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ABSTRACT
This essay presents genetic rhetorical criticism as an alternative methodology for the study of multi-versioned rhetorical works. In contrast to methodologies of textual authentication, which focus on the synchronic delivery of public address, genetic rhetorical criticism focuses on the diachronic movement of writing that both precedes and exceeds the work’s introduction to public history. It does so by affirming the value of unauthorized versions of rhetorical works, which deepen the field’s understanding of both particular rhetorical works and the textual dynamics of rhetoric. To support these claims, this essay reassesses the textual histories of both Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” and Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives. Engaging both works simultaneously shows that there are fundamental features of textuality that unite speech-centered and writing-centered rhetorical works. It also demonstrates that the textual histories of rhetorical works can support multiple scholarly interpretations.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the Eberly Family Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, and the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust for granting permission to cite unpublished materials in this essay. He also wishes to thank Barb Biesecker, Ron Fortune, Jack Selzer, and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable advice on early drafts of this essay.
Notes
1. Martin Medhurst, “Looking Back on Our Scholarship: Some Paths Now Abandoned,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 190.
2. Robert N. Gaines, “The Processes and Challenges of Textual Authentication,” in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, eds. Shawn J. Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010), 134.
3. Gaines, “The Processes,” 134.
4. Medhurst, “Looking Back,” 191.
5. We can add to Medhurst’s list research on Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Kenneth Burke. See, for example, Elisabeth Griffiths, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); James Arnt Aune, “Burke’s Palimpsest: Rereading Permanence and Change,” Communication Studies 42, no. 3 (1991): 234–37; Don M. Burks, “Kenneth Burke: “The agro-Bohemian ‘Marxoid,’” Communication Studies 42, no. 3 (1991): 219–33; Jordynn Jack, “‘The Piety of Degradation,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 4 (2004): 446–68; Edward Schiappa and Mary F. Keehner, “The ‘Lost’ Passages of Permanence and Change,” Communication Studies 42, no. 3 (1991): 191–98; Phillip C. Wander, “At the Ideological Front,” Communication Studies 42, no. 3 (1991): 199–218. This list is by no means exhaustive.
6. James Darsey, “Road-Tripping on Route 66: A Response to Medhurst’s Map of Abandoned Paths,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 201.
7. Darsey, “Road-Tripping,” 201.
8. Darsey, “Road-Tripping,” 201.
9. Darsey, “Road-Tripping,” 201.
10. Medhurst, “Looking Back,” 191.
11. Michel Foucault. “What is an Author?,” in Aesthetics, Methodology, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 213.
12. Foucault, “What is an Author?,” 214.
13. Gaines, “The Processes,” 134.
14. See Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945), 27; Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, “Introduction: A Genesis of French Genetic Criticism,” in Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 11.
15. Deppman, Ferrer, and Groden, “Introduction,” 11.
16. For more on this, see: Jacqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 2000); Malea Powell, “Dreaming Charles Eastman: Cultural Memory, Autobiography, and Geography in Indigenous Rhetorical Histories,” in Beyond the Archives: Research as Lived Process, eds. Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan, 115–27; Phillip H. Round, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1662–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010); Cheryl Glenn and Jessica Enoch, “Invigorating Historiographical Research Practices in Rhetoric and Composition Studies,” in Working in the Archives: Practical Research Methods for Rhetoric and Composition, eds. Alexis E. Ramsey, Wendy B. Sharer, Barbara L’Eplattenier, and Lisa S. Mastrangelo (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 11–27.
17. For instructive historical overviews of genetic literary criticism, see: Frank Paul Bowman, “Genetic Criticism,” Poetics Today 11, no. 3 (1990): 627–46; Sally Bushell, Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009); Graham Falconer, “Genetic Criticism,” Comparative Literature 45, no. 1 (1993); Louis Hay, “Genetic Criticism: Origins and Perspectives,” in Deppman, Ferrer, and Groden, 17–27; Laurent Jenny, “Genetic Criticism and its Myths,” Yale French Studies 89 (1996): 9–25.
