Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography

Author(s): Cheryl Glenn

Source: College English, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Jan., 2000), pp. 387-389
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/378937
Accessed: 09-02-2016 13:09 UTC
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387

COMMENT: Truth,
Method:
Revisiting

Lies,

and

Feminist

Historiography
Cheryl Glenn

ollegeEnglishhas invited me to comment on Xin Liu Gale'sreview of my feminist historiographic study of Aspasia of Miletus. Gale reiterates her 1997
"Intersectionsof Feminism(s) and Rhetorics(s) Conference"polemic by reaffirming a set of unquestioned privileges referredto, with numbing regularity,
as "tradition"and "truth."Thus her approachtakes the reactionarycriticism dujour
that associates much postmodern thought with the end of truth and the decline of
standardsand reduces it into a simple binary: on the one hand, there is traditional
objective historiography,and, on the other, subjectivefeminist fictionalization.What
is missing is the recognition that postmodern historiographydoes not attempt to do
away with the notion of truth; instead, it attempts to think of truth outside the confines of a mythical objectivity, or, at the very least, to decouple the link between
"objectivity"and "truth."Ignoring historiography'simbrication with truth, power,
and ethics results in a reading of SusanJarratt,Rory Ong, and me (and presumably
many others) only as adversaries,enemies of tradition, obstructionists of the Truth.
In spite of these difficulties, the discussion offers several instructive points: (1) a
focus on Aspasia,a figure who deservesmore scholarlyattention; (2) a thorough mining of the historical, literary,social, and political researchin my own discursivefootnotes; (3) a comparison of the purposefully different methodologies among various
academic fields (i.e., rhetoric, composition, and classics); and, most of all, (4) a rearticulation of the tension between history and history writing, between notions of

Ch er y I GIe n n is Associate Professor of English at Penn State. Founding board member and immediate
past president of the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, Glenn is
the author of RhetoricRetold:Regenderingthe Traditionfrom Antiquitythroughthe Renaissance,which won
best book/honorable mention by the Society for the Study of Early Modem Women; the St. Martin's
Guideto TeachingWriting;and TheSt. Martin'sReader(forthcoming). Her historiographicwork has earned
her two NEH fellowships and the Conference on College Composition and Communication Richard
Braddock Award. She recently initiated a new series for Southern Illinois University Press, "Studies in
Rhetorics and Feminisms," and is currentlyworking on Unspoken:
A RhetoricofSilence.

CollegeEnglish,Volume 62, Number 3, January2000

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388

College English

truth and method that I rehearsed throughout RhetoricRetold:Regenderingthe TradiI am limiting my comments to that fourth
tionfrom AntiquityThroughtheRenaissance.
fruitful
and
revisit
the
so
I
can
that
necessary tension between history and hispoint
that
scholars
have
been grappling with for decades as they
a
tension
tory writing,
read, reread, write, and rewrite histories of various discourses and practices.
Those of us who write histories of rhetoric, especially those of us who write
women into those histories, do so in response to intellectual and ethical questions (of
evidence, power, and politics) at the same time that we resist received notions of both
history and writing history. Speaking only for myself, my goal has not been to supplant the master narrativeof rhetorical history with a "mater"narrative,though such
a move has long been considered the paradoxof some feminist scholarship. Rather,
my goal has been to investigate a number of deeply contextualized narrativesin an
attempt to bring a fuller, richer-different-picture into focus.
But regardless of my goal, process, or product, I, like every other historiographer, face the task of connecting the "real"with discourse on "the real."As Michel
de Certeau tells us, at the point where this link cannot be imagined, historiography
must nevertheless work as if the real and discourse were actuallybeing joined (xxvii).
Every history writer faces this missing link. Thus, the text of history writing initiates a play between the object under study and the discourse performing the analysis. And even the most conscientious, "traditional"(however that word resonates),
and conservative history writer plays this game. Collapsing any binary of history
and fiction, Hayden White explains the historical as narrative, as representation,
and as interpretation (51). Nancy F. Partner describes history as "the definitive
human audacity imposed on formless time and meaningless event with the human
meaning-maker: language." She calls history writing "the silent shared conspiracy
of all historians (who otherwise agree on nothing these days),"who "talkabout the
past as though it were really 'there' " (97). Consequently, all historical accounts,
even the most seemingly objective historical records, are stories. And even these
stories are selected and arranged according to the selector's frame of reference, an
idea I'm not sure I fully appreciated until I read this rendering of my own logic,
method, and representation.
Why, then, should we continue to write histories (of rhetoric, or of anything else)
when both writing and history are suspect?when the pastwas not really"there"?when
we agree that there was a past but not what the past reallywas?Well, historiographic
practicesare so firmly situated in the postmodern critique of rhetoric that many of us
alreadytake for grantedthat histories do(or should do) something, that they fulfill our
needs at a particulartime and place, and that they never and have never reflected a
neutral reality.In choosing what to show, how to representit, and whom to spotlight,
all these maps subtly shape our perceptions of a rhetoric englobed.

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COMMENT: Truth, Lies, and Method

That is not to say, however, that all stories are created equal, that all histories
should or could be equal. Historiography'scentral question is not "true"or "false."
Instead, historiography asks us to consider questions of knowledge (in what context
is it produced and normalized? whom does it benefit?), ethics (to what/whom are
these practices accountable?what/whom do they privilege?), and power (what practices might produce historical remembrances?what are the effects of such representation?). At the nexus of these questions reside issues of historical evidence: What
counts? What is available?Who provided and preserved it-and why? How and to
what end has it been used? and by whom? Thus history is not frozen, not merely the
past. It provides an approachable,disruptableground for engaging and transforming
traditional memory or practice in the interest of both the present and the future.
Writing women (or any other traditionallydisenfranchisedgroup) into the history of rhetoric, then, can be an ethically and intellectually responsible gesture that
disrupts those frozen memories in order to addresssilences, challenge absences, and
assert women's contributions to public life. Such a gesture, particularly one that
interrogates the availability,practice, and preservation (or destruction) of historical
evidence, simultaneously exposes relations of exploitation, domination, censorship,
and erasure. This ethical practice not only accepts the "possible insufficiency" of
one's understanding of history and implies an "openness and reflexivity in one's
encounters," but it may also initiate a "restructuringof one's understanding of the
interrelation among the past, present and future; establishing possibilities for the
alteration of one's priorities, evaluations,and actions" (Simon 177).
Learning to write new histories, histories worthy of the remarkablerevival of
rhetorical consciousness, means embracing new opportunities for interrogating,
testing, and unfolding the rhetorical scholarship that has come before so that we
might advance our re/thinking, re/assessing, and re/writing of rhetorical histories
and futures, theories and practices. Whether they result in advances or setbacks,
these risks invigorate our field, signify our progress, and illuminate possibilities. But
they will not alwaysbe understood, let alone welcome.
WORKS

CITED

Certeau, Michel de. The WritingofHistory. 1975. Trans. Tom Conley. New York:Columbia UP, 1988.
Glenn, Cheryl. RhetoricRetold:Regenderingthe Traditionfrom AntiquityThroughthe Renaissance.Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1997.
Partner, Nancy E "Making Up Lost Time: Writing on the Writing of History." Speculum61 (1986):
90-117.
Simon, Roger I. "Pedagogy and the Call to Witness in Marc Chagall's WhiteCrucifixion." Education/Pedagogy/CulturalStudies19.2-3 (1997): 169-92.
White, Hayden. Tropicsof Discourse.Baltimore:Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

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389