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Symposium: InterdisciplinaryPerspectives on RhetoricalCriticismRichard Leo Enos, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, AndrewKing, Celeste M. Condit, Richard J. Jensen, Sonja K.Foss, Martin J. Medhurst & David Zarefsky

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To cite this article: Richard Leo Enos, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Andrew King, CelesteM. Condit, Richard J. Jensen, Sonja K. Foss, Martin J. Medhurst & David Zarefsky(2006): Symposium: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Rhetorical Criticism, RhetoricReview, 25:4, 357-387

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Interdisciplinary Perspectives on RhetoricalCriticism

Richard Leo EnosTexas Christian University

Introduction: The Inclusiveness of Rhetorical Criticism

This work is dedicated to Edwin Black in recognition of his contributions to thestudy of rhetorical criticism.

Since the early years of the twentieth century, scholars of rhetoric havemade enormous contributions in refining and applying how we understand therelationship between thought and expression. A tremendous argument would en-sue if we tried to determine which one of the many contributions was the moreimportant. Advances made in rhetorical theory, the history of rhetoric, and theteaching of oral and written expression have all benefited the modern era of rhet-oric. What can justly be claimed, however, is that one of the most important ofall achievements has been in rhetorical criticism. The majority of advances madein rhetorical criticism have come from scholars of communication. Their bodyof work has done more than refine the understanding and evaluation of spokendiscourse; their insights have revolutionized our sensitivity to the very natureand range of symbolic expression. For well over a century, work in rhetoricalcriticism has helped us to better understand the nature of discourse, assess themerits of expressed views, and, in a very real sense, situate discourse within itssocial contexts. I believe that this last area—understanding discourse within itssituational and cultural contexts—may indeed be the single greatest contributionof rhetorical criticism. Yet the insights offered by researchers of orality havetranscended the province of communication, reaching other manifestations ofexpression. Overall, twentieth-century contributions to rhetorical criticism ex-tend well beyond the field of communication studies to such kindred disciplinesas English, linguistics, and religion.

Rhetoric Review, Vol. 25, No. 4, 357–87Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. 357

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This collection of essays represents an effort to draw upon the wisdom ofsome of the most distinguished scholars of rhetorical criticism. We have askedthese experts to draw upon the knowledge that they have acquired from their ca-reer-long studies and to synthesize their observations for readers of Rhetoric Re-view. We have asked them to write about rhetorical criticism in a way that willreveal the wisdom that can only be acquired across time and to do so in a man-ner that will help reach readers eager to learn more about rhetorical criticism.Writing in such a manner itself requires a special talent, and I am indeed gratefulfor the time and effort that it took to produce such essays. What is apparent inthis collection is not only the depth of experience of each of the respective con-tributors but also the range and diversity of their perspectives. Included in thissymposium are observations about rhetorical criticism that bear on literary stud-ies, social movements, political rhetoric, women’s studies, history, and religion.

We intended to have Edwin Black write the introduction for this sympo-sium. Professor Black accepted our invitation, but ill health prevented his partic-ipation in our project. This short introduction is a far cry from what he wouldhave written. This project is dedicated to him, for Edwin Black has—as many ofthe writers in this collection will reveal—done more to broaden the view andscope of rhetorical criticism than any other scholar of our era.

(NB: I thank Sarah Yoder for her careful reading of, and thoughtful sugges-tions on, this work.)

Karlyn Kohrs CampbellThe University of Minnesota

Cultural Challenges to Rhetorical Criticism

When I was a graduate student, rhetorical criticism was not taught in speechdepartments; we studied rhetorical history. I learned close textual analysis inAmerican literature courses. I began teaching rhetorical criticism in the late1960s and published Critiques of Contemporary Rhetoric in 1972, which was, Ibelieve, the first criticism textbook. My notions of what was rhetoric and how itshould be analyzed were expanded by studying the rhetorical theory ofJean-Paul Sartre and by teaching in schools whose student populations were pre-dominantly nonwhite in the midst of the civil rights, countercultural, women’s,and antiwar movements.

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Because I found the discourse of these movements fascinating and challeng-ing, I began to think about alternative ways of approaching them, reflected in the1971 essay on Black rhetoric that appeared in the Central States Journal, in theessays in Critiques, and in essays on second-wave feminism and on CadyStanton’s “Solitude of Self,” which appeared in Quarterly Journal of Speech.From the outset I was searching for critical approaches that were adapted to thecharacter of the rhetoric and to the time, place, culture, and circumstances of therhetors. That is still my goal.

As I write this, I am in Tokyo, where I have been a visiting professor atDokkyo University teaching courses in Western rhetorical theory, rhetoricalcriticism, political communication, and gender and communication to Japanesestudents. There my rhetoric colleagues, Yoshihisa Itaba and Hideki Kakita,asked me to lecture to the English Department faculty on the topic, “What isRhetoric, and Why Should We Study It?” At the end of December, I attendeda conference at Xiamen University in China that explored the history of com-munication studies on the mainland, in Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and in re-search by Chinese scholars elsewhere. There, too, much confusion existedabout rhetorical studies, about its character and value, despite the fine work ofXing (Lucy) Lu, Lin-Lee Lee, and others. Our challenge is to find ways tomake rhetoric—its theory, practice, and criticism—a vital part of communica-tion studies in non-Western cultures.

There are several barriers to that goal. First, the study of public discourse inthe United States has been Western in two senses: theoretically grounded in theGreco-Roman theory of Aristotle and Cicero, and conceived as having as its pur-pose the celebration of public discourse by dominant figures, reflecting the ide-als of US democracy. A narrow understanding of Greco-Roman theory ledscholars to declare that there was no (Western) rhetoric in Japan until it wasopened to the West. Scholars produced rhetorical histories that dismissed or dep-recated voices of dissent, such as Barnet Baskerville’s The People’s Voice. As agraduate student in a top program, I read no work by a woman, an AfricanAmerican, an anarchist, a socialist, or a labor union organizer, and the only abo-litionist whose works I read was Wendell Phillips. In other words, our past theo-retical and historical training has been a poor basis for broadening our concep-tions of rhetoric, rhetorical theory, or criticism.

Second, our training in foreign languages is pitiful, and most programs, in-cluding my own, have dropped foreign language requirements. Happily, my de-partment has attracted rhetoric students from Taiwan (Chinese), Japan, and Ko-rea as well as from the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, and I have worked withstudents from Nigeria and Venezuela as well as with an American fluent inSpanish. The real challenge is to nurture the development of critical approaches

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suited to the ways that other languages define and categorize, to the value sys-tems and discursive expectations of other cultures, and to the distinctive circum-stances in which discourse emerges.

