PROPOSAL #1 Title: Bridging the Spheres: Juxtaposing Pedagogies from Four Public Research Sites Overall Panel Description

I. This panel argues that to open Composition Studies to emancipatory futures, we must unite public sphere research and the classroom. Though many scholars have taken composing lessons from various publics, fewer have directly bridged the scholastic gaps created by the multitude of different public sites studied through different frameworks. To reveal the potential such linking offers, this panel juxtaposes qualitative research from four distinct sites: national museums; high-tech workplaces; the psychiatric survivor movement; and a digitally-open class. In doing so, each panelist responds to several questions: Why should the field heed public research sites? How can nontraditional sites of learning change our classes? How might the stories of students who write for the public push our research into new paths? Despite varied lenses (museum studies, the philosophy of technology, disability studies, digital media studies), our answers overlap on the role of memory in revealing composing difference, the demand to build more inclusive spaces across composing contact zones, and the call for students to engage in public writing. Such common ground reveals the need to make cross-pedagogical comparisons, to find shared enthymemes across sites of writing, and the need to bridge the spheres. Individual Presentation Descriptions 1. From the Museum to the Writing Classroom: Connecting Public and Academic Pedagogies This presentation draws on recent qualitative research conducted at national historical museums. Building on the work of rhetorical scholars like S. Michael Halloran, Gregory Clark, Carole Blair, and Michael Bernard-Donals, I view these public spaces, in their efforts to represent and educate visitors about history while also raising civic awareness and participation in the present day, as important spaces of extracurricular rhetorical education. More specifically, though, this presentation focuses on direct classroom implications that have arisen from my museum-based research. What can scholars and teachers in Rhetoric and Composition learn from the public pedagogies of museums? How should the extracurricular affect the curricular? I argue that the diverse work of museums, spaces that are not aligned with traditional norms of rhetorical education, can offer innovative pedagogical perspectives and practices. I draw four interrelated curricular implications from my research, and my presentation will touch on each of them. I will discuss how research at museums can encourage teachers to (re)invest in the writing classroom as a space of rhetorical education; theorize how composition itself can be understood and explained through the metaphor of museum curation; share my own experiences designing writing courses that focus on

memory and museums as sites for student research; and finally explain how museums can offer new directions for service-learning in composition and rhetoric courses. 2. Handcrafting Difference into Composition This presentation argues that to embrace technological difference in new media comp, its vital to realize the traditions and cultural goals behind individual technology use. To do so, I relate interviews from three women who nostalgically craft to resolve technoideological conflicts at their high-tech jobs: Donna (a technology admin and knitter), Jo (a digital doctoral candidate and cross stitcher), and Kit (a digital video artist and woodworker). Though rhetoricians have created potent analyses of intra-cultural technocomposing (Banks, Takayashi, Alexander), fewer rhetorics of technology probe crosscultural difference. To create such a rhetoric, I survey how Donna, Jo, and Kit use craft to re-embody digital labor, hack male-centric workplaces, and identify the composing values they thrive under. By looking at the nostalgic repertoires these women use to resolve such tensions, I mature four praxes that aid students in mediating technological conflict: reciprocal adaptation (adapting and adapting to tech); emotional feedback loops (viewing affects as signs of technological contact zones); critical nostos (exploring techno-nostalgias); and cross-cultural usability testing (testing home discourses across different technologies and cultures). Ultimately, I posit that to open the comp class, workplace, or designers bench to emancipatory techno-ideological difference, technological nostalgia is key. 3. Listening to Psychiatric Survivors, Making Our Classrooms More Inclusive This presentation draws on interviews I conducted with six activists in the psychiatric survivor movement who encourage alternatives to the biomedical framework of mental illness and strive for social change and inclusion of people with differently functioning minds. My interviews with activists in the psychiatric survivor movement offer suggestions for creating more inclusive communities. And these suggestions contribute to disability studies scholarship in rhetoric and composition that recognizes how an understanding of difference and disability issues can inform new practices in teaching writing (Lewiecki-Wilson and Brueggemann; Dolmage). While disability theory has urged composition instructors to recognize the embodied nature of writing and to rethink participation expectations and what it means to be present in class (Critel; Price), as yet there are few first-person accounts that inform curricular design to benefit students with mental differences and distress. My presentation contributes such first-person accounts and draws out three themes from my interviews about features of inclusive communities: (1) flexible participation, (2) peer support, and (3) respectful language use. I use these themes to revise my own guidelines for in-class participation, peer review, and large and small group discussions in my own composition courses. My presentation will provide a model for using marginalized perspectives to critically revise pedagogical practices so that they are more inclusive of people with differing minds. 4. Composing for Digital Publics: Classroom Compositions as Public Writing

