The Committed Word: Literature and Public Values by James Engell (review)

to achieve the spontaneity of"extended conversations" (4). He acknowledges that, of the twenty-one interviewees, he has never met one of them in particular, Bernard Cooper. The interview was conducted not in person, but via the Internet. Gambone then proceeded to do the following: "A few days afterwards, I sent Cooper a transcription so that he could look it over for any changes he wanted to make" (31 1). The transcript ofCooper's interview, therefore, does not fit well with the other twenty subjects, for he is the only writer who had the opportunity to emend or correct a spontaneous interview. This is problematic because none of the other writers were invited to change or censor their own thoughts. Overall, though, Gambone's collection ofinterviews is a valuable addition to the ever-growing corpus in gay studies / queer theory. It poses far more questions than it does answers and relishes in the contradictions that emerge in intellectual conversations with writers and their craft. One of the most notable moments is when Bernard Cooper makes a statement and then revises it without judgment or interference of any kind on the part of the interlocutor. Ironically, his comment pertains to the process of revision itself: "Revise till you feel you need a straightjacket ; then you are done. You are never done" (323). & James Engell. The Committed Word: Literature andPublic Values. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, 1999. 198p. Cezar M. Ornatowski San Diego State University Recently, there has been increasing interest, across all areas oflanguage education, in what is often referred to as the "public sphere." James Engell's The Committed Word Is a timely addition to discussions of the role ofliterary and rhetorical education in contemporary culture. Engell suggests that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries "democratic societies, and societies struggling to be democratic, establish in the Englishspeaking world a modern practice oflanguage and rhetoric devoted to the deliberation ofpublic values" (163). Subsequently, however, language education in the U.S. split into literature and rhetoric/composition, the former limited to belles lettresand the latter to the "correction ofrudimentary faults in grammar and style" (167). "What," Engell asks, "can be done to redirect energy to all broader uses of literary expression, including those that inform public life?" (163). Engell's purpose is to restore to literature the meaning it had before it became limited to belles lettres. The essays explore how selected major political and literary figures in the Anglo-American tradition (Vico is the one exception) used "height152 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * FALL 2000 ened" language effectively to influence the course of their societies. They show that the texts of Burke, Pope, Paine, and Lincoln had high aesthetic value, appealed to the imagination, and were deeply engaged in cultural and political issues oftheir time; they united "practical imagination with moral stance" and used "powerful language attuned to ethical predicaments and human motives" (15051 ). While the collection makes a persuasive case for a broadened literary education , the essays are uneven and, although they have presumably not been published elsewhere, seem to have been written for diverse purposes. The best essays in terms of the book's overall thrust are the first two, on Burke and Pope, and perhaps the last one on Lincoln. The essay on Swift boils down to showing that Swift's satire applies to contemporary academia and science, while the essay on Vico argues for the applicability ofVico's ideas on educating the imagination to the cultural situation today, but simplifies (at times to the edge ofmisrepresentation ) some key rhetorical concepts. The essay on Lowth seems most tangentially related to the others. The book is addressed to literature scholars and I would heartily recommend it to my colleagues in the English department. As a rhetorician, however, I read it with a mixture ofsatisfaction and unease: satisfaction, because here is a colleague from the literature side of campus trying to give its due to rhetoric; unease, because I felt like a native watching my country being "discovered." Much that Engell argues is not new to rhetoricians (although the demonstration is erudite and useful). Consider the following statements: "Language can have the effect on creating a reality, of making the human...