My collaborative efforts as an advisor have convinced me that some ele-ments of Western rhetorical theory can be useful—all cultures have ways of as-sessing credibility, for example, but not as the ethos Aristotle described. Thepure persuasion that Kenneth Burke believed existed nowhere seems to havebeen enacted by oppressed women in a remote area of China. The rhetoric ofHugo Chávez is another example of constitutive rhetoric but in ways quite dif-ferent from that of the Quebeckers and in which television plays a significantrole. Rhetoric addressed to the Shogunate regarding foreign policy appeared inpre-Meiji Japan, but in forms (as a dream) and using assumptions (wait until theaudience wishes to listen) that make it difficult for Westerners to recognize orunderstand it.1 The nuances of language, cultural references, and metaphors ar-gue in subtle ways that cannot easily be recognized by outsiders, as illustratedby Korean President Roh-tae-woo’s inaugural address.2

Accordingly, I propose these principles:

(1) Rhetoric is ubiquitous. Never ask if there is rhetoric; where thereis culture and language, there is rhetoric. The challenge is to dis-cover its cultural forms and functions.

(2) Rhetoric is indigenous, linked to cultural history, traditions, andvalues. We recognize that Aristotle describes a rhetoric of the an-cient Greek polis; all rhetoric and the theory that underlies it are asclosely linked to time and place and culture as was Aristotle’s. Inother words, we should be searching for the assumptions that informthe use of discourse in a particular cultural time and place, not at-tempting to fit what occurred into theory designed for other rhetorsunder other conditions.

(3) The study of rhetoric is the study of language, how languageshapes perception, recognition, interpretation, and response. At themoment, the languages and discourses of Asia and the Middle Eastare becoming increasingly important. We need to foster rhetoricaltraining among those whose cultural experience enables them to becritics of bodies of discourse that are closed to most US critics.

Scholarship on feminist theory and criticism offers an analogy. An essay byIris Young uses the concept of seriality, developed by Jean-Paul Sartre in the

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Critique of Dialectical Reason,3 as a way to think about gender that avoidsessentialism. Young posits that gender, instead of being an identity or an attrib-ute or a trait, is constituted for women by seriality, that is, by their relationshipsto externals—to laws, institutions, norms, and the ways in which categories suchas race and class are constructed and enforced in a culture at a particular timeand place. Young concludes: “Woman is a serial collective defined neither by acommon identity nor by a common set of attributes that all the individuals in aseries share, but, rather, it names a set of structural constraints and relations topratico-inert objects [the sediment, material and symbolic, of past human action]that condition action and its meaning.”4

The cultural distinctiveness of rhetorical action and related theory that Ihave been describing is another instance of seriality.

Notes

1Yoshihisa “Sam” Itaba. “A Rhetorical Analysis of Pre-Meiji Arguments over Japan’s ForeignPolicies.” Diss. U of Minnesota, 1995.

2Sangchul Lee, and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. “Korean President Roh Tae-woo’s 1988 InauguralAddress: Campaigning for Investiture.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (Feb. 1994): 37–52.

3Jean-Paul Sartre. Critique of Dialectical Reason: I. Theory of Practical Ensembles. Trans.Alan Sheridan-Smith. Ed. Jonathan Rée (London: NLB, 1976). 256–69.

4Iris Marion Young. “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective.”Signs 19 (Spring 1994): 713–38; cited material on 737. I thank Zornitsa Keremidchieva for callingthis essay to my attention.

Richard Leo EnosTexas Christian University

Classical Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism

In 1876 Richard Claverhouse Jebb ushered in the first major English-lan-guage critique of classical rhetoric with his Attic Orators from Antiphon toIsaeos. Jebb’s intent was to provide a comprehensive account of the master-pieces of oratory in ancient Greece. In his monumental work, Jebb providedreaders with historical background, a survey of the theoretical tenets of rhetoric,and a cogent accounting of great oratory based on the classical tenets of rhetoric.Jebb’s nascent efforts were based on his presumption that the criticism of classi-cal oratory should be drawn from the tenets of classical rhetoric. That is, classi-

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cal rhetoric would be evaluated by its own canons: invention, arrangement, style,memory, and delivery.

So dominant were the methods of classical rhetorical criticism for evaluat-ing oratory that they evolved into Neo-Aristotelian criticism, a method of criti-cism that stressed speaker, speech, audience, and occasion as heuristics of analy-sis. As mentioned above, emphasis within this traditional method centered on ananalysis of the oration, which was based upon the principles derived from itsown canons. For much of the twentieth century, the methods of Neo-Aristoteliancriticism prescriptively directed not only our evaluation of classical rhetoric butalso virtually all manifestations of public address, as evinced by LesterThonssen, A. Craig Baird, and Waldo W. Braden’s Speech Criticism. More im-portantly, the taxonomy of Neo-Aristotelian criticism even dictated what“counted” as rhetoric, namely nonmimetic, civic discourse that was agonisticallyperformed before immediate audiences (for example, Howell 31–32). By de-fault, all other types of expression of thoughts and feelings that fell outside theseNeo-Aristotelian confines were also considered to be outside the province ofrhetoric itself.

Despite the narrow parameters of rhetoric that Neo-Aristotelian criticism es-tablished, there is an obvious reason why this method of rhetorical criticism per-sisted: Neo-Aristotelian criticism provided excellent heuristics for the evaluationof civic discourse. It is difficult to read the three-volume collection edited byWilliam Norwood Brigance and Marie Hochmuth (Nichols), The History andCriticism of American Public Address, and not admire the meticulous scholar-ship of that work. Many, in fact, would argue that Marie Hochmuth Nichols’brilliant essay “Lincoln’s Inaugural Address” ranks among the greatest examplesof rhetorical criticism that our field has produced in the twentieth century. Thosevolumes, and Nichols’s essay in particular, show Neo-Aristotelian criticism at itsfinest, and more than justify the classical approach as a powerful method ofrhetorical criticism.

Yet Neo-Aristotelian criticism designed for public, agonistic, civic discoursedid not transfer well to the analysis of other modes of rhetoric. As other types ofrhetorical discourse came into scholarly study, the need for other methods ofcriticism expanded dramatically. Twentieth-century rhetorical critics such asEdwin Black began to question the presumptions of Neo-Aristotelian criticism,asking: Are the tenets of Neo-Aristotelian criticism the most appropriate methodto evaluate rhetorical discourse? Since the publication of Black’s RhetoricalCriticism: A Study in Method (1965), alternative methods of rhetorical criticismwere applied to every facet of contemporary communication—oral and written.

