Where does drama get its materials? From that is going on at point in history when we are born. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, discussion had already begun long any of got there, so that no one present is to retrace for you all steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught tenor of argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him [or her]; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself [or herself] against you, to either embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon quality of your ally's assistance. However, discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with discussion still vigorously in progress. It is from this ... that materials of your drama arise. (Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form 110-11) Some forty-two years after Kenneth Burke described history, from a dramatistic perspective, as an unending conversation, Sonja Foss offered as a metaphor for rhetorical criticism's process of development (Criteria 288). In rhetorical scholarship, knowledge and progress cannot be measured in terms of linear accumulation, which assumes that a single vocabulary or metaphor is used by all so that pieces of are built on previous ones.... Given that data cannot be verified objectively, our aim becomes to continue conversation about data rather than to discover truth about them (Foss, Criteria 288). The topic of what constitutes rhetorical scholarship is one for which an unending conversation is, indeed, in progress, a conversation into which Editor Mike Allen has asked this volume's contributors to dip their oars. Therein lies challenge. As I enter this ongoing conversation I face twin risks that I will say too much, repeating what others have already said, and that I will say too little, failing to remember what others have said. Aware of this, I still want to provide a (recognizably incomplete) summary of what I have heard in conversation (while constantly reminding myself that I am qualified to retrace for you all steps that had gone before especially since much of it transpired the point in history when [I was] born either as a body or as a scholar.) Beginning with Spring 1957 special issue of what was then called Western Speech (edited by Ernest Wrage), rhetorical scholars sought to define and clarify what constituted good rhetorical scholarship. In 1957, main problem was uniformity of critical method and concomitant search for more diverse approaches. The renamed Western Journal of Speech Communication revisited rhetorical criticism in its Fall 1980 special issue, devoted to State of Art (edited by Michael Leff. By this point in time, a diversity of approaches to criticism existed: neo-Aristotelian, movement criticism, critical models, genre analysis, and dramaturgical (later called dramatistic). Writing elsewhere, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell celebrated diversity available to scholars on eve of 1980s, arguing it was not a sign of chaotic instability but evidence of health and maturity of our discipline (The Nature 9). However, Leff still worried that, with proliferation of theoretical approaches, critics lack perspectives that enable to make adequate connections between theoretical constructs and concrete data of rhetorical experience. The rise of pluralism has broken us loose from old constraints and encouraged fresh activity in field, but multiplication of theories does resolve tension between theory and practice (Interpretation 342). …