Places in Time: The Inns and Outhouses of Rhetoric1

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. For more on the ARS conference, at which these questions were posed, see Scott McLemee, “Making It ‘Big’: Rhetoricians Regroup in Era of Tight Purse Strings,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 31, 2003, A14; Gregory Clark, ed., The Alliance of Rhetoric Societies Conference, 2003: Conversations in Evanston, special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2004). 2. For a fuller discussion of disciplinarity, see Steven Mailloux, “Practices, Theories, and Traditions: Further Thoughts on the Disciplinary Identities of English and Communication Studies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 33 (2003): 129–38, from which this paragraph derives; also see Julie Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990). 3. See Steven Mailloux, “Disciplinary Identities: On the Rhetorical Paths between English and Communication Studies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (2000): 5–29. Besides such standard histories as James A. Berlin, Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987); Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Herman Cohen, The History of Speech Communication: The Emergence of a Discipline, 1914–1945 (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1994), also see the bibliographies for individual disciplines in Maureen Daly Goggin, “The Tangled Roots of Literature, Speech Communication, Linguistics, Rhetoric/Composition, and Creative Writing,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 29 (1999): 63–87. 4. I develop this formulation in Steven Mailloux, “Using Traditions: A Gadamerian Reflection on Canons, Contexts, and Rhetoric,” in The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition, ed. Janet Atwill, Richard Graff, and Art Walzer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 181–94. 5. James Morgan Hart, “The College Course in English Literature, how it may be Improved,” Transactions of the Modern Language Association 1 (1884–85): 84–85. 6. Hart, “College Course,” 85, n. 1. 7. Hart, “College Course,” 85. Reviewing a poetics handbook, Hart later reiterated his view: “The special connection between rhetoric and poetry is not obvious. My individual preference is for keeping them as far asunder as possible. The less readily poetry lends itself to rhetorical analysis, the more truly poetical it is” (James Morgan Hart, review of A Handbook of Poetics for Students of English Verse, by Francis B. Gummere, Modern Language Notes 1 [1886]: 17). 8. See Susan Miller, Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991); John Clifford and John Schilb, eds., Writing Theory and Critical Theory (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994); John Schilb, Between the Lines: Relating Composition Theory and Literary Theory (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1996); Maureen Daly Goggin, Authoring a Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000), 192–98. 9. See Hart's comparison of the German and American systems of higher education, based on his own experience at the University of Göttingen from 1860–64, in James Morgan Hart, German Universities: A Narrative of Personal Experience (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1874); also see Carl Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship, 1770–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). For accounts of the late-nineteenth-century emergence of the American university, see Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York: Vintage, 1962); Laurence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). On the disciplining of oral and written rhetoric during this period, see histories listed in Goggin, “Tangled Roots”; and Donald C. Stewart, “The Nineteenth Century,” in The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric, 2nd ed., ed. Winifred Bryan Horner (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 151–85. For useful collections of primary documents, see Gerald Graff and Michael Warner, eds., The Origins of Literary Studies in America: A Documentary Anthology (New York: Routledge, 1989); and John C. Brereton, ed., The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875–1925: A Documentary History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). 10. Charles W. Eliot, “What Is a Liberal Education?,” Century Magazine 28 (1884): 205. 11. Mentioning Hart's essay in passing, Seth Lerer provides a rhetorically inventive account of performing disciplinary identity in his history of American philology and its relation to rhetoric: Seth Lerer, Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 195–207. Also see Michael Warner, “Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature, 1875–1900,” Criticism 27 (1985): 1–28; Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 55–118; Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 176–257; Robert J. Connors, Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 171–209; David R. Russell, Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History, 2nd ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 35–132; John Guillory, “Literary Study and the Modern System of the Disciplines,” in Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 19–43. 