06/21/2018

Jane S. Sutton: The House of My Sojourn: Rhetoric, Women, and the Question of Authority

Jane S. Sutton: The House of My Sojourn: Rhetoric, Women, and the Question of Authority

University of Alabama Press, 2010

ISBN: 0817317155

Employing the trope of architecture, Jane Sutton envisions the relationship between women and rhetoric as a house: a structure erected in ancient Greece by men that, historically, has made room for women but has also denied them the authority and agency to speak from within. Sutton’s central argument is that all attempts to include women in rhetoric exclude them from meaningful authority in due course, and this exclusion has been built into the foundations of rhetoric.

With all the undeniable successes—socially, politically, and financially— of modern women, it appears that women are now populating the house of rhetoric as never before. But getting in the house and having public authority once inside are not the same thing. Sutton argues that women “can only act as far as the house permits.” Sojourn calls for a fundamental change in the very foundations of rhetoric.

“This is an intriguing, inspiring, imaginative, and deeply courageous excavation and rebuilding of the house of rhetoric. My advice to readers: prepare to read on the metaphoric edge of your seats; you’re in for a great ride.”

—Andrea A. Lunsford, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English at Stanford University and author of Writing Matters: Rhetoric in Public and Private Lives

"Sutton employs tropes of architecture and the house of rhetoric to demonstrate that over time room was made for women in public and rhetorical spaces, but authority and agency were denied them. ... Useful for philosophy and women's studies as well as rhetoric, this volume supplements and moves beyond earlier work. Highly recommended."--CHOICE