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Abstract
This essay offers a retrospective on the four special issues of this journal (1957, 1980, 1990, 2001) dedicated to the “state of the art” of rhetorical criticism. Drawing on Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Mr. W. H. as allegory, the essay also functions to queer this retrospective in an ongoing effort to queer rhetorical studies. The essay closes with a prospective call for “critical self-portraiture” and genealogy of rhetorical criticism.
Heartfelt thanks to Brian Ott and Greg Dickinson for their generous invitation to write this retrospective; it was an honor. There aren't sufficient words of gratitude for Greg Dickinson, whose empathy, patience, and encouragement saw me through to the completion of this project during a period of mounting grief. I also thank Jason Black, Rob Asen, and Dan Brouwer for their invaluable friendship and counsel. As always, Scott Rose is my mainstay, my sine qua non. I dedicate this essay to my cherished companion, my beautiful boy, Augustine.
Notes
Astonishingly, if not surprisingly, there are no essays on Wilde's work in the national and regional journals dating to the field's founding; in total (beyond a music review from the 1950s and a book review from the 1960s) only one essay concerns Wilde, a memory study of Noel Pemberton-Billing's smearing of J. T. Grein upon his staging in London of Wilde's Salome in 1918 (Brockett). There is currently a fledgling critic doing promising queer work on Wilde that I hope he will continue to pursue and that will find its way into print. On the queer impoverishment of the field, see Morris III, Queering Public Address.
See Ellman 296–299; McKenna 101–108; Bartlett; Danson; Cohen; Sinfield 19–24; Laroche.
This is the expanded version of the original published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1889. Although in process for publication in 1893, the expanded version, as I later discuss, did not materialize that year and was “lost” until its publication in the US and England in 1921. Though important, for my purposes in this essay the specific revisions are not of direct consequence.
See Scult, McGee, and Kuntz; Bravmann 68–96.
In seeking out the “concepts” revealed and induced by speech, Nilsen recommended for instance that “we should ask what a speech implies about rationality, tolerance, and the moral autonomy of the individual; what it implies about the expression of opinions, deliberation and persuasion, free inquiry, free criticism, and free choice…attitudes toward what is orthodox and unorthodox in thought and action” (76).
Without diminishing the revolutionary turn achieved by Black's magisterial Rhetorical Criticism, I have always thought the opening chapter linking the scientist with the critic, with its undeniable disciplinary influence, quite lamentable—a perspective ultimately belied by his own brilliant oeuvre and strongly qualified in his “Author's Foreword” to the Citation1978 edition.
Of course scholarship in the field for years has richly demonstrated how rhetorical criticism deepens perspective on Abraham Lincoln. My point here is about interdisciplinary influence, and there is an equally long history that evidences the provincialism and territoriality of the Lincoln establishment. The recent contrast between, on one hand, the interpretive shortcomings of those publishing books on Lincoln's canonical texts, and, on the other, the ungenerous citation and characterization of David Zarefsky's important work, is illustrative. See Holzer; Guelzo. Guelzo belittled Zarefsky's Lincoln, Douglas and Slavery, calling it “really a technical rhetorical analysis of the debates rather than a narrative history of the campaigns,” an uninformed and petty justificatory maneuver that is representative of his ilk (xxii).
In his introduction to the 1990 special issue, John Angus Campbell retrieved only Black and Leff, with Leff emerging as one of the twin touchstones for the symposium. James Jasinski, whose stated mission was to understand the dialectic of method and theory, also bypassed the “preceding essays” of the Citation1980 special issue (Campbell, “Introduction” 249–251; Jasinski).
In a sense my observation confirms and extends Celeste Condit's claim that Leff's contribution to the field is that “he has taught us how to read the dispositio of a single text.” My understanding of disposition in this context and beyond is manifold, a mapping of text, affect, persona, etc. (Condit, “Rhetorical Criticism and Audiences” 331).
I am tempted here to contrast Leff's portrait of Burke with an empty canvas, the absence (refusal) of the masterpiece. Were one to follow this metaphorical route, it might fittingly lead to the first page of Stephen Browne's book on Edmund Burke. There we find Browne in the summer of 1985 at the National Portrait Gallery in London, anxious to lay eyes on Sir Joshua Reynolds' portrait of Burke, only to lamentably discover that the painting had been removed for cleaning (Browne, Edmund Burke 1).
Clark explained, “Dystax is the digressive and antithetical emotion or mood, which seems to work at cross purposes to hinder or prevent the essential progression, but which in the end is seen not to thwart but to emphasize and heighten, perhaps ennoble the idea. Ethos is a kind of dystax. It gets in the way of the logical progression of the argument, is a constant source of irritation to the reader removed a hundred years from the charged atmosphere of the courtroom or the hysterical fervor of the nominating convention.” Clark, “Lessons” 85. In the case of touchstone ethos, the critic at historical remove would not be irritated by the dystax but rather would be caught up in it.
Although Hasian limits his citations to legal studies inside and outside the field, the imprint of the vernacular turn within critical rhetoric seems clear. See Ono and Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse.”
See Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron”; Cloud, “The Null Persona”; Crowley and Selzer; Greene; McKerrow; Ono and Sloop, “Commitment to Telos”; “Special Issue on Ideology and Communication.”
Rhetorical critics could gain a great deal from work on queer historiography, memory, and archives. See, for example, Bravmann; Howard; Dinshaw; Halperin; Cvetkovich; Butt; Halberstam; Johnson, Sweet Tea.
For an instructive exploration of self-portraiture, see Smalls. Outside the field, work by the late architecture critic Herbert Muschamp provides a superb model. See Muschamp, Hearts of the City; Muschamp, “Self-Portrait with Rivals.” In history, such self-reflection, following the work of John R. Stilgoe, has been called the “barefoot historian.” See Stilgoe; Halttunen.
See Wander; Blair, “Contested Histories of Rhetoric”; Blair, Brown, and Baxter; Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland 15–70; Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron.”
See, for example, Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland 114–125; Rushing and Frentz.
See Blair and Michel; Shugart; Tonn; Ott; Medhurst; Gunn; Finnegan; Pezzullo; Brouwer; Cloud, “On Dialectics and Duelism.” Although a blog would be beyond the domain of consideration here, Joshua Gunn's The Rosewater Chronicles (<http://www.joshiejuice.com/blog/>) often exemplifies critical self-portraiture.
I should quickly point out that there are efforts to bring rhetorical studies and performance studies into sustained interaction, and of course there have long been individual critics who have moved across these intradisciplinary borders; however, I do think it fair to say that rhetorical critics have not by and large availed themselves of performance studies scholarship. See Gencarella and Pezzullo.
Corey and Nakayama; Nelson; Langellier; Madison; Ellis and Bochner; Alexander and Warren; Gingrich-Philbrook, “Autoethnography”; Jones; Spry; Fox, “Skinny Bones”; Fox, “Tales of a Fighting Bobcat.” Thanks to Ragan Fox for his good and generous advice as I engaged this scholarship.
See also Blair and Kahl; Vitanza; Biesecker, “Coming to Terms.” In Public Address, critical history has only rarely occurred at moments of major intervention or “renaissance.” See Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her; Gaonkar, “The Oratorical Text”; Morris, Queering Public Address. On genealogy, see Foucault, Madness and Civilization; Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”; Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Lash; Stormer; Morris, “Richard Halliburton's Bearded Tales.” Performance studies scholarship also has much to teach us about the performance of history and the genealogy of performance. See Pollock; Jackson; Taylor; Fenske.