The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies

Andrea A. Lunsford, Kirt H. Wilson, Rosa A. Eberly

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781483343433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies surveys the latest advances in rhetorical scholarship, synthesizing theories and practices across major areas of study in the field and pointing the way for future studies. Edited by Andrea A. Lunsford and Associate Editors Kirt H. Wilson and Rosa A. Eberly, the Handbook aims to introduce a new generation of students to rhetorical study and provide a deeply informed and ready resource for scholars currently working in the field.

PART I

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Historical Studies in Rhetoric

Historical and Comparative Rhetorical Studies

Revisionist Methods and New Directions

C. JAN SWEARINGEN

EDWARD SCHIAPPA

One of the most significant recent developments in historical studies in rhetoric has been the increasing attention given in every field and period to comparative studies. Whether addressing the modern rhetorics of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, I. A. Richards, and Kenneth Burke, or the continuing influence of classical models on many contemporary and international practices of rhetoric, scholars increasingly attend to the presence of multiple rhetorical models and cultures throughout the world. The past 15 years have seen the emergence of new societies for the study of rhetoric in Scandinavia, Latin America, and China, with pan-Asian and East-West rhetorical studies now more prominently represented in the meetings of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric Society of America (Koeneke, 2004; Lu, 1998; Mao, 2006; Sen, 2005; Wang, 2004; You, 2006). A rich new diversity and revisionism among research methods has accompanied the movement toward inclusion and comparison. Different communities of interpretation have formed around the new methods used to define and study rhetoric, so much so that examining the formation of contemporary interpretive communities has itself become a part of the historical study of rhetoric. Whether the primary subject is gender, genre, class, ethnicity, or national identity and history, historical studies in rhetoric have become necessarily comparative (Fahnestock & Secor, 2003; Horner, 1990; Lipson & Binkley, 2004). The continuing use of a Greco-Roman rhetorical home base is now energetically debated (Kennedy, 1998; Lipson & Binkley, 2004; Sutherland, Chapter 3, this volume). Simple comparisons with a classical paradigm are long gone, replaced by more nuanced definitions and redefinitions of what rhetoric is, how it is used, and how it may best be observed and studied. The classical concept of “audience” has long since been widened to include readerships, communities of discourse, and the formation of voluntary political and religious communities. Concepts of ethos, rhetor, and author, similarly, now examine the mutual shaping of rhetoric by its speakers and hearers, its writers and readers, working in concert with one another (Baumlin & Baumlin, 1994; Swearingen, 1991). At the same time, and in sharp contrast to communitarian models, some modern studies of rhetoric past and present question the very notion of community as a remnant of Western hegemonic enlightenment rhetorical canons and focus their attention instead on the dismantling of that legacy, with various purposes (Aune, Chapter 5, this volume).

A starting point for most inquiries remains the word rhetoric, from the Greek word rhêtorikê, coined by Plato to not-so-flatteringly denote the “Art of the Rhetor” (Schiappa, 1990). But today the term can be used to refer to various phenomena, including individual acts of suasion (such as traditional oratory), literary works and other aesthetic genres with rhetorical puposes, the teaching of written and spoken discourse, or analytical frameworks for the evaluation and critique of efforts at persuasion. Philosophies or theories of rhetoric attempt to define and explain “rhetoric” as a frequent if not ubiquitous human activity with important ontological, epistemological, and/or ethical implications. As noted in Chapter 5, theories of rhetoric grew in scope in the 20th century to the point that everything, or virtually everything, can be described as “rhetorical.” Such accounts can be called theories of “Big Rhetoric” and are credited with popularizing or at least rationalizing what Herbert W. Simons (1990) calls the “rhetorical turn” in a variety of disciplines. Within the journals and conventions of rhetoric scholars, popularization is often characterized by studies of the form “the rhetoric of X,” where X could literally be anything. Outside the discipline of communication studies, popularization is evidenced by the apparently ever-increasing ranks of scholars who use “rhetoric” as a relevant and important term of art within their scholarship. By any measure, it can be argued fairly convincingly that “rhetoric” has become a widely used construct in scholarship in many fields. For better or worse, its very nature as a scholarly discipline continues to change as it crosses and includes more and more disciplines, regions, periods, genres, and topics.

Expansive definitions or theories of rhetoric have changed what counts as appropriate objects of analysis. Whereas the Greco-Roman origins of the term rhetoric previously limited what scholars analyzed as rhetoric, Big Rhetoric made it possible for scholars to describe a far broader range of phenomena as rhetorical, as long as important and interesting insights could be gained through such descriptions (Kennedy, 1998; Schiappa, Scott, Gross, & McKerrow, 2002).