Despite these dynamic changes in rhetorical criticism during the latter de-cades of the twentieth century, the long-held belief that classical works should

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be criticized by classical heuristics persisted. (That is, civic discourse should beanalyzed by the principles of Aristotelian rhetoric, since Aristotle’s Rhetoric wasbased on observations about civic discourse.) In a similar respect, the merits ofCiceronian oratory presumably should be adjudicated by the tenets ofCiceronian rhetoric because his rhetoric was a reflection of his belief in the hu-manistic underpinnings of civic discourse. Thus classical rhetoric became thelast bastion for the classical method of rhetorical criticism. Yet even the domainof classical rhetoric expanded beyond the traditional civic and agonistic mode oforal argument to include many other manifestations of “rhetoric” in antiquity.Today, we can reflect on classical rhetoric in much the same respect as Black didfor modern discourse and ask if new methods of rhetorical criticism are more ap-propriate for the evaluation of classical rhetoric than those that were developedin antiquity and promoted by scholars such as Jebb.

Recent developments in rhetorical criticism have challenged the presump-tion that classical discourse is best analyzed by its own theoretical tenets. In fact,the advances in rhetorical criticism in the last half century have enabled us toview classical rhetoric anew. Perhaps the most stunning achievements have beenin the area of orality and literacy. Due to such scholars as Walter Ong (for exam-ple, Orality and Literacy, 1982) and Eric Havelock (for example, The MuseLearns to Write, 1986), we now have invaluable insights into the composing pro-cesses of oral and written communication. Through such scholars we see theworks of Homer, Hellenic rhapsodes, and sophists such as Gorgias of Leontinifrom an entirely new perspective, one that is grounded on the formulaic tech-niques of nonliterate, preliterate, and literate practices of expression.

As the province of historical rhetoric dilated to include other types of ex-pression, so did new methods emerge to evaluate discourse. For example, femi-nist rhetorical criticism has demonstrated that women’s rhetorical practices neednot—and should not—be adjudicated by the classical standards of rhetoricalcriticism. The work of such feminist scholars as Karlyn Kohrs Campbell andCheryl Glenn has shown that female practices of expression operate from rhetor-ical systems previously unaccounted for in classical rhetorical theory. We alsocan look at classical rhetorical practices anew, thanks to the emergence of othermethods of rhetorical criticism. For example, the work in narrative rhetoricalcriticism by scholars such as Walter Fisher helps us to reevaluate other genres ofexpression for their rhetorical vectors. Similarly, the principles of social-move-ment criticism developed by researchers such as Charles J. Stewart, Craig AllenSmith, and Robert E. Denton, Jr. are invaluable in viewing sophistic rhetoric as asocial movement that dominated both the Greek world and the Roman Empire.

New developments in rhetorical criticism help us to look at classical rheto-ric in many different ways. We should not forget, however, that many of the

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extant rhetorical texts that we do have are compatible with the principles ofclassical rhetorical theory, and those methods should not be deemphasized ordiminished. Yet, even here, work in rhetoric in the last fifty years has refinedthe approaches to argumentation that dominated Aristotelian rhetoric. ChaïmPerelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argu-mentation has extended the principles of Aristotelian rhetoric, offering muchmore sensitive and sophisticated heuristics for evaluating argumentation thanclassical systems provide. Fittingly, we find that these new advancements donot rise to use by “defeating” other approaches to rhetorical criticism. Rather,the diversity of approaches in rhetorical criticism illustrates the expansivenessof rhetoric. That is, we see now that rhetoric operates in a variety of dimen-sions and ways that were unforeseen by the traditional methods of classicalrhetorical criticism.

The achievements of rhetorical criticism have shown not only a spectrum ofrhetoric ripe for evaluation but a diversity of methods for analysis. The field ofrhetoric is much wider and deeper now than the male-dominated agonistic civicdiscourse of Athens that Aristotle so brilliantly accounted for in his work. Whilefoundational methods of rhetorical criticism should not be forgotten or ignored,they must now stand shoulder to shoulder with new approaches to rhetorical crit-icism. Being equipped with an array of critical tools not only helps us to exam-ine classical rhetoric anew; these tools also broaden and deepen our appreciationfor manifestations of rhetoric that were left unexamined because they fell out-side the traditional domain of criticism.

Works Consulted

Black, Edwin. Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. New York: Macmillan, 1965.Brigance, William Norwood, and Marie Hochmuth (Nichols), eds. A History and Criticism of Ameri-

can Public Address. Three volumes. New York: Russell & Russell, 1943, 1954, rpt. 1960.Havelock, Eric A. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to

the Present. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1986.Howell, Wilbur Samuel. Poetics, Rhetoric, and Logic: Studies in the Basic Disciplines of Criticism.

Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1975.Jebb, R. C. The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos. Two volumes. New York: Russell & Russell,

1876, rpt. 1962.Nichols, Marie Hochmuth. “Lincoln’s First Inaugural.” Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Criticism.

Ed. Thomas W. Benson. Davis, CA: Hermagoras P, 1993.Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York:

Methuen, 1982.Perelman, Chaïm, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation.

Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. Notre Dame and London: U of Notre Dame P, 1969.Stewart, Charles J., Craig Allen Smith, and Robert E. Denton, Jr. Persuasion and Social Movements.

4th ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 2001.

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Thonssen, Lester, A. Craig Baird, and Waldo W. Braden. Speech Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: Ron-ald, 1970.

Andrew KingLouisiana State University

The State of Rhetorical Criticism

As Michael Hogan has often pointed out, the revival of rhetoric in the earlytwentieth century was linked to the building of a civic infrastructure. Crusadingnewspapers, adult education, farm extension, public debate, and academic de-partments flowered during the Progressive Era. Fearful that the nation was com-ing loose from them, that immigrants would not be assimilated, that bossism andmachine politics would erode democratic culture, Progressive leaders empha-sized an ambitious program of citizen education at all educational levels.

Thus early professors of rhetoric, such as Everett Lee Hunt at Cornell andHoyt Hudson at Princeton, called for the kind of broad and socially responsiblecriticism that Victorians had found in Matthew Arnold. Hunt in particular heldthe Arnoldian belief that debate was a form of institutionalized critique and thathis academic department should serve as a “clearing house” for the examinationand critique of public questions. However, academicians Hunt and Hudson knewthat academic criticism must be different from the witty phrase-making of thepublic intellectual; it must be disciplined by a rigorous and powerful method.They found their first magisterial method when Wichelns wrote “The LiteraryCriticism of Oratory” in 1925. In the decades after the appearance of that article,rhetorical criticism became a central pillar of writing and research.

