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Abstract
Using the first five years of the Quarterly Journal of Speech as a record of Communication Studies' founding, I contend that the discipline began with a tension between contrasting sets of affect and reasoning. In the initial volumes of QJS, one reads many recommendations designed to establish the discipline's academic sovereignty and self-determination, but, at the same time, other essays suggest a commitment to cross-disciplinary inquiry and citizenship. I interpret this tension through contemporary theories of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. These concepts highlight the implications of competing visions for the discipline's future, but they also reveal how cosmopolitan and nationalist processes complemented one another in the early years of “Speech.” I argue, finally, that this tension provides opportunities for Communication Studies in the twenty-first century.
He wishes to thank Barbara Biesecker for her editorial assistance and Celeste Condit and Eric King Watts for their responses.
He wishes to thank Barbara Biesecker for her editorial assistance and Celeste Condit and Eric King Watts for their responses.
Notes
[1] Glenn M. Merry, “National Defense and Public Speaking,” Quarterly Journal of Speech Education 4, no. 1 (1918): 53.
[2] Merry, “National Defense and Public Speaking,” 56, 57.
[3] Everett Lee Hunt, “Creative Teaching in War Time,” Quarterly Journal of Speech Education 4, no. 4 (1918): 386.
[4] B. C. Van Wye, “Speech Training for Patriotic Service,” Quarterly Journal of Speech Education 4, no. 4 (1918): 366.
[5] Merry, “National Defense and Public Speaking,” 57.
[6] “Glenn Newton Merry,” Spectra, December 1977, 1.
[7] Lisa Mastrangelo, “World War I, Public Intellectuals, and the Four Minute Men: Convergent Ideals of Public Speaking and Civic Participation,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12, no. 4 (2009): 607–33. See also the forum, “The Four Minute Men: The Conversation Continues,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13, no. 2 (2010): 134–62.
[8] See Pat J. Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University, 2009), Chapter 2.
[9] When referring to our discipline at its moment of origin, I will use the term “Speech,” because that is the term that appears most frequently. When I refer to the present discipline or its development across its entire existence, I will use the term “Communication Studies.”
[10] Herman Cohen, “The Development of Research in Speech Communication: A Historical Perspective,” in Speech Communication in the 20th Century, ed. Thomas W. Benson (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 283.
[11] Pat J. Gehrke, “Historical Study as Ethical and Political Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93, no. 3 (2007): 355.
[12] James A Winans, “The Need for Research,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 1 (1915): 17–18.
[13] William Keith, “On the Origins of Speech As a Discipline: James A. Winans and Public Speaking As Practical Democracy,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38, no. 3 (2008): 242.
[14] Winans, “The Need for Research,” 19.
[15] Winans, “The Need for Research,” 17.
[16] Winans, “The Need for Research,” 18.
[17] Winans, “The Need for Research,” 20.
[18] See, for example, Alfred G. Arvold, “The Little Country Theater,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 1 (1915): 65–73; Smiley Blanton, “The Voice and the Emotions,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 2 (1915): 154–73; J. H. Doyle, “The Style of Wendell Phillips,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 2, no. 4 (1916): 331–39; A. M. Drummond, “One-act Plays for Schools and Colleges,” Quarterly Journal of Speech Education 4, no. 4 (1918): 372–85; Everett Lee Hunt, “Plato on Rhetoric and Rhetoricians,” Quarterly Journal of Speech Education 6, no. 3 (1920): 33–53; Charles H Woolbert, “Conviction and Persuasion: Some Considerations of Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 3, no. 3 (1917): 249–64; Mary Yost, “Argument From the Point-of-view of Sociology,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 3, no. 2 (1917): 109–27.
[19] J. P. Ryan, “Terminology: The Department of Speech,” Quarterly Journal of Speech Education 4, no. 1 (1918): 1–11.
[20] Ryan, “Terminology: The Department of Speech,” 3.
[21] Ryan, “Terminology: The Department of Speech,” 3–4.
[22] Herman Cohen, The History of Speech Communication: The Emergence of a Discipline, 1914–1945 (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1994), 76–78.
[23] Charles H Woolbert, “The Organization of Departments of Speech Science in Universities,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 2, no. 1 (1916): 64–77; Charles H Woolbert, “Persuasion: Principles and Method,” Quarterly Journal of Speech Education 5, no. 2 (1919): 101–19.
[24] Everett Lee Hunt, “An Adventure in Philosophy,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 3, no. 4 (1917): 297–303.
[25] Everett Lee Hunt, “The Scientific Spirit in Public Speaking,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 2 (1915): 185–93.
[26] Everett Lee Hunt, “General Specialists,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 2, no. 3 (1916): 253.
[27] Hunt, “General Specialists,” 254.
[28] Theodore Otto Windt, Jr., “Everett Lee Hunt on Rhetoric,” Speech Teacher 21, no. 3 (1972): 177–92; Cohen, The History of Speech Communication, 75–79. See also Theodore Otto Windt, Jr., “Woolbert and Hunt,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1986): 251–59.
[29] Michael C. Leff and Margaret Organ Procario, “Rhetorical Theory in Speech Communication,” in Speech Communication in the 20th Century, ed. Thomas W. Benson (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 6.
[30] Hunt, “General Specialists,” 255.
[31] Hunt, “General Specialists,” 255, 256.
[32] Woolbert, “A Problem in Pragmatism,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 2, no. 3 (1916): 265.
[33] Woolbert, “A Problem in Pragmatism,” 264.
[34] Winans, “The Need for Research,” 20.
[35] Winans, “The Need for Research,” 23, emphasis mine.
[36] Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006); Jonathan Hearn, Rethinking Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Martha Craven Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996); Janet Lyon, “Cosmopolitanism and Modernism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, eds. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, September, 2012), 387–412.
[37] For examples see Charles L. Briggs, “Genealogies of Race and Culture and the Failure of Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms: Rereading Franz Boas and W. E. B. Du Bois,” Public Culture 17, no. 1 (2005): 75–100; Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
[38] Walter Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 721–48; Walter Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2007): 449–514.
[39] Committee on Research, “Research in Public Speaking,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 1 (1915): 27.
[40] Committee on Research, “Research in Public Speaking,” 30–31.
[41] Committee on Research, “Making a Start Toward Research Work,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 2 (1915): 194–96.
[42] Cohen, “The Development of Research in Speech Communication: A Historical Perspective,” 287.
[43] See Gerard Delanty, “The Idea of Critical Cosmopolitanism,” in Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 38–46; Gerard Delanty, “The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory,” in British Journal of Sociology 57, no. 1 (2006): 25–47.