ABSTRACT
The world she sang and singing made. Once this verse of Wallace Stevens’s was sufficient to reassure me that expression and creation and order could coincide. This mellifluous image of rhetoric recapitulates the ancient conception of its efficacy. Then rhetoric was not considered to be mere social exhortation. Discourse that shaped the polis was thought to be the expression of both a divine order of the universe as well as the full realization of human possibility. As the song of Stevens’s singer defines the boundaries of time, of space, and of meaning, it too appears to extend rhetoric’s promise of coherence. Once I identified with the singer. Now I am not so sure. Then I was more comfortable with the voice of feminist theory and pedagogy than I am now. Then I was more comfortable with voice as a metaphor for feminist theory and pedagogy than I am now. Now I stand on the beach with the others watching her, striding there, on the boundary of the world that she sang, and singing made.
