Charting a Course Between Methodological Formalism and Eclecticism: Pedagogical Tensions in Three Rhetorical Analysis Textbooks

Abstract

This review explores how method-oriented approaches to rhetorical criticism are articulated in three textbooks. In method-oriented criticism, methods are abstracted, foregrounded, and separated from each other and from their original contexts. As a number of rhetorical scholars have argued since at least the 1950s, when methods are detached from objects of analysis and when the problem is reduced to one of choosing the best method, the resulting criticism can be mechanical and unimaginative. At issue is how well such an approach serves critical practice and our students in the long run. Critical pluralism in rhetorical studies raises important questions—questions that have no easy, textbook-style answers—about the relationship between theory and practice, method and object, and method and critic. These questions cut to the heart of what it is to be a rhetorical critic. This review is organized around six tensions that both express some of the problems with method-based criticism and point the way to an alternative pedagogy for rhetorical analysis.

Keywords:

• Rhetorical Criticism
• Textual Analysis
• Methods
• Pedagogy
• Textbooks

Notes

1. The course has two primary names: rhetorical analysis and rhetorical criticism. It may have other names as well: methods of text analysis, discourse analysis, and rhetorical theory, among others. Often, course names betray disciplinary origins: rhetorical criticism is typically linked to communication studies, and rhetorical analysis is more often used in English departments. In this paper, I tend to use “criticism” and “analysis” interchangeably because the textbooks I analyze operate from different disciplinary bases and because my argument is not specific to one discipline. While I do not have space here to explore the history or nature of the differences between courses in criticism offered in communication studies and English studies, I argue later in this review that students can benefit from a clearer understanding of the disciplinary assumptions about criticism that inform the criticism course they are taking and the textbook (if any) they are using. These assumptions may be hidden in individual textbook chapters.

2. Medhurst (1989, p. 205) offers “several and well known” reasons why “the teaching of rhetorical criticism, especially to the undergraduate audience, is a taxing experience”:

the undergraduate's lack of knowledge about all things rhetorical, especially rhetorical theory; the lack of familiarity with oratory in general and specific speeches in particular; poor preparation in history, politics, and other cognate fields; generally low writing skills that sometimes seem to defy comment, much less correction; and the ever present problems of time and resources. Add to this the reluctance of some administrators to schedule classes that require small sections and one has at least a wide-angle view of the problem.

3. From this point forward, the three textbooks will be referred to only by author's last name and, where warranted, page number. Dates of publication will not be repeated in the interest of efficiency.

4. More troubling for rhetoricians is how the complexity of Burke's thought has been reduced to finite taxonomies—such as the pentad and ratios. According to Black (1980, p. 335), Burke's dramatism “begins promisingly with the expectation that a static taxonomy will not suffice to account for phenomena so mutable and unstable as rhetorical transactions,” but “ends by sponsoring a taxonomy.”

5. While graduate courses tend to use critical essays rather than textbooks, some textbooks, such as Bazerman and Prior's book, are clearly intended for advanced students. Moreover, as I have suggested, textbooks may be a viable supplement for graduate students taking their first course in rhetoric (e.g., students enrolled in technical communication programs). In the case of undergraduate courses, the brand of criticism outlined in the textbooks is overwhelmingly personal criticism (i.e., find a curious artifact and analyze it for greater self-understanding). Such criticism is typically bereft of community, including the community of the classroom and the student's local community. What we should be concerned about in the case of undergraduate courses in rhetorical criticism is not how textbooks distinguish between textbook criticism and the scholarly practice of rhetorical criticism (as Benoit does), but how they avoid community altogether. The challenge for the undergraduate instructor is to negotiate the tension between criticism as a pursuit of self-understanding and criticism as the critic's intervention in the public's understanding of texts. Service learning projects may provide one way forward at the undergraduate level.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sean Zdenek

Sean Zdenek is an assistant professor of technical communication and rhetoric at Texas Tech University