Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres.

• Author: Asen, Robert
• Position: Book Reviews

Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres. By Rosa A. Eberly. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000; PP. xvii + 232. $39.95; paper $14.95.

On the first page of Citizen Critics, Rosa Eberly informs the reader that her study proceeds from the "resilient conviction" that "cultural texts have some role to play in reinvigorating democratic practice." In the pages that follow, Eberly clearly demonstrates this conviction as she maps public debates prompted by the publication of four controversial novels: James Joyce's Ulysses, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, and Andrea Dworkin's Mewy. Analyzing public debates that did not address literary merit exclusively but instead broached such topics as free expression, sexuality, identity formation, and materialism, Eberly affirms the ability of readers to transform themselves into rhetors and debate matters concerning them as citizens.

Eberly defines citizen critics as persons who produce "discourses about issues of common concern from an ethos of citizen first and foremost--not as expert or spokesperson for a workplace or as member of a club or organization" (1). Eberly examines the debates of citizen critics as they emerge in what she identifies as "literary public spheres": "discursive spaces in which private people can come together in public, bracket some of their differences, and invent common interests by arguing in speech or writing about literary and cultural texts" (9). This conceptual definition draws upon Habermas's history of the bourgeois public sphere recounted in Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. In this book, Habermas notes the emergence of a public sphere in the world of letters that facilitated the formation of a bourgeois subjectivity subsequently oriented to political debate.

The rhetorical concept of topoi organizes Eberly's analysis. Treating topoi as inventional resources that produce recurring structures of argument, Eberly identifies significant topoi employed by participants in each of her case studies. This framework comports with Eberly's commitment to reinvigorate public deliberation by highlighting the productive capacity of rhetoric. Eberly proposes a metaphorical understanding of topoi that adopts an "agricultural trope." When employed by arguers, topoi appear as "organic" and "disclose argument from the common ground up." "Rhetorical topoi," Eberly writes, "are the bioregions of discourse" (6). Emphasizing invention...