Emancipatory Movements in Composition: The Rhetoric of Possibility

Abstract

The project Andrea Greenbaum attempts in EmancipatoryMovements in Composition is both worthwhile and ambitious. The project is worthwhile because introducing newcomers, particularly graduate students, to the multiple disciplines that have been incorporated into critical pedagogy in the last decade can be daunting, and there is certainly room in the field for a text that names and organizes them. The project is ambitious because it attempts to do this in a mere one hundred pages, with additional pages devoted to an appended syllabus, notes, and citations. Greenbaum opens her book with a personal narrative of the Passover story, drawing from it the lesson that "human beings need to experience oppression-even if it is relived only mythically-in order to understand our social responsibility to counter and resist those forces that seek to dominate, repress, and disempower individuals" (xi), setting the polemical tone she maintains through the rest of the work. She organizes the book around what she identifies as four key approaches to critical pedagogy for the writing classroom: neosophistic rhetoric, cultural studies, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies, examining each for what they offer writing teachers seeking to enact critical pedagogy in their classrooms. Her first two chapters offer a brief historical development of sophistic rhetoric and cultural studies approaches. Greenbaum begins with the reclamation of a sophistic rhetoric, drawing particularly on Susan Jarratt, Thomas Kent, John Poulakos, Sharon Crowley, and a handful of others. She proposes that this neosophistic rhetoric contributes to a "rhetoric of possibility" by drawing attention to the indeterminacy of language, an empowering shift from a logos privileged in Western philosophy to a mythos that invites disruptive stoof the frontier is reconstrued as a collabo ative zone of cultur l and linguistic contact, "a historical moment of meeting, clashing, and cooperating ulticultura encounters" (66).