Libraries and Their Publics: Rhetorics of the Public Library

Abstract

Arguments about the future of libraries are more trenchant than ever. Yet questions about the nature of public libraries are inseparable from questions about their public character. Historically, competing arguments about the ideal relationship between libraries and their publics have mirrored evolving technologies that affect a library’s potential content and accessibility. But today, when socially excluded populations need libraries to gain the cultural capital necessary to participate in civil society, threats to public libraries also threaten the public sphere’s viability as a way for the disenfranchised to address the state.

Notes

¹ I thank RR editor Theresa Enos and peer reviewers Frank Farmer and Steven Mailloux for their valuable help with this essay’s development.

² Steven Mailloux has given the name rhetorical hermeneutics to “the theoretical practice that results from the intersection between rhetorical pragmatism and the study of cultural rhetoric” (52). In this sense, my project in these pages might be described as a rhetorical hermeneutic of the public library: To use Mailloux’s felicitous phrase, it “uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history” (52, 63).

³ It is worth noting that the Parnassian and Universal models are also highly imbricated. For instance, a Universal model could be supported by the rationale that humans are fallible in our ability to gauge which texts will matter later; therefore, it is better to collect and archive as much material as possible in order to accommodate shifting judgments about which texts will count most in an unforeseeable future. In such an argument, a Parnassian ideal justifies a Universal policy; the dissoi logoi are deeply enmeshed. Conversely, though, the modern trend toward collecting all forms of human knowledge in a Universal library is itself a Parnassian endeavor to the extent that some genres of text tend to be collected more than others. Inasmuch as certain genres have little standing in library collections—ephemera being a good example—even modern libraries devoted to more Universal principles practice a tacit Parnassian elitism.

⁴ Harvard’s Puritanism may be revealing. The Puritan worldview, which takes God to be just and the greatest sin to be pride, seems to invite a Universal model for libraries by favoring the humility that would grant all humankind a capacity to read, reason, and arrive at the knowledge necessary to take care of others. Although Puritans of the time were highly influenced by Calvinists, we might speculate that Calvinist theology implicitly invites a Parnassian model insofar as Calvinists feared that if knowledge were not held by a select group of religious leaders, then others would interpret scripture and misread it.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chris Ingraham

Chris Ingraham is a doctoral candidate in Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder.