Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric ed. by Gregory Clark, S. Michael Halloran
Abstract
340 RHETORICA singularly persistent—and, one might add, singularly disturbing in some contexts—would be thoroughly vindicated. Whatever one's perspective, however, no one who is seriously inter ested in early modern culture, the history of pedagogy, or the history of ideas can afford to neglect this major contribution. Terence Cave Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric, eds. Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran's point of departure for this important collection of essays is Gerald Graff's claim in Professing the University that the collegiate oratorical culture in the first half of the nine teenth century linked college curricula with the "literary culture outside" (pp. 2-3). Yet as their introduction makes clear, "the culture outside dur ing the early years of the nineteenth century was not 'literary' in our sense of the term, but oratorical. Its most prized symbolic work was that of the orator" (p. 3). In fact, "literary" is just one species of expertise that began to develop during the course of the century. As Clark and Halloran write in their introduction, "both the theory of rhetoric taught in the schools and the practice of public discourse sustained outside them were transformed during the nineteenth century from those of the neoclassical oratorical cul ture into those of the professional culture we see characterizing both col leges and communities by its end" (pp. 5-6). Clark and Halloran use the Burkean concept of transformation to describe the changes in nineteenthcentury oratorical culture, and though the historiographical stance of the introduction and the collective practices of the nine essays are somewhat at odds, this collection makes a significant contribution to scholarship describing the move from a collective moral authority to an individual authority which became grounded, ultimately, on notions of expertise. Further, the volume contributes to studies of collective reading and writ ing practices by positing "oratorical culture" as a concept beside "audi ence," "community," "rhetorical culture," and "public" to describe where and how groups analyze and produce discourses collectively. In "Edward Everett and Neoclassical Oratory," Ronald Reid argues that Everett's successes and failures "illustrate the nation's changing Reviews 341 oratorical culture" (p. 29) because "Everett exemplifies the declining repu tation of neoclassical oratory" (p. 30). Reid contends that Everett's reputa tion declined because he could not adapt the neoclassical oratory in which he was trained at Harvard to the needs of Jacksonian democracy. Thus Reid's essay replaces Clark and Halloran's introductory trope of transfor mation with that of paradigm shift—"the old oratorical culture" versus "the new oratorical culture." The tensions among different conceptions of permanence and change within Reid's essay force us to question whether oratorical culture, or any culture, is not always undergoing transforma tions and how serviceable the notion of "oratorical culture" is for studying change. The contradictory tendencies inherent in belletristic rhetoric are taken on more directly by Gregory Clark in his essay "The Oratorical Pulpit of Timothy Dwight." Clark's argument centers on how Dwight combined Scottish conceptions of taste with the Evangelical Calvinism of his infa mous grandfather, Jonathan Edwards. The combination, which resulted in a distinctive theory and practice Clark calls "oratorical poetics," empha sized "the force of the language of sentiment" in service to "sustaining a common moral and political culture" (p. 58). Though Dwight's lectures on rhetoric are lost, Clark uses edited editions of the lecture notes of two of Dwight's students to reconstruct what Dwight probably taught. Instruction, of course, raises the question of native ability and of who was authorized to instruct whom. Again, Clark emphasizes the contradictions inherent in belletrism and Enlightenment rhetorics of all kinds, and articu lates how those contradictions asserted themselves in early nineteenthcentury America in particular. Russel Hirst's essay on Austin Phelps, Bartlett Professor of Oratory in Andover Theological Seminary from 1848 to 1879, is a rich historical study of how individualism and collectivism manifested themselves in the orato ry and homiletic theory of a less-known figure in the history of rhetoric. Valuable as it is both historically and for...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 1997-06-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.1997.0014
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