Road-Tripping on Route 66: A Response to Medhurst's Map of Abandoned Paths

Abstract

Martin Medhurst mourns the disappearance from the pages of QJS of four areas of scholarship. In response, I argue: (1) that publication in some of these areas is more robust than ever, simply having moved to other venues; (2) that some of these areas never demonstrated the disciplinary value Medhurst attributes to them; (3) that the disappearance of some of these areas is a necessary product of disciplinary evolution; (4) and that QJS, 100 years after its first issue, is still serving, as it has always served, as a spawning ground for the best new scholarship in our discipline.

Keywords:

• Disciplinary History
• Publication Trends
• Nostalgia
• Academic Specialization

Notes

[1] The information on Borchers is from two sources: Thomas Edward Wirkus, “Gladys Louise Borchers—Speech Educator,” Order No. 6614095, Northwestern University, 1966, http://ezproxy.gsu.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/302218852?accountid=11226/, and from Agate Krouse, Harry Krouse, and Audrey Roberts, “Gladys L. Borchers,” in They Came to Learn, They Came to Teach, They Came to Stay, University Women: A Series of Essays 1, ed. Marian J. Swoboda and Audrey J. Roberts (Madison, WI: Office of Women, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1980), 37–41, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/UW/UW-idx?id=UW.EssaysLTS

[2] James M. O'Neill, “The National Association,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 1 (1915): 57–58.

[3] J. A. Winans, “The Need for Research,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 1 (1915): 17.

[4] Committee on Research, “Research in Public Speaking,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 1 (1915): 24.

[5] Winans, “The Need for Research,” 22.

[6] Everett Lee Hunt, “General Specialists,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 2, no. 3 (1916): 255; Everett Lee Hunt, “Academic Public Speaking,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 3, no. 1 (1917): 27–36; Everett Lee Hunt, “General Specialists: Fifty Years Later,” RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1987): 167–76.

[7] Plato, Gorgias trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1998); Plato, Phaedrus, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1998); Philodemus, Philodemus on Rhetoric Books 1 and 2: Translation and Exegetical Essays, trans. Clive Chandler (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006).

[8] Jeffrey Walker, “Michael Psellos on Rhetoric: A Translation and Commentary on Psellos’ Synopsis of Hermogenes,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2001): 5–40.

[9] Lahcen E. Ezzaher, “Avicenna's Book of Rhetoric: An English Translation of Avicenna's Commentary on Aristotle's Rhetoric,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 11/12 (2008): 133–58.

[10] It is worth noting that the current editor of QJS, in her editorial policy statement, which preceded Medhurst's essay, invited researchers to submit “translations and retranslations of primary texts or parts thereof.” Professor Biesecker informs me that she has, to date, not received a single such submission.

[11] Haig Bosmajian, “The Inaccuracies in the Reprintings of Martin Luther King's ‘I Have A Dream’ Speech,” Communication Education 31, no. 2 (1982): 107–14.

[12] Lest it seem unfair for me to impose this criterion, Medhurst has made similar arguments regarding citations, as evidence of engagement in scholarly conversations, as an important measure of the value of scholarship: Martin J. Medhurst, “Public Address and Significant Scholarship: Four Challenges for the Rhetorical Renaissance,” in Texts in Context: Critical Dialogues on Significant Episodes in American Political Rhetoric, eds. Michael C. Leff and Fred J. Kauffeld (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1989), 30.

[13] I don’t wish to slight the excellent two-volume anthology edited by James Andrews and David Zarefsky, American Voices and Contemporary American Voices, published in 1989 and 1991, respectively, but those worthy volumes never got the traction or had the influence of the Wrage and Baskerville volumes.

[14] Ernest J. Wrage, “Public Address: A Study in Social and Intellectual History,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 33, no. 4 (1947): 453.

[15] For just a sampling of some of the recent work in Medieval and Renaissance rhetorical history: Martin Camargo, “The Late Fourteenth-Century Renaissance of Anglo-Latin Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 45, no. 2 (2012): 107–33; Judith Rice Henderson, “Valla's Elegantiae and the Humanist Attack on the Ars Dictaminis,” Rhetorica 19, no. 2 (2001): 249; Eddo Rigotti, “The Nature and Functions of Loci in Agricola's De Inventione Dialectica,” Argumentation 28, no. 1 (2014): 19–37; Shawn D. Ramsey, “The Voices of Counsel: Women and Civic Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42, no. 5 (2012): 472–89; Chris Miles, “Occult Retraction: Cornelius Agrippa and the Paradox of Magical Language,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38, no. 4 (2008): 433–56; Wayne A. Rebhorn, “Proteus Unmasked: Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric and the Art of Shakespeare,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2005): 99–102; Don Paul Abbott, “Rhetoric and Dialectic in the Time of Galileo/Mirth Making: The Rhetorical Discourse on Jesting in Early Modern England/Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 36, no. 1 (2006): 115–21.

[16] Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1971), xi.

[17] Robin Dennell, “Progressive Gradualism, Imperialism and Academic Fashion: Lower Palaeolithic Archaeology in the 20th Century,” Progressive 64, no. 244 (1990): 549–58; Chris Gibson and Natascha Klocker, “Academic Publishing as ‘Creative’ Industry, and Recent Discourses of ‘Creative Economies’: Some Critical Reflections,” Area 36, no. 4 (2004): 423–34; Ha-Joon Chang, “Institutions and Economic Development: Theory, Policy and History,” Journal of Institutional Economics 7, no. 4 (2011): 473–98; Elihu Katz, “Theorizing Diffusion: Tarde and Sorokin Revisited,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 566, no. 1 (1999): 144–55; Owen Renik, “Playing One's Cards Face Up in Analysis: An Approach to the Problem of Self-Disclosure,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 68, no. 4 (1999): 521–39; Janet Adshead-Lansdale, “The ‘Congealed Residues’ of Dance History: A Response to Richard Ralph's ‘Dance Scholarship and Academic Fashion’—One Path to a Pre-Determined Enlightenment?,” Dance Chronicle 20, no. 1 (1997): 63–80.

[18] Wayne N. Thompson, “Contemporary Public Address as a Research Area,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 33, no. 3 (1947): 274–83; Wayne N. Thompson, “Contemporary Public Address: A Problem in Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 40, no. 1 (1954): 24–30. In the 1947 essay, anticipating one of Medhurst's examples, Thompson even outlines, as an example, what a study of Harry Truman might look like, including a section on “Truman's theory of speechmaking as evidenced by his own statements and writings” (283).

[19] I remember Edwin Black being proud of his publication of “Gayspeak” in QJS 1977, not because of its subject matter, but because of its method.

[20] Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989): 91–111; Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric in a Postmodern World,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 1 (1991): 75–78.

[21] “Bus Tours: USA/Route 66 Dream,” Reuthers, accessed November 27, 2014, http://reuthers.com/bus-tours-usa-route66-dream.html