Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature

Abstract

In 1960, Professor Donald R. Pearce edited and published a small volume entitled The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats.1 Some editorial decisions Pearce made serve to focus attention on what the distinctive features of spoken, instigative discourse may be.2 Pearce included in his volume of speeches a body of extensively inter rupted discourse on divorce, delivered in the Irish Senate. This material com prises remarks by Yeats and seven other senators plus a number of interruptive observations and rulings by the presiding officer of the Senate. The editor says he chose to present this discourse practically in its entirety, partly as the best way of incorporating necessary information, and partly to preserve the context of excitement surrounding what was probably Yeats's forensic showpiece.3 Elsewhere in his collection Pearce included what he titled, Divorce: An Un delivered Speech.4 This editor's inclusion and treatment of materials satisfy common sense. Why? To ask the question is to draw attention to seldom discussed aspects of rhetorical speech: contextual information must be supplied if oral rhetoric (or its printed remains) is to be open to full understanding, and to think of unde livered speech is not to be self-contradictory. I propose in this essay to explore why these common-sense judgments can be true and what the reasons may suggest concerning distinctions among oral rhetoric, rhetoric, and In the process I hope to display some features of oral rhetoric which may partially account for the fact that editors like Pearce and ordinary users of English would find it unusual to refer to a man's speeches as his tracts and equally unusual to say that his speeches are, by definition if printed, literature. In furnishing contextual material for Yeats's remarks on divorce and in using the concept of an undelivered speech together with special contextual material, Professor Pearce acted as though some prose composed for oral delivery has attributes of a unique sort. He implied that these works by Yeats could not be rightly understood or rightly described by reference to the same data and terms