In this presentation I examine student works created in a digital media composing class for public audience and distribution. Turning to three, student-created digital composition portfolios, this presentation shows how public writing can be integrated into composition and/or rhetoric classes. Composed within a framework of digital citizenship and digital civic engagement (Mossberger, et al.), the selected student projects represent the range of issues student texts can address, including the 2012 presidential election, GLBTQ representation on television, and a guide for prepping college students job materials. Following scholarship that promotes increased public engagement in the composition classroom (Weisser, Flowers), I use these examples of student work to argue that compositions begun in the writing classroom can transcend that space to address and be distributed to a digital, public audience. This presentation will demonstrate how student-created public writingincluding digital compositionscan give renewed purpose to students compositions and create specific rhetorical situations for students texts. I will also discuss the specific learning outcomes this class promoted: 1) developing new compositional skills with a firm rhetorical foundation; 2) obtaining an analytical framework for understanding their position(s) as digital citizens; and 3) understanding how class-based compositions can reach beyond that space to rhetorically influence others in online spaces. ********** PROPOSAL #2 Panel Title: The things they left behind: Toward an Object-Oriented History of Composition Panel Description: Recently, composition and rhetoric scholars have been arguing for an ontological turn in the field--a turn that places engagement with everyday things to the fore of our attention (Boyle and Barnett). Although composition and rhetoric scholars have begun to engage with object-oriented ontology (Bogost; Bryant; Harman) as a methodology for reconceptualizing rhetorical theories and digital writing pedagogies (Barnett; Reid; Rivers), compositionists have yet to explore how object-oriented methods might both inform and be informed by the history of composition as a discipline. In this panel, we seek to articulate object-oriented ontology as a methodology that can enable us to reimagine a composition history composed not only of ideas and practices, but also of complex and shifting interactions among materials, tools, and things. Individual Presentations: 1) In From Historiography to Ontography: Reassembling Composition History, Speaker 1 argues that the dominant paradigm of social-epistemic rhetoric has narrowed our fields attention to focusing nearly exclusively on how language has

