Some years ago my mother told me the story of how, when she was twenty years old and the mother of two, she drummed up the courage to ask the family doctor about something called “birth control.” “Oh, no,” the doctor replied, “Not until you have six children at least.”

“So you were born ten months later, and your brother, fourteen months after that.”

“And then?” I asked.

“And then your father learned the word vasectomy.”

At the time my mother told this tale, I was twenty years old, working in Boston, and had just gotten myself down to the...

Reconciling our desire for individual freedom to act with our practical need to establish and maintain with others a working consensus might well be the foundational project of human sociality, and it is certainly the reason for rhetoric. Particularly in a democratic society, this binary structures the experience of social interaction and, consequently, rhetorical practice. It structures conventional rhetorical practice in the form of a conflict that is resolvable only when one element of the binary concedes to the other, or, at its most democratic, when each relinquishes enough to the other to effect a momentary compromise. Conventionally, then, we...

In the last few months, I have gone to demonstrations against the “war on terrorism” and rallies on behalf of a living wage for Providence city workers. I attended a public hearing of the Workers Rights Board—a grassroots organization of trade unionists, clergy, and community activists—to investigate the conditions of undocumented workers in Rhode Island’s fish-packing industry. I’ve made phone calls, written letters and e-mails, signed petitions, and raised money for a workers’ housing project in South Africa. To be honest, I don’t consider myself much of an activist these days. Instead, I see my participation more as...

Mary Putnam Jacobi was a remarkable nineteenth-century physician and medical researcher. As a writer and speaker, she was always fascinated by the promise and difficulty of seeing the inside of the body, of representing dynamic bodily processes. Since medical illustration is a relatively well-documented field (Cazort, Kornell, and Roberts; L. Dixon; Herrlinger; Jordanova; Petherbridge and Jordanova; Roberts and Tomlinson; Rousselot; Stafford, Body Criticism), an analysis of Jacobi’s practices of visual representation can help us trace the relation between her personal absorption in such images and the ways they are used to construct scientific facts.

We can conveniently begin by recalling...

This essay considers the following thought: in the history of the academy, only one sense of privacy has existed, the collective privacy of the male group. As a social institution, the university and other academies have been, over the past eight centuries, groups of men, separated from the rest of society, bound together by a language few others in society knew, and, except in extreme cases, exempt from civil laws and constraints that applied to nonacademic citizens. The groups of men were privileged by their occupation of learning—reading, repeating, and interpreting texts again and again so as to contribute...

This chapter will demonstrate that the work of superstar canonical essayists is qualitatively different from that of many other essayists (including many canonical essayists of lesser luminosity) in one significant respect—the intensely felt presence of the essayist within the essay. This ethos is comprised of the author’s ethical and intellectual stance toward the subject—and perhaps the world—and manifested in the essayist’s characteristic voice and literary style. These constitute the author’s persona, distinctive and ongoing, sustained from one work to the next. Verisimilitude notwithstanding, the essayist behind the essay is not necessarily the character, the I, “the singular...

In the late-nineteenth century, concepts of public activity were reshaped by the emergence of the modern professions. Before the second half of the nineteenth century, the term profession was reserved almost exclusively for the three classic professions inherited from the Anglo-Saxon tradition and largely restricted to members of the upper class: law, medicine, and the clergy. By the end of the century, however, the rise of the modern professions had transformed this upper-class solidarity based on social ties into a middle-class solidarity based on ties of occupation (Collins).

As occupation-based alliances formed to protect professional privilege, professions became players on...

Public interaction can expose private beliefs. In deliberating a public policy, discussants may have to reveal personal values or privately held information. This disclosure can make them vulnerable because some people in positions of authority are not trustworthy recipients of sensitive information and may punish dissensus. How does one determine when to reveal personal values or proprietary information in public settings? The answer to this question has important implications for solving problems—particularly ethical problems—when writing and speaking in collaborative groups. For instance, if group members are reluctant to reveal differing private values, how can they work publicly to...

Shortly after the publication of his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers announced a contest whose rules were simple: 1) post a review of the book on the Amazon.com Web site that 2) awards the book five stars (the top rating) and 3) bears no resemblance to the book itself (“McSweeney’s”). Within a week the Amazon site for A Heartbreaking Work featured several cleverly wrought evaluations of how the book treated strategies for hanging sheetrock, the Netherlands/Bhutan trade imbalance, or the relative merits of crotchet versus spot welding, all of them headed with five stars. Clearly not...

The concept of a public is contested territory. We can’t even decide on a preferred part of speech. Noun or adjective? Is the public an entity in search of properties? Or a property in search of entities? When we think of public in the entity sense, we usually think of it as a mass of citizens. A politician says, “The public is behind me,” meaning that there is constituent backing. But how much backing? The difficulty in answering this question is that public, as entity, is a mass, not a count, noun. It is more like air than sheep. You...

On May 10, 1996, a sudden storm stranded several climbers on Mount Everest. By all accounts, the mountain was crowded with over fifty amateur and professional climbers that day. The traffic caused slow movement toward the summit and a bottleneck of climbers at the Hillary Step, the last hurdle before the slope toward the summit. When the clouds lowered, the wind picked up speed, and the temperature dropped. It was already past the safe turnaround time for the climbers, the time that is imposed to avoid the hazards of climactic changes that are common in the mountains. No one knows...

In the last two decades of work in composition studies, the personal as a category has come under siege from proponents of post-structuralist, post-Marxist, feminist, and social constructionist theory. This siege has now provoked a backlash in which personal, expressive writing is valorized for its difference from conventional, and especially densely “theoretical,” academic writing: scholars engaging in personal writing are now hailed for defying academic disciplinary conventions. Roughly simultaneously, in response to the same theoretical perspectives that have laid siege to the personal, critical ethnographers in and outside composition have concluded that these theories place an ethical responsibility on ethnographers...

For the past few summers, I have taught a course entitled Rhetorics of Women’s Multicultural Autobiographies in which students and I read American women autobiographers (Maya Angelou, Dorothy Day, Diane Glancy) and autobiography theorists (Joanne Braxton, Leigh Gilmore, Sidonie Smith). Although the stated purpose of the course is to question definitions of autobiography as well as to critique its purposes, tactics, and effects, a side benefit for me is that teaching autobiography theory has helped me to rethink the personal turns in rhetoric and composition studies.

DIGRESSION 1: I know it’s more accepted these days to say “composition studies,” but...

It is surprising, in many ways, that this deep into the postmodern era we still make distinctions between public and private discourse(s) (or any discourses, for that matter). It seems that one of the primary characteristics of postmodernity is the debunking of narratives that cubbyhole phenomena in convenient, codifiable locations. Yet, our conversations regarding public and/or private discourses frequently maintain a binary opposition between the two. As Andrea Stover has noted: “The public and private frequently collide in my classroom, and I worry about it” (5). Collision. The term suggests both fundamental distinction between the colliding items and conflict between...

Due to a number of internal and external forces, the field of composition has begun to embrace courses, pedagogies, and theories that engage in discourse with and about the public—and rightly so. (For a fuller explication of the recent move in rhetoric and composition toward public writing, see Weisser; Dobrin and Weisser.) A focus on public writing—which might loosely be defined as written discourse that attempts to engage an audience of local, regional, or national groups or individuals in order to bring about progressive societal change—offers much more than the relatively “arhetorical” approaches to writing instruction that...