Ethos As Location

Ethos as Location: New Sites for Understanding Discursive Authority
Author(s): Nedra Reynolds

Source: Rhetoric Review, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Spring, 1993), pp. 325-338
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NEDRA REYNOLDS
University of Rhode Island
Ethos as Location:
New Sites for Understanding Discursive Authority
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe
-James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Adrienne Rich
14 Edgevale Road
Baltimore, Maryland
The United States of America
The Continent of North America
The Western Hemisphere
The Earth
The Solar System
The Universe
- "Notes toward a Politics of Location" (1984)
Separated by nearly seven decades, an ocean, and differences in genres/gen-

ders, James Joyce and Adrienne Rich use the same rhetorical gesture to emphasize
the importance of location, of one's place or perceived place in the world. Dedalus
as a schoolboy signing his geography textbook and Rich as a child writing to a
penpal both inscribe who they are by showing where they are. These passages offer
a valuable perspective on ethos. They begin with a name-a declaration of
self-identity-and move incrementally to wider locations, the sites on which an
individual's social identity is constructed.
Stephen Dedalus writes his location, not insignificantly, in a geography book.
Feeling dwarfed and confused by all the countries and continents he must learn,
Stephen reads through his list to experience a sense of place and to affirm his
identity: "himself, his name, and where he was.... thatt was he" (15-16). In the
Rhetoric Review, Vol. 11, No. 2, Spring 1993 325
326 Rhetoric Review
collected essays of Blood, Bread, and Poetry, Adrienne Rich repeatedly identifies
her position as a white, educated, North-American Jewish lesbian and, in doing so,
marks out the ground for ethos to be established with her readers. A politics of
location begins with the body, "the geography closest in" (212), and includes her
whiteness: "a point of location for which I [need] to take responsibility" (219).
Both of these passages start with the individual and move into the social realm,
demonstrating the increasingly accepted notion that identity is formed through
negotiations with social institutions (Brooke) and through one's locatedness in
various social and cultural "spaces."
Writing theorists are paying considerably more attention to issues of subjec-
tivity and to the ways subjects are constructed through discourse. For example, in
"The Subject in Discourse," John Clifford analyzes the subject position con-
structed for the student writer by the popular St. Martin's Guide to Writing. And in
Textual Carnivals, Susan Miller analyzes "the subject of composition" as con-
structed by writing programs, textbooks, and college catalogues. Miller concludes,
among other things, that "the required subjectivity of the composition student is
infantilized" (102). Along with Robert Brooke's book-length study of writing and
identity negotiation, these studies investigate writing and writers in a social,
ideological, and discursively situated realm.
In addition, representations of space have become important to discussions of
writing; note the appearance of "site" in the program title of the 1991 Conference
on College Composition and Communication. "Site" is, in fact, a key word in the
discourses of poststructuralism, where subjects become sites: "poststructuralism
theorizes subjectivity as a site of disunity and conflict" (Weedon 21). The subject
is the "site" on which language becomes meaning, where meaning is constituted
and thereby constitutes the subjectivity of the individual.
These notions of identity and site, packed with currency from recent theories,
have long been important to the rhetorical concept of ethos, which encompasses
the individual agent as well as the location or position from which that person
speaks or writes. I want to suggest the potential of ethos to open up more spaces
in which to study writers' subject positions or identity formations, especially to
examine how writers establish authority and enact responsibility from positions
not traditionally considered authoritative. In this view ethos is not something
"embodied" by the classical orator with his audience, nor it is crafted in solitude
by the modernist artist in his garret (Brodkey). Ethos, like postmodern subjectivity,
shifts and changes over time, across texts, and around competing spaces.
My argument begins with the etymological and moves outward to issues of
community and marginality. Concentrating on ethos in written discourse, this
expansion of the traditional concept of ethos includes the site of the margins, a
recent source of discursive authority for feminist writers, and widens further to
include conflict and difference without excluding the classical notion of responsi-
bility. Finally, I suggest places where responsible writers negotiate and construct
Ethos as Location 327
ethos-sites both on the margins and from the "betweens."
Ethos as Space, Place, or Haunt
Standard translations of the Greek word ethos have not maintained its complex
ity. Along with other Greek words, ethos has been repeatedly translated by substi-
tution, a strategy that "flattens" key concepts (Welch 11-15). Kathleen Welch pins
this "translation-as-substitution" phenomenon on the "Heritage School" of rhetoric
and its dependence "on the erroneous concept of one-to-one correspondence of
meaning" (13). When ethos, for example, is reduced to "ethical proof," Welch
argues, "[o]nly residual ancient connections remain for the current reader" (17).
In richer forms than its substitution as "ethical appeal," ethos in classical
rhetoric is one of three strands of the pisteis, intertwined with logos and pathos. In
Aristotle's treatment of ethos as moral character, the sense of character is neither
singular nor innate; it is a combination of practical wisdom, virtue, and good will
(Aristotle, On Rhetoric 121); and is "reflected in deliberate choices of actions and
[is] developed into a habit of mind" (Kennedy 163). In ordinary usage today, the
term ethos often refers to the character of an age, era, society, or culture, something
like zeitgeist. For example, composition has been described as "a young field
determined to establish a scholarly ethos, proud and insecure" (Phelps 206). In his
illustration of ethos, Michael Halloran claims that he has authority at professional
conferences partly because he presents "some important aspects of what we call
'the professorial ethos"' ("Aristotle's Concept" 62). In these two examples, ethos
is not measurable traits displayed by an individual; rather, it is a complex set of
characteristics constructed by a group, sanctioned by that group, and more readily
recognizable to others who belong or who share similar values or experiences. The
classical notion of ethos, therefore, as well as its contemporary usage, refers to the
social context surrounding the solitary rhetor.
Not all scholars encountering ethos have recognized its spatial and social
emphases. As philosophers concerned with ethics-or rhetoricians opposed to
Aristotle's contingencies-have encountered ethos, they have felt compelled to
make it "ethical appeal"; in other words, to translate it with the use of the word
ethical, even though its Greek roots are habit, custom, and character (see, for
example, Yoos). Careful attention to the etymology of ethos-its connections to
space, place, or location-helps to reestablish ethos as a social act and as a product
of a community's character.
Arthur B. Miller gives the most thorough etymological account of ethos as it
occurs in the Rhetoric and the Ethics. The Greek words for habit ( EOos) and for
character ( nOos ) differ only by the first letter-an epsilon or an eta. Miller's
purpose is to show how Aristotle uses character by understanding how Aristotle
uses habit (ethos). Ethos, the key word, derives from eOw (etho), "'to be accus-
tomed, to be wont"' (Miller's emphases, 309-10). But the basic denotation of
ethos, in addition to its meaning as character, is "'an accustomed place' and in the
328 Rhetoric Review
plural may refer to the 'haunts or abodes of animals'; it also may refer to 'the
abodes of men"' (31 0). Aristotle used ethos to refer to the function of the polis:
society is the haunt where a person's character is formed, and "when one portrays
character [ethos] he does it best by showing its origin in habit and disposition" (A.
Miller 31 1).
Michael Halloran recognizes the importance of these etymological relation-
ships in the following passage:
In contrast to modem notions of the person or self, ethos emphasizes