18. Pierre-Marc de Biasi, “Toward a Science of Literature: Manuscript Analysis and the Genesis of the Work,” in Deppman, Ferrer, and Groden, 37.
19. Deppman, Ferrer, Groden, “Toward a Science,” 5; Michel Contant, Denis Hollier, and Jacques Neefs, “Editor’s Preface,” Yale French Studies 89 (1996): 2.
20. See: Louis Hay, “Does the ‘Text’ Exist?,” Studies in Bibliography 41 (1985): 75; de Biasi, “Toward a Science,” 61.
21. Deppman, Ferrer, Groden, “Introduction,” 11.
22. For a notable exception, see: William Kinderman and Joseph E. Jones, eds., Genetic Criticism and the Creative Process: Essays from Music, Literature, and Theater (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009).
23. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945), 27.
24. Burke, Grammar, 24.
25. As Burke notes, familial definitions can invoke Aristotelian entelechy, which would seem to complicate the nonteleological approach that distinguishes genetic rhetorical criticism. On this point, it is useful to consult Byron Hawk’s discussion of entelechy in A Counter-History for Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 125–26.
26. Bushell, Text as Process, 111.
27. Michael Bernard-Donals, “Synecdochic Memory at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,” College English 74, no. 5 (2012): 417–36; Timothy Barney, Mapping the Cold War: Cartography and the Framing of America’s International Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
28. Sally Bushell, “Textual Process and the Denial of Origins,” Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation 2, no. 2 (2007): 100–16.
29. Hans Walter Gabler, “Genetic Texts—Genetic Editions—Genetic Criticism or, Towards Discoursing the Genetics of Writing,” in Problems of Editing vol. 14, ed. Christa Jansohn (Tübingen: Beihefte zu edition, 1999), 59–78.
30. Pierre-Marc de Biasi, “Toward a Science of Literature: Manuscript Analysis and the Genesis of the Work” in Genetic Criticism, 42.
31. Jenny Edbauer, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2005): 20.
32. Ben McCorkle, Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2012), 1. See also, “Harbingers of the Printed Page: Nineteenth-Century Theories of Delivery as Remediation.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2005): 25–50.
33. John Bryant, The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 90.
34. Bryant, The Fluid Text, 90.
35. Bryant, The Fluid Text, 90.
36. Bryant, The Fluid Text, 94.
37. Bryant, The Fluid Text, 89.
38. Bryant, The Fluid Text, 104.
39. Medhurst, “Looking Back,” 191.
40. Debra Hawhee, “Historiography by Incongruity,” in Burke in the Archives, 197.
41. Martin P. Johnson, Writing the Gettysburg Address (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2013), 18.
42. Gaines, “The Processes,” 134.
43. Gaines, “The Processes,” 134.
44. Gaines, “The Processes,” 134.
45. Johnson, Writing, 4.
46. Johnson, Writing, 5.
47. Falconer, “Genetic Criticism,” 13.
48. Jared Peatman, The Long Shadow of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), 97.
49. Steven Mailloux, “Reading Typos, Reading Archives,” College English 61, no. 5 (1999): 584–90.
50. Johnson, Writing, 5.
51. Peatman, Long Shadow, 89.
52. Peatman, Long Shadow, 89.
53. Peatman, Long Shadow, 89.
54. Johnson, Writing, 4.
55. Bryan Crable, “Distance as Ultimate Motive: A Dialectical Interpretation of A Rhetoric of Motives,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2009): 214.
56. Crable, “Distance,” 216.
57. Crable, “Distance,” 216.
58. Crable, “Distance,” 216.
59. This argument is based on my discovery of four book outlines that Kenneth Burke produced during the composition and revision of A Rhetoric of Motives. These materials are stored in the Kenneth Burke Papers at the Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Penn State University. The dates that Burke assigned to these outlines are: January 2, 1946, September 1946, April 27, 1947, and February 15, 1948.
