Spiritual Literacy & articles

Burton, Vicki Tolar. Spiritual Literacies in John Wesley's Methodism.

Makes reference to New Literacy Scholars (Brandt, Cushman & Beverly Moss whom she claims are influenced by Foucault and Bakhtin).

Wesley influenced by a number of sources, like sects that preached in the street or rural areas, lending Wesley to field-preach. Another strong influence was extempore praying, which melded into sometimes part practiced and part extempore preaching. John Locke's emphasis on sensory support lead Wesley to value rhetoric of experience; here persuasion takes root more in the identification with the moral argument found in personal narrative.

Wesley succeeded in training ordinary people in practices essential to an egalitarian faith, teaching them to examine, value and account for their own experience and to trust 'the witness of [their] own spirit' (WJWJk 5:112). I would argue that believing in the witness of their own spirit and the value of their own witness gave people a reason to read and write a speak aloud of their lives, their souls, and their experience of God. How that happened is the subject or this book. (32)

Burton examines Susanna Annesley and Samuel Wesley as examples of the everyday experience that Methodists had with literacy, often including reading and writing about spiritual matters.  In Susanna's house, we see the Bible used as a way to learn reading through standard pedagogical practices at the time. One particular writing piece demonstrates Susanna's mimetic of the Socratic dialogue between herself and her daughter.

The submissive wife was easier to achieve in heroic couplet than in actual marriage (48).

Controversy seems to imbue both of these figures in terms of writing, as Susanna demonstrates a resistance to the image of honorable wife and Samuel was attracted to controversial writing albeit he rarely applied it to sermons. Burton implies that it is his mother that John developed a large sense of his spiritual literacy and personal development. Then she gives a list of literacy practices in the Wesley household.

Burton highlights that journal writing for spiritual growth created a genre accessible to people who can read and write, including women and the poor.

Through the composing, publishing, and circulating of life-writing (his own and that of other Methodists), Wesley and his followers developed a discourse community that disrupted class expectations by empowering marginalized people, such as the working class and women, to litersy and to public speech. (68)

Articles:
mentions how women spoke or exhorted about spirituality, although they did so by creating a pious ethos and a rhetorical situation in which they acknowledged women's limitations with public preaching. These women were often encouraged & sanctioned by Wesley using apostolic precedent.

So my intent is to complicate the feminist project and offer caution to feminist travelers whose maps may have been too quickly drawn, oversimplifying complex rhetorical situations. The complexity of the Methodist women's rhetorical situation invites scholars to survey rhetorical territory with care, noting the roles powerful men and institutions have played historically in nurturing, controlling, and silencing women's discourse. (352)

 In an article in College English, she says:

The main tasks of feminist literary criticism have been, accord- ing to Carla Kaplan, “1) exposing the mechanisms of cultural silencing, 2) revaluing dismissed or ignored women’s writing, and 3) recovering alternative forms of women’s creative expression” (25). Patricia Bizzell has identified three projects for feminists in rhetoric: 1) resistant readings by women and men of traditional rhetoric, 2) reclaiming rhetorical works by women and valuing them along with those by men, and 3) broadening the definition of rhetoric so that it is more inclusive, especially of the work of women (51).

 She is using material rhetoric to desribe the work of Hester Ann Rogers:

Drawing on the work of Jerome McGann (The Textual Condition) and Michel Fou- cault (“The Order of Discourse”), I define material rhetoric as the theoretical inves- tigation of discourse by examining how the rhetorical aims and functions of the initial text are changed by the processes of material production and distribution...The task of material rhetoric as a methodology is to penetrate and examine the layers of rhetorical accretion, reading each one closely not only for the nature of its own rhetoric but also for how it colors the ethos of the core text and what it, along with the modes of production and distribution, indicates about cultural formation in the larger discourse community. For the feminist critic, the focus is on discovering material practices as mechanisms for controlling women’s discourse and shaping representations of gender. (547-548)