Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study by Ben McCorkle
Abstract
Reviews 417 many ways, but it confirmed for me the distance between Letters to Power and Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals. To be sure, I want all of what McCormick has to offer: I want the letter to help us rethink rhetorical history, and I want the weapons of the weak to supply learned advocacy. I'm unsure, however, that we need to Hold these projects in tandem. Dave Tell The University of Kansas Ben McCorkle, Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A CrossHistorical Study. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Uni versity Press, 2012, xiii, 207 pp.: black and white illustration. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-8093-3067-6 At a time when media platforms for content delivery proliferate so we can stay abreast of the latest iLife gadgetry; many scholars in both rhetorical studies and new media studies have been tracking the resurgence of interest in "delivery"-both in terms of the technical apparatuses that deliver content and in the rhetorical affordances of such platforms. Rhetoricians as diverse as James Porter and Kathleen Welch tout a new era of delivery, even the ascendancy of delivery as the rhetorical canon needing attention and study in the digital age. Such, at least, is the opening premise of rhet/comp and new media scholar Ben McCorkle's first book, Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Dis course: A Cross-Historical Study, which takes stock of this "revived" interest in delivery and notes how it has assumed a position as the "central element of the rhetorical process" (xi). But McCorke's interest in delivery is not just to help assert its current eminence; rather, he seeks to examine "the dynamic that has historically existed between rhetorical delivery and...technological shifts in our society" (2). More bluntly, he argues throughout the pages of this ambitious and wide-ranging book that "delivery's status can be read as an indicator of Western culture's attempts to come to terms with newly emerging technics, media forms, and technologies" (2). To demonstrate how delivery has been key to navigating shifts in literacy and the acquisition of new communications tools and platforms, McCorkle takes a broad view, examining over 2500 years of technological innovation in writing and composing across media. We move quickly through the shift from orality to alphabetic literacy in ancient Greece, to the Ramist rhetorics of the latel5th and early 16th centuries and the birth of European printing, to the belletristic and elocutionary movements of the 18th and 19th centuries and the rise in mass printing and literacy, to the advent of mass and digital media in the early and late 20th century respectively. Each historical moment becomes a "case study" of a technological innovation in writing or literacy that McCorkle invites us to re-imagine as an example of how the 418 RHETORICA canon of delivery comes to the fore to help navigate the transition. In the process, McCorke redefines delivery as a "technological discourse" in that "theories of delivery have historically helped to foster the cultural reception of emergent technologies of writing and communication by prescribing rules or by examining and privileging tendencies that cause old and new media forms to resemble one another" (5). Take the emergence of textual literacies in ancient Greece as an exam ple. Writing about Plato's dialogues, McCorkle notes how they "are not faithful transcriptions of oral events"; rather, any given dialogue comprises a "conceptual remediation of an oral discursive practice that functions by borrowing the generic conventions of a prior mode of communication, ac complishing the dual task of making writing appear more like speech and speech more like writing" (61). While the move to print literacies might have coincided with a declining overt interest in oral delivery, those modes of delivery were nonetheless recaptured in the new technology of writing. In this fashion, McCorkle's analysis avoids technological determinism by emphasizing the interplay of older modes of delivery with newer technolo gies. For instance, when analyzing the rise of the elocutionary movement with the spread of mass printing and increasing literacy in the nineteenth century, he describes how oral delivery and printing conventions began to resemble one another: "Yet another mechanism of remediation, the elocu tionary movements advocated...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 2014-09-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.2014.0006
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