Rhetoric Review

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January 2008

  1. Making Style Conscious: A Response to Paul Butler's “Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies”
    Abstract

    In his 2007 Rhetoric Review article "Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies," Paul Butler explains that while style seems to have vanished from the field of rhetoric and composition since the 1980s, it has actually been appropriated by areas within our discipline including genre theory, rhetorical analysis, personal writing, and even race, class, gender, and difference studies. Using Janice Lauer's metaphor of the "diaspora" of composition studies to guide his analysis, Butler examines the ways that style, like invention, has "migrated" in the field. he claims that style is both absent and ubiquitous in our scholarship. Because "style in its dispersed form is often not called style but instead is named something else within the field," it remains central to our field although its presence is masked (5). That is, while it seems as though style is simultaneously absent and present in our discipline, the concept of style has remained present and it is the name style that is now absent. Therefore, style's place within composition studies is not paradoxical at all. "Style" appears to have gradually separated from the concept with which it was associated and has taken on other names that better fit the trends and developments of our discipline.

    doi:10.1080/07350190701738866
  2. The Seduction of Samuel Butler: Rhetorical Agency and the Art of Response
    Abstract

    Using the Victorian writer Samuel Butler's response to Darwin's Origin of Species as an example, I argue for a method of reading characterized by the process of fascination and seduction. Such an antimethodical method not only requires a different kind of agency on the part of the reader, but it also resituates rhetoric as an art of response to the dynamic flux of the communicating world.

    doi:10.1080/07350190701738825

September 2007

  1. Author Index for Volume 26
    doi:10.1080/07350190701638850

June 2007

  1. Burke and War: Rhetoricizing the Theory of Dramatism
    Abstract

    While rhetoricians are familiar with Kenneth Burke's epigram Ad bellum purificandum, little attention has been paid to why the “purification of war” would be Burke's purpose in A Grammar of Motives. Yet the Grammar, with its theory of dramatism, was written throughout a conflict Burke called “the mightiest war the human race will ever experience.” This article recovers Burke's wartime writings and explores the impact of World War II on his intellectual development. Arguing that Burke's dialectical project was conceived as a specific, hortatory response to the absolutism of total war, it recontextualizes Burkean themes of ambiguity, transcendence, dialectic, and action as it “rhetoricizes” dramatism, placing it within its original cultural/material conversational parlor.

    doi:10.1080/07350190701419848
  2. Lingua Esoterica Obnox (ad nauseum); or, The Critics' and Editors' Snow-Jobs?
    Abstract

    From the editor: When you enter the parlor of “unending conversation” that Kenneth Burke dramatizes in Philosophy of Literary Form, you “listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught th...

