Ede, Glenn and Lunsford encourage readers to combine rhetoric and feminism, using each to help further understand the other. “rhetoric offers feminism a vibrant process of inquiring, organizing, and thinking, as well as a theorized space to talk about effective communication; feminism offers rhetoric a reason to bridge differences, to include, and to empower, as well as a politicized space to discuss rhetorical values” (401). The authors organized their article through the rhetorical canons. First, they assert that memory and invention are linked. For instance, there is a connection “between inquiring (inventio) and knowing (memoria)” (410). Also, in order to invent new arguments, examples and so on, we need to go into our memories. Furthermore, “invention and memory constrain and shape both who can know and what can be known” (411). They suggest what counts as knowledge and who is allowed to hold, shape, and convey this knowledge. “Feminist efforts…aim to expose the political and ideological assumptions that inevitably inform any act of invention and memory” (412). In terms of arrangement, feminism helps us analyze classical rhetoric’s push for linear, unemotional, and leading toward closure type of arrangement and offers additional arrangements that encourage dialogue, personal and passionate examples, and an open-endedness. The same is true of style; feminism can help “resist traditional western stylistic conventions of unity, coherence, linearity, and closure and…challenge traditional distinctions between poetry and prose” (426). Finally, feminism shows that delivery “is utterly dependent on one crucial item: access not only to the conventions regarding delivery but also to the system of delivery itself” (430). In the end, “rhetoric offers a rich conceptual framework and terminology that could prove heuristic as feminists attempt to probe and articulate these and other concerns” (440).
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