Concerning Judgment in Criticism of Rhetoric

Abstract

Drawing on John Dewey's classic definition of criticism, this essay centers on judgment as a necessary culmination for criticism of rhetoric. Concentrating primarily on the use of touchstones and analogs in aesthetic appraisals of rhetoric, the essay reconsiders and reshapes insights from scholarship on criticism by Edwin Black and Michael Leff to argue that touchstones and analogs can reveal rhetorical possibilities from a range of situated standpoints. A rhetorical shift to the judgment of touchstones can move us from the artifact to the public disclosure of a critic's narratives and reasons concerning the possible in rhetoric, regardless of whether the artifact is considered an exceptional masterpiece.

Keywords:

• Rhetorical Criticism
• Judgment
• Criticism Pedagogy
• Touchstones
• Analogs

Notes

1. This view of history writing can be found, for example, in Edward Hallett Carr's (1962) What Is History? The view that history is interpretive is now commonplace.

2. The coeditors have organized a book on rhetorical criticism of visual rhetoric around key symbolic actions in Olson, Finnegan, and Hope's (2008) Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture (pp. 9–10).

3. If we accept this idea, then an emphasis on “methods” with a false promise of reproducible results and a pretense of objectivity may be misguided. We might, moreover, be bothered by the uncritical application of extant theories to creative productions, which reduce them to data or example. I have in mind Herbert A. Wicheln's seldom quoted remark in 1925, “nor is his [or her] judgment warped… by having a theory to market” (qtd. in Scott & Brock, 1972, p. 35).

4. It may follow from Dewey's perspective that there has been a decline in the production of scholarship in speech and communication that exemplifies rhetorical criticism. Essays of considerable historical or interpretive value regularly stop short of offering a thesis encapsulating an appraisal of a creative production. This might be a consequence of an increase of scholarly interest in ideologies, genres, institutions, and taken-for-granted presumptions, all of which tend to limit or circumscribe the potential for human agency. There is a decline of scholarly interest in identification of masterpieces, at times rooted in a healthy skepticism about myths of individualism or an exaggerated sense of each person's agency. Some have apparently abandoned judgment in favor of interpretation as sufficient for criticism, e.g., Charles Morris, III, Queering Public Address: Sexualities in American Historical Discourse (Morris, 2007, p. 3). One ambivalent outcome of this stance may be that it could become impossible to distinguish between a thesis for criticism and history, since history is ordinarily interpretive, too (e.g., Carr, 1962).

5. I have sympathy for aesthetic judgments which are normative for the kind or type (genre criticism), even though this approach can be vulnerable to concerns about the usual limitations that attend normative assessments. Some creative productions are powerful precisely because of non-normative or one of a kind events. G.P. Mohrman and Michael C. Leff, for example, advocated reforming the “neo-classical” approach by devoting attention to the contemporaneous audience's judgment to be rendered and, consequentially, the norms concerning the corresponding genre. The coauthors acknowledged significant changes in cultural conditions, exemplified by the political campaign speech in nineteenth-century U.S. history (Mohrmann & Leff, 1974; Leff & Mohrmann, 1974). An attention to norms in genre criticism can be much more responsive to history and culture than much predominantly theory-driven criticism. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1978; 2008) have likewise embraced a normative approach to aesthetic judgments in which the exemplary can be recognized by how it goes beyond the normal or typical in the genre.

6. Edwin Black did so in his now classic 1965 book, Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. Yet touchstones need not be founded in formalism, as he claimed, nor must touchstones be used only to identify masterpieces (66–68). Michael Leff proposed the use of touchstones in his classic essay on textual criticism, “Textual Criticism: Tribute to Mohrmann,” in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 1986. Turning attention to how critical practice could generate theoretical insight and critical judgment, Leff focused on touchstones primarily in the criticism-theory relationship. Leff commented, “Since the exemplary case instantiates a standard of excellence, it provides access to qualitative grounds for rhetorical judgment” (p. 383). With regard to theory, Leff added, “Moreover, I think it fair to regard such critical activity as theoretical, though not in the dominant contemporary sense, which refers to theory as a body of doctrine, an abstract set of principles organized in a self-contained and coherent structure. Instead, theory becomes linked with a kind of activity, and meaning approximates the early Greek sense of theoria, which… denotes, a viewing or observing of something as a whole in order to understand it” (p. 383). Though there is much to commend this view, touchstones need not be limited in their value to the production or generation of theory.

7. For an alternative view concerning objectivity and normative assessments with analogs, as well as their use as a preliminary step in genre criticism, see Larry Rosenfield's “The Anatomy of Critical Discourse” and “A Case Study in Speech Criticism: The Truman-Nixon Analog,” both in Speech Monographs in 1968 (Rosenfield, 1968a, 1968b).

8. The text of Wiesel's speech is available at http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/wiesel.htm. A link on this website makes it possible to listen to the entire speech. Also available at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches under Wiesel's name and/or the speech title.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lester C. Olson

Lester C. Olson (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Professor of Communication and Women's Studies and Chancellor's Distinguished Teacher at the University of Pittsburgh