60. Kenneth Burke, Burke to Watson, April 4, 1948 in Burke-3, Kenneth Burke Papers.
61. Burke, Burke to Watson, 4 April 1948.
62. Kenneth Burke, Burke to Watson, April 8, 1948 in Burke-3, Kenneth Burke Papers.
63. Burke, Burke to Watson, April 8, 1948.
64. On June 11, 1950 Donald Stauffer reviewed A Rhetoric of Motives in The New York Times and, like Crable, questioned the value of the final 40 pages of the book. On June 16, 1950, Burke wrote a letter to Stauffer in response to his critique:
As regards the question whether the last section belongs in this particular book: The work hinges about two terms (“persuasion” for the Old rhetoric, “identification” for the “New”). Accordingly, it seemed reasonable that each should terminate in its corresponding “metarhetorical absolute”: hence, “persuasion” should end up in “pure persuasion,” and “identification” in “ultimate identification.” Also, besides dividing up the fields (Grammar, Rhetoric, Symbolic) for conveniences of discourse, I also find it advisable to keep reminded of their overlap (since all such divisions are somewhat arbitrary).
65. In a March 10, 1949 letter to Watson, Burke reports of completing his lectures at Princeton. He eventually delivered his lecture on socioanagogic analysis in Venus and Adonis, which also included “the Kierkegaard, the Castiglione-Kafka matching, and Pure Persuasion, winding up with the mildly perverse interpretation of the Apocalypse.” Burke reports that there were no “bleats” in protest, but worried that it was not as convincing as he had hoped. Burke’s admission is important because the lecture was drawn from his material on the chapter, Order, which he planned to publish. Kenneth Burke, Burke to Watson, March 10, 1949, James Sibley Watson/The Dial Papers in the Berg Collection, The New York Public Library. For more on this, see Robert Fitzgerald, Enlarging the Change: The Princeton Seminars in Literary Criticism, 1949–1951 (Northeastern University Press, 1985).
66. Kenneth Burke, “Order 162,” in Burke-3, Kenneth Burke Papers.
67. Kenneth Burke, “Order 382,” in Burke-3, Kenneth Burke Papers.
68. The subsequent version of Rhetoric that collates the sections, “The Range of Rhetoric,” “Traditional Principles of Rhetoric,” and “Order” shows that the page Crable cites is revised from “162” to “382.”
69. On May 7, 1948 Burke wrote to Watson to update him on the progress of his work, “Lo! I am back at the part of my project where, some several years back, when I began to write up these same notes (though many have been added since), I found all the other stuff interposing itself (plus the h.b.p). So now, after the Grammar, and the Mlbrn Bch section of the Rhetoric, I am caught up. The puffed-upness has now abated. The particular kind of tension and impatience that went with these unwanted but necessary preliminaries is gone. The writing becomes more of a driving, less of a being-driven. (Which means that, if something is gained, something also will be lost.)” Burke is here referring to the earlier drafts of the “Devices” chapter that he began writing in 1946. The “Mlbrn Bch section of the Rhetoric” refers to the chapter “Order” specifically, and the completion of the first three chapters of A Rhetoric of Motives, generally. Kenneth Burke, Burke to Watson, May 7, 1948 in the James Sibley Watson/The Dial Papers.
70. In 2014, Anthony Burke, Jack Selzer, and I began editing an edition of “The War of Words” by drawing together extant manuscripts from The Kenneth Burke Papers in the Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Penn State University, the James Sibley Watson/The Dial Papers in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, and the Burke family's archive.
71. Falconer, “Genetic Criticism,” 2.
72. Bowman, “Genetic Criticism,” 636.
73. Bowman, “Genetic Criticism,” 634. See also, de Biasi, “Toward a Science,” 43–60.
74. Bowman, “Genetic Criticism,” 634.
75. For more on this, see: de Biasi, “Toward a Science,” 61–64; Jean-Louis Lebrave, “Hypertexts—Memories—Writing” in Deppman, Ferrer, and Groden, “Introduction,” 218–38.
76. See Casey Boyle, “Low Fidelity in High Definition: Speculations on Rhetorical Editions,” in Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities, ed. Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 127–39; Ridolfo, Digital Samaritans.