Tough Babies or Anger in the Superior Position

Abstract

Tn this article, I use the label baby, adapted from Adorno, to designate a specific complex of rhetorical gestures that forms a coherent authorial image-a rhetorical ethos or persona. In Hudson Review, Joseph Epstein displays some of the rhetorical characteristics of the tough baby a polemical commentary against the left academy, where he speaks disparagingly of academic feminists as angry. The feminists roll on, perpetually angry, making perfectly comprehensible the joke about the couple their West Side Manhattan apartment who, having been twice robbed, determine to protect themselves, he wanting to get a revolver, she a pit bull, and so they agree to compromise and instead get a feminist (28). Epstein presupposes and relies on our agreed-upon understanding of what may count as (unjustified, unreasoning) textual anger and what may count as humor when he provokes all feminists in general without closely examining any arguments in specific. By equating feminists with revolvers or pit bulls, his anecdote represents feminists as pure instruments of attack-as people who are angry by nature, rather than as thinking subjects who have decided to become angry (albeit at targets that