shaped the reality of composition as a discipline. Seeking to account for the ways in which nonhuman objects also have agency in constructing the field, Speaker 1 articulates object-oriented ontology (Bogost; Harman; Bryant) as a methodology that can enable us to recognize how material objects have played a role in shaping composition history. In particular, Speaker 1 suggests that an object-oriented approach history entails resisting binary epistemological taxonomies in favor of reseeing the field as a complex, shifting assemblage of human and nonhuman objects. Challenging the dominant model of history as alphabetic narrative, Speaker 1 reconceptualizes historical research as an ontographic enterprise (Bogost) that entails employing a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methods (e.g. data visualization tools; machine reading) to map complex ways that nonhuman and human objects have shaped our field over time. Although object-oriented ontology productively avoids the logocentrism of social epistemic rhetoric, it also tends to problematically elide concerns of power and embodied difference. By placing objectoriented ontology in dialogue with Sarah Ahmeds articulation of queer phenomenology, Speaker 1 articulates a politics of location for object-oriented historiography--emphasizing the need for scholars to account the ways in which sexuality, race, gender, class, and disability both influence and are influenced by our relations with things. 2) In Particles and Milkweed Pods: An Ontological History of the Process Movement, Speaker 2 recovers the ontologically-oriented process pedagogies of Ann Berthoff and Young, Becker and Pike--scholars whose work has too often been mischaracterized (by Berlin and others) as solely concerned with the epistemic power of language. Placing ontology at the center of writing pedagogy, Berthoffs textbook, *Forming / Thinking / Writing*, introduces the process of rhetorical invention by instructing students to carefully interact with a nonhuman object (such as a milkweed pod) over a week and observe their observations of it. In this way, she powerfully encourages students to come to see the world from the objects point of view through dialogue with it--asking students to address yourself to the object; ask it questions; let it answer back (6). By presenting the act of recursive dialogue with nonhuman objects as a model for the composing process, Berthoff suggests that composing is a process of assembling and interacting with a diverse collection of human and nonhuman objects that all have agency in making meaning. Complicating and extending Berthoffs approach, the tagmemic rhetoric of Young, Becker, and Pike offers a more radically flat ontology (Bryant) that positions all units of experience as objects that can be viewed at different levels of scale. In particular, Young, Becker, and Pikes Rhetoric: Discovery and Change asks students to begin analyzing how things in the natural world (such as trees) can be seen as assemblages of diverse objects in relation to one another. After engaging the natural world through the heuristic observation procedure of particle, wave, and field, Young, Becker, and Pike encourage students to consider abstract concepts and human audiences as fundamentally similar to material objects. Both Berthoff and Young, Becker and Pike

powerfully demonstrate that writing pedagogy must necessarily extend beyond mind and page to engage with all the diverse objects that influence students composing. Ultimately, Speaker 2 suggests that contemporary approaches to object-oriented writing pedagogy could be enriched by recovering our fields long-standing tradition of conceiving writing as an ontological process. 3) In From Stereoscope to Super 8: Data Visualization, Distant Reading, and Composition History, Speaker 3 offers a distant reading (Moretti; Mueller) of how technological objects have influenced the teaching of English in the 20th century. Although many scholars have written histories of how compositionists have engaged past multimedia technologies (Hawisher et al; Jones; Palmeri), these histories take a case study approach that ultimately narrows our vision to a small corpus of texts-failing to account for the myriad ways that nonhuman technological objects have shaped the field over time. In contrast, Speaker 3 presents a data-driven reading of how over 400 articles in CCC and English Journal address pre-digital, multimedia technologies (e.g. photography, radio, television, film, tape recorders). Detailing the results of this qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis of CCC and English Journal articles from 1912 to 1980, Speaker 3 presents a series of visualizations that demonstrate the common rhetorical patterns of remediation (Bolter and Grusin) by which new multimedia technologies enter, disrupt, and ultimately become naturalized in disciplinary conversations about English pedagogy. Demonstrating the explanatory power of object-oriented methods, Speaker 3 offers a visual, ontographic mapping of how the discipline of English has been shaped by the complex relations among technological objects, pedagogical practices, and rhetorical theories over time. **********

PROPOSAL #3 Title: Undergraduate Writing Majors and the Future of Writing Studies

Panel Description: This panel explores the development of the undergraduate writing major and the effects such development has on rhetoric and writing, both locally and disciplinarily. In 2000, Rebecca Moore Howard urged composition studies to move toward developing the writing major, which was critical in the argument for the disciplinary status of writing studies. Similarly, in 2004, Kathleen Blake Yancey called for members of the field to establish more writing majors to fill the glaringly empty spot between first-year composition and graduate education. Writing majors have proliferated in the intervening years, leading Christian Weisser and Laura Grobman to characterize the past ten years or so as the decade of the undergraduate writing major. The past

