Modifying Traditions

While reading these two chapters, I repeatedly felt as though the authors were writing with the intention of pushing back against the restrictions caused by traditions, while not rejecting traditions themselves per se.  For instance, their choice to employ almost-informal key phrases (such as ‘tacking in’ and tacking out’) as well as first names in reference to themselves surely reflects the wish incorporate personality and experience into academic writing...which is somewhat unconventional.  

Critical imagination and strategic contemplation perhaps work to similar purposes.  Within the fifth chapter, it is written that critical imagination (or CI) “mandates that researchers engage their topics in multiple ways, using dialectic and dialogic approaches and imagining ways in which historical subjects might have left traces of a stream in places where we may not have looked, looked closely enough, or may have overlooked” (79).  Modifying traditions is necessary for the acquisition of new or lost information.

Concerning stategic contemplation, the authors come out and admit that it's a bit of a departure from academic norms; for instance, they explain that “whole notion of making the time and space to sit and think or to talk about doing so as a normal part of scholarly methodologies has seemed unintelligible” (86).  Now that they've pointed it out, this fact does seem odd.  After all, it’s usually viewed as helpful for authors of prose and poetry to slow down and reflect upon their work before completing it.  Why isn’t this attitude likewise applied to academics? 

In class, we’ve been discussing the role of narration in rhetoric, and how older rhetorical texts are generally prone to feature less while more recent pieces often contain more.  Since strategic contemplation also calls for relating one’s life experiences to those of another person, I’d venture that the authors of Feminist Rhetorical Practices certainly approve of narration as a means of cutting past artificial restrictions as well.