![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
This essay reflects on the last 100 years of sensation in the journal to figure out where and when scholars in the field have concerned themselves with sensuous activity, how that activity is seen to interact with language, knowledge, and speech. The past can serve to some extent as a “rough guide,” showing gaps and leaps as well as modeling specific approaches.
She wishes to thank Barbara Biesecker, Jeremy Grossman, John Marsh, and members of her graduate seminar on Rhetoric's Sensorium for their helpful engagements with earlier versions of this essay.
She wishes to thank Barbara Biesecker, Jeremy Grossman, John Marsh, and members of her graduate seminar on Rhetoric's Sensorium for their helpful engagements with earlier versions of this essay.
Notes
[1] Judson and Rodden, “Fundamentals of the Speaker–Audience Relationship,” 351; The Research Committee, “Research in Public Speaking,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 1, no. 1 (1915): 24–32.
[2] L. S. Judson and D. E. Rodden, “The Fundamentals of the Speaker Audience Relationship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 20, no. 3 (1934): 353.
[3] Judson and Rodden, “Fundamentals,” 356. Italics in original.
[4] Judson and Rodden, “Fundamentals,” 358.
[5] Judson and Rodden, “Fundamentals,” 358.
[6] Judson and Rodden, “Fundamentals,” 360.
[7] Judson and Rodden, “Fundamentals,” 357.
[8] Judson and Rodden, “Fundamentals,” 357.
[9] These terms are not interchangeable, of course. After compiling the “hits,” I eliminated those uses of “sensation” that deal with celebrity (“e.g., the book became a sensation”) and “senses” that turn on meaning (e.g., “in both senses of the term.”). This literature-search approach is meant to be neither exhaustive, nor conclusive, but merely suggestive.
[10] “Sensorium, n.” OED Online. November 2014. Oxford University Press (accessed November 25, 2014).
[11] “Sensorium,” OED.
[12] Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1980), 1672.
[13] Joshua Gunn, “Speech is Dead; Long Live Speech,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 (2008): 345.
[14] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
[15] Carole Blair, rev. of Digital Sensations: Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality, Quarterly Journal of Speech 87, no. 4 (2001): 447; Michael P. Graves, “Functions of Key Metaphors in Early Quaker Sermons, 1671–1700,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69, no. 4 (1983): 376; Bruce E. Gronbeck, Rev. of Mediation and the Communication Matrix, Quarterly Journal of Speech 91, no. 2 (2005): 227; Joshua Gunn, “Speech is Dead,” 345–46 and 349; W. Lance Haynes, “Of That Which We Cannot Write: Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Media,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74, no. 1 (1988): 92; Ronald L. Holloway, rev. of The Presence of the Word, Quarterly Journal of Speech 53, no. 3 (1967): 316; Martin J. Medhurst, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour: From Iconography to Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 68, no. 4 (1982): 347; Brian L. Ott and Gordana Lazić, “The Pedagogy and Politics of Art in Postmodernity: Cognitive Mapping and The Bothersome Man,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 3 (2013): 263.
[16] Joseph Dumit, “Neuroexistentialism,” in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 182.
[17] J. A. Winans, “The Need for Research,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 1 (1915): 20.
[18] The Research Committee, “Research in Public Speaking,” 24.
[19] The Research Committee, “Research in Public Speaking,” 25.
[20] Charles H. Woolbert, “Theories of Expression: Some Criticisms,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 2 (1915): 128.
[21] Smiley Blanton, “The Voice and the Emotions,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 2 (1915): 154.
[22] Blanton, “The Voice and the Emotions,” 154.
[23] Blanton, “The Voice and the Emotions,” 155.
[24] Blanton, “The Voice and the Emotions,” 155. Titchener exerted powerful influence on his colleagues at Cornell. See Giles Wilkenson Gray, “Some Teachers and the Transition to Twentieth-Century Speech Education,” History of Speech Education in America: Background Studies, ed. Karl R. Wallace (New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1954), 433–37, Titchener (along with William James) was a primary source for the early work of Winans.
[25] Blanton, “The Voice and the Emotions,” 156.
[26] Blanton, “The Voice and the Emotions,” 157.
[27] Blanton, “The Voice and the Emotions,” 167.
[28] Blanton, “The Voice and the Emotions,” 170–71.
[29] Binney Gunnison, “Imagination in Oratory,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 2 (1915): 144.
[30] Gunnison, “Imagination in Oratory,” 144.
[31] Gunnison, “Imagination in Oratory,” 146: “Our educational life in the past has tended to destroy these powers of the imagination until the average graduate from college has no imagination. He thinks that it is absurd to see things-that it is quite sufficient to reason about them.”
[32] For more detail about phantasia and its relationship to rhetoric, see Debra Hawhee, “Looking Into the Eyes of Aristotle: Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Vision,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 14, no. 2 (2011): 139–65; Michele Kennerly, “Getting Carried Away: How Rhetorical Transport Gets Judgment Going,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2010): 269–91; and Ned O'Gorman, “Aristotle's Phantasia in the Rhetoric: Lexis, Appearance, and the Epideictic Function of Discourse,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 38, no. 1 (2005): 16–40.
[33] Gunnison, “Imagination in Oratory,” 151–52.
[34] Gunnison, “Imagination in Oratory,” 152.