decade has also seen an increase in scholarship pertaining to the writing major, from Composition Studies 2007 special issue dedicated to the undergraduate major to Giberson and Moriartys 2010 collection, What We Are Becoming. The writing major has received such significant attention because it is a crucial site for the continuing development of the field as vertical curricula bridge the gap between FYW and graduate studies in writing studies. This panel examines how the proliferation of writing majors has impacted the field, its curricula, and its students as well as what the writing major suggests about the future directions of writing studies. Using varied methods, sites, and materials, the panelists ask and seek to answer these general questions about undergraduate writing majors: ! What impact does the growth of writing majors have on the field? ! How do programs both respond to and shape student interests and capacities? ! How do writing majors interact with other developments and trends in the teaching of writing? ! What can we learn from the stories of specific writing major programs and from the voices of particular students majoring in writing? Overall, the presenters assert the importance of continuing to investigate the development of undergraduate writing majors and their role in shaping students educational experiences; institutions efforts to create, extend, and assess curricula; and the discipline of writing studies. Presentation Descriptions: 1) The Undergraduate Writing Major and Disciplinary Expansion and Maturation Speaker 1 argues that the undergraduate writing major reflects the ongoing maturation of writing studies (a cross-disciplinary term described by Bazerman, Miller, and Dobrin, among others) as well as an explicit attempt to demarcate the fields boundaries while simultaneously expanding them. Relying on case studies of five programs and their institutional and curricular documents, this presentation focuses specifically on how the shape of writing majors at different institutions are determined by faculty members efforts to negotiate between different areas of writing, such as professional writing, creative writing, rhetoric, and composition studies, and the purposes of their programs to meet student needs. Based on these studies, the speaker asserts that the shape of writing majors point to the increasing attraction of writing studies as a disciplinary model because that model embraces a broad and flexible understanding of what it means to study and teach writing at every curricular level. Writing majors both reflect and extend the cross-disciplinary work that is conceptualized as writing studies. 2) A Matrix of Motivations: Why Students Major in Writing Speaker 2 draws on data from a two-institution study of the undergraduate writing major that includes student surveys, interviews, and writing. This presenter argues that the

motivations that lead students to major in writing, as well as those motivations they develop during their program of study, are multiple and not easily predictable. In this study, students sought curricula that engaged with them as whole persons as well as programs that would develop their self-reflexive writing processes and their rhetorical preparedness. While job-focused concerns may surface alongside an interest in the perceived practicality of rhetoric, these motivations do not negate the significance students also place on humanistic inquiry and theoretical questions. Likewise, writing majors voicing enthusiasm for personal writing reflect complicated desires that may not be readily discerned. Rather, the matrix of motivations students report might best be understood as intersecting with many curricular concerns about writing instruction. 3) Now with More Modes?: How Writing Majors Implement Multimodal Curricula Speaker 3 explores the undergraduate writing major through the lens of multimodality. As Balzhiser and McLeod note, when the Committee on the Major in Writing and Rhetoric was established in 2005, they identified 45 writing majors; by 2008, that number had grown to at least 65. Growing too is the amount of scholarship keyed toward multimodality. This presentation explores the intersection of these two relatively recent phenomena. Drawing from data collected via a survey of 21 undergraduate major programs and case studies of three major programs in particular, this presentation speaks to the ways multimodality is defined, taught, assessed, and supported within undergraduate writing majors. This presentation illuminates how other majors have gone about developing and implementing a multimodal curriculum, how such development and implementation may vary according to the emphasis on multimodality, and what local and programmatic circumstances can foster and/or constrain multimodal activity. 4) Creating, Promoting, Running, and Rethinking a New Writing Major in an Old English Department Speaker 4 chronicles the development and evolution of a writing major, established in 2008 at a large state college in the Northeast, and considers the form and function of the major into the future. This particular writing major is a selective admissions program established in a long-standing, conventional English department. Although students are able to choose a creative or professional track, or a mixture of both, in the five years since the programs inception, the majority have opted for the creative writing track. Almost by default, the program leans more toward the study and practice of writing fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, and it has also established interdisciplinary ties to an innovative, vibrant Television and Film Arts program. This tendency toward creative writing and interaction with a multimedia program will inform the shape of the major in years to come. So, as the program undertakes a five-year assessment, it is faced with a number of questions that go to the core of what it means to be a writing student, teacher, and professionals: What is a writing major, can it coexist and grow in a

