'Following Their Own Strides': Exemplars for the Twenty-first Century

• In Event: The Function of Examples in Public Discourse

Abstract

The concept of the “exemplar” began as a pedagogical tool to train students of rhetoric for judgment and action. An understanding of the exemplar as a model for living and acting in the world remained prominent until the European Enlightenment, when it lost favor as a rhetorical and literary device. In Western societies that privileged future progress over past tradition, the practice of imitating a human model implied slavish copying with no room for the expression of individuality and originality.
Contemporary U.S. public culture has inherited these prejudices against exemplarity as an explicit practice, yet educational institutions in the United States continue to rely upon human models as vehicles for instruction in collective identity and civic virtues. Implicit reliance on exemplars is especially evident in juvenile biographies published and widely circulated among young readers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These texts have adapted their subject matter for the pluralistic context of contemporary society by combining “universal” values with particular identities and experiences. In this paper, I draw upon biographies of African American women in order to illustrate how the practices of exemplarity shifted from explicit appeals to character to implicit celebrations of individual personality and social progress.

Author

• Sara VanderHaagen, Northwestern University