Similarly, with the expansion of graduate programs, criticism also assumeda key role in the social sciences and the humanities. Bursting onto the scene likea nova, New Criticism provided mid-century scholars in English departmentswith a method that appeared rigorous, scientific, and professionally respectable.Internationally famous scholars had birthed this master method; it accommo-dated (some say concealed) wide ideological differences. Its practitioners couldbe seventeen or ninety, libertine or celibate, poetasters or profound scholars. De-spite its paucity of theory and the clenched intensity of its text-mining proce-dures, New Criticism swept all before it. As an English undergraduate in the late1950s, I worshipped Ivor Armstrong Richards and Cleanth Brooks and practicedwith fervor and zeal all the muscular procedures that Alan Tate jokingly called

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“poet surgery” during a 1958 stint as a visiting professor at the University ofMinnesota.

After spending the first half of the 1960s in military service, I went to grad-uate school in what was still called The Minnesota Department of Speech.Speech, I soon discovered, had its own master method: a routine called Neo-Aristotelian Criticism. For forty years, the method had been viewed as our finaldeclaration of independence from the other language arts, and it had provided asense of disciplinary unity and common enterprise for the discipline. So power-ful was its gravitational field that even early communication theorists often be-gan by testing assumptions about communication behavior that had been cast upby the Neo-Aristotelian school.

But the winds of change were blowing. In the refulgent summer of 1965,Robert L. Scott quipped while striding past me in the marble clad halls ofFolwell, “I am like Othello, King. My occupation’s gone.” I had no idea what hewas talking about until a few hours later when he tossed me a small green bookhe had just finished. “Attention, King!!! You and the other graduate students areassigned to read this book now. It could change things.”

He was right. When we graduate students read Ed Black’s 1965 work, sim-ply titled Rhetorical Criticism, we felt a Sartrean rush of nausea and vertigo. TheEarth shook beneath our feet. Nearly every tenet of Neo-Aristotelians was sav-agely run through. The master method that we had so earnestly practiced wasexposed as clumsy and trivial. When some of us tried to say we thought the at-tack was overblown, others had caught Black’s flame. They announced that itwas long overdue.

Destruction begets creation. Around the crumbling edifice of Neo-Aristotelianism, new methods sprang up. There was a brilliant flowering ofnew schools, some of which had been suggested by Black himself. Genre Crit-icism, Movement Studies, Situational Criticism, and Burkean Criticism rushedto fill the void left by the dying god. Of course, most young professors of the1970s still used the Neo-Aristotelian method in their lectures, but research wasa different matter.

I have not forgotten the golden fall of 1972 when Ernest Bormann came toArizona for a series of lectures. Even as he spoke about the revolution going onin rhetorical studies, he smiled mysteriously: “It is the third quarter and there arealready a few shadows transiting the walls of the stadium. It is time to throw along-scoring strike.” His ordinarily crisp speech had become opaque. Twomonths later his famous article on Fantasy Theme Analysis burst into being inthe Quarterly Journal of Speech.

Waiting in the wings was the Ideological Criticism of Michael McGee andWalter Fisher’s Narrative Paradigm. Criticism and theory advanced together as

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Bitzer’s matured reflections on situational rhetoric grew into a theory of publicknowledge. Bormann’s critical method cast up the theory of symbolic conver-gence. Burkean criticism, the school closest to my heart, broadened the nature ofcriticism in our field and changed the traditional speaker/audience/situation to-ward considerations of the inventional potential of many different genres of dis-course. The gradual but steady advance of Burkean and Burke-inspired criticismduring the 70s, 80s, and 90s was like a benediction, a happy memory. Burkelinked rhetoric to both aesthetics and politics. Burkean criticism crossed disci-plinary lines. The Burke Society contained scholars from English, communica-tion, sociology, and philosophy, with even a small sprinkling of economists andpolitical scientists. While Burkean critics concentrated on a single finite text,they placed it in a rich historical and political context.

Echoes of the old New Criticism abounded in the 1980s as critics werestrongly influenced by the deconstructionists Paul DeMan, Richard Poirier, andPaul Alpers. A new love of ambiguity, paradox, and irony and what can only becalled a fetishism of oppositions appeared. I can recall a poignant moment at anSSCA conference when Robert L. Scott felt moved to define himself as anold-fashioned rhetor, drawn to similitude, common ground, community, and con-sensus. It was a sultry spring day in San Antonio, and Scott was having ratherheavy weather critiquing an SSCA panel on the Subaltern Voice. He told hisangry interlocutors that he was certainly in favor of the inclusion of formerlysilenced voices but he was wearied of the constant privileging of the unique, themarginal, and the outsider. Despite a hungry feral roar from several of his audi-tors, Scott wondered out loud why metaphor was now being denounced as atrope of dominance and imperialism, while metonymy (the favorite trope of PaulDeMan) was championed on the grounds that it maintained a sense of distance,disjuncture, and otherness.

The late 1980s and the 1990s were years of contention in which criticsworked to bring formerly silenced voices into the public arena. But this salu-brious work was accompanied by the attack on the canon and the exposure ofideological foundations of the intellectual tradition. The widespread obsessionwith power shook many disciplines to their foundations. The attempt to build anew ethics of relativism resulted in nearly unblemished failure. As post-modernism penetrated one sphere of thought after another, scholars felt an in-creasing sense of insignificance and isolation from the mainstream. Metaphorwas denounced as a theological trope, the linguistic servant of humanistic im-perialism. It was a difficult moment. I recall students asking me: “Why is allthis time wasted in angry accusation? Why aren’t you people building any-thing?” Just as the suppression of ideology in the New Criticism prepared theway for the explosion of ideology in later critical schools, so the ideological

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criticism of the 80s and 90s prepared the way for the pragmatic resurgence ofcivic discourse in the new century.

The twenty-first century in rhetorical criticism is full of surprises. Long-dead projects have been called to a second life. The explosion of interest inmetaphor in the social sciences has returned it to an axial position in rhetoric.Further, there is a recrudescence of interest in ethics. Out of the relativistic fur-nace of the 1990s there has been a surprising rehabilitation of the idea of theuniversal. Even the ferocious club spirit of the schools has dissipated, andmethodology is clearly less important than before. Globalism seems to havespurred a quest for community. There is a wonderful eclecticism of methodand a kind of healing of the breech between effective discourse and beautifuldiscourse that acted as a Berlin Wall between critics in English and those incommunication.

