An annotated bibliography of the history of non‐western rhetorical theory before 1900

Donawerth, Jane

doi:10.1080/02773949409391025

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist scholars in the history of Composition and Rhetoric worked to rediscover and reconstruct the efforts of Buck and other early figures of feminist rhetoric (Allen, 1986;Burke, 1978;Campbell, 1989;Mulderig, 1984;Weir, 1989; see also Kitzhaber, 1953). By the 1990s, Buck was cemented as an important subject of works reconstructing the traditions of rhetoric and composition studies (Bordelon, 1998;Donawerth, 2002;L'Eplattenier, 1999;Lunsford, 1995;Sutherland & Sutcliffe, 1999;Vivian, 1994). Campbell (1996) collected Buck's most significant works together in one volume, and Bordelon (2007) published the most extensive study focused solely on Gertrude Buck's work and life.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Language as social action: Gertrude Buck, the “Michigan School” of rhetoric, and pragmatist philosophy

Huebner

2024

J History Behavioral Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Gertrude Buck and collaborators developed a sociologically and pragmatist‐informed approach to language that has been neglected in later scholarship. Buck approached the study of language from the standpoint of pragmatist functional psychology, which is indebted to John Dewey's pragmatism at the University of Michigan, and which views language as a normal, dynamic action of human organisms engaged in necessary cooperative relations with one another. Her approach overcomes the small‐minded pragmatism that would criticize figurative or poetic language as impractical, and instead shows how figuration is essential to the particular ways in which language is action that conveys meaning to others and serves broader social functions. Buck's forgotten work helps overcome criticisms of the application of pragmatic action theory to language and literature, sketching how language structure may be explained on the basis of language as a natural social‐communicative act, how figurative language is inherent in the normal act of communicating situated bodily experiences to others, and how rhetorical speech and writing contributes to participation in democratic social processes. This paper also indicates how Buck's work has been partially rediscovered in Composition Studies, as well as prefigures later reader‐response esthetics and feminist analyses of language.

show abstract