[35] Gunnison, “Imagination in Oratory,” 151.
[36] David Howes uses this phrase, obviously invoking James's famous title. David Howes, A Variety of Sensory Experiences: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).
[37] Harold Westlake, “Understanding the Child With a Cleft Palate,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 39, no. 2 (1953): 165–72.
[38] John S. Kenyon, “Need of a Uniform Phonetic Alphabet,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 37, no. 3 (1951): 311–20; Lester L. Hale, “Dr. James Rush—Psychologist and Voice Scientist,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 35, no. 4 (1949): 449–55; Lee S. Hultzén, “Phonetic Transcription as Communication,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 34, no. 2 (1948): 194–201.
[39] Edward Ward Camack, “The Yankee ‘R,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 37, no. 3 (1951): 320; Angela Thirkell, “The Orthography of Dialect,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 37, no. 3 (1951): 320.
[40] Julius M. Nolte, “The Specifications of American Culture,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 37, no. 2 (1951): 153–57; Robert D. Clark, “These Truths We Hold Self-Evident,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 34, no. 4 (1948): 445–50.
[41] H. Darkes Albright, “Appia Fifty Years After: I,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 35, no. 2 (1949): 182–89.
[42] Marvin T. Herrick, “The Theory of the Laughable in the Sixteenth Century,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 35, no. 1 (1949): 1–16.
[43] Carl E. Burklund, “Melody in Verse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 39.1 (1953): 57. See also Wallace A. Bacon, “Scholarship and the Interpreter,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 39, no. 2 (1953): 187–92.
[44] E. J. West, “Saint Joan: A Modern Classic Reconsidered,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 40, no. 3 (1954): 249–60.
[45] Kenneth Burke, “Postscripts on the Negative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 39, no. 2 (1953): 209–16; Kenneth Burke, “A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38, no. 3 (1952): 251–64; Kenneth Burke, “A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language: Part Two,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38, no. 4 (1952): 446–60; Kenneth Burke, “A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language: Part III,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 39, no. 1 (1953): 79–92; Marie Hochmuth, “Kenneth Burke and the New Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38, no. 2 (1952): 133–44.
[46] Debra Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009): 106–24.
[47] The writings on epistemic rhetoric are vast, and word constraints prevent me from citing the key texts beyond what I discuss below. For a keen and fascinating analysis that cuts to the heart of some of the issues raised in this piece, see Richard A. Cherwitz and Thomas J. Darwin, “Why the ‘Epistemic’ In Epistemic Rhetoric? The Paradox of Rhetoric As Performance,” Text and Performance Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1995): 189–205.
[48] Walter M. Carleton, “On Rhetorical Knowing,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 1 (1985): 228.
[49] Barry Brummett, “Some Implications of ‘Process’ or ‘Intersubjectivity’: Postmodern Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 9, no. 1 (1976): 28.
[50] Thomas Frentz, “Rhetorical Conversation, Time, and Moral Action,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 71, no. 1 (1985): 1–18.
[51] Steve Whitson and John Poulakos, “Nietzsche and the Aesthetics of Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79, no. 2 (1993): 132.
[52] Whitson and Poulakos, “Nietzsche,” 133–34.
[53] John Poulakos and Steve Whitson, “Rhetoric Denuded and Redressed: Figs and Figures,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 382.
[54] For a genealogy of the idea of imagination in communication studies, see Joshua Gunn, “Refiguring Fantasy: Imagination and Its Decline in U.S. Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 1 (2003): 41–59.
[55] Whitson and Poulakos, “Nietzsche,” 141.
[56] Medhurst, “Hiroshima,” 353.
[57] Sonja K. Foss and Karen A. Foss, “The Construction of Feminine Spectatorship in Garrison Keillor's Radio Monologues,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80, no. 4 (1994): 410–36.
[58] Foss and Foss, “The Construction,” 412.
[59] Foss and Foss, “The Construction,” 413; emphasis added.
[60] Brian L. Ott and Diane Marie Keeling, “Cinema and Choric Connection: Lost in Translation as Sensual Experience,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 4 (2011): 378.
61 Joshua Gunn, “Maranatha,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 4 (2012): 359–85.
62 Brian L. Ott, “The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, no. 1 (2010): 42.
63 See, e.g., Ott and Keeling, “Cinema and Choric,” 366; and Ott and Lazić, “The Pedagogy,” 263. Ott and Keeling quote Rogers who formulates sensation as the way affects speak to the body (384, fn 92), while Ott and Lazić offer Beverley Best's observation that “because ‘sensation is social, or historical’ then ‘affect is a social and collective event,’” 280 fn 46, a distinction I have a hard time grasping.
64 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Anne Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
65 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 4 (2002): 367.
66 Cvetkovich, Depression, 4–5.
67 Brent Malin, “Communication with Feeling: Emotion, Publicness, and Embodiment,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87, no. 2 (2001): 217.
68 “Feel Tank Chicago,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feel_Tank_Chicago.
69 Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009): 4.
70 Jenny Rice, Distant Publics: Development Rhetorics and the Subject of Crisis (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012): 58–59.
71 Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press), 2013.
72 For an important piece on rhetorical energy, see George Kennedy, “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 1 (1992): 1–21.
73 Carole Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public Places,” Western Journal of Communication 65, no. 3 (2001): 275.