Finally, one does not like to use the standards of commerce and industry toappraise an intellectual enterprise, but not since the sixteenth century have therebeen so many scholars engaged in rhetorical criticism. And rhetorical criticshave a mission. Cries for the restoration of the civic/rhetorical infrastructurehave given them a vital social and intellectual role. Such brilliant rhetorical crit-ics as Michael Hogan at Penn State and Bernard Duffy at Cal Poly San LuisObispo are leading the way as scholarly critics who are engaged in promotingthe ideal of the citizen orator in their own communities. Criticism has a brightfuture. And once again we have a sense of a useable past.

Celeste M. ConditThe University of Georgia

Contemporary Rhetorical Criticism:Diverse Bodies Learning New Languages

“All living things are critics,” Kenneth Burke told us, and he noted that hu-mans, in specific, are bodies that learn languages (Permanence 5; “Poem” 263;plural added by Condit, “Post-Burke”). These attributes imply that all human be-ings are also rhetorical critics. Doing such criticism well might nonetheless beenhanced by self-consciousness about rhetorical theory, which views languageas the sharing of potent forms—genres, tropes and figures, syllogistic and quali-tative progressions, narratives, binaries, ideographs, climaxes, gestures, and

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more (Burgchardt). The classical (or at least neoclassical) Western rhetorical tra-dition approached the study of the circulation of these forms by attending to fivecanons: invention, style, delivery, organization, and memory. Since that time,rhetorical criticism and theory have continued remaking each other in the con-text of dramatic changes in the patterns of human linguistic action.

One of the more notable insights of contemporary criticism-and-theory isthe deep interpenetration of the canons of invention and style. Tropes are nowunderstood not just as decoration added onto preexisting ideas. Tropes aremodes of thinking (Ivie). To speak an antithesis is to think differently than tospeak a hyperbole or a metonymy.

The rhetorical critic’s treatment of the canon of delivery has likewise undergoneradical revision. In classical Greece live speech was the ubiquitous medium of hu-man symbolizing, interrupted only rarely by scarce written texts. Two-and-a-halfmillennia later (give or take a century!), live speech waters a swamp of billboards,radiowaves, fiber optic cables, blogs, pop-ups, t-shirts, blimps, television stations,film conglomerates, and cellphonetextmessagingvideosportsdownloadgamers. Insuch a context, theoretical understandings of the specificities of mediation neces-sarily inform critical efforts (Deluca and Peeples).

A key dimension of this contextual shift is the change from an immediate,relatively homogenous, and modest-sized audience to the “mass” audience. Thisshift has meant a radical growth in the canon of memory. Today memory studiesencompass issues of archiving, secrecy, and forced forgetting, among others(Blair and Michel). The grafting of studies of multiple texts to the earlier tradi-tion of single-text studies likewise exploded the canon of disposition (“organiza-tion”). A single text grows through time, and the linear trajectory of that growthis a potent component of its rhetorical action (Leff). But a mass of texts, thoughthey may share components such as ideographs, metaphors, or narratives, rarelyshare organizational patterns. It is the distribution of textual components acrossthe textscape, and more recently their dynamic patterns of circulation (Finneganand Kang), that are the contemporary issues added to the canon of dispositio.Studies of social movement have thus been prominent in recent rhetorical cri-tiques (Morris and Brown).

This recounting, however, seems too technical. Rhetorical criticism and the-ory are never merely technical. They are not neutral description. As with all hu-man symbolizing, the discourse of rhetorical scholars is always motivated (in theBurkean sense, Burke Grammar). Contemporary rhetorical studies have ex-panded and made more explicit these motivations. Cued by Marx’s pronounce-ment that the dominant ideas in a society are the ideas of the ruling classes, fem-inist critics not only have pointed out the limitations and biases that have arisenfrom male-dominated theories and other social discourses but also have explored

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their own positionings (Miller). The same has been true of ethnic, ecocentric,sexual, postcolonial and other critical positions (Sloop; Wilson).

The older persona of the disembodied critic still pervades much rhetoricalcriticism (and continues to serve broadly useful purposes), but it has lost the pre-sumption of “objectivity,” and it has been joined by critical analyses that moreopenly advocate specific positions and views. These “ideological” studiesself-consciously elaborate, legitimate, and even develop views from a relativelyhomogeneous or singular positionality. They are occasionally also joined bywhat I have called empathic studies (“The Critic”). An empathic study does notseek to develop a single, tightly held position. Neither does it presume a univer-sal stance or even a Hegelian dialectic of synthesis. Instead, the critic beginswith a modicum of openness and uncertainty and simply tries to lend as em-pathic an ear as s/he possibly can to multiple voices. The goal is not to promoteone “side” of the discourse over another, nor to synthesize, though either ofthose may sometimes be the product. The goal is to construct discourses one canbest embody (whether at the social or individual scale).

From this perspective the categories of rhetorical theory are tools for listen-ing to discourses in specific ways. They supply lenses that highlight the piecesand connections of a circulating flow that is otherwise so fastmoving,multivarious, and seductive that one cannot but be swept along. They allow oneto surf—to choose lines along the complicated flows of social movements—rather than merely be dragged like flotsam in the waves.

Because I cannot hold to a singular position as I bob at the convergence ofmultiple streams, I listen as widely and as empathetically as I can. But listento what? The questions that rhetorical critics choose are always a product oftheir embodied positions. As a young woman, I chose to listen to the abortioncontroversy. When I moved to New Orleans, I chose to listen about race. Asmy body intrudes more forcefully on the flow of my discourse over time, Ihave begun to try to listen to it and to our discourses about the body. Each ofthese reports have merely constituted one anemometer from the larger socialflows. A series of convergences in those larger flows, however, now challengesrhetorical critics to transcend our historical, “trained incapacities,” to take ac-count of codes outside of human language—codes of the body and the broaderecologies in which we swim.

This talk of a body that is not merely “body” nears sacrilege for the human-ist academy. “We” have denied the body or outsourced it to other parts of thecampus. The claim to a force of the body exerted upon “body” has been rele-gated to conservatives, who make body determinative of “body.” Recent studiesof embodiment by progressive humanists often merely seek to stuff all of the re-sources of the body back into the “body.” To be a materialist who denies the ma-teriality of everything except texts is, however, peculiar.

