Manly Writing: Gender, Rhetoric and the Rise of Composition by Associate Professor Miriam Brody

By Associate Professor Miriam Brody

During this serious background of the gendered politics of rhetoric and the increase of composition, Miriam Brody argues that not anything approximately phrases or their association is innately gendered. but because the English Enlightenment, academics have inspired their scholars to recognize and imitate "manly" writing, writing that's undeniable, forceful, cogent, and actual. equally, scholars were enjoined to prevent so-called effeminate or female writing—writing characterised as imprecise, unorganized, ornate, and deceitful.Such suggestion, a part of what Brody phrases the hidden curriculum, has served the pursuits of discourse groups as numerous because the early Enlightenment Royal Society in seventeenth-century London (by urging a transparent and masculine kind for the paintings of technological know-how) and the land-grant universities of nineteenth-century the US (by claiming that the paintings of writing was once just like clearing the land and pushing again the frontier). Brody’s dialogue in reality turns into a social heritage of canonical rhetorical essays and critical overdue Enlightenment, nineteenth-century, and early sleek institution texts. She issues out that during their recommendation to writers even the Strunks and Whites and Peter Elbows of newer occasions have extolled masculine virtues and suggested keep an eye on over invasive and troublesome female qualities.Brody’s booklet not just clarifies rhetoric’s inheritance and transformation of the classical perfect of manliness, it is also the 1st severe paintings to discover the ideological value of gendered imagery and to interpret in mild of this imagery rhetorical essays and hard-to-locate early composition texts opposed to a history of formerly unpublished archival fabrics.

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But because style seemed to be necessary, a language of facts not enough, it became the project of the virtuous writer to separate good writing from bad, finding the precise moment when language turned against itself and lied. Quintilian described his definition of excellences in language early in his first book: to represent the things of this world, language should be perspicuous, an excellence in language denoting clarity that Enlightenment rhetorician Hugh Blair adopted and defined as purity, propriety, and precision (1:188).

Earlier in the century, empiricist philosopher David Hume referred to Quintilian on style, 1 and Scottish rhetorician George Campbell generously cited him in The Philosophy of Rhetoric. In 1774 another member of the Scottish Enlightenment, John Ogilvie, in his lengthy work on the art of composition, called Page 12 "the judicious and elegant" Quintilian "the most copious and particular" of the Roman rhetoricians (1:89). So too Quintilian's voice was important in shaping the rhetorical tradition in the new Republic.

Conclusion: Through the Looking Glass 188 Notes 221 Works Cited 233 Index 243 Page ix PREFACE Manliness is a masculine virtue with a long history and an uncertain meaning. No less a chronicler of Victorian morality than Anthony Trollope claimed manliness was an elusive ideal. Trollope's Phineas Finn came triumphantly through a trial for his life, only to succumb to an ignoble depression. Was he being, asked Trollope, perhaps unmanly? " Yet none of these attributes taken together described all there is to manliness: "Before the man can be manly, the gifts which make him so must be there, collected by him slowly, unconsciously, as are his bones, his flesh, and his blood.

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