Main Claims
At this point in his analysis of the Telecorp network, Spinuzzi recognizes the need to more clearly justify the use of both ANT and activity theory. Rather than attempt to force peace between them, he posits the two in a sort of theoretical celebrity death match. (jk)

I think a good metaphor to understand the basic differences between the two would be that AT could well describe the butterfly's wing causing a typhoon, where as ANT might be visualized more like watching raindrops hitting the surface of a pond- all the ripples blend into and change one another. I would label AT modernist and ANT postmodernist.

It seems that the two theories have more disagreements than commonalities (93-5), and that what we get from placing them together is presumably that ANT can gain from AT the attention to "developmental issues and issues of competence and cognition, it is in a much stronger position to explain how workers learn and how the develop resources" (93). ANT's benefits include the understanding that every point in a network changes every other, and that these relations are continually renegotiated, in any direction. ANT is less prescriptive.

Essentially, Spinuzzi agues that we must take each on its own merits- we cannot expect ANT to be a theory of learning and AT is not an ontology. Hence, they can mutually inform each other.

Assumptions about Method/ologies
It's difficult for me to pin this down because I know sooo many of the theories he's drawing on, but I've never seen them talking to each other in this way. For instance, the chain: Socrates, Machiavelli, pragmatism, and ANT. What!? I think in a way Spinuzzi is sort of embodying his commitments to both ANT and AT as he brings together all these actors and tries to understand the systems they construct and how they change each other.

Key Words
Activity theory, actor network theory, weaving and splicing, dialectics, symmetry-as-negotiation, boundary crossing, polycontextuality

Key Texts
Machiavelli, Latour, Callon, Engestrom, Deleuze and Guatarri

Questions/Challenges
For me, this stuff is really complicated-I wonder what kind of reaction people committed to either AT or ANT have had. I wonder if they bought his bridging of the two was effective. I bet not, the way he described the bitter criticism they have offered each other. Do you buy it?

What is the point of bringing the two together if they have such distinctions? Why not just propose that one adopt the principle it's missing from the other? Can the two be held together as units at the same time or do they become a network which change each other?

Main Claims

In this Rhetoric Review essay, Burton begins by paying tribute to feminist scholars in our field, such as Bizzell and Glenn, who have authorized or precedented projects like hers that "'remap rhetorical territory"' by revisiting rhetorical sites in history and re-placing women within their rightful contexts (336). That site for Burton is women in early British Methodism. She first traces John Wesley's founding of Methodism before giving space to the voices of women preachers and parishoners who he authorized as both leader of the faith and editor of its many publications that sought to convert followers away from the sinful practices, arts (i.e. novels), and rationalism of the time.

Burton sites that Wesley "not only functioned as the production authority for the methodist movement as a whole, he also individually authorized, encouraged, and nurtured the writing of individual women" (344). Hester Rogers is exemplified as among the most important of these, despite her resistance to actually preaching. Rather, she was in Wesley's view, one of the few men or women to have truly experienced the "union with God," though Burton also speculates-I think correctly- that part of Wesley's fascination with Rogers may have been due to the highly erotic description of that union (345, 347).

The essay concludes with a description of the "institutional darkness" into which women of Methodism were cast after Wesley's death, citing many examples of despicable private and official communications by men in the church who condemned women's preaching, as well as the drying up of publication of women's writings. In one of the best lines of the essay, Burton sadly reports that "it has taken the women of Methodism nearly 200 years to reclaim the rhetorical space they lost when John Wesley died" (351). Here, she postulates that the reason Hester Rogers' narratives were so widely published and distributed past the time of Wesley's death is that her story was heavily edited and she was essentially repackaged as as Methodist woman who reveled in he spirituality in the most private of literacy spaces, thereby comprising the ideal model for other Methodist women who were no longer offered the stage, mic, or page.

Assumptions about Method/ologies
In the conclusion of the essay, Burton again speaks directly to the project of feminist revisionist history, citing "Tim Miller's lead into the rhetoric of traditions, expanding the boundaries of the history of rhetoric from the centers of the privileged [male] intellectual power outward to include the outposts of cultural production like religious movements, in the process bringing to light persuasive women and recovering their texts. This recovery in itself is a feminist act (see Bizzell)" (351).

Key Words
Feminism, John Wesley, Methodism, rhetoric, women, public, private

Key Texts
Bizzell, Glenn, and other primary, secondary and archival texts from the history of Methodism

Questions/Challenges

I have a couple of related issues with this essay. The first is that I wonder why Burton didn't push a little harder against the portrait she paints of Wesley as savior to women, without further questioning his motives to amass followers. It surely wouldn't be the first time that a minority group was "used" for their numbers.

Secondly, I wonder to what extent she recognized the paternalist image she casts of Wesley. She seems to so fereverently celebrate this man who she describes with words like control, edit, authority, protect, nuture, etc., in relation to his engagement with women's texts. Is paternalism in itself a bad thing? What is the ill in relation to the good in this case? In other words, is the rhetorical space and ethos he helped open up for women more important than how tangled the motives, positioning, and intentions may have been?