Towards a Rhetoric of Everyday Life: New Directions in Research on Writing, Text, and Discourse (review)

In their preface and introduction, editors Martin Nystrand and John Duffy carefully posit a definition of rhetoric to orient readers for a collection of essays investigating everyday uses of language: "'Rhetoric' here refers not to the classical arts of persuasion, or the verbal ornamentation of elite discourse, but rather to the ways that individuals and groups use language to constitute their social realities, and as a medium for creating, managing, or resisting ideological meanings" (ix). In order to identify new approaches to research for an addressed audience of "researchers and teachers of writing, rhetoric, literacy, and education" (xi), the editors and their contributors focus on "the rhetorical discourse of popular culture and institutional discourse as they situate us in our worlds . . ." (ix). These parameters prepare the way for nine varied—and often elegant and captivating—demonstrations of rhetoric at work in the world. Because of its considerable scope and variety, the volume makes fertile reading for academics who are looking for ways to use and test social-constructivist theories in their own work, particularly, I think, those searching for engaging and meaningful dissertation topics.

Perhaps the first of these, "'Gates Locked' and the Violence of Fixation" by Ralph Cintron, best serves to note several interrelated commonalities that unite the book: an adaptation of the scholarly article genre into an essay, a more descriptive and less prescriptive approach to research and scholarship, and a strong reliance on the theories of Kenneth Burke and Mikhail Bakhtin. Cintron's chapter, an ethnographic investigation into vengeance stories told by Chicago-area gang members, is actually a first-person academic essay. Though the editors and some of the authors name their contributions chapters, I would characterize all but two as essays—rather than articles—because the authors overtly establish individual voices for themselves and reveal their personal interest in their topics and in the individuals they describe and discuss. Cintron's piece is a loosely structured argument that occasionally seems like an associative collage. He narrates scenes and conversations from years of fieldwork with gang members, traces the similarities between rhetorical analysis and critical anthropology, and uses the techniques of both to show how the rhetorical acts he has described are always both partial (because they are biased and incomplete) and reifying (because their expression gives them an appearance of factuality). Like Cintron, four other authors adopt ethnographic methods, so the book displays the personal dimension of scholarship, showing how researchers are drawn into their topics and the lives of individuals they encounter during research.

The contributors' fieldwork and theory inform each other; for example, Cintron maintains that reification unchallenged and untempered—such as he has witnessed among both gang members and town leaders—leads to ideology. In turn, the ideology fixes human perceptions and limits individuals' and groups' abilities to understand each other and find inclusive and nonviolent ways to confront problems. He concludes by asking, "What do we do, both as individuals and as communities, when the fixation of the world has become so complete that we resemble our own fixations? What gentle shift can we encourage in ourselves that might start to melt the frozen impasse between ourselves and our mirror images? " (33). Following Cintron's lead, many of the subsequent chapters are essays in a traditional sense as well because they reach suggestive and approximate conclusions; the authors adopt personal and nonprescriptive views in their final paragraphs, indicating hopes and notions without insisting on them. Predictably perhaps, social constructivist ideas supply the theoretical foundations for inquiry throughout the volume, though other theorists, including many from other fields (e.g., artificial intelligence and anthropology) are referenced.

Nystrand and Duffy organize Everyday Life into three parts with each focusing on a forum for rhetoric: community life, education and classrooms, and modern institutions. The first of these, which includes the Cintron essay...