There are a number of narratives on the rise of Big Rhetoric already in print in communication studies (Gaonkar, 1990; Simons, 1990), rhetoric and composition (Berlin, 1987; Young & Goggin, 1993), and interdisciplinary publications (Mailloux, 2000; Nelson, Megill, & McCloskey, 1987; Roberts & Good, 1993). Aune in Chapter 5 provides a rich narrative as well, but one more cannot hurt. Many accounts identify the 1960s as a turning point, a period that brought, for better or worse, a confluence of changing rhetorical practices, expanding rhetorical theories, and opportunities for rhetorical criticism. The cultural clashes of the 1960s were felt perhaps most acutely on college campuses. The sufficiency of deliberative argument and public address can be said to have been called into question whether one was an antiwar activist who hated Lyndon B. Johnson’s war in Vietnam, or if one was a proestablishment stalwart trying to make sense of the rhetoric of protest and demonstration. Years later, scholars would characterize war itself as rhetorical. What counts as rhetorical practice was up for grabs.

At about the same time, our understanding of rhetorical theory was being expanded. Here we can identify two main strands of thought. For ease of reference, we can call one the symbolic interactionist rationale and the other the epistemological rationale. The symbolic interactionist rationale can be boiled down to a syllogism:

All persuasive actions are rhetorical.

All symbol/language-use is persuasive, therefore

All symbol/language-use is rhetorical.

Perhaps the two most significant pronouncements of this approach—for one generation of rhetoric scholars, at any rate—are by Richard Weaver and Kenneth Burke. Weaver (1970) claims that “language is sermonic” in the sense that whenever we offer a description or label a phenomenon we are “preaching” a particular way of making sense of it (pp. 201–225). And, of course, Burke (1950) has two famous (or infamous) statements in Rhetoric of Motives: First, that rhetoric is “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (p. 43); and second, that “something of the rhetorical motive comes to lurk in every ‘meaning,’ however purely ‘scientific’ its pretensions. Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric. And wherever there is ‘meaning,’ there is ‘persuasion’” (p. 172). Obviously, such pronouncements serve as encouragement to those who would define rhetoric broadly and arguably fueled the popularization of rhetorical studies.

The epistemological rationale is fueled by the argument that the philosophical criteria used traditionally to separate “higher” ways of knowing, such as “science” (as epistêmê), from “rhetoric” (as doxa) have been critiqued persuasively. Again, at least for the post–World War II generation, the key writers here are Chaim Perelman, Stephen Toulmin, Robert L. Scott, and Thomas S. Kuhn. In 1958, Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca published The New Rhetoric in which they argue, in effect, that everything outside of scientific demonstration and mathematical logic was the province of rhetoric and argumentation (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969/1958). Also in 1958, Toulmin critiqued the “analytic ideal” and, borrowing a page from Hume, argues that all substantive claims are contingent. Enter Robert L. Scott, who took Toulmin’s case the next step in 1967 by arguing, in effect, that since the “certain” or “absolute” side of binaries such as certain/contingent, absolute/probable are unavailable, we are left to dwell in the historicized land of contingency and probability, which means that cultural knowledge is the product of rhetorical activity. Rhetoric thus can be viewed as epistemic. Kuhn (1970) provides the historical evidence to apply these insights to the hitherto forbidden land of Science; a bushel full of articles and books written in the past 40 years attests to the efforts by rhetorical scholars to identify various rhetorical aspects of the practices of scientists. In a similar vein, continuing efforts to define rhetoric as a scientific linguistic inquiry expand I. A. Richards’ and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s efforts after each of the 20th century’s World Wars (Koeneke, 2004; van Eemeren, Chapter 6, this volume).

The preceding narrative suggests that broad definitions of rhetoric and the popularization of rhetorical studies is partly due to scholarly attention begun in the rhetorical practices of the 1960s, partly due to specific positions advanced by influential theorists and partly due to the understandable desires of members of a discipline to see what they are doing as important. No matter which explanation one might prefer, popularization proceeded apace. The broadening of the scope of rhetoric has facilitated the recognition and appreciation of “the rhetorical” in a variety of historical and cultural contexts previously neglected by rhetoric scholars—understudied and undervalued social groups (including women and minorities), neglected genres of communicative practice throughout history (diaries, poetry, theatre, scientific discourse, and various forms of art), and whole cultures previously ignored by rhetoric scholars. As George A. Kennedy (1998) has argued, practices describable as rhetoric can be identified even among animal species.