    doi:10.1080/07350190701419871

January 2007

  1. Affirmative Reaction: Kennedy, Nixon, King, and the Evolution of Color-Blind Rhetoric
    Abstract

    Abstract This essay blends critical race theory and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's sociological theory of color-blind racism to interrogate color-blind rhetoric. It uses the Kennedy–Nixon Presidential Debates as a site that, while illustrating the widely presumed duplicitous nature of political discourse, paradoxically romanticizes and concretizes the concepts of freedom and equality as race-neutral categories. Tracing the term "color blindness" to the Plessy Versus Ferguson case, the paper exposes the rhetorical and material limitations of legal language, from the Brown Versus the Board of Education decision to current controversies surrounding affirmative action, which advocate race neutrality rather than progressive color consciousness. Notes 1I appreciate Lorien Goodman, Steven Mailloux, Catherine Prendergast, Jacqueline Jones-Royster, and Victor Villanueva for making comments on a rough draft of this essay. I wish to especially acknowledge RR reviewers Keith Miller and Barbara Warnick for their insightful suggestions. 2Though it has been well documented that many blacks switched allegiance from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party with Franklin Roosevelt's presidency, many others remained loyal to the GOP. Of particular note here were the two preconvention meetings that the NAACP sponsored in 1960, one in Los Angeles for the Democrats and the other in Chicago for the Republicans. Of the combined 14,500 who attended these meetings, 7,500 attended the pre-Republican convention. According to Roy Wilkins, the NAACP was determined to remain nonpartisan. Aside from this, several prominent African Americans, according to Taylor Branch, wanted Democrats other than Kennedy to receive the presidential nomination. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, for example, initially supported Lyndon Johnson. Baseball great Jackie Robinson, a Republican, supported Democrat Hubert Humphrey during the primaries. Robinson said he would support Nixon if Kennedy were nominated, and Powell, as the third Kennedy-Nixon Debate reveals, eventually made some outlandish statements in support of the Democratic frontrunner. Powell's support, if not these statements themselves, may be attributable to the bribe Powell sought and received from the Kennedy camp. See The Crisis, August-September issue of 1960 and Branch's critically acclaimed Parting the Waters. 3While Nixon alludes to Lincoln five times in his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination in July 1960, he does not invoke his name at all during the four debates. Kennedy alluded to Lincoln twice during his acceptance speech and four times during the debates. Though both men referred to how slavery supposedly fueled Lincoln's moral fervor for the Union's cause, all of the references gloss over the inequities that African Americans were experiencing during the 1960s, and only one of these references, ironically, identifies their race. Equally important, domestic freedom became a synecdoche for America's international agenda. Lincoln's larger-than-life status as a harbinger of freedom for blacks has been well researched and critiqued. For a fairly recent, provocative analysis, see Lerone Bennett's Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream. 4The Republican and Democratic respective civil rights planks of 1960 are worthy of rhetorical analysis aside from this study. As might be expected, both parties appealed to the spiritual, legal, and moral implications for civil rights that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence supposedly suggest. More surprisingly, each plank condemns racial discrimination as a practice that extends beyond southern borders. Both planks also appeal to the civil rights acts of 1957 and 1960 as the foundation and impetus for racial progress. While the Democratic platform set a deadline of 1963 (an acknowledged link to the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation) to comply with the Brown decision, the Republican platform rejects this specific timetable, believing that it would actually encourage delays in school desegregation. Under proposals to ensure voting enfranchisement, the Republican platform proposes that "completion of six primary grades in a state accredited school is conclusive evidence of literacy for voting purposes." In contrast, the Democratic platform promises to "support whatever action is necessary to eliminate literacy tests and the payment of poll taxes as requirements for voting." These passages underscore a fascinating ironic twist, for it was the Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) who started and protected literacy tests as one way of disenfranchising black voters; yet the Republican proposal could be viewed as an appeasement to the Southern Democrats' constituency. 5The widely recognized birth date for the Sit-in Movement is February 1, 1960. Only nine days later, according to Lerone Bennett, "the movement had spread to fifteen Southern cities in five states." By March 22, "more than one thousand blacks had been arrested in sit-in demonstrations." No wonder Nixon felt compelled to say a word about this movement. Curiously, he did not say more. More curiously, Kennedy says nothing on this topic during the debates. 6Kennedy admits during this debate that he borrows the phrase "moral leader" from Franklin Roosevelt. The Democratic Platform also uses the expression. In reality, Kennedy, according to Mary Dudziak among others, would not become fully convinced about civil rights until after the Birmingham campaign of April and May 1963, and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in September would transform him into a full-fledged moral leader. 7At the close of the fourth debate, Nixon asserted that with regard to "civil rights," the Republican Party had made "more progress in the past 8 years than in the whole 80 years before." The Republican platform, from which Nixon lifts this statement almost verbatim, specifies what "progress" Nixon may be alluding to, namely the civil rights legislation passed in 1957 and 1960. 8King had little tolerance for permutations of "liberalism" that were not radically progressive on the issue of racial justice. Two stellar examples of this posture are his speeches, "Give Us the Ballot," delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1957, and the other, "The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness," delivered at the Golden Anniversary Conference of the National Urban League in 1960. Both speeches contain sections that challenge Northern liberals to examine their motives behind fears about achieving racial justice. See The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., James M. Washington, editor. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid G. Holmes David G. Holmes is Associate Professor of English and Blanche E. Seaver Professor in Hu-manities at Pepperdine University, where he teaches courses in rhetoric, composition, the civil rights movement, and the Harlem Renaissance. His most recent essays have appeared in College English and in the anthology Calling Cards. His research interests include epistemologies and rhetorics of racism, theories of ethos, and the civil rights movement mass meetings.

    doi:10.1080/07350190709336684

October 2006

  1. Symposium: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Rhetorical Criticism
    doi:10.1207/s15327981rr2504_1

July 2006

  1. Activist Rhetorics and the Struggle for Meaning: The Case of "Sustainability" in the Reticulate Public Sphere
    Abstract

