Rhetoric and the archive

ABSTRACT

Blending personal narrative, pedagogical guidance, and analytic commentary, this essay performatively explores the individual and social dimensions of contemporary rhetorical inquiry, claiming the experiential interdependence of its manifold forms. Situating archive as a conceptual bridge that links different types of practice, the essay first proffers an approach to reading the archive of rhetorical scholarship in order to ascertain its evolving dynamics. Next, it explicates the creation of an archive for an individual project, demonstrating that a letter of condolence written by a Union soldier in 1863 represents text or context, and is recognizable as fragment or icon, depending not on its physical or formal features but on the analytic purposes and processes of the scholar. The essay constitutes pluralism and specialization as a productive paradox for individual scholars as well as the disciplinary community, and it emphasizes the interactions of analytic approach and affective associations.

KEYWORDS:

• Rhetorical criticism
• archive
• interdisciplinarity
• fragment
• icon
• U.S. Civil War
• Conrad D. Ludeke

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to those who generously supported her in the preparation of this essay, whether in discussing goals and ideas or in reviewing drafts: Lauren DeLaCruz, Joshua Gunn, Elisabeth Kinsley, Robert Elliot Mills, Zachary Mills, Ashlie Sandoval, Robert John Topinka, and Sara VanderHaagen. She thanks Charles E. Morris III and Jeffrey Bennett, for the invitation to write for the special issue, and the members of Sara VanderHaagen's Spring 2016 graduate seminar in rhetorical-critical research methods at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, for beta testing the penultimate version of the essay.

Notes

1. Amy Mandelker, ed. Bakhtin in Contexts: Across the Disciplines (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995); Katherine M. Quinsey, Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996); Antonio María Osio, A History of Alta California: A Memoir of Mexican California, ed. Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Brainard L. Palmer-Ball Jr., The Kentucky Breeding Bird Atlas (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996); Philip J. Schwartz, Slave Laws in Virginia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Robert C. Smith, The Wounded Jung: Effects of Jung's Relationships on His Life and Work (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996).

2. James G. Cantrill and Christine L. Oravec, eds. The Symbolic Earth: Discourse and Our Creation of the Environment (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996); Charles Alan Taylor, Defining Science: A Rhetoric of Demarcation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).

3. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988), 160.

4. Charles E. Morris III, “Invitation,” email to author, March 8, 2015.

5. See esp. Angela G. Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005).

6. See, e.g., A. Craig Baird and Lester Thonssen, “Methodology in the Criticism of Public Address,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 33 (1947): 134.

7. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed. (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 2004), s.v. “archive.” See, e.g., Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Antoinette Burton, ed. Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

8. Kirt H. Wilson, “Adopt a Scholar Program,” syllabus for SPCH 8110, Rhetoric, Race, and Culture, University of Minnesota, Fall 1997. This approach proved so productive for me that in 2002 I adapted it for a graduate course in contemporary rhetorical theory that I taught at the University of Memphis.

9. Angela G. Ray, “The Transcript of a Continuing Conversation: David Zarefsky and Public Address,” Argumentation and Advocacy 45 (2008): 64–79; Angela G. Ray, “Rhetoric and Feminism in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” in The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, ed. Michael MacDonald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

10. An explanation of these features, produced for undergraduates, appears in Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Susan Schultz Huxman, and Thomas R. Burkholder, The Rhetorical Act: Thinking, Speaking, and Writing Critically, 5th ed. (Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2015).

11. David Zarefsky, “Four Senses of Rhetorical History,” in Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, ed. Kathleen J. Turner (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 23.

12. Jenell Johnson, American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 16–17, 12, 13.

13. Boris Litvin, “Mapping Rule and Subversion: Perspective and the Democratic Turn in Machiavelli Scholarship,” European Journal of Political Theory, p. 19, first published online on August 17, 2015, as doi:10.1177/1474885115599894; Elisabeth H. Kinsley, “‘The Jew That Shakespeare Drew, at Least in Outlines’: Renderings of a Yiddish-Speaking Shylock in New York, circa 1900,” Theatre Journal 68 (2016): 20, 19.

14. Sara VanderHaagen, “Practical Truths: Black Feminist Agency and Public Memory in Biographies for Children,” Women's Studies in Communication 35 (2012): 19; Elliot Heilman, “Manifestos in Postrevolutionary Mexico: Opposition, Imposition, and the Comprimido Estridentista,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 17 (2014): 1–33; Thomas R. Dunn, “‘The Quare in the Square’: Queer Memory, Sensibilities, and Oscar Wilde,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100 (2014): 223, 233, 218.