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The codes of human language are not the only codes at work in the uni-verse. At the prompting of feminists as well as others, rhetorical critics have ex-panded our conception of rhetorical texts to include art, architecture, cityscapes,monuments, handicrafts, and many more human-made objects (Blair andMichel; Foss and Foss). We have even recognized the rhetorical potential in phe-nomena that are not human-made—the seasons, the sun, the human body itself(Harold and DeLuca). These tacks prepare us for one more move—to expandonce again our understanding of the scope of “languages” by shedding ourethnocentric assumption that only human-made symbolic codes matter to humanaction. The other codes that are most obviously pertinent for humans are thoseof the human body—its DNA, proteins, hormones, and their patterned accretionthrough time—and those of our ecoscape—the codes that generate and are gen-erated by the birds and insects and microbes that create the living flow that al-lows us to be.

These convergences present a formidable challenge to rhetorical criti-cism/theory—to integrate the classical and contemporary tools of rhetoricaland textual analysis with the Enlightenment-engendered understandings ofbodies and their interests. Although yet unredeemed and admittedly jarring toour current sensibilities, there is promise here. Within the embodied practice ofempathic listening, a biosymbolic critic might seek for better life-scripts forhuman beings. The choices are all situated, constrained, even overdetermined.They are all rhetorical, but all living things are coders, and all the codes ofliving things are relevant to rhetorical critics.

Works Consulted

Blair, Carole, and Neil Michel. “Commemorating in the Theme Park Zone: Reading the Astronauts’Memorial.” At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies. Ed. Thomas Rosteck.New York: Guilford, 1999. 29–83.

Burgchardt, Carl R., ed. Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, 3rd ed. State College, PA: Strata, 2005.Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. 1945. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.——. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. 3rd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1965.——. “Poem.” The Legacy of Kenneth Burke. Ed. Herbert W. Simons and Trevor Melia. Madison: U

of Wisconsin P, 1989. 263.Condit, Celeste. “The Critic as Empath.” Western Journal of Speech Communication 57 (1993):

178–90.——. “Post-Burke. Transcending the Sub-stance of Dramatism.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78

(1992): 349–55.DeLuca, Kevin Michael, and Jennifer Peeples. “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy,

Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002):125–51.

Finnegan, Cara A., and Jiyeon Kang. “‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory.”Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 327–403.

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Foss, Karen A., and Sonja K. Foss, eds. Women Speak: The Eloquence of Women’s Lives. ProspectHeights, IL: Waveland, 1991.

Harold, Christine, and Kevin DeLuca. “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of EmmettTill.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8 (2005): 263–86.

Ivie, Robert. “Metaphor and the Rhetorical Invention of Cold War ‘Idealists.’” CommunicationMonographs 54 (1987): 165–82.

Leff, Michael. “Dimensions of Temporality in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.” Communication Reports1 (1988): 26–31.

Miller, Diane Helene. “From One Voice A Chorus: Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1860 Address to theNew York State Legislature.” Women’s Studies in Communication 22 (1999): 152–89.

Morris, Charles E., III, and Stephen H. Browne, eds. Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest.State College, PA: Strata, 2001.

Sloop, John. “Disciplining the Transgendered: Brandon Teena, Public Representations, andNormativity.” Western Journal of Communication 64 (2000): 165–89.

Wilson, Kurt. “The Racial Politics of Imitation in the Nineteenth Century.” Quarterly Journal ofSpeech 89 (2003): 89–108.

Richard J. JensenEmeritus, University of Nevada–Las Vegas

Analyzing Social Movement Rhetoric

Since the 1940s communication scholars have attempted to understand andexplain the rhetoric of social movements. Much of the early research was basedon the work of sociologists and historians, but rhetoricians also sought to maketheir own unique contributions to the field.

Although social movement studies appeared in communication journals asearly as 1947, the first significant article was Leland M. Griffin’s “The Rhetoricof Historical Movements,” which was published in 1952. Griffin’s article usedhistorical methods to explain the events that led to movements and the stagesthrough which those movements evolved. Griffin later altered his approach andattempted to apply Kenneth Burke’s theories to movements.

In the 1960s communication researchers began to actively respond to thegrowing dissent in the United States. They faced a frustrating task because muchof the rhetoric of the 1960s violated the expectations of rhetorical scholars.Communication scholars had been trained to assume that rhetoric was rational.Their research had traditionally focused on studies of great speeches by great or-ators, persuasion, and public speaking—all of which were based on rational ar-gument. Much of the rhetoric of the 1960s, however, was not rational, nor did it

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involve speaking. Protest rhetoric included marches, music, slogans, chants, andother forms of nonverbal communication and often involved the use of profanity,which certainly was not seen as being rational. Scholars were forced to changethe way they studied rhetoric and learn new tools of analysis. They began by at-tempting to define basic terms such as “radical,” “agitator,” and “activist” beforethey could analyze the rhetoric used by those individuals.

Many of the studies during the 1960s focused on the Black Power Move-ment. Articles were published in journals and books (such as The Rhetoric ofBlack Power by Robert L. Scott and Wayne Brockriede) that included texts ofspeeches. Studies of major Black spokespersons were produced, and courses onBlack oratory were created on many campuses. At the same time, researchersbegan to study the Feminist Movement, confrontation, the rhetoric of the streets,the Anti-War Movement, dissent on campus, and other groups that challengedthe establishment.

Scholars sought to understand the interplay between the rhetoric of dissent-ers and the reaction to protest by members of the establishment. In 1971 JohnWaite Bowers and Donovan J. Ochs wrote The Rhetoric of Agitation and Con-trol, a brief volume that had a significant effect on studies of the subject. Bowersand Ochs proposed a theory that outlined the stages through which the rhetoricof agitators evolved and the response by the establishment. They then appliedtheir theory in case studies of dissent at the Democratic National Convention inChicago in 1968, San Francisco State University in 1968–69, and nonviolentprotest in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. The book was revised in 1993, and anadditional chapter on the abortion debate in Wichita, Kansas, was added. Thebook inspired the creation of many university courses that focused on dissentand continues to be a popular text. A third edition is currently being prepared.

In 1970 Herbert W. Simons published a major article on movement leader-ship, “Requirements, Problems, and Strategies: A Theory of Persuasion for So-cial Movements.” That article helped lead to a spirited debate in the 1970s overwhat constituted a social movement. Many scholars built on Griffin’s article byattempting to explain the stages through which social movements evolved whileothers looked for alternative approaches to studying movements. The discussionled to a conference of leading movement scholars that was sponsored by the(then-called) Speech Communication Association. The papers from that confer-ence were published in a special issue of The Central States Speech Journal in1980. Those articles have become standard references for anyone interested inthe study of movements. A second conference was sponsored by the SpeechCommunication Association in 1990. Several of the papers from that gatheringwere published in Communication Studies in 1991 and also have become stan-dard references.