the conventional rather than the idiosyncratic, the public rather than
the private. The most concrete meaning for the term in the Greek
lexicon is 'a habitual gathering place,' and I suspect that it is upon this
image of people gathering together in a public place, sharing experi-
ences and ideas, that its meaning as character rests. To have ethos is
to manifest the virtues most valued by the culture to and for which one
speaks.... ("Aristotle's Concept" 60)
Considering the social construction of ethos, as Halloran does here, shifts its
implications of responsibility from the individual to a negotiation or mediation
between the rhetor and the community. With such a shift, "ethical appeal" becomes
an insufficient category to account for the social production of discourse because
it emphasizes individuals as they act in isolation, simply reproducing what the
community would approve. The idea of ethos as a social construction, in which
subjects are formed by the habits of their culture, belies the charges that ethos can
be "faked" or manipulated. According to Aristotle, "we become just by doing just
acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts" (NE, II, 5).
When ethos is, as in the Nicomachean Ethics, a result of experience and instruc-
tion, it becomes a shared enterprise among members of the community, and the
community decides, in turn, what constitutes justice, temperance, bravery, or
ethics.
The following passage from the Nicomachean Ethics helps to illustrate the
role of the social in the formation of subjectivity:
[I]ntellectual virtue is for the most part both produced and increased
by instruction, and therefore requires experience and time; whereas
moral or ethical virtue is the product of habit (ethos), and has indeed
derived its name, with a slight variation of form, from that word. And
therefore it is clear that none of the moral virtues is engendered in us
by nature, for no natural property can be altered by habit.... nature
gives us the capacity to receive [the virtues], and this capacity is
brought to maturity by habit. (II.i. 1-3)
Character is formed by habit, not engendered by nature, and those habits come
from the community or culture. One identifies an individual's character, then, by
looking to the community. An individual's ethos cannot be determined outside of
the space in which it was created or without a sense of the cultural context. That
cultural context, however, does not necessarily mean a conflict-free environment;
a social group is not necessarily made up of like-minded individuals who gather
in harmony.
Even in societies that are extremely homogeneous, individual experiences and
material circumstances differ. When Halloran, for example, invokes the "image of
people gathering together in a public place, sharing experiences and ideas" ("Aris-
totle's Concept" 60), we must remember that in classical Greece and Rome, slaves
and women were not welcome to share in the public space of experiences and
ideas. Thus it is risky to assume, in a view of ethos as a social act, a speaker who
is a unified, moral individual or a community of like minds where opposition is
never an issue.
Ethos Without Harmonious Communities
As Joseph Harris has argued, no longer can the term community be so "warmly
persuasive" that we are blinded to the way it masks differences among group
members (13). In social theory and within composition, the idea of community has
been critiqued for denying differences among subjects and for assuming automatic
or easy consensus. Iris Marion Young, a social theorist, objects to notions of
community which rest on an "impossible ideal of shared subjectivity" (311): the
idea that people can openly "share" who they are. Communities too often proceed
as if differences among their members are either nonexistent or negligible, or that
"knowledge is outside the realm of ... people's social differences" (Myers 167).
In Greg Myers' analysis, composition studies' appropriation of consensus has
ignored the conflict that inevitably takes place whenever and wherever groups
meet. Myers' reform of consensus would require a definition of the historical
processes that shape discourse or interpretive communities (166-67). Similarly, in
his essay on "Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning," John Trimbur
wants to develop a "critical practice" of collaborative learning that allows for
dissensus. Myers, too, would encourage "conflict as well as collaboration" (169),
and Harris asserts that "[o]ne does not need consensus to have community" (20).
Communities are usually invoked as "discursive utopias" (Harris 11). How-
ever, communities have histories, functions, agendas, and, in the spatial metaphor
so prevalent in Harris's essay, "margins or borders." In poststructuralist theories
of subjectivity, persons are not "knowing subjects" who are capable of recognizing
the histories, agendas, or borders of communities; neither do they neatly "cross
over" from one community to another, able to shift "naturally" from one set of
standards to another. Writers do not simply or even consciously move in and out
of separate, discrete communities, adjusting their language perfectly each time;
330 Rhetoric Review
ratherhe, one is always simultaneously a part of several discourses, several com-

