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  • Compelling Confessions: The Politics of Personal Disclosure ed. by Suzanne Diamond
  • Mary Jo Wiatrak-Uhlenkott
Compelling Confessions: The Politics of Personal Disclosure. Edited by Suzanne Diamond. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011; pp. 230. $58.50 cloth.

In Compelling Confessions: The Politics of Personal Disclosure, Suzanne Diamond has assembled an insightful, interdisciplinary collection of essays on the dynamics of confessional discourse. Together they make a useful anthology for scholars of rhetoric and public affairs, especially those interested in the nexus of the personal and the political. Each of the authors has treated the subject engagingly by considering the links between confession and the fields of rhetoric, composition, pedagogy, criminal justice, or cultural studies. The titular term "compelling" holds a double entendre. As a verb, it signifies the negative, confession at its worst; involuntary. A confession under duress is problematic and presumed to be untrustworthy. However, as an adjective, it signifies the positive, confession as rhetorical strategy, and the telling of something interesting with the purpose of evoking the emotion and attention of others. Throughout the essays the reader is reminded of this double meaning and the importance of developing the critical tools to better-scrutinize the role of confessed truths. What expectations for truth-telling do we have? How will we "know" truth? How should we respond? These questions drive this inquiry into the ethics of writer-reader, speaker-listener relationships. At the center of the ethical quandary [End Page 600] resides a doubt, not only about what level of veracity a confession may possess but also about the possibility of any confessed truth at all.

Diamond launches the anthology with her chapter examining the role of personal disclosure in the classroom. Her essay will appeal to compositionists on both sides of the expressivist-constructivist divide. She refers to a debate in the field of rhetoric and composition between Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae as the "conundrum about whether we master narratives of 'who we are' or these narratives master us" (35). And she pushes back on postmodern critiques of experience by calling for a focus on response, "whether it's all truth or it's all fiction—whether we deem personal narration to be fundamental to individual agency or downright irrelevant to it—we need to build an interdisciplinary language for assessing the assumptions, desires, and arguments encapsulated within disclosures . . . by turning our attention to what it means to hear" (50). Her argument reprioritizes the ethic of critical response over the proliferation of "cacophonous self-stories" (50) of narrative. The focus on response is Diamond's way of neutralizing the debates about authenticity and provides compositionists a way around the postmodern impasse about subjectivity as produced by discourse.

Two other essays in the collection address personal disclosure in the classroom. Christy Reiger and Dawn Skorczewski each reflect on their own pedagogical purposes in requiring students to write about personal experience. Reiger's focus is on students in the composition classroom and the shifting line between fiction and nonfiction. She claims that classroom discussions offer students some insight into the "ethical concerns about the literal truth of a narrative" as they start to think of themselves as "nonfiction writers do, as authors who make decisions about what is fair to their intended readers" (148). The focus shifts to pedagogy itself with Dawn Skorczewski's essay about her use of trauma literature. Her intent of "motivating students to elaborate their experience of the texts" led to misgivings about turning "the classroom into a kind of talk show, encouraging confessional responses" (163) rather than analysis. Skorczewski confesses her own fear of retraumatizing students in the process. After a decade of reflection on her teaching, she decided to teach the trauma literature again, this time with a new focus on listening rather than disclosing. The emphasis on the audience position provided a way of "witnessing the testimonies of others" (165) and helped to bypass classroom confession and absolution. [End Page 601]

Three of the essays make links between confessional discourse and the genres of poetry, memoir, or creative nonfiction. Lisa Baird's contribution politicizes the personal in creative nonfiction. She claims that this form of argument combines logic and emotion...

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