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Early studies, such as those of Simons, and Bowers and Ochs, proposedthat movements began among individuals outside the establishment and thatdecision-making within protest organizations moved from the bottom up. Theauthors argued that movements did not occur within established organizationsor that decisions could come from the top down. This argument was not uni-versally accepted. Researchers such as David Zarefsky, John Murphy, and Eliz-abeth Mechling and Gale Auletta proposed that establishment figures likeLyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy and groups within the establishmentcould create movements. In 1991 Elizabeth Jean Nelson’s article, “‘NothingEver Goes Well Enough’: Mussolini and the Rhetoric of Perpetual Struggle,”clearly illustrated how an establishment figure could assume the role of anagitator or dissenter.

In the 1980s and 1990s, there seemed to be decreased interest in movementstudies. This perceived lack of interest may have been deceiving because re-searchers published significant articles that focused on such subjects as GayRights, the Chicano Movement, civil rights, Asian-American dissent, Red Powerand the American Indian Movement, the antinuclear movement, disability rights,the labor movement, movements among conservatives, the temperance move-ment, issues surrounding AIDS, animal rights, environmental issues, and thedebate over abortion rights. These articles built upon previous studies and pro-posed innovative ways of analyzing social movements and dissent.

In recent years there have been signs of a renewed interest in studying pro-test movements. In 2001 Charles E. Morris III and Stephen H. Browne publisheda collection of articles titled Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest. Thatvolume included many of the most significant articles on social movements bycommunication scholars. The book was revised and expanded in 2006.

Another sign of interest was the workshop titled “Reinventing the Rhetoricof Social Movements” that was held during the Rhetoric Society of America’sBiennial Institute in May of 2005. That workshop included many young scholarsinterested in reviving the study of social movements among communicationscholars. Hopefully, these individuals will lead a resurgence of interest in move-ment studies.

Scholars in the twenty-first century face interesting challenges. They mustcombine current theories of rhetoric with traditional theories used in previousmovement studies, explain how new technologies such as the Internet have im-pacted the role of leaders and the organization of movements, and analyze sig-nificant recent social movements such as those challenging globalization and theWorld Trade Organization and online groups such as MoveOn.org. At the sametime, contemporary scholars must not lose sight of the rich legacy of studies thatis available to them. By combining the best ideas of the past with innovative

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approaches in the present, scholars should be able to produce intriguing studiesof social movements in the future.

Works Consulted

Auletta, Gale Schroeder, and Elizabeth Walker Mechling. “Beyond War: A Socio-Rhetorical Analy-sis of a New Class Revitalization Movement.” Western Journal of Communication 50 (1986):388–404.

Bowers, John W., Donovan J. Ochs, and Richard J. Jensen. The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control.2nd ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1993.

Griffin, Leland M. “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38 (1952):184–88.

Morris, Charles E., III, and Stephen Howard Browne. Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest.2nd ed. State College, PA: Strata, 2006.

Murphy, John M. “Domesticating Dissent: The Kennedys and the Freedom Rides.” CommunicationMonographs 59 (1992): 61–78.

Nelson, Elizabeth Jean. “‘Nothing Ever Goes Well Enough’: Mussolini and the Rhetoric of PerpetualStudy.” Communication Studies 42 (1991): 22–42.

Scott, Robert L., and Wayne Brockriede. The Rhetoric of Black Power. New York: Harper and Row,1969.

Simons, Herbert W. “Requirements, Problems, and Strategies: A Theory of Persuasion for SocialMovements.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (1970): 1–11.

Zarefsky, David. “President Johnson’s War on Poverty: The Rhetoric of Three ‘Establishment’Movements.” Communication Monographs 44 (1977): 352–73.

Sonja K. FossUniversity of Colorado at Denver

Rhetorical Criticism as Synecdoche for Agency

I have been a rhetorical critic from the time I made the decision to partici-pate as a scholar in the communication discipline. I have never really consideredusing any other method to answer the questions I want to ask about rhetoric orcommunication. The reason, I believe, is that the act of rhetorical criticismserves for me as synecdoche for agency in general.

I am defining agency in a standard way here—as the capacity to exert “somedegree of control over the social relations in which one is enmeshed”1 or, morerhetorically, to exert “influence through symbolic action.”2 I am aware of the dis-cussion about the impact of postmodernism on rhetorical agency, and my view isthat agency is located neither exclusively with an agent nor determined by struc-

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ture but lies in the interplay between the two.3 I see rhetoric playing a criticalrole in this intermediate view of agency because it is the mechanism that enablesthe agent to engage but also to develop creative responses to structural or mate-rial conditions in a negotiation between self and structure.

The essence of the argument I want to make about rhetorical criticism andagency is that the process of rhetorical criticism mimics the process of agency.In both processes the agent/critic selects something on which to focus or en-gages a perceived structure of some kind. The agent/critic then interprets thatstructure in particular ways and shares that interpretation with others. The resultis a world of the agent’s/critic’s own creation. I turn now to an explanation ofeach of these three steps.

Selecting an Artifact/Engaging Structure

My first agentic choice occurs in the initial step of rhetorical criticism—selecting a text or engaging an artifact to analyze. This is a process not of en-countering artifacts but of attending to artifacts, so infinite possibilities areavailable to me. I make choices about where to focus my attention, directingmy attention to some artifacts and ignoring those not selected. As I interactwith a selected artifact and continue to select it, I reify it and stabilize it, mak-ing it part of my world. Because I am the one who calls an artifact into beingwith my act of attention and who bestows meaning on it with my act of inter-pretation, I attribute no inherent power to the artifact, for to do so would cedemy agency to the artifact. I retain agency, then, as I attend, select, and focus tochoose an artifact to analyze.

The first step of criticism, the selection of an artifact, is parallel to the firststep of the agentic process, which begins with engagement with the structuralenvironment. Agency is “always agency toward something,”4 and that somethingis a perceived structure. As I perceive something, I construct it, and I sustain itwith my attention. I am reminded, in this step of criticism, to consider my start-ing points in the general process of enactment of agency. I cannot attend to andengage with everything in the world, so I am always choosing. Some conditions,in other words, are not more “real” than others and cannot require my attentionto them. Just because some people have chosen to create a war in Iraq and con-tinue to attend to it, holding it in their worlds, does not mean it must capture myattention. I always have the choice of asking what other possibilities are avail-able, and when I look for more options to which to attend, I see them. I am en-couraged, then, to reflect on whether I want the ideas, constructions, objects, orconditions on which I am focusing because what I choose constitutes the build-ing blocks of my world.