munities" (Harris 19, his emphasis).
In order to account for differences and conflict without ignoring the fact that
people live and work together, Young develops her politics of difference with the
metaphor of "city life" (317-19). Harris, too, uses the idea of a city, which provides
"room": for polyphony, for struggle, for competing and overlapping discourses-
and communities-to converge and intersect (20). Members of a group must
acknowledge that they "do not understand one another as they understand them-
selves" and then "accept this distance without closing it into exclusion" (Young
312). Young calls for multiplicity, contradiction, and tension in her political ideal
of an "unoppressive city" (317).
The spatial metaphors used by these critics of community-metaphors of a
city, of margins and borders-echo the spatial metaphors in classical and contem-
porary discussions of ethos. Cities, communities, groups, bodies, embodiments of
all shapes-all of these formulations imply space: when people come together,
they meet in a specific location. "Location" is crucial to ethos, and, as a number
of feminist theorists have noted, holds important implications for politics and
epistemology. Most importantly, feminist location theories demonstrate ways of
achieving rhetorical authority from a marginalized position.
Ethos from the Margins
Recognizing the marginalization that has historically imposed silence, recent

feminist writers have put a different spin on the struggles of women and other
oppressed groups to come to voice: rather than arguing a move to the center, their
goal is to change the structure altogether, so that authority can be claimed even by
those whose differences are marked, and whose distance from the center is
considerable. Feminists are working to displace the connection between authority
and center and to replace it with a tighter connection between discursive authority
and the marginal position.
Studies of feminist epistemology, many of them by now quite familiar, create
a convincing argument that the sex of the knower is epistemologically significant.'
When that knower is located as a female in this culture, knowledge is experienced,
constructed, and recalled in nonhierarchial, nonlinear, and nonobjective forms. In
other words, female knowers adapt to their marginalized position in a male-domi-
nated culture by seeing differently-and learning different things. These differences
are finally being reconsidered as valuable rather than wrong, but in the interest of
ethos and rhetorical authority, I want to present here a few of the arguments that
have made this transition possible.2 These writers earn their rhetorical authority by
being responsible-by stating explicitly their identities, positions or locations, and
political goals. In their acknowledgment of differences and their insistence on
responsibility, feminist theorists of location (or, those feminist writers who rely on
spatial metaphors or concepts of positionality) contribute to a revised notion of
ethos which recognizes that even in a postmodern context, "it does matter who is
speaking or writing" (Huyssen 45, his emphasis).
Rich's essay on a politics of location is motivated by her concern that white,
middleclass, American feminism has historically assumed that it can represent the
experience of oppression for all women, regardless of race, class, nationality,
geographical, or historical position. She wants to fight against abstraction and
reclaim the material, beginning with the female body, and to "[locate] the grounds
from which to speak with authority as women" (213). Rich insists that we accept
responsibility for our points of location (219) and describes her effort in this essay
as a struggle-"a struggle for accountability" (211). As feminists and others have
struggled to be responsible in their discourses, they have begun to recognize the
importance of location to that responsibility, particularly the value of moving away
from the center to find different perspectives.
Many feminists-and, in fact, some composition scholars-have argued for
the epistemological and theoretical advantage of the margins.3 In asserting that
margins are productive sites for knowledge and vision, sociologist Patricia Hill
Collins shows how an "outsider within" status provides "a special standpoint on
self, family, and society for Afro-American women" (35). Those who are "in touch
with their marginality in academic settings" can tap this standpoint. Individuals
can see differently when they are on the margins or borders of particular groups;
it is easier to observe from the outside, where the perception is broader, keener, or
productively different.