department that privileges the study of literature, and what does it mean to have a degree in writing? ********** PROPOSAL #4 Panel Description: Feedback to student writing is a vital component of composition instruction, especially in First-Year Writing programs, which rely heavily on utilizing the writing process as an effective tool to encourage growth and improve writing skills. However, providing lengthy feedback raises the question of its actual usefulness (Ackerman & Gross, 2010) since students often see instructor feedback as prescriptive directions used to improve the grade, but not necessarily the students writing (Huot, 2002). Thus, although instructor feedback in First-Year Writing courses creates a foundation for academic writing throughout and beyond a students college experience, it is difficult to discern whether the amount of time instructors spend responding to student writing is truly effective. The results of a preliminary survey submitted to faculty in Writing and Rhetoric revealed that exhaustive amounts of time (between twenty and forty minutes per student per draft) are spent responding to student writing. To better understand the relationship between efficient and effective instructor feedback, this research committee was charged with implementing several methods of data collection and analysis over the course of two semesters, and making recommendations about effective response practices. This session seeks to share the results of our research while offering participants a set of applicable best practices for providing timely and useful feedback to students. Speaker 1 will present methodology along with a brief pedagogical discussion of instructor feedback; Speaker 2 will explore research results and its implications; and Speaker 3 will present suggested models and constructive guidelines related to medium, type, and timing of feedback as they correspond to researched outcomes. Presentations: 1) Opening the Door to Change: A Look at Feedback Theory and Student Response Speaker 1 will introduce the research with a brief history and theory of feedback as a pedagogical tool, as discussed in the introduction. In looking at the methods used by the research committee, the speaker will also provide a general outline of the study as well as how it relates to an improvement of the medium, type and timing of feedback used. Aspects of the research included surveying instructors on feedback medium (i.e., oral/video, typed, handwritten), type (i.e., margin comments, global comments, praises, suggestions), and timing (i.e., prewriting, drafting, or final copy stage). The survey responses were followed by a year-long, program-wide analysis of

feedback types used by a select group of faculty in hopes that the most effective set of responses could be employed for the dual purpose of enhancing students skills and ensuring an efficacious use of time. 2) Present Observations: Medium, Type and Timing of Feedback Speaker 2 will share the results and implications of our research by exploring the different ways in which feedback is provided as well as what the feedback actually focuses upon. Combined with the issue of timing, this speaker will describe the findings of the research committee in an attempt to promote discussion about feedback as it applies directly to improved student writing in first-year composition classes and beyond. Surveys provided to students specifically were crucial to understanding the appeal and benefit of instructor feedback according to medium, type, and timing. Finally, this speaker will examine the issues instructors currently face in regards to providing feedback in a timely and productive manner. 3) The Future of Feedback: A Fresh Perspective Educational research supports the idea that feedback is a critical component in students acquisition of skills and knowledge (Azevedo & Bernard, 1995; BangertDrowns, Kulik, Kulik, & Morgan, 1991; Corbett & Anderson, 1989; Epstein et al., 2002; Moreno, 2004; Pridemore & Klein, 1995), leading instructors to assess and reassess their methodology. Speaker 3 will discuss the best practices and most effective models for using medium, type and timing in a way that exhibits a better understanding of what works in terms of subsequent student submissions and the most efficient use of instructors time. **********

