History Bump

Purpose: According to Brody, “My project in this work is to study the metaphor of gender in a discourse of texts that I call advice to writers. I intend to explain the systematic use of this metaphor in the Enlightenment and in our time to resolve problems about writing. These problems inhere in our imagining that writing imperfectly represents our interior sense of self and our exterior world. I claim that advice to writers functioned as an ideology that severed the cultures whose students were being taught oral and written composition” (3).

Methodology: For Brody it is critical to expose the underlying assumptions in rhetorical and composition texts about the writer and audience, as well as these texts’ lack of attention to the social situation into which writing instruction was formulated. Because Brody is attempting to disrupt the notion that writing is an activity that focuses on the individual writer and that writing texts only advise from within that paradigm, she uses Foucault’s definition of discourse “which renders complicated and problematic the ideal of reading neutrally, writing objectively, or seeing the word without a frame of reference that not only distorts seeing but has already distorted (transformed) the seer (subject)” to show how complicated both the production and reception of a written text actually is (6). Brody then attempts to employ a Foucauldian analysis of the language within these texts by placing each text within a greater network of meaning that she names the “discursive economy” (7). For Brody, this economy includes the economic, historical, political, national, and gendered ideologies that inform the site of textual production.

Method: Brody mostly relies on close textual analysis of primary historical documents. There are several lengthy citations which Brody then spends pages analyzing the particular style, word choice, and structure of the passage. She uses historical context, feminist and post-modern theories to frame her analysis, but her primary method of analysis is close textual reading. Although she does touch on historical and economic research to establish the conditions under which these texts were produced, she rarely cites these texts at great length. Instead, she leaves that kind of further exploration to the notes. This may seem contradictory to her commitment to examining the “discursive economy” of these texts, but instead it keeps with her commitment to Foucault’s definition of discourse where the historical influences will be produced within the text itself. She states “With such an understanding of discourse, I foreground the written text when I analyze gender, because in the written text I identify a particular play between critical ideas of virtue, truth and gender. These critical ideas comprise the contrasting structure of advice to writers, providing an apparently stable topography” (7). Therefore, her heavy reliance on primary sources is indicative of her desire to expose the ideologies present through the text because that is the site where, through language, ideology often disrupts the seemingly neutral text. And after all, as a rhetorician focused on writing, that is Brody’s central interest