For cultural theorist bell hooks, the margin is "a space of radical openness,"
"a profound edge" that is not a safe place but a site necessary to resistance (149).
Hooks, like Rich, speaks of the struggle-and the pain-of coming to terms with
her location as a Southern black female, "aggressively silenced" for years and now
trying "to name that location from which I come to voice" (146-48). Her effort is
to distinguish between the marginality imposed by dominant institutional struc-
tures and the marginality chosen as a site of resistance (153).
Finally, Donna Haraway argues for a version of marxist standpoint theory
based on the importance of vision ("always a question of the power to see") and
opposed to objectivity:
Many currents in feminism attempt to theorize grounds for trusting

especially the vantage points of the subjugated; there is good reason
to believe vision is better from below.... this essay is an argument for
situated and embodied knowledges and an argument against various
forms of unlocatable, and so irresponsible, knowledge claims. (583)
We are able to see from below if we recognize our partial perspective-if we insist
that our sight or location is never representative of all experience. Vision, like
subjectivity, is "multidimensional." As selves are "split" and never whole, so is
332 Rhetoric Review
vision (586). Metaphors of vision lead Haraway to a conception of a new "feminist

objectivity" that recognizes "limited location and situated knowledge" (583).
These writers weave into their discourses explicit acknowledgments of their own
positionality and the limits to their claims, but at the same time, these "limits" are
not-as they are in traditional Western epistemology-blocks to the "truth" to be
eliminated. They are instead incentives to see differently, to shift position, to make
adjustments. Haraway's situated knowledge is a site for discursive or rhetorical
authority; a writer's situatedness constitutes much of her subjectivity in discourse.
Writers construct and establish ethos when they say explicitly "where they are
coming from" as Rich and hooks do. This may not seem an artful or sophisticated
way to establish credibility, but it is an increasingly important feature of writing
which challenges the dominant discourse, a way of challenging the pretense that
authority comes from on high or from the printed page itself. In the recent
anthology Feminisms, editors Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl identify
themselves as "we" and as feminists in the first paragraph and quickly clarify that
the "we" means "white middle-class heterosexual American feminist academics in
our early thirties" (iX).4 An even more expanded and "personal" version of this
self-identifying strategy occurs in Cinthia Gannett's new book, Gender and the
Journal. In her first chapter (while it usually occurs in the more marginal preface or
introduction), Gannett spends three full paragraphs (instead of a single sentence)
outlining the "factors [that] influence the personal and social situation from which
I write" (12). Gannett is one of many feminists who refuse to subscribe to the idea
that authority comes from the length of one's bibliography or the objectivity of the
analysis. Gannett's authority comes from reading and research, yes, but also from
the experiences she shares with readers: the multiple ways that language and writing
have impacted her life as a female child, as a mother, and as a struggling graduate
student. Also in the spirit of disrupting the dominant academic discourse, Gannett
includes italicized passages from her own journal throughout the text-a "marginal"
discourse made authoritative.
Claiming marginality has become a potent declaration of authority for those
writers who have not historically occupied the centers of power. The margins are
not the only place, however, for building credibility. In fact, it would be ludicrous
to suggest that all writers-regardless of their position in this culture-could claim
rhetorical authority from the margins for any topic or subject matter. Just as learners
and writers shift positions continually, ethos is not constructed on a single site, from
an unchanging vantage point on the margins. Another "site" for ethos can better
highlight the multiple negotiations that go on between self and society, between
writer and reader, between and among overlapping discourse communities.
Ethos in the Betweens
Two recent writers in rhetoric and composition, Karen Burke LeFevre and
Kate Ronald, have suggested a different site for the construction of ethos, not
something so clearly "outside" as the margins. In these two treatments of ethos,

