Susan Wells

In Sweet Reason, Susan Wells presents a rhetorical model for understanding the diverse discourses of modernity. Wells describes modernity as a system of texts which we are only now learning to read. In order to comprehend how these texts organize our world, she argues, we must grasp how reason and desire interact to create meaning. To this end, Wells offers a rhetoric based on an understanding of meaning as intersubjectivity created through the work of language. Wells elaborates this "rhetoric of intersubjectivity" by drawing on both Jürgen Habermas's concept of communicative rationality and on Jacques Lacan's theory of desire, affirming the significance of reason and desire for rhetorical studies. From scientific articles to classroom altercations, contemporary government hearings to Mantaigne's Essays, Wells organizes several using rhetoric as an art, and she shows how rhetoric operates in practice. Susan Wells is associate professor of English at Temple University.

Rhetoric and the Discourses of Modernity

Sweet Reason

Published in five editions between 1621 and 1651, The Anatomy of Melancholy marks a unique moment in the development of disciplines, when fields of knowledge were distinct but not yet restrictive. In Robert Burton’s Rhetoric, Susan Wells analyzes the Anatomy, demonstrating how its early modern practices of knowledge and persuasion can offer a model for transdisciplinary scholarship today. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, Robert Burton attempted to gather all the existing knowledge about melancholy, drawing from professional discourses including theology, medicine, and philology as well as the emerging sciences. Examining this text through a rhetorical lens, Wells provides an account of these disciplinary exchanges in all their subtle variety and abundant wit, showing that questions of how knowledge is organized and how it is made persuasive are central to rhetorical theory. Ultimately, Wells argues that in addition to a book about melancholy, Burton’s Anatomy is a meditation on knowledge. A fresh interpretation of The Anatomy of Melancholy, this volume will be welcomed by scholars of early modern English and the rhetorics of health and medicine, as well as those interested in transdisciplinary work and rhetorical theory.

An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge

Robert Burton’s Rhetoric

An introduction to the history, inhabitants, exploration, and uses of the earth's oceans.

The Illustrated World of Oceans

This book is a sociological and rhetorical analysis of the best-selling guide to women's health, the collectively authored Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing

Heart-warming, busybody, Bernice Butzen reports her neighbor, Carolyn Fazzino, missing. Veteran Detective Waller is forced to work with new Detective Garcia. They discover Carolyn's car, purse, iPhone, and camera footage of a man abducting her, proving she has been kidnapped. Detectives interview Carolyn's estranged husband, Vince, who has a past of domestic violence. During an intense interrogation, he confesses, he has a girlfriend, Jenny Maxwell. But the married Jenny denies dating the egotistical womanizer making him look guilty in the eyes of the police. Tension mounts when Carolyn wakes, devastated, confused and hurt, finding herself in the killer's trap. The list of suspects grows to include Carolyn's drunk psychiatrist and her introverted boss with a suspicion of solicitation. Detectives wonder if he did away with his employee who may have discovered his secret. The psychopath killer becomes violent trying to stab Carolyn when she refuses to cooperate. Frustrated, the kidnapper throws the only food she will receive while being held captive. Carolyn's frantic mother, Ruth, pleads for her daughter's safe return.

Secret Lives

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, two thousand women physicians formed a significant and lively scientific community in the United States. Many were active writers; they participated in the development of medical record-keeping and research, and they wrote self-help books, social and political essays, fiction, and poetry. Out of the Dead House rediscovers the contributions these women made to the developing practice of medicine and to a community of women in science. Susan Wells combines studies of medical genres, such as the patient history or the diagnostic conversation, with discussions of individual writers. The women she discusses include Ann Preston, the first woman dean of a medical college; Hannah Longshore, a successful practitioner who combined conventional and homeopathic medicine; Rebecca Crumpler, the first African American woman physician to publish a medical book; and Mary Putnam Jacobi, writer of more than 180 medical articles and several important books. Wells shows how these women learned to write, what they wrote, and how these texts were read. Out of the Dead House also documents the ways that women doctors influenced medical discourse during the formation of the modern profession. They invented forms and strategies for medical research and writing, including methods of using survey information, taking patient histories, and telling case histories. Out of the Dead House adds a critical episode to the developing story of women as producers and critics of culture, including scientific culture.

Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine

Out of the Dead House

Kevin Mahoney

Rachel Riedner

Drawing upon a variety of contemporary sites and social movements, this book explores pedagogical relationships that can be the basis of political and social organizing. The authors approach pedagogy as a space of learning_not simply teaching_whose purpose is to develop an understanding of cultural networks and in so doing develop critical literacies.

Rhetorical Action, Neoliberalism, and Communities of Resistance

Democracies to Come

Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published by a mainstream press in 1973, is now in its eighth major edition. It has been translated into twenty-nine languages, has generated a number of related projects, and, with over four million copies sold, is as popular as ever. This study tells the story of the first two decades of the pioneering best-seller—a collectively produced guide to women's health—from its earliest, most experimental and revolutionary years, when it sought to construct a new, female public sphere, to its 1984 revision, when some of the problems it first posed were resolved and the book took the form it has held to this day. Wells undertakes a rhetorical and sociological analysis of the best-seller and of the work of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective that produced it. In the 1960s and 1970s, as social movements were on the rise and many women entered higher education, new writing practices came into existence. In the pages of Our Bodies, Ourselves, matters that had been private became public. Readers, encouraged to trust their own experiences, began to participate in a conversation about health and medicine. The writers of Our Bodies, Ourselves researched medical texts and presented them in colloquial language. Drafting and revising in groups, they invented new ways of organizing the task of writing. Above all, they presented medical information by telling stories. We learn here how these stories were organized, and how the writers drew readers into investigating both their own bodies and the global organization of medical care. Extensive archival research and interviews with the members of the authorial collective shed light on a grassroots undertaking that revolutionized the writing of health books and forever changed the relationship between health experts and ordinary women.

Susan Wells

Books

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