Why scholars engaged in historical and comparative studies is a question that generates answers as diverse as the scholars doing such research. What one studies and how one goes about the study of rhetoric ultimately are decisions fueled by the values, interests, and purposes one brings to the table. It may be worth noting, however, that the collective motivations of historians and comparativists involve a dialectic between similarity and difference. It can be argued that the more one studies rhetoric, the more one finds a common human impulse to influence each other and to produce shared meaning and understanding. But it is also the case that the historical and comparative work produce accounts of rhetoric that are amazingly diverse. What a particular rhetorical scholar finds most salient will be a function of his or her own interests (Schiappa, 2003, pp. 206–212), but we all benefit from the study of the splendid banquet of scholarship that this set of chapters charts.

Alluding to all these contexts, Richard Enos (Chapter 2) reviews traditional and revisionist approaches to classical rhetorics that have widened the domain of rhetorical objects of study. He provides a rich history of the many recent and not-so-recent historical studies in rhetoric that have reconstituted the field beginning in the 1960s. Two streams, one pedagogical and one historical and scholarly, began to converge in a variety of ways, not the least of which was a shared interest in the study of rhetoric in contexts. Enos defines the primary task of the historian of rhetoric as the reconstruction of how meaning is made and shared through discourse. Moving away from simply narrating a historical account of rhetoric in Rhodes or stele inscriptions in Egypt, rhetorical studies of all times and places should reconstruct an entire rhetorical situation, providing an argument that offers evidence to a reader, a way of validating an interpretation. In his chapter, Enos provides many examples of a two-stage process. The first stage, which he compares with archaeology, is represented by finding new artifacts, new rhetorical objects of study, in the vast fields of inquiry that have opened up in the past 30 years. The second stage Enos defines is the reconstruction of the artifact by employing the heuristics of rhetorical layering. The benefits of rhetorical archaeology are evident in each of the chapters in this section and far beyond as well. An especially vivid example of the process Enos describes is Antoinette Wire’s (1995) study The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction Through Paul’s Rhetoric. Both biblical and classical rhetorical studies now debate and define new methods of contextual reconstruction (Swearingen, 2002; Zulick, Chapter 7, this volume). Indeed, throughout rhetorical history, and evident in the methods now available to the historian, heated debates also surround the issue of proper objects for study.

Christine Mason Sutherland (in Chapter 3) takes up directly the matter of inclusion and exclusion, the questions of what figures and what uses of language should be counted as rhetoric. She begins her consideration of Early Modern women rhetoricians with the question of period boundaries: Should these be drawn by date, by language, by genre, or by a combination of factors? She locates those women rhetoricians who lived before the 16th century as belonging to the Middle Ages, based on the traditional dating of Modern English to 1485. In this context, Julian of Norwich becomes even more important as the first author writing in (Middle) English, but also problematic as a woman rhetorician because she so clearly renounces her own authorship, for the complicated reasons Sutherland explains and explores. On the other end of the Early Modern period, Sutherland observes, Margaret Fell continues to be located as a Renaissance figure, even though she was writing up to the end of the 17th century and did not die until the early 18th century. Nonetheless, Sutherland suggests, 1688 presents a reasonable end date for the Renaissance because on several fronts the reign of William and Mary may be said to inaugurate the Enlightenment.

Concerning the inclusion and exclusion of individual figures and genres, Sutherland forges a middle ground somewhere between including everything written by women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and restricting the choices to women who clearly and self-consciously identify themselves as rhetorical, either in practice or theory. In the first section, dealing with public discourse, she includes women whose works have been studied from a rhetorical point of view by historians of rhetoric today, even when the women studied did not at the time identify themselves or their writings as rhetorical. They may have simply taken it for granted in an oral/rhetorical age. They may have declined the title or role for any of a number of reasons. Nonetheless, they are now regularly studied from a rhetorical point of view by historians of rhetoric. Similarly, in the second section, on semiprivate and private discourses, Sutherland selects figures based on those already studied from rhetorical perspectives today. The third section, an examination of social practices, provides additional examinations of rhetorical actions, spaces, and contexts shaped by new understandings of women as rhetorical in the Early Modern period. As to genres, within each section, Sutherland has decided to exclude historical fiction, drama, verse, and works of translation—even though women were active translators during these periods. Nonetheless, she proposes that in our studies of women’s rhetorics we extend the genre boundaries of what has been considered rhetoric to include polythetic and enthymematic forms of reasoning recognized as early as Aristotle as “inartistic” modes of rhetoric, as well as Cicero’s distinction between contentio and sermo: public adversarial debate versus “conversational,” informal, colloquial dialogue: the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Rhetorics and Roadmaps
• PART I: HISTORICAL STUDIES IN RHETORIC
• PART II: RHETORIC ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
• PART III: RHETORIC AND PEDAGOGY
• PART IV: RHETORIC AND PUBLIC DISCOURSE
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors