I can see how scholars would easily dismiss critical imagination and strategic contemplation as insufficient methods of research. But Jackie and Gesa have some really great arguments for the validity of these methods, especially pertaining to their own rhetorical practices.
Because women's voices have been suppressed for so long, Jackie and Gesa had to get creative if they really wanted to make a place for women in the history of the rhetorical practice.
I like the idea of "tacking in" and "tacking out" which appears in both chapters and applies to both critical imagination and strategic contemplation. "Tacking in" is necessary for any practice. It's "tacking out" that seems to be of more importance for both methods. It's the principle of stepping back and looking at that the bigger picture. "Tacking out" is certainly important for feminist rhetoricians, because, as Jackie and Gesa discussed, they had to search for instances of women breaking the silence, which were not always instances pertaining directly to rhetorical practices. If they were only "tacked in" searching for women who wrote strictly about rhetorical theory, they would have come up short-handed.
The section about the significance of physical places to strategic contemplation is especially interesting. "A sense of place--the physical, embodied experience of visiting places--can become a powerful research tool and an important dimension of strategic contemplation . . ." (92). This really reminded me of police work, and how important a physical place and strategic contemplation is for detectives in solving a case. When detectives are out of leads and ideas, they'll often revisit the crime scene, and discover new evidence. It seems like this is a powerful tool for Jackie and Gesa as feminist rhetoricians.
I agree that Jackie and Gesa had to be very creative when making a place for women in rhetoric. “Tacking out” was a great strategy when finding women that couldn’t be silenced. After reading your post I went back to the section on “tacking out” and found a way to put this in perspective for myself: “we stand in conscious awareness of what we have come to know by more-traditional means and from that base used critical imagination to look back from a distance (from the present into the past, from one cultural context toward another, from on sociopolitical location to another, and so on) in order to broaden our own viewpoint in anticipation of what might become more visible from a longer or broader viewpoint (72)”. Taking a step back to see the bigger picture makes complete sense to me.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of "detectives" makes me think of the classical way of thinking of invention: discovering what is there to make an argument, or in some cases, rediscovering/repurposing. It kind of verifies the canon, in a way; just the fact that although the ideas of Aristotle, Plato, etc. are very old, if we bring a fresh mind to it and try and rediscover facts in a different light, we might be able to find something very useful. This is probably not what Royster and Kirsch are going for, but why can't we use strategic contemplation to these known texts, too?
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