Contesting cultural rhetorics

About this book

Margaret J. Marshall's analysis employs a range of contemporary theorists from Bakhtin to Foucault and draws on a number of disciplinary perspectives, including law, history, and ethnography, where scholars have been examining discursive practices and where rhetoric is understood to be a means of examining cultural conceptions and embedded ideologies. Through these lenses she examines four influential and popular texts of the 1890s that serve to illuminate current public debates on education: Joseph Mayer Rice's articles in Forum, a well-respected magazine; Matthew Arnold's introduction to a government report; W.E.B. Du Bois's "A Negro Schoolmaster in the New South;" and Jane Addams's "A Function of the Social Settlement." Neither a history of education nor a typical literary analysis of the texts in question, this book considers the rhetorical stance of authors, the constitution of audience and subject, and the use of references and narratives as devices of authority. Taken together, these texts reveal the complicated public discussion of education in the 1890s - a period of transformation in culture, schooling, and the organization of knowledge. Moreover, they reveal the rhetorical structure of many of the questions Americans ask about education today: who should be educated, by whom, for what purposes, using what methods or materials? What of the past should we pass on to the future, and how? Contesting Cultural Rhetorics will be useful to readers interested in the history of education and nineteenth-century popular culture, as well as those involved in current debates on education and public policy.