American Silhouettes: Rhetorical Identities of the Founders by Albert Furtwangler (review)

242Rocky Mountain Review of all we have learned in the last two decades about writing and revising. Michael Southwell's "Microcomputers and Writing Instruction" provides a useful introduction to using computers in ways other than basic word processing (text analysis, for example). Patricia Bizzell reflects on the essential nature of literacy and its social ramifications in "Literature in Culture and Cognition." One of these commissioned essays deserves to be singled out for particular praise. Karen Greenberg's "Research on Basic Writers: Theoretical and Methodological Issues" stresses the importance of a comprehensive theoretical framework for any research effort in language studies, and suggests fruitful approaches that a teacher-researcher might take. It should be required reading for anyone contemplating research in writing. But while the individual essays make informative and helpful reading, the most valuable thing about this collection is the fact that for the first time these pieces can be seen together; looking at them in a body gives a rich new perspective on the subject ofbasic writing. Putting essays by Paulo Friere and E.D. Hirsch together, for example, creates a fascinating dialogue on the nature of literacy and how cultures define literacy to include or exclude certain portions ofthe population. The question of error, always at the forefront of any discussion of basic writing, is dealt with from several thought-provoking angles (in Barry Kroll and John Schafer's "ErrorAnalysis and the Teaching of Composition," Elaine Lees' "Proofreading as Reading, Errors as Embarrassments," and Glynda Hull's "Constructing Taxonomies for Error ") And the relationships among reading, writing, and speaking (particularly important for students from a culture that is primarily oral) are explored in a number of different ways, all of which comment on one another. The book is, in short, an excellent example of the social construction of knowledge, a collaboration among some of the most informed people in the field. It should go on the shelf next to Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations as a standard text, to be read by all involved in the teaching ofwriting. SUSAN H. MCLEOD Washington State University ALBERT FURTWANGLER. American Silhouettes: Rhetorical Identities ofthe Founders. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. 168 p. Albert Furtwangler's literary approach to the political materials of the early national period in the United States will already be familiar to readers of the Review who remember his study of the Federalist papers, The Authority ofPublius (Cornell, 1984). He argued there that the "authority" of the Federalist papers derives as much from literary and rhetorical strategy as from the theories of constitutional government they develop. In American Silhouettes, Furtwangler extends his literary and rhetorical analysis to other works from the political literature of the founding period. This lucidly written monograph "silhouettes" the "rhetorical identities," or public self-definitions, of Franklin, Adams, Washington, Jefferson, John Marshall, and less directly, Hamilton, and Madison in a series of loosely related chapters, two of which are familiar from earlier versions published in New England Quarterly and Modern Language Quarterly. Book Reviews243 Furtwangler's introductory chapter establishes John Trumbell's well known painting, "The Declaration of Independence," as a crucial image of the period of the U.S. founding. The painting not only introduces the key figures for this study but also provides an analogue for the book's method. Furtwangler's chapters become a collective "portrait in paper," attending both to individual identities and to the network of relationships deriving from their juxtaposition. Individual "silhouettes" are developed from a selected passage or text in each man's written work. Relationships are pursued in published debates, collaborations, and correspondence. Furtwangler's claims are modest: "I have traced congruences between these early Americans and some older or alien cultural heroes and have examined each founder's words and deeds in order to distinguish his uniqueness in a passing instant of self-definition" (13). The choice of "passing instant"— felicitously made for Franklin, Washington, and Marshall, less aptly for Jefferson —is arbitrary and fixed, as it must be for portraiture. It marks a vulnerable point in Furtwangler's analysis, a problem inherent in his method. But Furtwangler partially counteracts that problem by distributing his "passing instants" widely—from Boston in 1720 to...