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Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, by Cheryl Glenn. Garbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. 220 + xxii pp.
In his 1762 Lectures on Elocution, Thomas Sheridan contended that language must not be denned as words alone; rather, he asserted, a complete understanding of rhetoric begins with the recognition that all signs-including nonverbal, or silent, ones-effectively communicate. As illustrated by Sheridan's redefinition of language, one of the hallmarks of modern rhetoric, even in this comparatively antique example, is its espousal of not merely linguistic but symbolic meaning as the essential domain of rhetoric. By now, rhetoric's equation with diverse forms of symbolic expression has become commonplace. Cheryl Glenn's Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, however, suggests that even at this late date we may have yet to appreciate fully the implications of this topos for understanding the rhetorical functions of symbolic phenomena such as silence. Such a premise is borne out by the fact that her volume is the first of its kind in rhetorical scholarship: an effort to "expand our understanding, construction, and production of silence as a rhetoric, as a constellation of symbolic strategies that (like spoken language) serves many functions" (xi). Glenn accordingly asserts that, contrary to classical wisdom, the rhetorical forms, strategies, and effects of silence constitute a mode of symbolic expression as fundamental to human nature (and, in some cases, more so) than speech.
Unspoken elaborates upon Glenn's previously valuable and transformative insights into silences observable throughout the history of rhetoric. In Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance (1997), she provided a long-overdue account of how female rhetoricians have been excluded from, or silenced by, both the conceptual foundations and canonical boundaries of the rhetorical tradition. Glenn's Unspoken shares with her previous work the conviction that to investigate the rhetorical function of silence in institutional histories and arrangements is to uncover their constitutive, if frequently unstated, power dynamics. If Rhetoric Retold chronicled the historical exclusion of women's voices from the rhetorical canon, Unspoken demonstrates how the affirmation of silence as a rhetorical medium provides an apt hermeneutic with which to analyze the contemporary politics of speaking, not speaking, and being unable to do so. Readers of this engaging and provocative study, therefore, will be rewarded not merely with...