The Year of Frederick Douglass

2008 will be the year of Frederick Douglass, one of the most important nineteenth century rhetors in American history. Douglass is one of the rhetors at the center of my dissertation. I will be working on my prospectus this month and begin the actual dissertation project in the month of May. Therefore, I will thoroughly research any and all fragments of information about and related to Douglass. In honoring Douglass, I have decided to make this blog more of a “repository” of information about him in order to keep a memory of his work alive.

During the holidays, I visited the online Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress, which presents the full online text of Douglass’ first autobiography “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, which was published in 1845. African American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written an excellent introduction to Douglass’ narrative in “The Classic Slave Narratives” in the Signet Classics series.



Some articles that I’m currently reading are:

Bizzell, Patricia. "The 4th of July and the 22nd of December: The Function of Cultural Archives in Persuasion, as Shown by Frederick Douglass and William Apess" CCC 48.1 (Feb. 1997): 44-60.

Brewton, Vince. "'Bold Defiance Took Its Place'--'Respect' and Self-Making in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave" Mississipi Quarterly.

Brignano, Russell C. "Autobiographical Books by Black Americans: A Bibliography of Works Written Since the Civil War." Negro American Literature Forum 7.4 (Winter, 1973): 148-156.

Chaney, Michael A. "Picturing the Mother, Claiming Egypt: My Bondage and My Freedom as
Auto(bio)ethnography." African American Review 35.3 (Autumn 2001): 391-408.

Matlack, James. "The Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass." Phylon (1960-) 40.1 (1st Qtr. 1979): 15-28.

Shelby, Gary S. "An Eloquent Life: The Rhetoric of Frederick Douglass in Biographical Perspective." The Review of Communication 1 (2001): 93-6.

If time allows, I will share some of my notes in my research on Douglass; however, given my commitments to teaching and taking two graduate courses, I may just feature the links to any and all information on Douglass.

So, in sum, I am making this blog more academic this year and I might create a new and separate blog that relates to personal matters but I haven’t decided yet. My current goal in this blog is to compile all sources on Douglass as I continue my research on memory. Therefore, in my research and writing, I am looking at the historical relationship between memory, autobiography, and rhetoric.