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Vicki Tolar Burton (Ph.D. Auburn University) is Professor of English and Director of the Writing Intensive Curriculum at Oregon State University.
Burton specializes in the history of rhetoric, specifically 18th-19th century theories of British rhetoric, and also works in the area of Writing Across the Curriculum. She is the author of Spiritual Literacy in John Wesley's Methodism: Reading, Writing, and Speaking to Believe (Baylor Press, 2008) as well as articles in College English, College Composition and Communication, Computers and Composition, Rhetoric Review, and several edited collections.
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Vicki Tolar Burton
to Speak November 2
Vicki Tolar Burton will visit the Writing Program November 2 to lead an informal discussion session and give a public lecture.
Burton will lead an informal discussion session on Writing Across the Curriculum from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. in 239 H.B. Crouse. In this discussion session, she will share her experiences directing a very successful Writing Across the Curriculum Program at Oregon State University. She will be happy to take questions about her work as a WAC Director and the work of WAC in general. Graduate students, staff, faculty, and PWIs are invited to attend.
Her public lecture will be November 2, 2:15–3:45 in 500 Hall of Languages:
Taking Heaven by Story: Life Writing and the Rhetoric of Experience in the Methodist Archives
John Wesley is best remembered as the eighteenth-century Anglican priest who founded the Protestant movement called Methodism. What is little understood is the impact that Wesley and the methods of Methodism had on the rhetorical and literacy practices of the British laboring classes and women. By encouraging his followers, regardless of class or gender, to consume and create various genres of life writing and life speaking, Wesley democratized these genres and empowered his people with the rhetoric of experience. This talk will explore the rhetoric of experience in two locations: in the archival life writing of early British Methodists, and in the archival methods and experience of the researcher as she worked in the British Methodist Archives of the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. As Barbara L’Eplattenier has observed, “Methods make the invisible work of historical research visible.” But because historians of rhetoric rarely include a “methods” section in their work, each researcher is left to invent the archives and archival practices for themselves. This talk, then, seeks to make visible both the little-known life writing of the early Methodists and the missing “Methods” chapter of the speaker’s new book, Spiritual Literacy in John Wesley’s Methodism: Reading, Writing, and Speaking to Believe.
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