We set out to investigate Miller's curious assertion--curious for a deconstructionist committed to a critique of the old metaphysics of presence--that literary works preexist their being written down. We find a basis for this sense of the preexistence of the literary work in Miller's insights about the performative dynamics of reading and writing.…

Remembering Sappho, from a pedagogical perspective, usually means that teachers bring recovered women's rhetorics into the classroom, prompting students to come to know women as rhetorical agents by analyzing the rhetorical strategies they used to make their voices heard. Teaching women's rhetorics in this way works toward the ultimate goal of…

Traditionally, we English faculty have warned our students against simply identifying with a literary work's characters. For us, such attachments constitute "reading badly." But we engage in identifications, too, including ones with the work's author. A consideration of critical responses to "Benito Cereno" and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" enables us to…

In this article, the author argues that Emerson repudiated the formalism of nineteenth century belletristic, mechanistic, reason-centered, American rhetoric influenced by Hugh Blair. Instead Emerson promoted a rhetoric with imagination at its center, which calls for civic duty. (Contains 33 notes.)