authority is constructed in the "betweens," a spatial metaphor I find full of
possibilities for studying ethos and its construction in written texts.
As its etymological history shows, gathering or meeting is literally at the root of
ethos. This crucial part of its definition emphasizes both the spatial-a gathering
place-and the idea of presence, of speakers and listeners. As Karen Burke LeFevre
notes, the concept of ethos was developed in a culture which engaged in spoken
discourse, where the actual presence of an audience was assumed: "In Aristotle's view,
ethos cannot exist in isolation; by definition it requires possible or actual others" (45).
LeFevre's reference to "possible others" opens a space to examine ethos in written
texts and thus to explore the ethos of a society (see Ryan).
In asserting the social nature of ethos (within her larger effort to establish
invention as a social act), LeFevre offers a provocative description of ethos,
reconceiving it as a negotiation that takes place in written discourse:
In written composition, the social matrix of necessary others who form

community and audience are less obvious, but nevertheless present.
Ethos, we might say, appears in that socially created space, in the
'between,' the point of intersection between speaker or writer and
listener or reader. (45-46)
LeFevre captures the spatial metaphor inherent in ethos (a haunt, an abode, an

accustomed gathering place) and applies it to written texts. Kate Ronald, too, refers
to the spatial to define the concept of ethos as workingn] in the spaces between
personal and public life" (37); she, like LeFevre, emphasizes the "between."
Speakers or writers develop their ethos by practicing in the accustomed gathering
places of the society: in our contemporary technological culture, those gathering
places are often written texts.
Locating ethos in written texts requires attention to the mediation or negotia-
tion that goes on in the spaces between writers and their locations, in "the tension
between the speaker's private and public self' (Ronald 39). Ethos, in fact, occurs
in the "between" (LeFevre) as writers struggle to identify their own positions at
the intersections of various communities and attempt to establish authority for
themselves and their claims. By emphasizing where and how texts and their writers
are located-their intersections with others and the places they diverge, how they
occupy positions and move in the betweens-we can retain the spatial metaphors
of ethos without limiting it to arenas of spoken discourse and without assuming
that those gathering places are harmonious or conflict-free.
How might this idea of "the betweens" work in practice? I think it means
attending to the rhetorical strategies writers use to locate themselves, their texts,
and the particular discursive communities they are mediating within and between.
How do writers identify themselves, claim authority, and position their projects?
334 Rhetoric Review
Are these self-identifications explicit, and if so, what is their effect? In the spirit
of ethos as a negotiated space where authority is established within and between
communities, I want to suggest that being explicit is also being responsible.
As feminist location theorists emphasize, rhetors must take responsibility for
their ways of knowing. One who "sees" must also position her seeing: "[p]osition-
ing implies responsibility for our enabling practices" (Haraway 587). Feminist
authors are particularly committed to acts of self-identification, as passages from
Rich, hooks, Warhol and Herndl, and Gannett illustrate. This strategy can take
different forms, however, beyond a "list" of the writer's various subject positions.
A recent article by Patricia Harkin is a refreshing exception to the typical
"writer-is-removed" style of academic prose. Her purpose is to write consciously
about how she wrote an earlier piece, backtracking through her thought processes.
Harkin acknowledges that she tries to earn or create good will with her audience
through her ethos, and she identifies two "ethical moves of which I am most
conscious," that of "finding concrete examples of theoretical points" and "connect-
ing my thought with that of well-known theorists" (59). Both are explicit efforts
not to lose members of her audience and to "authorize" herself. This strategy
focuses simultaneously on form and content, on purpose and the rhetorical strategy
for achieving that purpose. Harkin's self-conscious prose operates in the betweens
as it moves between past and present texts, the self who writes and the self who
reads, between the writer's authority and sense of responsibility.
Because ethos is constructed in the betweens, another site for ethos occurs at
the disciplinary or field-specific intersections of various texts, the places where