    Mainstream and movement rhetorics interact as political actors and struggle to control meaning in ways that are not evident from single-site analysis. This article examines how three speakers in southern Arizona give meaning to "sustainable ranching." The vir bonus is used to understand meanings developed in face-to-face deliberative forums. Social movement framing theory, briefly reviewed, is used to analyze activist rhetoric and limits of the vir bonus model. Finally, Gerard Hauser's "reticulate public sphere" is used to account for invention as a dialogic response to rhetorics from multiple sites.

    doi:10.1207/s15327981rr2503_4

October 2005

  1. Symposium: Whiteness Studies
    Abstract

    This essay discusses the emergence of whiteness studies in the study of English rhetoric and composition in the U.S. History of whiteness studies; Function and definition of whiteness in the U.S.; Role of race in different U.S. cultural logics; Relationship of whiteness studies with teaching composition.

    doi:10.1207/s15327981rr2404_1

July 2005

  1. The Art of Essaying
    Abstract

    What follows is an essay-as-speech, offered as a direct response to a weekend of freewriting at Bard College enacted under the direction of skilled practitioners of Peter Elbow's principles of writing and thinking. Elbow, in attendance, gave the keynote address. This essay-as-speech both critiques the practices enacted at Bard and offers a very different way of teaching writing, one that honors the epistemological underpinnings of Elbow's work while outlining a pedagogy founded on constraints and images.

    doi:10.1207/s15327981rr2403_5

April 2005

  1. The Rhetoric of the End Comment
    Abstract

    In recent years a number of studies have limned the generic features of the instructor end comment on student texts. This study complements these large-scale analyses by examining from a rhetorical perspective two end comments, written by a first-year composition instructor, and by evaluating how the comments reflect and resist elements of two schemes that classify teacher response.

    doi:10.1207/s15327981rr2402_5

January 2004

  1. Plato's Denunciation of Rhetoric in the Phaedrus
    Abstract

    Contrary to a prevailing view within rhetoric and composition circles that finds a positive view of rhetoric in the Phaedrus, I contend that Plato mockingly denounces rhetoric in the Phaedrus. To support this claim, I argue that the Phaedrus is an unmistakable response to Isocrates' Against the Sophists and needs to be understood as part of this dynamic dialogue and that in the Phaedrus Plato is distinguishing his philosophical method, as he conceives it, from Isocrates' pseudo-philosophical method (as conceived by Plato). I provide parallels between Against the Sophists and the Phaedrus and then explain the distinction between Isocrates' and Plato's respective conceptions of what the philosopher is and should do and between each writer's philosophical method.

    doi:10.1207/s15327981rr2301_2

January 2003

  1. On Argument, What Some Call "Self-Writing," and Trying To See the Back Side of One's Own Eyeballs
    Abstract

    (Editor's Note: Jim W Corder submitted the following essay to Rhetoric Review in 1996. The essay was accepted for publication but never published because of uncompleted correspondence and manuscript preparation. We decided to typeset and format this essay in order to bring to readers this first posthumous Corder essay, convinced that it is an important addition to his rhetorical canon. Introducing the essay is a contextual note by Keith D. Miller, who like this editor, is a former graduate student of Corder's.)

    doi:10.1207/s15327981rr2201_3

October 2001

  1. The Stasis in Counter-Statement: "Applications of the Terminology" as Attempted Reconciliation of the Formal and the Rhetorical
    Abstract

    This early letter plainly embodies Burke's conflicting views about the constituents of the aesthetic experience. Is the delight of literature a hysteric result of the work's overlap with an audience's ideology-the nodus of beliefs and judgments in a work? Or is the pleasure the result of a technical response to the formal qualities of art? The answer in the letter to Cowley suggests that the enjoyment is an unproblematic result of both the ideological and the technical, the rhetorical and the formal. But the incipient contradiction contained even in this early and tentative resolution seems to haunt Burke throughout his career, most clearly ghosted in his first book of criticism, Counter-Statement.1 To announce that this wrinkle can be found in many of the pages of Counter-Statement probably trespasses on the platitudinous. From the earliest reviews of the book, such as that of Granville Hicks in the 2 December 1931 issue of The New Republic, to its most contemporary explication, such as Jack Selzer's article in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, the unsettling tension . . . between the aesthetic and the social is given place and sometimes even described as the animating principle of the book (Selzer 37). As Selzer notes, most of the major critics of Granville Hicks, Isidor Schneider, Robert Penn Warren, Armin Paul Frank, Paul Jay, Grieg E. Henderson, William H. Rueckert, and Frank Lentricchia, and even Burke himself note the internally-contradictory character of Counter-Statement, each with his own manner of reconciling, laying bare, or judging the discordant timber (45-46). What is absent in the criti-