15. In 2001, the year I earned a doctorate, James Jasinski claimed that “there is growing evidence that the hegemony of method-based criticism is coming to an end”; Jasinski, “The Status of Theory and Method in Rhetorical Criticism,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 254. Jasinski's observation meshed with my experience as a graduate student.

16. Hermann G. Stelzner, “‘War Message,’ December 8, 1941: An Approach to Language,” Speech Monographs 33 (1966): 419–37; Michael Leff, “Dimensions of Temporality in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural,” Communication Reports 1 (1988): 26–31.

17. See, e.g., John M. Murphy, “‘Our Mission and Our Moment’: George W. Bush and September 11th,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6 (2003): 607–32; V. William Balthrop, Carole Blair, and Neil Michel, “The Presence of the Present: Hijacking ‘The Good War’?” Western Journal of Communication 74 (2010): 170–207.

18. Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 92.

19. Entry for July 20, 1853, in Clionian Debating Society (Charleston, SC), Proceedings, 1851–1858, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC (hereafter CDS-Duke).

20. Angela G. Ray, “A Green Oasis in the History of My Life”: Race and the Culture of Debating in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, Twenty-eighth Annual B. Aubrey Fisher Memorial Lecture (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 2014), 10.

21. See Angela G. Ray, “The Agency of the Archive and the Challenges of Classification,” in Recovering Argument, ed. Randall A. Lake (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).

22. Leah Ceccarelli, On the Frontier of Science: An American Rhetoric of Exploration and Exploitation (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 12; Leah Ceccarelli, “Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 410; Ray, “Agency of the Archive”; Ray, Lyceum, 10.

23. Ray, Lyceum, 8–9; Angela G. Ray, “Living and Learning with the Lyceum: A Reflection on Invention,” Review of Communication 10 (2010): esp. 239, 242–43.

24. See entry for Conrad D. Ludeke letter, 1863, WorldCat database (accession no. 879631087), accessed October 19, 2015.

25. William R. Hill, Pension Application File, Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, 1773–1985, Record Group 15, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC (hereafter NARA); New York (State), Adjutant General's Office, Annual Report of the Adjutant-General of the State of New York for the Year 1901: Registers of the Eighty-eighth, Eighty-ninth, Ninetieth, Ninety-first, Ninety-second and Ninety-third Regiments of Infantry, Serial no. 31 (Albany, NY: J. B. Lyon Co., 1902), 425, 454; Woodlawn, Almond Cemeteries, Local History and Genealogy, Allegany County Historical Society, http://www.alleganyhistory.org/, accessed October 19, 2015. See also Conrad D. Ludeke, Compiled Military Service Records, for Co. B, 82nd New York Infantry; Co. C, 90th New York Infantry; Co. C, 1st New Orleans Infantry, Records of the Adjutant General's Office, 1780s–1917, Record Group 94, NARA; Conrad D. Ludeke, Pension Application File, Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, 1773–1985, Record Group 15, NARA.

26. 90th Regiment, New York Infantry, Union New York Volunteers, Battle Unit Details, The Civil War, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, www.nps.gov/civilwar, accessed October 19, 2015.

27. Conrad D. Ludeke to Mrs. William R. Hill, May 14, 1863, New-York Historical Society, New York.

28. CDS-Duke, January 14, 1858.

29. For example, many historians confuse Simeon W. Beaird (1826–94), a member of the debating society and later a minister and educator, with Thomas P. Beard (1837–1918), a postwar newspaper editor. Both men were Black leaders and Republican politicians in postwar Augusta, Georgia. I appreciate Elena Rodina’s assistance in disentangling the two men’s histories.

30. Farge, Allure of the Archives, 8.

31. Steedman, Dust, 68.

32. The NPS database lists Ludeke's name twice; both entries refer to the same person. He is listed in two of the three regiments in which he served.

33. See, e.g., Ludeke, Compiled Military Service Records, passim. On racial identifiers in this project, see Ray, “Agency of the Archive.”

34. Job G. Bass, Compiled Military Service Records, Co. C, 90th New York Infantry, Records of the Adjutant General's Office, 1780s–1917, Record Group 94, NARA; Ludeke, Compiled Military Service Records, Co. C, 90th New York Infantry.

35. Friendly Association Records, 1853–1869, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, SC.

36. Hill, Pension Application File.

37. See James Boyd White, Heracles' Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), xi.

38. Michael Leff, “Textual Criticism: The Legacy of G. P. Mohrmann,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 388; M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 254.

39. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Stanton’s ‘The Solitude of Self’: A Rationale for Feminism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 312.