Lives of the Saints in Southeast Idaho: An Introduction to Mormon Pioneer Life Story Writing by Susan Hendricks Swetnam (review)

Book Reviews107 compels Swearingen to equate "dialogue" with the technical "dialectic" ostensibly propounded in the Phaedrus or the Sophist (87 ff.), and this unfortunately constrains the dialogical in Plato within the arid, monological terms of Eleatic synagoge and diaeresis. Hence again, differences between contentious art and pacific dialogue seem to be repressed or deferred. In contrast, Cicero affords Swearingen a fascinating case-study of an attempt to open up the Aristotelian heritage and its sense of language and logic as "preponderantly instrumentalist, semiotic, referential, predicational , and rule-governed" (125). This is the sense of language and letters that Cicero depicts as producing schoolroom rhetoric and its discontents, against which he urges an alliance of philosophy and letters that would encourage fruitful exchange among tradition, innovation, schoolroom routine, and real-world opportunity. Swearingen's chapter on Augustine further testifies to curious powers of literate rhetoric not comprehended by Aristotle's analysis—the temptations of rhetorical art, its psychological sophistication, its urbane indirectness that subverts the message by foregrounding the medium, in effect its ability to co-opt a knowing audience willingly in its lie. Such rhetoric typifies how means eclipse ends, how the city of man eclipses the city of God. Swearingen skillfully narrates this case, then shows how Augustine is reconciled to a reformed rhetoric, for example in his flexible, resourceful scriptural allegoresis, which allows candor to coexist with a plurality of meanings. As a set of readings, as commentary, as a meditation on the persistence of aboriginal problems in the humanities, Rhetoric and Irony is an exciting, challenging book. It is current, well documented, well informed, and—how shall I say?—effectively networked. On the downside, its multivocalist ambition inspires leaps of exposition from text to notes, from text to text, or from voice to voice that are at times disorienting. A developed taste for the collaborative, dialogical enterprise the book champions would probably help prospective readers. And as a monograph advocating dialogue, its obvious self-contradictions, though at times offset by knowing counter-measures, may also puzzle readers. These effects, one hopes, will lend redoubled force—and responsive discourse—to the book's calls for réévaluations of our traditions and to its many provocative claims on the humanities. JAY FARNESS Northern Arizona University SUSAN HENDRICKS SWETNAM. Lives of the Saints in Southeast Idaho: An Introduction to Mormon Pioneer Life Story Writing. Moscow: Idaho University Press, 1991. 188 p. Any reader assuming by its title that Lives ofthe Saints in Southeast Idaho would be of interest only to 1) residents of that region of the state, 2) Mormons, 3) scholars studying personal narratives, or 4) Idaho historians would be quite wrong. Swetnam's analysis of the archival materials she 108Rocky Mountain Review accumulated and studied over an eight-year period is germane to a far wider audience. This book continues a line of research that became popular in the 1970s when the personal narratives of the common woman or man grew respectable as a genre for collection and study, as evidenced in Pioneer Women, Women's Personal Narratives, and Women's Voices: The Untold History ofthe Latter-Day Saints. In fact, if I were to criticize any portion of this book it would be that the author "protests too much"; there is quite a bit of arguing that life stories are worthy of study. Life stories have achieved a status in literary studies, teacher education, and anthropology—among other disciplines. The recently initiated Journal of Narrative and Life History publishes interdisciplinary articles, drawing on a foundation of work from the likes of Clifford Geertz and Jerome Bruner. Swetnam's study grew out of a desire to compare fictional family chronicles with factual ones. In 1983, funded by the Idaho Humanities Council, she sent out a call for family histories to be housed in archives at the Idaho State University Library and the Idaho State Historical Society; within six months' time, she had received over 7,000 pages of materials. Fascinated with these "real" life stories, she chose to focus on about half of that material , dating from 1860 to 1930. (Settlers in southeast Idaho can justifiably be termed "pioneer," given that immigration was not feasible until federal and...