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2001.9683387

May 2001

  1. Index to Volumes 15-19
    doi:10.1207/s15327981rr201&2_8

September 2000

  1. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350190009359272

March 2000

  1. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350190009359266

September 1999

  1. Cynic rhetoric: The ethics and tactics of resistance
    Abstract

    Cynicism is that offers the contemporary reader creative links with an ethical past as well as important legacies of rhetorical tactics.' In particular, a rereading of the Cynics provides an important but overlooked history that harbors some strategic ethical positions for rhetoric.2 In the Cynics we find the possibilities of rhetorical resistance as well as places from which speakers and writers who remain at the margins can launch critique, those minority voices that get silenced under the monolith of majority conversation. This is an important tradition of Cynic rhetoric; it operates from the margins, taking its model from their forced or chosen exile. It foregrounds the political by calling attention to the inequity in both speech and discursive situations. Cynic tactics are impolite and disruptive, for if you are a minority, you have to shout to be heard (Hodge and Mansfield 199). This disperses the centrality of logic in philosophy and by operating by a logic of its own, one that uses parody and satire to question accepted norms (Branham). Cynic uses the body and accounts for desire in constructing its ethics; it is, as Edward P. J. Corbett describes, a closed fist that is at once persuasive and potentially coercive in its ethos of action (99). What distinguishes Cynic from other, more authorized rhetorics is its physicality, its emphasis on the equation of principle, discourse and action, and its blatant disregard for community standards of decorum. The Cynic rhetoric of confrontation is a counterstatement to the of Aristotle that presuppos[es] the 'goods' of order, civility, reason, decorum, and civil... law (Scott and Smith 7). The Cynic rejects decorum by adopting incivility as a means of speaking out on issues of social and political importance to often unwilling audiences. Cynic stages kairotic moments when dissensus, rather than consensus, becomes the goal of the speaker in imploring an audience to self-scrutiny and action. The implications of this counterstatement within the rhetorical are evident in the simple fact that little is known-or left-of the Cynics,3 unless we look to the ways in which incivility and interruption are and have become an effective discursive means to an ethical or political end. Therefore, to understand the Cynics' significance, we need to suspend our support for a of reason and decorum and lend an ear to the rhetorical possibilities of noise.

    doi:10.1080/07350199909359254
  2. Citation systems: A response to Robert J. Connors
    doi:10.1080/07350199909359263
  3. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350199909359252

March 1999

  1. Erratum
    doi:10.1080/07350199909359243
  2. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350199909359241

September 1998

  1. Edward P.J. Corbett, in memoriam
    doi:10.1080/07350199809359235
  2. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350199809359229
  3. Re‐review
    Abstract

    Richard E. Young, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike. Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970. Pp. xxi + 383. Eric A. Havelock. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard UP, 1963. Preface to Plato, Part One: “The Image Thinkers”; Preface to Plato, Part Two: “The Necessity of Platonism”; Post‐Preface to Plato: A Re‐Review of Havelock's Scholarship

    doi:10.1080/07350199809359239

March 1998

  1. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350199809389091
  2. The return of the addressed: Rhetoric, reading, and resonance
    Abstract

    In past several decades, much talk about orality and literacy has appeared in academic circles. Havelock (Preface to Plato and The Muse Learns to Write), Ong (The Presence of Word, Orality and Literacy), Jamieson (Eloquence in an Electronic Age) and McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galaxy) write of changes in both and consciousness associated with either or modality of communication. They write of distinctions between oral culture and oral state of mind, and literate culture and literate state of mind. However, distinction between orality and literacy itself is never directly called into question. The categories have been set and subsequent scholarly discourses pivot on these platforms. I offer an alternative discourse and argue that categories of orality and literacy are not as definitive as Havelock, Ong, Jamieson, and McLuhan would have us believe. While I agree that shifts in modalities of discourse have occurred from tales of Homer to texts of Hegel to technological trends of Hollywood, human experience does not sustain these demarcations. The sensating body experiences a simultaneity of sound, vision, and tactility, even if a particular discursive modality favors speech, print, or electronic pixels. The orality-literacy schism does not acknowledge this simultaneity. In fact, it further compartmentalizes human experience by separating it into and Havelock writes that early Greek mentality, because it was oral, was not capable of or thought (xi), and it was not until alphabetization that eye supplanted ear as chief organ (vii). For Havelock, the and sensual is coupled with oral culture while the and metaphysical is coupled with literate culture. I argue in this paper that orality-literacy dichotomy is fallacious and that notions of either being concrete or being abstract cannot be anchored in it. Furthermore, I argue that it is rhetorical capability of language, not its capacity for production or literal production, that generates either the concrete or the abstract. More specifically, I explore notion that language, whether produced orally through mouth or literally through mind will tend to be more or less euphonic, more or less dramatistic, or more or less imagistic. In short, degrees of euphony, drama, and image will be in direct proportion to degree of rhetoricity in any given discourse. With this

