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January 23, 2005
Methodology Overview - Campbell on Gertrude Buck
Campbell, Joann, ed. Toward a Feminist Rhetoric: The Writing of Gertrude Buck. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Univ. Press, 1996.
In this book, Campbell assembles a collection of the writing of Gertrude Buck, a composition scholar and teacher at Vassar College from 1897-1992. Campbell frames Buck's writing, contextualizing Buck's contributions to the field's disciplinary roots and offering a representational coverage of Buck's personal and professional writings as conflations of spheres too often treated separately. Furthermore, Campbell explains her titling of the book, Toward a Feminist Rhetoric, as necessary to distinguish that Buck actively revised traditions, but that a feminist rhetoric must be a collective rather than an individualistic enterprise (xii).
The collection opens with an introductory historical overview by Campbell, which accounts for the various events in Buck's professional formation, from studying with Fred Newton Scott at Michigan to accepting a directorship of rhetoric and writing at Vassar. The thirty-page introduction allows Campbell to establish the central themes as well as the surrounds of the project; she explains, through brief critical summaries, many of Buck's contributions, including the application of organic metaphors to the writing process and an insistence on teaching grammar in the context of actual and never "make-believe" instances of language usage. The arrangement of the text is directed at re-proving the many merits in Buck's work, which is particularly important when we develop the histories of women working against gendered conventions, such as Buck did. The collection includes a multi-genre, multi-media range of texts; Campbell includes a photo of Buck, images of Buck's sentence diagram exercises, as well as a play and several poems written by Buck. Before each chapter, Campbell interjects a brief, italicized epigraph, returning to motivation for the collection as well as some of the challenges Buck faced in ascribing to certain approaches for teaching writing. Throughout, Campbell includes extensive footnotes, which she uses to comment on the asides or contexts of the particular work. Thus, Campbell's mark on the collection is manifest in the introductory essay, in the epigraph preceding each of Buck's texts, and in the ongoing notations.
Specifically, Campbell's method involves archival historiography that includes some rhetorical analysis of an assembled array of texts produced by a solitary writer. She matched those texts with a series of theoretical questions, organizing them in an effort to historicize the work and, as well, to prompt further projects rejuvenating lost histories of women scholars and teachers who made contributions to the field which have not yet been adequately recognized, confronted, or historicized.
Posted by dmueller at January 23, 2005 12:12 PM
Comments
I thought about saying something about rhetorical analysis as well, but since I'm a newbie I'd be going out on a limb to claim I know what rhetorical analysis is, as opposed to some other kind of textual/archival analysis.
What analytical methods are specifically
"rhetorical analysis"?
-gratefully, clo
Posted by: clo at January 25, 2005 10:01 AM
I'd welcome other input on this Carol; I don't want to presume that I've got the only proper grasp on "rhetorical analysis." As I've used the phrase to characterize Campbell's work, I mean that she frames Buck's writing not only historical artifacts or as literary artifacts, but also as rhetorical acts. In other words, Campbell sees (and analyzes) Buck's work according to rhetorical terms. I'm at the office now, and I left my copy of Buck at home, but I will look again for specific examples to elaborate what "rhetorical analysis" of archival texts actually looks/sounds like in Campbell. I can't remember whether Campbell's rhetorical framework invokes a classical term-set, a modern term-set, or some other mix, such as, just possibly, a feminist rhetoric term-set (and, of course, there are serveral overlapping possibilities among these).
Posted by: Derek at January 25, 2005 01:37 PM