PROPOSAL #5 Panel Title: No panel description because there were individual presentations matched by the Chair. Title: 19th Century Women's Rhetoric: Medicine, Mental Health, Theater, and Elocution 1) Speaker 1: This presentation examines the professional writing of early woman physician Eliza H. Root, a national leader among American medical women from the 1880s through 1920, decades in which the number of women physicians in this country peaked, not to be matched again until the 1960s. In addition to her practice as a hospital obstetrician, Root presented papers at national medical conferences, published papers in prestigious medical journals, taught obstetrics at the Northwestern University

Womans Medical School (where she briefly served as dean), and edited the Womans Medical Journal for two decades beginning in 1900. This presentation focuses on Roots work as editor of the Womans Medical Journal. The years around 1900 saw the rise of the modern medical professional, an individual whose status depended almost as much on his or her performance of the role of professionaldemonstrating expertise, authority, and independenceas it did on a particular skill or knowledge set. Womens participation in the evolution of the (rhetorical role of the) professional has been understudied, yet their adoption of professional eth" would be crucial to their success as rhetors in a society that increasingly valued arguments grounded in professional expertise and authority. Scholars have analyzed the transition in women physicians eth" from appeals grounded in the physicians femininity in the mid-1800s to appeals more strongly grounded in their professionalism by 1900. This presentation extends that work into the early 1900s, examining how Root constructed the role of woman physician, not only as a component of her own ethos, but also as a model for the readers of the Womans Medical Journal. Much of the scholarship on historical womens rhetoric interprets womens ethos as a response to their subordinate position and womens rhetoric as a set of practices reflective of womens exclusion from the prominent (masculine) discursive spheres. Eliza Roots rhetoric poses a different set of questions: What are the features of a womans ethos when she speaks from positions of authority, such as those of physician and editor? How does such a woman use her platform to develop and demonstrate for her audience of women physicians what it means to be a woman and a professional? In what ways does her ethos become representative of the ethos of her readers? In what ways might an authoritative woman use her influence to open up rhetorical spaces for other, less powerful women? In her editorials, Root simultaneously spoke to and spoke for other women physicians; because she modeled a woman physician ethos while addressing multiple audiences, Roots ethos complicates simple descriptions of this appeal as a performance of the values of ones audience. Ultimately, this presentation considers the Womans Medical Journal as a discursive space that Root shaped for the professional rhetorical activities of early women physicians, complicating the assumed linkage between masculinity and professional rhetorical space early in the twentieth century. 2) Speaker 2: In her chapter On the Rhetorics of Mental Disability, Catherine Prendergast asserts, That the mentally ill are treated as devoid of rhetoric seems to me to be an obvious point: If people think youre crazy, they dont listen to you (57). For patients in the Utica Insane Asylum, this was not the case in the 1850s. Inmates in the asylum had rhetorical power and exercised it through the monthly newsletter, The Opal. Writers for The Opal published articles, poems, stories, and plays that claimed sanity and denounced labels of madness in their very existence. At a time when the mad, and those believed mad, were locked behind doors in institutions, inmates at Utica worked for access to the outside world through writing. The Opal, published numerous works women authored. Among these were the sartorial works of Etta Floyd using clothing as a metaphor for life within the walls of asylum. Floyd and other regular contributors like her, including Cecilia and Floretta, wrote under pseudonyms presumably as a means of keeping their