    doi:10.1080/07350199809389094

September 1997

  1. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350199709389076
  2. Aristotle'srhetoric,dialogism, and contemporary research in composition
    Abstract

    This essay had its origin in my reaction to the claim, repeated in a number of essays by prominent scholars in composition, that Aristotle's theory of rhetoric was a dialogic one.' My response to such claims was and remains one of disbelief. As I examined the essays in which this view was advanced, I came to see that the evidence in support of it depended on related interpretations of Aristotle's concept of the enthymeme advanced by Lloyd Bitzer and John Gage. But in my view whether or not one accepts this controversial understanding of the enthymeme, it does not license a reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric as genuinely dialogic. As I reflected on what I now regarded as the immediate cause of a misinterpretation of Aristotle's Rhetoric (the misappropriation of a controversial interpretation of the enthymeme), I realized that this case had implications for how we, in rhetoric and composition, relate to and use our past. To establish my argument, I must show that important scholars in composition have claimed or implied that the theory Aristotle advances in the Rhetoric is dialogic, that this claim is obviously (not merely possibly) false, and that the evidence compositionists cite in support is derived not from the Rhetoric but depends on a misunderstanding of the implications of Bitzer' s and Gage's interpretations of the enthymeme. Then, having made this argument, I will trace what I regard as more general methodological implications of the misreading of the Rhetoric. Arguments that Aristotle's theory of rhetoric is dialogic have been advanced by Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa S. Ede, John T. Gage, Gregory Clark, and Richard Leo Enos and Janice Lauer. In each case the claim is advanced in support of a more general effort to reconcile Aristotle' s theory with modem perspectives on rhetoric. The burden of Lunsford and Ede's thesis, as reflected in their title, On Distinctions between Classical and Modem Rhetoric, is to prove that Aristotelian rhetoric is closer in its theoretical assumptions to modern rhetoric than is generally thought. The view that Aristotle's theory is monologic is among the mistakes they address. They maintain that despite what we have thought in the past, Aristotle' s understanding of the rhetorical transaction is dialogic: Far from being 'one way,' 'manipulative' or 'monologic,' Aristotle' s [presentation of] rhetoric provides a complete description of the dynamic interaction between rhetor and audience, interaction mediated by language, the goal of which is not a narrow persuasion but an interactive means of discovering meaning through

    doi:10.1080/07350199709389079

March 1997

  1. Encouraging civic participation among first‐year writing students; or, why composition class should be more like a bowling team
    Abstract

    Last summer, I wrote a letter to editor of my local newspaper and coauthored a response to George Will's now-infamous assault on college writing instructional Big deal? Yes. And here's why: Like many composition instructors, I've been preoccupied for some time with what S. Michael Halloran once called the need for a revival of public discourse (246) and what 1995 Conference on College Composition and Communication called literacies, technologies, responsibilities. My response to these preoccupations has always been passive: I figured that I could best promote responsible practice of public literacies by enhancing my students' awareness of-and thus, I thought, their stake in-public issues. Unsure of whether I was actually accomplishing this, though, I decided to investigate whether there were indeed connections between students' classroom-initiated participation in literate behavior (e.g., writing, reading, and talking about issues) and their self-initiated participation in civic behavior, such as voting and writing letters to editor. To do so, I looked closely at several current issues-type writing textbooks and selected one that appeared to share my goals; I designed an attitudinal survey and a sequence of assignments; and I assembled a file of student writing samples. I'll discuss results of my study in more detail later in this essay, but for now, let me suggest that writing-about-issues texts that I examined (including America Now, one I eventually chose) do not particularly encourage students' participation in world beyond classroom, and may unwittingly repress it. And while this came as a great surprise to me, my students seemed aware of profound difference between writing about issues in class and acting on them (in writing or otherwise) outside of class. For example, in response to some end-of-semester assessment questions about America Now, one young woman, Laura G., wrote, Well, I'm not going to go join [G]reenpeace or storm White House or anything but, yes, reading some of these chapters really did [a]ffect my thinking. . . . Reading these articles caused me to speak out at times when I would have normally remained silent. I don't want to underestimate move from silence to speaking out, but I

