Still Running for the Canon

In her presentation on Andrea Lunsford, Nancy Albertson introduced Lunsford’s pedagogy of memory as the forgotten canon, and Kathleen Blake Yancey asserts in her 2004 CCCC Chair’s address that memory has been “separated” from the canons of invention, arrangement, and style “in ways that are counterproductive” (316). Into this separation step Elizabeth Tasker and Frances B. Holt-Underwood with their article “Feminist Research Methodologies in Historic Rhetoric and Composition: An Overview of Scholarship from the 1970s to the Present.”

The article looks at “feminist historic research” (54) in the context of its place among the constellation of historic research. They tackle this one decade at a time, reminding their audience of “scholars, teachers, and students” (67) of the importance of the first canon to our understanding of where we have been and where we are trying to go within the field of feminist theory.

They begin with definitional difference between feminist and traditional historical research methods. Patricia Bizzel, say Tasker and Holt-Underwood, “explicitly identifies the [feminist] researcher’s emotional involvement with the subject” (55), assuming the traditional (usually male?) researcher has no such connection to their subject of study. An argument could be made that the word Bizzell uses describing the historicists’ subject as “neglected” is not objective, implying that the researcher, indeed, could have a vested interest.

The authors also make the points that, according to Bizzell, feminist researchers are not “neutral” observers, “gain ethos not from objectivity but from community,” and “[embrace] pluralistic, rather than definitive, theories and conclusions” (55), a stance which not only takes scholarship away from feminist researchers, but, again, assumes traditional (read: patriarchal) researchers are always neutral and never affected by societal or community-related concerns – especially if we read community as “discourse community.”

Converging with other cultural historicists, as has happened since the 1990s, seems an obvious path for feminist theory, as does, finally, “restating the need to discern why certain historic women” were “rhetorically effective” (58). But, now, in the 2000s, we have come full circle and are being told that “feminist rhetorical methods have moved too far from mainstream academic strategies and therefore cannot be trusted to be truthful” (61). We are forced to establish ethos once more and continue to argue for our place in the canons of rhetoric and of literature.

But, thought is a construct, and there is no such thing as pure objectivity within in any genre, any pedagogy, or theory. We all begin from a different history – which is why we look to the canon of memory to, eventually, establish our agency once and for all.