with pale yellow title would only enhance the puzzlement of the general reader, offering no clues what might be discussed within. But Rhetorical Education in America* is intended for the initiated, those who are already aware that the education of young people in America (particularly the male elite) traces its origins to the teachings of persuasive communication by rhetors in Ancient Greece and Rome such as Aristotle, Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian. In her “Broad Stroke Introduction” to Rhetorical Education in America, Cheryl Glenn chooses the launching of the First-year Writing Program at Harvard in the mid-1800s as the beginning point of her discussion of rhetorical education in America. She raises the question pondered at that time by those designing the Harvard curriculum: “If a college education were to prepare its all-male students for active participation within a citizenry, for leadership positions in the church, state, and trades, what specific skills and knowledge would equip them?” (vii). It is an ancient question, for rhetoric and writing have rarely been taught as ends in themselves but as means to the end of preparing young people to take leadership roles as adult citizens. William N. Denman’s “Rhetoric, the ‘Citizen-Orator,’ and the Revitalization of Civic Discourse” is a cornerstone of the collection, tracing the evolving answer to the question of educational needs of America’s citizens. Classical rhetorical education, filtered through centuries of European heritage, dominated American higher education into the beginning of the nineteenth century. In America’s participatory democracy, though, it became important for the general population to be read and write, not to be educated in the classics. One did not need Latin or Greek to vote. Nineteenth-century colleges began to rely less on the classical canon, instead emphasizing a degree not only as a gateway to a profession such as law, engineering, or teaching, but also as a way to distinguish the status of the middle and upper classes from the working classes. Written work became emphasized over that of the orator; and oral delivery, with its performance orientation, lost its power as persuasive discourse. The focus shifted from the process of developing a text or speech to rest solely upon the product. While rhetorical education was being tailored for Americans, though, the classical ideal of the citizen-orator who utilized rhetoric to serve the community was lost, and “little was offered in its place,” according to Denman. He urges contemporary first-year composition classes to encourage civic involvement of their students as a way of recovering some of what is missing in rhetorical education today (12-14). Shirley Wilson Logan, in “To Get an Education and Teach My People,” builds upon Denman’s recommendation by encouraging the teaching of rhetoric to empower disenfranchised individuals and groups. Instructors need to be more sensitive, she writes, to the ways “rhetoric competence influences and enables meaning and enhances the ability to manage human affairs” (38). To rephrase Logan, instructors need to encourage knowledge of and use of rhetoric to enable the disenfranchised to take advantage of their rights as citizen-rhetors. Other essays in the volume focus upon timely topics in rhetoric and composition, such as the role of English departments in a university education, diversity of students in the classroom, and non-traditional sites of rhetorical instruction. For example, in “Lest We Go the Way of the Classics,” Thomas Miller argues that the preference of English departments for a literary-research paradigm forfeits the teaching of rhetorical skills for public participation, which may lead to marginalization of English Departments. Susan Kates, in “Politics, Identity, and the Language of Appalachia,” explores how rhetoric is taught at Berea College in Kentucky, where Appalachian dialect is prevalent. Nan Johnson, in “Parlor Rhetoric and the Performance of Gender in Postbellum America,” examines rhetoric outside the academy, focusing on the parlor movement among women in antebellum America. Laura J. Gurak, in “Cyberliteracy: Toward a New Rhetorical Consciousness,” completes the volume of essays by arguing that we need a new critical literacy that applies to the Internet. According to Gurak, this cyberliteracy encompasses much more than just being able to use the technology to find information or create web pages. Rather, cyberliteracy is the analysis and use of the Internet as a site of rhetorical exchange. A citizen-rhetor of the twenty-first century should be able to analyze and make use of the Internet as a tool for persuasion, as a tool for action. This cyberliteracy, says Gurak, “Should be at the heart of rhetorical education in the twenty-first century” (196). The collection as a whole will inform the rhetoric teacher or researcher, and the volume will take its place on reading lists with A Short History of Writing Instruction, Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays, and other important texts on the history of writing instruction. El Paso, TX Works Cited Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998. Murphy, James J., ed. A Short History of Writing Instruction: from Ancient Greece to Modern America. 1990. Mahwah: Hermagoras P, 2001.