    doi:10.1080/07350199709359225

September 1996

  1. Erratum
    doi:10.1080/07350199609359203

March 1996

  1. Edward Schiappa's reading of the sophists1
    Abstract

    Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I would like to thank Kathleen Welch and Richard Leo Enos, RR peer revieweis for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

    doi:10.1080/07350199609389064
  2. Some of my best friends are neosophists: A response to Scott Consigny
    Abstract

    has misunderstood me, I shall maintain, and the misunderstanding matters for our collective understanding of antifoundationalism and the genre of writing known as history. In this reply I begin with claims that are intended to challenge SC's reading of my work: First, I am an antifoundationalist. Second, I do not oppose neosophistic scholarship. Third, SC's reading of my work is overly reductionist. Then, in conclusion, I want to suggest that SC's account of antifoundationalism is problematic and that a more pragmatic version of antifoundationalism would be more consistent with SC's presuppositions and politically more useful.1 I do not understand why SC believes I am a foundationalist, since I have identified repeatedly my theoretical preferences for antifoundationalist social constructionism. SC simply proclaims, ex cathedra, that Poulakos, Crowley, Vitanza, Welch, and Jarratt are antifoundationalists, and Havelock, Kerferd, de Romilly, Cole, and I are foundationalists. Though I would be honored to be counted as part of either group, I do not understand why I am in the group that is supposed to move to the back of the bus. Why are these scholars (all of whom have published in classics journals) to be branded foundationalist? Just because they do history and work with original Greek texts? And, even if these scholars are (gasp!) foundationalists, precisely how does that make their work any less valuable?

    doi:10.1080/07350199609389065
  3. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350199609389062

September 1995

  1. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350199509389048

September 1994

  1. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350199409359171

March 1994

  1. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350199409389041
  2. Preface
    doi:10.1080/07350199409389042

September 1993

  1. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350199309389023

March 1993

  1. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350199309389005

September 1992

  1. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350199209388982
  2. Poststructuralism, cultural studies, and the composition classroom: Postmodern theory in practice
    Abstract

    The uses of postmodern theory in rhetoric and composition studies have been the object of considerable abuse of late. Figures of some repute in the field-the likes of Maxine Hairston and Peter Elbow-as well as anonymous voices from the Burkean Parlor section of Rhetoric Review-most recently, TS, graduate student, and KF, voice speaking for a general English teacher audience (192)-have joined the chorus of protest. The charges have included willful obscurity, selfindulgence, elitism, pomposity, intellectual impoverishment, and host of related offenses. Although my name usually appears among the accused, I am sympathetic with those undergoing the difficulties of the first encounter with this discussion. (I exclude Professor Hairston in her irresponsible charge that its recent contributors in College English are low-risk Marxists who write very badly [695] and who should be banned from NCTE publications.) I experienced the same frustration when I first encountered the different but closely related language of rhetoric and composition studies some fifteen years ago. I wondered, for example, if I would ever grasp the complexities of Aristotle or Quintilian or Kenneth Burke or I. A. Richards, not to mention the new language of the writing process. A bit later I was introduced to French poststructuralism, and once again I found myself wandering in strange seas, and this time alone. In reading rhetoric, after all, I had the benefit of numerous commentators to help me along-the work of Kinneavy and Lauer and Corbett and Emig, for example. In reading Foucault and Derrida in the late seventies, on the other hand, I was largely on my own since the commentaries were as difficult as the originals, and those few that were readable were often (as even I could see) wrong. Nonetheless, with the help of informal reading groups made up of colleagues and students, I persisted in my efforts to come to terms with this difficult body of thought. I was then, as now, convinced that both rhetorical studies and postmodern speculation offered strikingly convergent and remarkably compelling visions for conducting my life as teacher and citizen. It is clear to me that rhetoric and composition studies has arrived as serious field of study because it has taken into account the best that has been thought and said about its concerns from the past and the present, and I have found that postmodern work in historical and contemporary rhetorical theory has done much to further this effort.

