The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America (review)

458 Rhetoric & Public Affairs graders and they get it. I longed for an instance where Henriksen surprised me with a persuasive reading of a text I did not know or one I only thought I knew. A broader complaint I have about these thin readings of many texts is that Henriksen seems to ignore a great deal of the secondary criticism of the texts she is examining. Henriksen is not the first nuclear critic to look at popular culture texts. Spencer Weart's Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (1988), for example, does the sort of detailed readings I mean. Henriksen rightly uses Hitchcock films to illustrate themes in Cold War America, but why not make use of the critical literature that helps complicate one's reading of, for example, Rear Window? Similarly, a look at the critical scholarship on the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still would reveal the polysemy of this text. In short, I wish Henriksen had summarized fewer texts and used the space instead to read some familiar and unfamiliar texts in ways that go beyond the meanings that seem clear enough. Finally, I find the most fault with Henriksen's claim that "the culture of dissent" and "the moral awakening of America in the 1960s" (189) owe so much to the new genres of nuclear criticism. I would not deny the importance of film and roman noir or of black humor or of rock'n' roll in legitimating skepticism (if not cynicism) toward authority and the nuclear consensus. But Henriksen so overdraws the claim that one wonders what the Civil Rights movement or the religiously based antiwar movement were about. One finds the redemptive possibilities of a "culture of dissent " in the texts of those movements, not in the nihilism of so many of the texts that Henriksen finds important. True, she cites Martin Luther King in the last pages of this book and sees the cult film Harold and Maude {1971) as a text about redemption , but to read the symptoms as the cause seems to me to slight a more complex history of the cultures of dissent in American culture. Jay Mechling University of California, Davis The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America. By James Darsey. New York: New York University Press, 1997; pp. xii + 279. $35.00. In the summer of 1838 Angelina Grimké, smarting from criticism over her public advocacy of abolition and women's rights, insisted that if radical change was ever to happen, then "Men and Women will have to go out on their own responsibility, just like the prophets of old and declare the whole counsel of God to the people. The whole Church Government must come down," Grimké warned, for "The Church is built not upon the priests at all but upon the prophets and apostles, Jesus Christ being the chief corner stone."1 Grimké aimed to count herself among those prophets, whose task it was to obliterate and hence to build anew; to awaken a somnambular people not with gentle whispers but through voices trumpeted by outrage against the chaos of the world. Book Reviews 459 Like Grimké, James Darsey understands what is required and what is at stake in the discourse of radicalism: above all, a community grown from roots strong enough to feel the strike that must come. Like Grimké, Darsey knows that the prophetic voice inflecting that discourse is not reducible to a repertoire of images and appeals; it is, rather, a way of being and doing in the world, thus a way of speaking to the world. Grimké did not want to talk like a prophet: she was a prophet and spoke as one. Darsey perceives with Grimké that for all its righteousness and wrath, for all the exhortative energy expended to get to the roots, radical rhetoric, far from debasing human community, in truth exalts it, indeed makes it possible. Authentic radicalism, in this view, presupposes genuine community, which is to say a people for whom agon is less to be feared than complacence. For Darsey, if not for the Old Prophets who so occupy his imagination, "the goal must be endlessly competing zealotries. In vigorous opposition we...