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Abstract
This essay begins with a brief review of past research in rhetorical theory and criticism. Attention then turns to an examination of two present issues—big rhetoric and the critique of postmodernism—that influence rhetoric's prospects. The essay closes with a consideration of the vibrancy and vitality represented by recent scholarship in the Quarterly Journal of Speech. The diversity and sophistication of current scholarship bode well for rhetoric's future.
Raymie E. McKerrow wishes to acknowledge Barbara Biesecker and Jeremy Grossman's careful attention to this essay.
Raymie E. McKerrow wishes to acknowledge Barbara Biesecker and Jeremy Grossman's careful attention to this essay.
Notes
[1] Raymie E. McKerrow, “Research in Rhetoric: A Glance at our Recent Past, Present, and Potential Future,” Review of Communication 10, no. 3 (2010): 206–7.
[2] Carole Blair, “Mark(et)ing ‘The Handbook’: Pedagogies of Legitimization, Neutral Expertise, and Convention,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 4 (2009): 425–28.
[3] Blair, “Mark(et)ing ‘The Handbook,’”427.
[4] McKerrow, “Research in Rhetoric.”
[5] Lester C. Olson, “Rhetorical Criticism and Theory: Rhetorical Questions, Theoretical Fundamentalism, and the Dissolution of Judgment,” in A Century of Transformations: Studies in Honor of the 100th Anniversary of the Eastern Communication Association, ed. James W. Chesebro (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), 37–71.
[6] David Zarefsky, “History of Public Discourse Studies,” in The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, eds. Andrea A. Lunsford, Kirt H. Wilson, and Rosa A. Eberly (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008), 433–59.
[7] Shawn J. Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan, eds., The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
[8] Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted, eds., A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), xvi.
[9] Richard Graff, Arthur E. Walzer, and Janet M. Atwill, eds., The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2005).
[10] James Jasinski, Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001), xiv; xxiv.
[11] Alan G. Gross, “The Rhetorical Tradition,” in Graff, Walzer and Atwill, The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition, 36.
[12] Mark J. Porrovecchio, ed. Reengaging the Prospects for Rhetoric: Current Conversations and Contemporary Challenges (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010).
[13] Barbara A. Biesecker, “Prospects of Rhetoric for the Twenty-First Century: Speculations on Evental Rhetoric Ending with a Note on Barack Obama and a Benediction by Jacques Lacan; A Response to Samuel L. Becker's ‘Rhetorical Studies for a Contemporary World,’” in Porrovecchio, Reengaging the Prospects for Rhetoric, 17.
[14] McKerrow, “Research in Rhetoric.”
[15] See Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Rhetoric and Its Double: Reflections on the Rhetorical Turn in the Human Sciences,” in The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry, ed. Herb Simons (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,1990), 341–66; Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” Southern Communication Journal 58, no. 4 (1993): 258–95; Herbert W. Simons, “Review Essay: Rhetorical Hermeneutics and the Project of Globalization,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85, no. 1 (1999): 86–100; William Keith, Steve Fuller, Alan Gross, and Michael Leff, “Taking Up the Challenge: A Response to Simons,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85, no. 3 (1999): 330–34; Edward Schiappa, “Second Thoughts on the Critiques of Big Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 34, no. 3 (2001): 260–74; Joshua Gunn, “Size Matters: Polytoning Rhetoric's Perverse Apocalypse,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38, no. 1 (2008): 85–86, doi:10.1080/02773940701779744.
[16] David Zarefsky, “Institutional and Social Goals for Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2004): 29, doi:10.1080/02773940409391288.
[17] Schiappa, “Second Thoughts.”
[18] Plato, Gorgias, trans. W. C. Helmbold (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952).
[19] Schiappa, “Second Thoughts,” 260.
[20] Schiappa, “Second Thoughts,” 268. For a view that goes further than this, see Victor Vitanza, interview with Jimmy Butts, March 22, 2013, http://alexreid.net/2013/03/vitanzas-big-rhetoric-and-some-more.html, accessed 01/8/14; also, Richard Andrews provides an expansive view of rhetoric as the “arts of discourse” in his text: It is not just in speech and writing that rhetoric operates. There is a range of modes—the image, the moving image, sound, gesture, movement—in addition to the verbal arts.” A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), x, xi, italics in original.
[21] Gunn, “Size Matters.”
[22] Gunn, “Size Matters,” 90.
[23] Gunn, “Size Matters,” 104.
[24] Donald C. Bryant, Dimensions in Rhetorical Criticism (Baton Rouge, LA: University of Louisiana Press, 1973).
[25] James Arnt Aune, “Coping With Modernity: Strategies of 20th-Century Rhetorical Theory” in Lunsford, Wilson, and Eberly, The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, 87. Aune is not alone in responding to the perceived limits of a postmodern perspective. Cheryl Geisler, reporting on the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies deliberations on the question of rhetorical agency, notes the same point of view with respect to the absence of the autonomous subject, and the inability of a postmodern orientation to act without engaging that same subject. “How Ought We to Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency? Report from the ARS,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2004): 9–17, doi:10.1080/0277394040391286.
[26] Aune “Coping with Modernity,” 100. To be fair, Pauline Marie Rosenau goes on to suggest “they overlap considerably and sometimes are considered synonymous.” Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 5 (italics added).
[27] Aune, “Coping with Modernity,” 104.
[28] Rosenau, Post-Modernism, 15–16.
[29] Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989): 92.
[30] McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric,” 101.
[31] Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “Commitment to Telos—A Sustained Critical Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 59, no. 1 (1992): 48–60.
[32] Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric and Propaganda Studies,” in Communication Yearbook 14, ed. James A. Anderson (Newbury Park, CA: Sage 1991), 250.
[33] Dana Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 58, no. 3 (1994): 157–58.
[34] McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric and Propaganda Studies.”
[35] Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric and the Possibility of the Subject,” in The Critical Turn: Rhetoric and Philosophy in Postmodern Discourse, eds. Ian Angus and Lenore Langsdorf (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 51–67.
[36] Raymie E. McKerrow, “Opening the Future: Postmodern Rhetoric in a Multicultural World,” in Rhetoric in Intercultural Contexts, International and Intercultural Annual, Vol. 22, 1999, eds. Alberto González and Dolores V. Tanno (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 41–42.
[37] McKerrow, “Research in Rhetoric.”
[38] See Brian Jackson's survey of undergraduate rhetoric curriculum in both composition and communication studies. Brian Jackson, “Cultivating Paideweyan Pedagogy: Rhetoric Education in English and Communication Studies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37, no. 2 (2007): 181–201.