Hello and welcome to my blog! For the past year, I’ve been working on a project involving a historical study of cookbooks and recipes. I first did a genre study of cookbooks, looking at community cookbooks and the ways in which they are like conversations between female authors and readers. I analyzed the language used in these types of recipes and argued that their discourse formed a women’s community. While this project was interesting, it wasn’t an especially new or innovative approach to the text. Much has been written on community cookbooks, and most of those arguments are concerned with the way these texts build community. Also, I hadn’t read Ong yet and didn’t have the theory background needed.
Once I did read Ong’s Orality and Literacy, I also picked up his earlier work on Ramus which gets into how the printed text has influenced our ways of thinking. His last chapter in Ramus is similar to chapters 4 and 5 of O&L, in that he discusses the influence of the printing press. At this same time, I became more interested in early printed versions of cookbooks, as I was observing the formatting changes (from paragraph format to list and numbered step by step format) over time. In this seminar paper (that I will also present at Fems Rhet in October), I re-write women into the rhetorical tradition through the printed cookbook. I focus on the late 19th-early 20th century time period, as this was the birth of mass-produced cookbooks as well as the cookery reform movement. I look at the ways the cookery reform movement used print technology (in the form of charts, tables, lists, and the like) to revise societal misconceptions about housework. I argue the reform movement used the spatial qualities of print to value women’s work. For more details, see the attached abstract.
In fact, these reformers were able to use the print medium to blur the boundaries between private and public spheres of rhetoric. This is a point that I am currently interested in, and want to continue to pursue. However, I also realize that this area can be quite broad and interdisciplinary (I’m already incorporating sources from print culture, oral/literacy studies, food studies, folklore, gender studies, body studies, visual rhetoric, just to name a few outside rhetoric, women’s rhetorical practices and history of rhetoric). I’m also trying to focus on what methods I want to use, and what audience would be most helped by my research.
I currently have a blog that I began this summer when I was writing my specialized prelim and doing research for the initial reading list. If you would be interested in being a member of that blog, let me know–currently it’s set to private because I don’t want people I don’t know reading my ideas. But it’s OK, I trust you 
–Elizabeth
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
August 26, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Brittany
Ah, but Elizabeth, perhaps you shouldn’t trust us.
Your blog is the only one I could find because yours is the only one linked on the course page.
–Brittany
August 27, 2007 at 10:49 pm
rcjgraves
I really appreciate your desire to evince the feminist rhetorical practices in turn-of-the-last-century cookbooks. But you list a lot of different focal points: maybe you should think about breaking your process down into manageable steps. Ambition, however, is always to be praised.