Jessica Enoch

Octalog III: The Politics of Historiography in 2010

The field of rhetoric has historically been defined by competing visions of language and education—and by the conviction that these debates have significance for public life. James J. Murphy highlighted this point at the beginning of Octalog I (1988) when he noted the field’s consistent engagement with the idea that “what is at stake . . . ought to be discovered for the good of the community” (5). The Octalogs have provided a space for exploring varied notions concerning rhetoric’s role in serving a common good and assessing the contentious nature of that undertaking. These conversations have included a wide range of perspectives concerning rhetoric’s role in public and private life, methods of researching and writing rhetorical history, and the values that surround our work. They have suggested that our field’s notion of “truth” is multiplicitous and incomplete. Octalog I sparked new scholarship by asking us to uncover and recover histories that have been neglected or hidden. The panelists highlighted assumptions about power, knowledge, and struggle that are embedded in every construction of history. They discussed the importance of creative research methodologies, what constitutes evidence, who and what should be included in our histories, and how researchers’ positions and goals affect their interpretations. Octalog II (1997) extended these discussions by pointing us toward the importance of local, contested, and marginalized histories and rhetorical practices and encouraging us to listen for the silences that have been left out of well-known historical accounts. The discussions urged a continued awareness about how moving the margins to center revises our sense of rhetorical history.

Composing a Rhetorical Education for the Twenty-First Century: TakingITGlobal as Pedagogical Heuristic

The online activist site TakingITGlobal offers teachers of rhetoric a pedagogical heuristic that enables us to rethink and revise rhetorical education. More specifically, the site raises questions concerning what the “civic” means inside a global rather than a national context. It revitalizes thinking about how students might “go public” in both online and offline spaces. And it challenges ideas about the traditional rhetorical practice in which an individual rhetor composes a single document for a specific audience.

Claiming access to elite curriculum: identification and division at the Harvard Annex

This article analyses the rhetorical practices deployed by the Society for the Collegiate Instruction for Women (SCIW) that sought to gain and maintain curricular access to Harvard University in the late 19th century Using Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification as an analytical framework, the article considers how the SCIW composed Burkean rhetorics of identification and division towards achieving this goal. The SCIW’s identificatory practices are worth serious attention because of the full range of rhetorical modes these women leveraged. Their identificatory rhetorics not only took the discursive form of writing, but the SCIW also articulated their claims through the rhetorical use of students’ bodies as well as the built environment in Cambridge. This examination of the robust rhetorical repertoire of the SCIW prompts scholars of curriculum studies to expand their analytical vision by considering how groups such as the SCIW not only gain curricular access to elite sites of education but also how they maintain and make use of such access.