    doi:10.1080/07350199209388984
  3. Discourses of separation: The relation between rhetoric and poetics in the work of Hoyt Hudson and Herbert Wichelns
    Abstract

    In his 1925 article Literary Criticism of Oratory, Herbert Wichelns, a scholar of rhetoric at Cornell, observed that, with respect to literary study, oratory had become either an outcast or a poor (181). Oratory's falling out of favor indicated to Wichelns that perceptions of discourse had been radically transformed. Intimating what the change might consist of, he wrote, [i]nvolved in it is some shift in the conception of oratory or of literature, or of both; nor can these conceptions have changed except in response to the of which oratory, as well as literature, is part (181). Scholars writing after Wichelns have frequently reported on the ill fate of oratory-and, more broadly, of rhetoric as the practice and study of some kinds of written as well as oral discourse-in American colleges. How had colleges by 1925 come to demote rhetoric to a position beneath literary critical study and literary works of fiction, drama, and poetry? As Wichelns suggested, rhetoric and literature shared some life, and our elaboration of their common history and context can help us account for rhetoric's condition. Some scholars have argued that the study and status of rhetoric in the college curriculum diminished as a strong interest in literature emerged (e.g., Stewart 119-21; Connors, Ede, and Lunsford 5-7; Halloran 176). Exploring the role of the belletristic tradition in rhetoric and of representative individuals such as C. S. Baldwin and the men who held the position of Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard, the work of these scholars offers insight into the interrelations among rhetoric and literature during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians neither of English nor of speech as academic disciplines, however, have traced the relation between rhetoric and literature as it was construed by scholars who were active during this time. The concomitant rise of literary study and fall of rhetoric suggest that historical perceptions of the relation between literary and rhetorical discourse figure in the story of rhetoric's demise. Part of what we might call the life of rhetoric and of literature is the relation that members of the profession perceived between them. As with contemporary discussions on the issue in such texts as Jane Tompkins' Reader in History and Steven Mailloux's Rhetorical Power, we might guess that turn-of-the-century scholars posited rela-

    doi:10.1080/07350199209388991

March 1992

  1. Response to “Sophistic Rhetoric: Oasis or Mirage?”
    doi:10.1080/07350199209388981
  2. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350199209388964
  3. The case for collaborative scholarship in rhetoric and composition1
    Abstract

    Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes First, we owe much to Gesa Kirsch and Patricia Sullivan for motivating us to write this paper. They may never fully realize how much they did. Second, we are grateful for the assistance of all the people—both living and dead—whom we list in the references. Third, we owe much to Jim Corder, who helped us to see that academic papers and personal essays are more alike than we know. Fourth, we thank all of the colleagues who have collaborated with us on books and articles: Gene L. Piche, Mike Graves, Wayne Slater, Ann Duin, Donna Johnson, Maureen Roen (two children, their journals, and a literary map), Patricia Hazeltine, Nicholas Karolides, Deborah Grunloh, Stuart Brown, Bob Mittan, Margaret Fleming, R. J. Willey, Kate Mangelsdorf, Vicki Taylor, Zita Ingham, Mike Rogers, Gesa Kirsch, Diane Clymer, Jan Swearingen, Marvin Diogenes, Clyde Moneyhun, Vicki Small, and Jim Nesci. Finally, we thank Theresa Enos and two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

    doi:10.1080/07350199209388973

September 1991

  1. Review essays
    Abstract

    Andrea A. Lunsford, Helene Moglen, and James Slevin, eds., The Future of Doctoral Studies in English. New York: Modern Language Association, 1989. xii + 179 pages. Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America. New York: Routledge, 1990. xi + 212 pages. Bernard Bergonzi, Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. viii + 240 pages. Reed Way Dasenbrock, ed. Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 263 pages. John D. Schaeffer, Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990. 181 pages. $25.75. Donald A. Daiker and Max Morenberg, eds. The Writing Teacher as Researcher: Essays in the Theory and Practice of Class‐Based Research. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1990. xi + 357 pages. $19.50. Alice Glarden Brand, The Psychology of Writing: The Affective Experience. Foreword by Peter Elbow. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. 259 pages.

    doi:10.1080/07350199109388959
  2. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350199109388943

March 1991

  1. The preface as illumination: The curious (if not tricky) case of John C. Van Dyke'sThe Desert
    doi:10.1080/07350199109388937
  2. Editorial board
    doi:10.1080/07350199109388928