To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

esponses will appeal first to an audience of
rhetoricians, it deserves a wider audience.
Although not everyone would want to ask
the same questions the interviewers do (for
example, Olson, who conducts all the interviews
but those with Belenky and Spivak,
usually leads with "Do you consider yourself
a writer?"), the interviews are engaging,
revealing, even riveting—and they remind
us, as David Bleich says in his Introduction,
that "there is a heartbeat on the pages of
our intellectual lives." The responses to the
interviews are generally insightful, and
they work to set up another dialogue, not
only with participants of the interview,
but also with the reader, who is forming
responses of his/her own.
What's wrong with the book is confessed
adequately within its own pages. In one
response, C. H. Knoblauch distinguishes
between the interview and the conversation:
"Interview is static, simplified, deferential
(as a rule), and abbreviated, resisting
the give-and-take, the fluid, mercurial,
serendipitous movement of conversation."
The fact that these are interviews (and in
some cases—like Chomksy's—a series of
short lectures) means exchanges are sometimes
forced and disappointing. "The politeness
of the interview," as Knoblauch says,
"closes off talk"; the interviewer often settles
for half-answers, too respectful (?) to push
a line of questioning. A final criticism: the
interviewers persist in asking scholars not
in rhetoric and composition to comment
on the field, including its politics and pedagogies—and
the interviewees often flounder
or demur. I agree with John Clifford who
writes in his response, "When thinkers like
Derrida, Rorty, and Spivak are being interviewed
for informed readers, we should
probably stop asking them what they think
about our specific professional concerns."
As it is, readers are sometimes invited to
judge these people by their sympathy to the
projects of rhetoricians (Geertz comes off
well; Rorty, badly) and this is unfair.
A different polyvocality characterizes
Explorations in Feminist Ethics, where
authors share at least a particular perception
of a problem. The valuing of the individual
in context over the individual as
human abstract is one point of commonality
among the various and divergent voices
which populate the book.
Explorations originates in papers given at
a 1988 conference of the same name, each
paper considering some aspect of a feminist
ethics or the invention/discovery/construction
of one. The book's main weakness is
that the essays are short—conferencelength
rather than real essay-length—and
therefore somewhat undeveloped. In fact,
given the self-conscious self-consciousness
of most of the essays, and their careful setup
work to rationalize and position their
arguments, some essays end just a page or
two after they really get going.
The book's main strength is its subject
matter. Patricia Ward Scaltsas writes, "The
project of criticizing, analyzing, and when
necessary replacing the traditional
catagories of moral philosophy in order to
eradicate the misrepresentation, distortion,
and oppression resulting from the historically
male perspective is, broadly speaking,
the project of feminist ethics"; these
"explorations" command our attention.
Another strength is that some of the essays
at least begin to be excellent, and are
provocative in the best way.
Naturally recurring points of reference in
the essays are Carol Gilligan's {In a
Different Voice) distinction between a
more-or-less masculine ethic of justice and
a more-or-less feminine ethic of care and
Nell Noddings' (Caring: A Feminine Approach
to Ethics and Moral Education) elaboration of
an ethic of care. The most interesting essays
in Explorations get past not only a dichotomy
of justice and care, but also the argument,
now well-known, that the care ethic binds
women to traditional roles, newly glorified.
Marilyn Friedman sets feminism against
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