History Bump

Her text focuses on the figurative rhetorical language present in archival texts to attempt to reveal how the metaphorical construction of gender reveals the social and epistemic assumptions of the time. She then attempts to show how these assumptions drive the construction of the student in composition through the rhetoric and metaphors used in textbooks. These embedded rhetorical moves, according to Brody, are at the heart of the development of composition and come through in the writing of the texts which both define and teach.

Brody's analysis of sections of both composition textbooks and rhetorical treatises is much like White's analysis of Taylor's passage from The Course of German History . She takes discreet parts of texts and closely analyzes them for the moves they make from "the manifest level to the figurative level and back again" (White 114). Brody's shifts display how gendered writing and rhetorical practice has been, so that she may reveal the inherent power-relations between teacher and student through composition discourse.

Because Brody is so focused on gender, she may seem as if she is not fully reaching the ideas set forth by White in allowing the study of the rhetorical tropes to reveal the ideological assumptions made in both the past and the present. However, I would argue that this is the type of history that White would advocate because it is looking at particular tropes to construct meaning not about what has been lost in the chronicle of history, but what has been ideologically embedded in that history through language. Brody, like White, is interested in how we come to know the world and make meaning of it through language; therefore, like White she is focused on the tropes which drive how composition defines itself.

I suppose one could say that the emplotment Brody follows is gender, and the history of how the masculine has always been privileged over the feminine. And this is the point where her text may part company from the "ideal" of Whitian history. Because she is steeped in the confines of gender ideology, she assumes a baseline meaning for gender and how the metaphors surrounding it function, and therefore, she is limiting her study to what she already knows. But I don't think that White would object to this all that much, really. Because White sees the possibility of infinite numbers of histories because of the historian's personal commitments. And Brody's ability to construct her analysis on the basis of rhetorical tropes would prove that she is aware of the power of language and her own position in it.