A Living Rhetorical Enterprise: The RSA Oral History Initiative

Abstract

This essay introduces the archive created by the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA)’s Oral History Initiative. The archive consists of 21 audio interviews recorded at the 2018 RSA conference, transcripts of those interviews, and miscellaneous supplementary materials. Recorded on the occasion of RSA’s fiftieth anniversary, the interviews feature long-time RSA members, past and present officers and board members, and those who were otherwise a part of key moments in the society’s history. The essay’s authors explore the contents of the interviews, emphasizing three key terms frequently invoked by the interviewees themselves: interdisciplinarity, intimacy, and inclusivity. The authors also provide instructions for accessing the archival materials and invite readers to make use of them.

Keywords:

• archives
• disciplinary history
• inclusivity
• interdisciplinarity
• oral history

Notes

¹ The interviewees were Fred Antczak, David Blakesley, Gregory Clark, Richard Enos, Michael Feehan, S. Michael Halloran, Gerard Hauser, Cynthia Haynes, Janice Lauer Rice, Andrea Lunsford, Steven Mailloux, Carolyn Miller, Lester Olson, Krista Ratcliffe, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Jack Selzer, Jane Sutton, Sue Wells, Hui Wu, and David Zarefsky, as well as a group of rhetoricians who participated in the first RSA summer institute in 2005: René De los Santos, Jessica Enoch, Jenn Fishman, Elizabeth Kimball, and Scott Wible. The interviewers and proctors for the initiative were Whitney Jordan Adams, Sweta Baniya, Amy Charron, Derek Handley, Ben Harley, Justin Hatch, Laura Jones, Jennifer Juszkiewicz, Emily Katseanes, Brittany Knutson, Caroline Koons, Jennifer Malkowski, Eda Ozyesilpinar, Heather Palmer, Sarah Riddick, Peter Simonson, Emily Smith, Jason Tham, and Rick Wysocki. Copious thanks for the generosity, flexibility, and candor of everyone involved. Thanks also to Kirt Wilson for reserving the meeting room in which most of the interviews were conducted and to Middle Tennessee State University's Albert Gore Research Center for providing some of the recording equipment used for the initiative.

² For the interview questions, see the Appendix. More technical details of the project are available in the digital archive.

³ On the marginalization of rhetoric in twentieth-century American universities, see Berlin; Crowley, Composition; Goggin; Skinnell. On the English studies side of things, rhetoric and composition—now widely referred to as “rhetoric and writing studies”—has often played the upstart, disrespected counterpart to the more prestigious, supposedly established study of literature. And even within the heading “rhetoric and composition,” scholars like Crowley have argued that composition-centered approaches to the teaching of writing have boxed out more rhetorical approaches (Crowley, “Composition”). Meanwhile, in “Epistemological Movements in Communication,” Anderson and Middleton analyze “one hundred years of empirical and rhetorical/critical scholarship in communication” (82). Unlike many disciplinary histories of English studies, Anderson and Middleton do not point to rhetoric as a clear underdog in communication studies’ disciplinary landscape. However, the OHI interviews demonstrate a feeling that, from the start, RSA was making space for rhetorically oriented communication scholars as their discipline became increasingly focused on empirical methodologies and subfields. This feeling may have intensified when the Speech Communication Association was renamed the National Communication Association in 1997 (Gunn and Dance 74), a change Antczak discusses in his OHI interview and Gunn and Dance explore in detail in “The Silencing of Speech in the Late Twentieth Century.”

⁴ Miller goes on to note that the RSA Constitution has always had measures in place to balance the disciplinary affiliations of the organization’s leadership, but that these measures were not always observed in earlier days (see also “RSA Constitution”; Skinnell and Goggin 352).

⁵ Here we might consider the American Society for the History of Rhetoric, the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, and the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine, all of which held symposia in conjunction with the 2018 conference.

⁶ For more on Mailloux’s points, see his Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition.

⁷ Haynes also mentions Kathleen Welch and Susan Jarratt as noteworthy attendants of the Arlington conferences.

⁸ In her OHI interview, Andrea Lunsford discusses the motivations behind the latter effort: “Membership in ACLS is instrumental in terms of getting grants. So rhetoric was not recognized as a field of study on many grant applications. … But getting into the ACLS allowed us to become, in some ways, a category.”

⁹ On the urgency of challenging histories of rhetoric that privilege narratives of “Western civilization,” which can be disturbingly consonant with narratives forwarded by white supremacists, see Atwill and Portz. Atwill and Portz question the depiction of “Greeks” as a “unitary category,” instead emphasizing the diversity and “complexity of Mediterranean cultures” (180). They go on to ask, “What if diversifying histories of rhetoric also entails ‘unwriting’ narratives of Western civilization and extricating canonical figures from their plots?” (187). For similar work in classics, see Bernal; Zuckerberg.

¹⁰ The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies documents many of the ways in which rhetorical scholarship has moved beyond the singular Greco-Roman tradition that dominated rhetoric’s initial reemergence in the late twentieth century. See Gaillet and Tasker; Hum and Lyon; Ronald; Sutherland. See also Agnew et al.