insane identity a secret. Even as anonymous authors, these writers pushed the limits of what it meant to be locked away from society as their works circulated outside the walls of the asylum. During the time these women wrote in The Opal, there was change in the treatment of asylum patients; moral treatment was questioned and the medicalization of asylums was growing. In addition, the image of insanity transformed in the early nineteenth century from that of a madman to that of a madwoman. As Jane E. Kromm asserts, the figure of the sexually aggressive madwoman effectively displaced the previously more common figure of the raving male lunatic (530). Thus women writing from inside the walls of an insane asylum were up against a doubly difficult stigma to overcome. Not only were they insane, but they were the epitome of the mad in society. Fighting against this, Etta Floyd, Cecilia, and Floretta wrote about ideas outside of the subject of insanity. They chose reviews of literature, discussions of asylum events such as dances and fairs, and fashion. I see this as a deliberate choice in asserting their sanity and, building a bridge with their readers. Female authors whose works appeared in The Opal were making rhetorical choices to make connections with their outside readers, claiming their likeness with the sane and dispelling the image of the nineteenth-century madwoman. Kromm, Jane E. The Feminization of Madness in Visual Representation. Feminist Studies 20.3 (1994): 507-535. Jstor. Web. 15 March 2009. Prendergast, Catherine. On the Rhetorics of Mental Disability. Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture. Ed. James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2001. Print. 3) Speaker 3: In response to Program Chair Adam Bankss call this year to ask ourselves how we can open up our disciplinary history and scholarship, this paper on late nineteenth-century womens rhetorical tactics will investigate a site of persuasive praxis not often explored in our field: the theater. It examines a form of argument historically known as the women worthies tale: a form of inductive argument created by compiling a list of examples of female personages (real and fictional) from which to extrapolate some thesis about the true nature of women. This form of play is one example of what I term the rhetorical drama: a type of production in which the actors enter into a public debate in an entertaining yet persuasive way. Finally, I will argue that historians who study the rhetoric of womens rights movements are overlooking a veritable treasure trove of material in the period dramas of the day, and I offer for analysis two such plays: The Genius of the Nineteenth Century (1892) and A Pageant of Good Women (1909). The gaps in feminist and rhetorical scholarship as I see them are these: historians who study suffrage plays acknowledge that these dramas functioned rhetorically, yet mention this in passing without analysis of specific rhetorical methods (Spender and Hayman; Chothia; Nelson). Meanwhile, our own disciplinary histories look at this same period with a tendency to focus more on the most forensic forays into the debates for womens rights, all but ignoring the theater. We have not as yet made a thoughtful study of how these plays functioned as texts, how they were staged, how they were enacted or received. We have only recently begun to think about what it means that women in this era studied personation (acting) in their colleges of oratory (Suter), or why these female rhetors might have turned to ludic forms of theater in this era fraught with clashing cultures and social upheaval. My purpose in this paper, therefore, will be to address these gaps by arguing that the women who wrote, staged,

directed and enacted these plays did so strategicallyto enter into societal and political debates that concerned their careers and their future freedomsand to analyze both their methods and their level of success. Another consideration deserves mention here: theatrical productions are a form of both collectively-created and collectively-delivered rhetoric. A number of feminist rhetoricians have observed that collaboratively-composed forms of rhetoric are overlooked or undervalued in our field. In her book Regendering Delivery, Lindal Buchanan, for example, calls our attention to what should be selfevident about our canon: for the most part, our tendency is to value individual speakers, not groups of rhetors working together. Barbara Biesecker has noted the same tendency: she contends that we need to recognize that the rhetorical canon is a system of cultural representation whose present form is predicated on and celebrates the individual and that as a result, many types of womens rhetoric, which often assume a collaborative form, she notes, have therefore been consigned into oblivion (Biesecker 157). Recognizing these collaborative efforts also allows us to recover forgotten rhetorical strategies that were crafted by women facing seemingly insurmountable odds of ever winning future freedoms such as the right to vote, increased access to higher education, etc. A turn-of-the-century woman who was unwilling to become an orator holding forth in public on one of these issuesstanding all alone on a platform, subjecting herself to probable social vilificationcould instead take to the stage with a group of her peers to enter into public policy debates in comical (yet still highly persuasive) ways. Furthermore, she could expect that, due to the nomos inherent to any theatrical production, her audience would most likely remain wholly silent while she and her fellow actors would get to do all the talking. Lastly, the two plays I will analyze are both examples of what is called the women worthies or catalogue tradition of listing excellent women of history in order to make some sort of argumentative claim regarding the worth of the sex as a whole. Several feminist scholars who have investigated this literary tradition have commented on the ironic misogyny involved in male-authored good women catalogs (also called the de claribus tradition). Ann McMillan notes that many of the heroines of these catalogs fall prey in the end to sexual assault; Karen Newman points out the women who were impudent enough to enter into the masculine sphere were usually depicted as suffering terrible punishments. But once women playwrights took up the form for their own purposes in the late nineteenth century, the genre changed radically. Suddenly readers and theatergoers were seeing more tales of brilliant women scholars, intrepid women rulers, and courageous women warriors, all of whom are being marshaled for the sole purpose of proving the (inductive, yet powerful) claim that women deserved the rights they were arguing for. These performances were not merely entertainment, but also arguments using examples of great women of the past to demand the publics acknowledgement of the future potential of the women of their own time. 4) Speaker 4: Through the recovery of the published writings of Henrietta Hovey, this presentation examines an American elocutionary theorist and teacher whose work at the end of the nineteenth-century helped to make rhetorical education accessible to female students, and whose career modeled professional possibilities for women. Hovey was a key figure

