Content area
Full Text
Ratcliffe, Krista. (2006). Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 224 pages.
DOI: 10.1177/1050651907300471
In Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, Ratcliffe seeks to supplement Burke's theories of persuasion and identification with a means by which cross-cultural identifications may be accomplished through rhetorical listening. She defines rhetorical listening as "a trope for interpretive invention and as a code of cross-cultural conduct" (p. 1). Ratcliffe expands this complex definition throughout the book and situates it by telling the story of how she came to develop this theory through her own scholarship in feminist theory and whiteness studies as well as through her teaching experiences. Researchers and teachers in technical and professional writing may be keenly interested in the theoretical discussion Ratcliffe provides regarding cross-cultural communication. Readers may also be interested in the strategies Ratcliffe offers for moving interlocutors from "dysfunctional listening" to productive rhetorical listening, particularly as these strategies may apply to usability studies. Ratcliffe also offers insights for how rhetorical listening and its attendant theories of identification support productive classroom communication and instructional practices. Researchers and teachers in business and technical communication may also find value in Ratcliffe's personal teaching examples as well as in the examples of student writing that illustrate rhetorical listening in the classroom.
Ratcliffe presents the concept of rhetorical listening as one that may help to negotiate what she calls the "troubled identifications" of gender and race by attempting to make the intersections of gender and race more visible. In briefly referring to the absence of listening in contemporary Western rhetorical theory, Ratcliffe suggests several biases against listening that may have contributed to the apparent lack of scholarly interest. She claims that the very nature of Western rhetoric as a written discourse precludes attention to listening. Furthermore, Ratcliffe suggests that the extant texts of classical Western rhetors, such as Aristotle, do not treat listening but rather appear to make assumptions that if there is a speaker, there is also a listener. She also claims that poststructuralism has had the unintended effect of ignoring listening by focusing on deconstructing the speaking-writing dichotomy. In addition to disciplinary biases, Ratcliffe points to cultural biases such as those relating to mainstream U.S. gender roles, race,...