Abstract

The essays collected by Karen Tracy, James P. McDaniel, and Bruce E. Gronbeck in The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy explore the rhetorical details and patterns of grassroots democracy as they emerged in one particular controversy in a Boulder, Colorado, school district in 2001. Attending to the specificities of the case is crucial to the editors' larger mission: to offer a radically localized alternative to the field's penchant for "grand theory," which, they suggest, too often neglects or ignores "the tenacious intrusions of the nonsovereign subject speaking to neighbors and the institutions of the village, town, and city" (37).The essays all explore what, for a while, became known in ..