in the popularization of elocutionary study in America at the end of the nineteenth century. This movement in American rhetorical education opened up new educational and oratorical possibilities to a large, diverse population of students and private learners (Johnson). In particular, the American elocution movement made rhetorical education accessible to women, who became not only students of elocution but also prominent figures in the teaching and theorizing of elocution. Despite the popularity of elocutionary education and the prominent roles women held in the promulgation of the elocutionary rhetorical education movement, turn-of-the-century women elocutionists have often been overlooked in our larger histories of rhetoric and composition. Recently, scholars (Donawerth; Gold and Hobbs) have begun to bring to light the importance of elocutionary education in the history of rhetoric and composition in general and in the history of womens rhetorical education in particular; however, there remains a vast number of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women elocutionists unacknowledged and unexamined in our historical record. This presentation recovers the work of one such female elocutionist, Henrietta Hovey, who was the first woman to gain recognition as a specialist in the Delsarte system of elocution and performance. I argue that Hovey helped to regender rhetorical education through her elocution teachings. Central to Hoveys career as an elocution teacher and lecturer was the theme of opening. Influenced by the expression theories of French vocal and acting coach and philosopher Franois Delsarte, Hovey emphasized the rhetorical power of an affective mind, body, and soul in tune with the impressions it receives and able to express those internal feelings, thoughts, and emotions to others. Hovey encouraged her female pupils to cultivate their bodies natural rhythms and movements. She taught women to free up their bodies and movements and to break away from societal mores that confined them. Hovey lived and embodied her teachings. Adorning herself in clothing designed for freedom of movement and demonstrating Delsartian principles through her bearing, Hovey modeled new possibilities for women. Moreover, Hovey was a self-made woman, who supported herself through the money she made from teaching and lecturing. Her appearance and teachings thus embodied not only the specter of an independent woman; she was indeed living proof of the professional possibilities opened to women through the popular elocution movement. I examine the career and teachings of Hovey through her own writingsparticularly her only book publication, Yawning (1891), which went through only one edition and of which only few copies remain extant today. In addition, I also look at articles Hovey wrote for elocutionary trade journals and ephemeral accounts of Hoveys lectures and teachings located through archival research. I argue that Hoveys career is an important piece of womens rhetorical education in need of recovery. Hoveys teachings and writings demonstrate a regendered understanding of rhetorical performanceone that invited women to see themselves as agents and actors in a world of rapid social change. Works Cited Donawerth, Jane. Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Womans Tradition, 1600-1900. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2011. Print. Gold, David and Catherine L. Hobbs. Rhetoric, History, and Women's Oratorical Education: American Women Learn to Speak. New York: Routledge 2013. Russell, Henrietta (Henrietta Hovey). Yawning. New York: United States Book Company, 1891. Print. Johnson, Nan. "The Popularization of Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric: Elocution and the Private Learner." Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Essays on the Transformation of

Rhetoric. Eds. Michael S. Halloran and Gregory Clark. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. 139-157. Print.