The Prospects for Literacy Studies in the Revival of Rhetorical Education

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ Walker’s presentation at the ARS Conference influenced the theme for the first RSA Summer Institute seminar in 2005, “The History of Rhetoric as a Teaching Tradition.” The seminarians and workshop leaders, including Jeffrey Walker, Martin Camargo, Lawrence Green, Arthur Walzer, Linda Ferreira-Buckley, Steven Mailloux, Cheryl Glenn, and Michael Leff, reimagined “The Rhetorical Tradition” as one comprised of teaching materials and pedagogical approaches used to teach rhetorical practice from ancient through contemporary times, such as progymnasmata exercises in ancient Greece and letter writing manuals from the medieval period.

² Significantly, the same issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly (vol. 44, no. 1) that featured the “Mt. Oread Manifesto” also included three other articles exploring rhetorical education: Pamela VanHaitsma, “Queering the Language of the Heart: Romantic Letters, Genre Instruction, and Rhetorical Practice,” pp. 6-24; Glen McClish, “‘To Furnish Specimens of Negro Eloquence’: William J. Simmons’s Men of Mark as a Site of Late-Nineteenth-Century African American Rhetorical Education,” pp. 46-67; and Grace Wetzel, “Winifred Black’s Teacherly Ethos: The Role of Journalism in Late-Nineteenth-Century Rhetorical Education,” pp. 68-93. Notably, VanHaitsma’s article earned the 2015 Charles Kneupper Award, which recognizes the best article published in that year’s volume of RSQ.

³ In a footnote in “The Mt. Oread Manifesto,” the document’s primary authors, William Keith and Roxanne Mountford, acknowledge the “editorial and conceptual contributions” from scholars who participated in the “Rhetoric in/between the Disciplines” seminar at the 2013 RSA Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. Please see page 1 of the manifesto for the names of those contributors. Given the collaborative nature of the piece, I have taken the liberty to refer to the manifesto authors as “The Mt. Oread Collective” throughout this essay.