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Laura R. Micciche. Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2007. xvi+ 127 pages.
In recent years, interdisciplinary research has turned its attentions to emotion, feeling, and affect. Antonio Damasio and others have been investigating emotion's place in reasoning skills through the cognitive sciences. Damasio 's own 1994 book, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, is a direct break with Cartesian duality, a prominent strain in philosophy and the humanities that treats emotion and reason as separate entities, typically with reason privileged and emotion villified. In the arena of cultural theory, social theory, and rhetoric, there has been an equal reassessment of emotion as a cultural construction intersubjective, performative, and invisibly influential upon heuristics based in "logic." One need only peruse the pages of myriad journals since the late 1990s to chart emotion's journey to the fore of rhetorical studies. Laura Micciche's Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching is a welcome addition to the field. Based in the interdisciplinarity of the social sciences and humanities, Micciche's work will be useful to those in rhetorical historiography, composition theory, social constructivism theory, and writing program administration.
For those familiar with Micciche and Dale Jacobs's 2003 monograph A Way To Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies, Micciche's Doing Emotion will feel like familiar territory. Micciche announces her major intentions as twofold. First, "bored and disappointed by approaches to emotion that cast it as an always suspect, usually fallacious feature of persuasive discourse" (xiii), she wishes to recover emotion as a social act that shapes and is shaped by conventions and acts of resistance. Second, Micciche offers performative pedagogies that return emotion and performance to texts that lose their emotional suasion when studied only through textual or logical/ causal analysis.
To begin these projects, Micciche is continually redrafting our ideas and definitions of emotion proper. Emotion socializes, enables or disables change, is part and parcel of our professional and private lives, and undergirds all ethical and activist motivations. Emotion is "naturalized" through social acts and therefore lives in the realm of performance and identity where emotion "does, rather than is" (Jacobs and Micciche 3). One can discern flavors of Burkean dramatism here. Emotion is learned as the conversation of humankind is learned, and therefore emotion...