12. On the more complex and locally varied situation for writing instruction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Kathryn M. Conway, “Woman Suffrage and the History of Rhetoric at the Seven Sisters Colleges, 1865–1919,” in Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, ed. Andrea A. Lunsford (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 203–26; Susan Kates, Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education, 1885–1937 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001); David Gold, “Never Mind What Harvard Thinks: Alternative Sites of Rhetorical Instruction in American Colleges, 1873–1947” (diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2003). I thank my colleague Susan Jarratt for these suggestions; see her “Rhetoric” essay in the Introduction to Scholarship in the Modern Languages, 3rd ed., ed. David Nicholls (New York: Modern Language Association of America, forthcoming 2007). 13. See James Morgan Hart, A Handbook of English Composition (Philadelphia: Eldredge and Brother, 1895); and his “English as a Living Language,” PMLA 10 (1895): xi–xxi. Hart's father, John S. Hart, had published a widely adopted textbook, A Manual of Composition and Rhetoric (Philadelphia: Eldredge & B rother1870), which his son took it upon himself to defend in a letter to the editor in 1890, ending with the sentence: “May our teachers of rhetoric, instead of criticizing sentences by arbitrary rules from without inwards, evolve them from the inner thought outwards” (“Notes on Rhetoric,” Modern Language Notes 5 [1890]: 25). On composition texts of the period more generally, see Nan Johnson, Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). 14. See Waterman Thomas Hewett, Cornell University: A History, vol. 2 (New York: University Publishing Society, 1905), 47, 52, 65; and Thomas W. Benson, “The Cornell School of Rhetoric: Idiom and Institution,” Communication Quarterly 51 (2003): 1–56. 15. Andrew Thomas Weaver, “Seventeen Who Made History—The Founders of the Association,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 45 (1959): 195–99; and Herman Cohen, The History of Speech Communication: The Emergence of a Discipline, 1914–1945 (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1994), 29–36. 16. I'm thinking here especially of the Rhetoric Society of America (see http://rhetoricsociety.org) and the International Society for the History of Rhetoric (see http://ishr.cua.edu) as well as ARS (see http://www.rhetoricalliance.org). 17. Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. (2003). 18. For a more recent, extensive rhetorical account addressing the post-9/11 challenges, see Robert Ivie, Democracy and America's War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005). 19. Steven Mailloux, “Contingent Universals: Religious Fundamentalism, Academic Postmodernism, and Public Intellectuals in the Aftermath of September 11,” Cardozo Law Review 24 (2003): 1583–604. 20. Edward Rothstein, “Attacks on U.S. Challenge the Perspective of Postmodern True Believers,” New York Times, November 17, 2001, A7. 21. Edward Rothstein, “Pomo at War,” Cardozo Law Review 24 (2003): 1605. 22. Rothstein, “Pomo at War,” 1606. 23. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes toward History, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 166. The Burkean association was suggested to me by Jack Selzer's ARS position paper (see http://www.commumn.edu/ARS/Goals/Selzer,%20 goals.htm). 24. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 130. For recent discussions, see Daniel M. Gross and Ansgar Kemmann, eds., Heidegger and Rhetoric (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). 25. Also see the essays and bibliographies in Martin Nystrand and John Duffy, eds., Towards a Rhetoric of Everyday Life: New Directions in Research on Writing, Text, and Discourse (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). The editors define “the rhetoric of everyday life” as “the rhetorical character and dynamics of language in mundane contexts especially beyond school, and also the rhetorical interpenetration of school discourse and political and cultural forces transcending the academy” (viii). Cf. Ralph Cintron's focus on “the rhetorics of public culture or the rhetorics of the everyday,” an approach “interested in the structured contentiousness that organizes, albeit fleetingly, a community or a culture” (Ralph Cintron, Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday [Boston: Beacon, 1997], x). 26. John Frow, “‘Never Draw to an Inside Straight’: On Everyday Knowledge,” New Literary History 33 (2002): 637. 27. See Steven Mailloux, Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), especially 97–98 and 175–76. 28. On the first debate, see Edward Schiappa, “Second Thoughts on the Critiques of Big Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 34 (2001): 260–74; on the second within communication studies, see Thomas Rosteck, ed., At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies (New York: Guilford, 1999). 29. See Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith, eds., Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Herbert W. Simons, “Rhetorical Hermeneutics and the Project of Globalization,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 86–109; William Keith, Steve Fuller, Alan Gross, and Michael Leff, “Taking Up the Challenge: A Response to Simons,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 330–31. 30. John Frow, “Text, Culture, Rhetoric: Some Futures for English,” Critical Quarterly 43, no. 1 (2001): 5. 31. For background, see the introduction and bibliography in the new edition of Blair's Lectures: Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran, eds., Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, by Hugh Blair (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), xv–liv. 32. Frow, “Text, Culture, Rhetoric,” 12; quoting Mailloux, Reception Histories, 4. 33. Frow, “Text, Culture, Rhetoric,” 12. 34. Frow, “Text, Culture, Rhetoric,” 12–13.