Rhetorical Bodies ed. by Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (review)

Reviews Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley, eds. Rhetorical Bodies. Madison: The University ofWisconsin Press, 1999. 406p. Brad E. Lucas University of Nevada, Reno The sixteen essays comprising RhetoricalBodies emerged from the Fifteenth Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition in 1997. EditorsJack Selzer and Sharon Crowley have furthered this collection beyond any mere conference proceedings : the essays read like fully developed articles on the material conditions, embodiments, and technologies of rhetoric. According to Selzer, "the contributors together consider what it might mean to take very seriously the material conditions that sustain the production, circulation, and consumption of rhetorical power (whether that power is in a text orsome other physical form)" (9-10). From the assessment ofshifting political ideologies in Washington, DC, to the study of home HIV testing kits, Rhetorical Bodies illustrates the material dimensions of traditional literary practices while advocating newways ofthinking about literacy, embodiment, and rhetorical dynamics for the next century and beyond. Readers will find careful investigations of unlikely sites, combining academic concerns with popular sensibilities. Contemporary subjects include U.S. memorial sites, Vanity Fairs cover nude of a pregnant Demi Moore, and Elizabeth Taylor's public "bearding" for Malcolm Forbes as a means to disguise his homosexuality . Other subjects delve historically into the boundaries of corporeal life, such as Susan Wells' recovery of dissection narratives from nineteenth-century women physicians, and Christine DeVinne's return to the notorious cannibalism of the ill-fated Donner Party. More traditional studies of rural literacy, working class student poetry, and archival deterioration are perhaps less provocative, but nonetheless breath new life into the complex relationships between textual artifacts and physical bodies, suggesting that these rhetorics of materiality apply equally to traditional as well as cultural notions of text. Particularly intriguing in this collection are the corporeal implications ofscience and politics, prompting complex inquiry handled with analytic precision. For example, John Schilb explores the impact ofpsychotropic drugs on autobiography , and Christina Haas considers how die notion ofspace is created, defined, and regulated at abortion clinics. The most useful contributions to Rhetorical Bodies, however, are essays that stand to challenge our future thinking about materiality and rhetoric. Lester Faigley challenges notions of literacy that denigrate the visual, and Yameng Liu questions how the shifting ideologies of Dick Morris (and Bill Clinton) reflects a disruption ofthe connections between political loyalty and the work of rhetoricians. As a striking coda to this collection, Celeste FALL 2001 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW + 127 Condit offers an incisive critique of ultra-structuralist theory for its neglect of materiality, offering the coding of DNA as a model for future consideration of material rhetorics. The contributions to RhetoricalBodies are well-researched, accessible, and theoretically stimulating in their treatment of materiality. Many contributors attend to die intricate details oftheir studies, offering extensive analyses oftheir material subjects with pithy theoretical reflections that circulate throughout the book. However, while the individual essays comprise a coherent whole, some of them could have been much more concise. Several essays belabor the analyses, burying readers in excessive details without counterbalancing commentary—raising tacit questions about the precarious tension between matter and meaning. Even more stunning, however, is the ironic absence ofthe writers in RhetoricalBodies. There are some clues that these noteworthy scholars occupy a place in the worlds they study (especially Wendy Sharers research on the preservation ofresearch materials ), but by and large, the presence ofthe researcher is elided in these essays, giving us die sense that some ofthese rhetorical bodies are indeed haunted by ghosts. Despite its few shortcomings, RhetoricalBodieswill likely provoke readers to think, ultimately making this collection awelcomecontribution to considerhowour lives are steeped in rhetoric and die material world. % Phyllis Franklin, David Laurence, and Elizabeth B. Welles, eds. Preparing a Nations Teachers: Modelsfor English andForeign Language Programs . NY: The Modern Language Association ofAmerica, 1999. 423p. Sonja G. Hokanson Washington State University Change is always the issue. To embrace the work, worry, and ego threat which is integral to change, professors must feel that the end result is professionally and personally valuable. Having taught or studied in well over a dozen foreign language departments and English departments, I believe that the MLAs 1999 book, Preparing a Nations Teachers: Modelsfor English and Foreign Language Programs...