different voices merge (not necessarily in unison) to discuss a particular issue, text,
or set of ideas. Here I want to suggest, along with Stephen North, that we pay more
attention to book reviews and their function in establishing our discursive prac-
tices. His suggestions to make the review process in rhetoric and composition more
dissonant, more public, and more collaborative (359-60) open up more spaces for
ethos and exploring the betweens. These betweens expand and become even more
fascinating, in fact, when they are not limited to single-author or single-work
studies of ethos in written discourse.5 What's needed are studies of ethos in written
discourse that extend outward to include multiple texts as well as the historical and
political context for those texts, the ways they are read and responded to, the ways
they get interpreted, adjusted, or appropriated.6
What I have in mind and have attempted elsewhere is a study of the ethos of
a textual community such as composition studies as it struggles to define its
boundaries and assert its rhetorical authority (Reynolds). The historical moment
of composition's emergence-its efforts toward self-definition and the conflicts
and negotiations that these efforts involved-seems full of possibilities for the
study of ethos and authority. Is, for example, Phelps' description of composition's
ethos accurate or representative when she calls it "proud and insecure"? In the
struggle to establish "a scholarly ethos," what constituted authority or responsibil-
ity for early writers in composition studies? Do they all claim membership or
affiliation with the same "community"? Where do various or competing repre-
sentations of composition converge and intersect-where do they form "be-
tweens"-to establish traits and features we can now identify as composition's
ethos?
Such a study would include texts widely read, discussed, and cited within a
fluctuating reading and writing community. However, a line-by-line rhetorical
analysis of such texts-searching for textual evidence of good will and good moral
character-would miss the point. For example, Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and
Expectations seems to capture the ethos of composition studies in its early days
and could be said to represent or stand for something we might call composition's
ethos. But such a claim must take into account a much larger space than the text
itself: the New York City student demonstrations of 1969; the resulting Open
Admissions policy and its effects on teaching writing, especially in "worn urban
classrooms"; Shaughnessy's combination of literary New Criticism and sociolin-
guistics; issues of academic discourse and students' rights to their own languages;
Shaughnessy's Western heritage and romantic longings; and the enthusiastic, if not
worshipful, reception of her book. All of these features, as well as other texts and
voices entering the conversation in the 1960s and 70s, contribute to a developing
ethos for composition studies. Most importantly, however, one cannot discuss the
ethos that this text constructs for composition studies without acknowledging the
anonymous student writers whose crippled passages and "tortured prose"
prompted Shaughnessy's study and make up much of the book's content. Along
with Miller and Clifford, we must investigate the ways in which our discourses
and teaching practices construct and affect student writers, especially in terms of
their fragile identities within the university and between the sometimes painfully
confusing states of their emerging authority as speakers and writers. To account
for something called composition's ethos, we must examine the places where our
practices, language, and attitudes come together or collide with the subjects of
these practices: student writers.
In addition, we must be responsible for the ways we construct our own
ethos-in textbooks and articles, departmental documents, course syllabi and
handouts-and for the ways we represent composition's ethos in all forums of our
public discourse. Do we treat or refer to composition as a service course? Do we
participate in the "discourse of crisis" concerning literacy (Trimbur)? Do we
participate in the much-rehearsed discourse of student bashing?
As Stephen Dedalus and Adrienne Rich do, we must inscribe our own identi-
ties, on envelopes or the flyleaves of books, by beginning with the self and moving
outward to the widest possible spaces where responsible writing and the study of
writing matter. Writers' identities, as well as their associations with writing and
writing instruction, are constructed by space and the spatial; a writer's subject
positions are determined by the space of the body, her geographical location, her
336 Rhetoric Review
shifting intellectual positions, her distance or closeness to others, to texts, to

