Abstract

My purpose today is to frame, quite briefly, the somewhat different critical assumptions found in literacy and communication studies and then to illustrate the latter perspective with a discussion of rhetoric and the media. Before doing so, however, I want to express my deep appreciation for having been asked to address you today. We are cousins, you and I, for we share a common ancestry. A bit under eighty years ago, seventeen stalwart professors of public speaking walked out of the third annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English (which was itself formed in reaction to the MLA) and fashioned what would later become the main professional organization in Communication Studies in the United States. They did so because they felt that rhetoric done orally had a unique character, that that character manifested itself in distinctive conceptual and behavioral ways, and that it took a special pedagogy to tease spoken eloquence out of college sophomores. I mention these historical matters not in the spirit of academic chauvinism but because these facts made a difference in the professional options available to me. Nevertheless, I confess a certain ambivalence when realizing that this intrepid band of dissidents, aided and abetted by the rise of the electronic media, can now claim great-grandparentage to some 200,000 Communication majors in US college and universities today. These students dwarf by a factor of two the current number of English majors, a fact that might dismay some of you but a fact that has gladdened the hearts of both linebackers and Miss Virginia contestants for decades. Being neither a linebacker nor a raving beauty as an undergraduate, I studied English. I did so until I became a college senior, at which time I faced decisions about graduate study. I was not as wise as many twenty-year-olds, but I was wise enough to know that studying English had become an affaire de coeur with me.