Making, not Curating, the Rhetorical Tradition: Ways through and beyond the Canon

Abstract

The idea of the rhetorical tradition continues to trouble scholars, in part because it is often conflated with the Western rhetorical canon. The current way we use the word tradition is tied to nineteenth-century ideas of inheritance and continuity, which reinforce the canon. Using folklore scholarship to redefine tradition as something we continuously make and take responsibility for moves away from the canon while still allowing for creative use of past rhetorical practices and theories. Redefining tradition as something we make and pass on responsibility for should inform our teaching and reform the syllabi we create for our rhetoric courses.

Notes

1. ¹The constructive feedback from RR reviewers Victor Vitanza and John Schilb proved invaluable as I worked on this article. I also thank Jacob Babb, T. J. Geiger II, Annie Mendenhall, and Julia Voss for critiquing drafts and providing encouragement throughout the process. The Concordia College Faculty Writing Retreat, led by Joan Kopperud and Stephanie Ahlfeldt, also deserves recognition for providing time for me to turn pages of notes into an article.

2. ²Whether or not introductory rhetoric courses cover the history of rhetoric, it is important to disrupt the Western rhetorical canon. As the end of this essay suggests, I see eschewing an historical survey in introductory courses as a fruitful course of action. However, I also want us to consider how we can teach the history of rhetoric in ways that decenter the WRC.

3. ³Even this proposal is controversial. Bizzell and Jarratt note: “Many people at the conference did not even like the term ‘traditions,’ plural, because they felt that any version of the word ‘tradition’ implies a continuity and teleology for the texts and figures under study that is tendentious and exclusionary” (20).

4. ⁴While I focus on the Octalogs as representing key moments in our debates about the rhetorical tradition, edited volumes like Writing Histories of Rhetoric (Vitanza) and Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric (Ballif) capture how rhetoric and composition has worked to break the bonds of the canon. Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric highlights the innovative work we are doing with feminist and queer theory, hauntology, and sub/versive historiography. The inventiveness of the volume further throws into the relief the staid convention of most rhetoric syllabi.

5. ⁵The idea of stewardship of a practice echoes Anna Frost’s theory of literacy stewards in “Literacy Stewardship: Dakelh Women Composing Culture” (2011). Noyes’s definition of tradition clarifies how stewardship is the most appropriate term for understanding our relationship to the rhetorical tradition.

6. ⁶The Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives and other archives present rich sites for research in this vein.

7. ⁷Kathleen Blake Yancey, Gwendolyn Pough, Douglas D. Hesse, and Howard Tinberg have also used polyvocality to great effect in their own chair’s addresses.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erika Claire Strandjord

Erika Claire Strandjord is an assistant professor of English at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. She researches the role that rhetorical education plays in creating and maintaining ethos in communities, focusing especially on community organizations and the teaching of traditional handcrafts. She can be reached at [email protected].