events. ethos is created when writers locate themselves; it is "a way of claiming
and taking responsibility for our positions in the world, for the ways we see, for
the places from which we speak" (Jarratt; Reynolds).
When we orchestrate social and socially responsible classrooms-one of the
most important writing sites of all-we are creating ethos and stressing its impor-
tance. As composition's locations in and out of the academy change and expand
(this year's CCCC program included several panels on teaching writing in prisons
and other typically marginalized sites), we have further opportunities to explore
connections between space and authority, between the social and responsibility,
between sites and the writing self.7
Notes
Most familiar to rhetoric and composition scholars are Belenky et al., Women's Ways of Knowing
and Gilligan's In a Different Voice. From philosophy, see Lorraine Code's What Can She Know?
2 Other feminist works that explore or assert the importance of location to discursive authorit
include Elspeth Probyn's "Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local" and Gayatri Spivak's
"Can the Subaltern Speak?"
3 In composition studies, one recent example of a work that claims the margins is Carolyn Erick
Hill's Writing from the Margins: Power and Pedagogy for Teachers of Composition (Oxford, 1990).
4 As admirable as this strategy seems, however, it can also be said to reduce issues of subjectivity t
a list-a list that emphasizes coverage rather than conflicts. Cultural theorist Kobena Mercer criticizes
"the all-too-familiar 'race, class, gender' mantra" that he claims is a weak version of liberal multicul-
turalism (425).
5 Two examples of the single-work, single-author approach to ethos in written discourse include
Avon Crismore and Rodney Farnsworth's analysis of the ethos Darwin constructs in Origin of Species
and Halloran's "The Birth of Molecular Biology: An Essay in the Rhetorical Criticism of Scientific
Discourse," which demonstrates how the 1953 Watson and Crick article on DNA establishes an ethos
for a new, emerging discipline. The problem with Halloran's close rhetorical analysis, however, is that
he makes claims about the ethos of microbiology as a community with only one text as evidence.
6 In his dissertation Roger Cherry examines the ethos of letters written for tenure cases, a fascina
site for the construction of ethos in the "betweens" of academic life and politics.
7 I thank both early readers of this essay-Susan Jarratt, Paul Anderson, Mary Jean Corbett, and Pat
Bizzaro-and the reviewers for RR-John Trimbur and Kathleen Welch-for their encouragement and
astute comments.
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Nedra Reynolds is Assistant Professor at the University of Rhode Island, where she teaches courses
in writing, composition studies, and rhetorical theory. She continues to pursue the elusive notion of
composition's ethos, and prompted by her work with a number of graduate students, she has begun a
study of graduate writing-issues of subjectivity and discursive authority.
Mid-Atlantic Writing Centers Association Conference
March 13, 1993

Villanova University
Villanova, Pennsylvania
This year's theme is "Conversations about Writing: Faculty, Peer Tutors

and Students." Elaine Maimon of Queens College will deliver the keynote
address. One-page proposals for papers, workshops, or panel discussions
should be sent by February 1, 1993, to Karyn Hollis, English Department,
Villanova University, Villanova, PA 19085 (215/645-7872).

Ethos As Location

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Ethos As Location

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Ethos as Location: New Sites for Understanding Discursive Authority

Author(s): Nedra Reynolds

University of Rhode Island

Separated by nearly seven decades, an ocean, and differences in genres/gen-

Rhetoric Review, Vol. 11, No. 2, Spring 1993 325

ethos-sites both on the margins and from the "betweens."

Ethos as Space, Place, or Haunt

In contrast to modem notions of the person or self, ethos emphasizes

Ethos Without Harmonious Communities

ratherhe, one is always simultaneously a part of several discourses, several com-

Ethos from the Margins

Recognizing the marginalization that has historically imposed silence, recent

Many currents in feminism attempt to theorize grounds for trusting

vision (586). Metaphors of vision lead Haraway to a conception of a new "feminist

Ethos in the Betweens

something so clearly "outside" as the margins. In these two treatments of ethos,

In written composition, the social matrix of necessary others who form

LeFevre captures the spatial metaphor inherent in ethos (a haunt, an abode, an

shifting intellectual positions, her distance or closeness to others, to texts, to

Mid-Atlantic Writing Centers Association Conference

March 13, 1993

This year's theme is "Conversations about Writing: Faculty, Peer Tutors

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