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Analyzing an Artifact/Interpreting Structure

The second step of criticism offers a second agentic choice. I can choosehow to interpret an artifact on which I focus, and my choices are limited only bymy imagination and the dictates of criterial adequacy for presenting my analysisto others. The unlimited possibilities available at this step are most evident at themoment when I initiate the coding of an artifact. Probably my favorite part ofthe process, this is when I have no idea what my interpretation will be or whatschema I will formulate to explain an artifact, and I stand poised at the artifact’sedge, eager to jump in.

Although critics have virtually infinite responses available for interpretingan artifact, they do not always take advantage of that freedom. The option is al-ways available to choose scripted or conventional interpretations. Such interpre-tations may be scripted by method, for example, when critics choose a criticalmethod and apply it to their artifacts. Others choose scripted interpretationswhen they know the results they want to accomplish with their criticism beforethey begin the analysis or believe an artifact itself requires a particular response.In such scripted interpretations, critics are not surprised by what they discoverbecause they already know that, for example, an artifact exemplifies oppression,encourages consumption, or inhibits social justice. Although a scripted responseis legitimate in some situations and with some artifacts, it tends to illustrate andreinforce existing theories and understandings rather than encourage the devel-opment of new ones. It also restricts agency; to tell a new story using a conven-tional script is difficult because the script encourages making the same choicesthat were made in the past. In contrast, innovating in response to an artifact chal-lenges received patterns of understanding and action. Such innovation contrib-utes to the development of theory that has the capacity to challenge assumptions,to reconsider what is taken for granted, and to generate new options.

The process of analyzing an artifact is a reminder to me that a major part ofagency involves interpretation of the structural conditions to which I attend. Ihave infinite responses available to any given structure I perceive. My exigenceis not a structure but my interpretation of that structure, making structure de-pendent on my interpretive choices. Because structure is not something real andimmutable outside of me, changing the structural world happens when I changemy analysis, change my interpretation, change my mind.

Sharing Criticism/Interacting with Other Agents

As a rhetorical critic, I interact with other critics and with readers. Thisinteraction takes the form of sharing my analyses with others and inviting

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them to consider my interpretation of an artifact. I have choices in this processas well. I can ignore other analyses, label others’ analyses wrong or incorrect,or try to discover what is useful for me from those analyses. My preference isfor the latter. I do not believe that any interpretation of an artifact can bewrong—instead, interpretations are simply less or more useful to me. BecauseI do not find a particular analysis useful because of where I am in my thinkingor interests does not mean it is not useful for others. Thus those analyses I finduseful, I include in my world; those I do not remain available for others to useif they make sense to them.

The enactment of agency involves interaction with others, just as rhetoricalcritics interact with others. The process of sharing my work as a rhetorical criticreminds me that there is no need to insist that my interpretation of the world pre-vail over others. When I go through a buffet line, selecting foods I want to eat, Ido not have to lobby the manager of the restaurant to remove all of the foodsfrom the buffet I do not like; I simply choose those that I prefer and let otherschoose foods in line with their preferences. The same is true for my choices asan agent in interaction with others. I respect the preferences of others, trustingthat they are making decisions that are best for their lives and do not try to dis-suade them from their particular agentic choices.

Outcomes of Rhetorical Criticism/Agency

Agency is an important construct for me because I believe it is the meansthrough which rhetors use symbols to construct the world. Choice is the basicmechanism by which the world is made manifest,5 and my agency is enactedthrough my choices. The choices I make as a critic/agent function epistemicallyto create my world—and I mean my literal, material world as well as my sym-bolic one. With Butler, I adhere to the notion that the structural world not only“bears cultural constructions” but is itself a construction.6 Agency, then, is al-ways functioning and is always efficacious in that it is always accomplishingworld creation.

Rhetorical criticism is not simply a process of explicating artifacts and con-tributing to rhetorical theory. It functions as synecdoche for agency that remindsme that I always have choices and am always choosing as I move through myday. It also suggests to me how much power and responsibility I have as anagent. Rhetorical criticism admonishes me to select with care the artifacts orstructures on which I focus, to choose interpretations carefully but imaginatively,and to engage in respectful interactions with others, knowing that my choices atall of these junctures are creating the world in which I live.

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Notes

1William H. Sewell, Jr. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” Ameri-can Journal of Sociology 98 (1992), 20.

2Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean.” Communication and Criti-cal/Cultural Studies 2 (2005), 2.

3Among those who hold such an intermediate view of agency are Maureen A. Mahoney andBarbara Yngvesson, “The Construction of Subjectivity and the Paradox of Resistance: ReintegratingFeminist Anthropology and Psychology,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18 (1992),50; Catherine Egley Waggoner and D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, “Feminist Ideologies Meet Fashion-able Bodies: Managing the Agency/Constraint Conundrum,” Text and Performance Quarterly 21(2001), 31, 40; John Louis Lucaites and Celeste Michelle Condit, “Epilogue: Contributions fromRhetorical Theory,” Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, ed. John Louis Lucaites, CelesteMichelle Condit, and Sally Caudill (New York: Guilford, 1999), 610, 612; and Judith Butler, ThePsychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), 2.

4Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische. “What Is Agency?” American Journal of Sociology 103(1998), 975.

5Among the sources that articulate this idea in various ways are Peter L. Berger and ThomasLuckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (GardenCity, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1966); Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought & Reality: SelectedWritings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll (Cambridge: MIT, 1956); Jonathan Potter, Rep-resenting Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996);Fred Alan Wolf, Taking the Quantum Leap: The New Physics for Nonscientists (New York: Harper& Row, 1981); Amit Goswami, Richard E. Reed, and Maggie Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe:How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin Putnam,1993); Robert Sapolsky, “Sick of Poverty,” Scientific American Dec. 2005: 92–99; and Martin E. P.Seligman, Authentic Happiness (New York: Free, 2002), esp. chapter 4.

6Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge,1993), 28.

Martin J. MedhurstBaylor University

Thirty Years Later: A Critic’s Tale

It has now been more than thirty years since I published my first piece ofrhetorical criticism in the Illinois Journal of Speech and Theatre. Even thatphrase, “speech and theatre,” has a slightly antiquarian ring to it since speech hasevolved into “communication” and theatre has long since severed its ties withthose scholars formerly known as speech teachers. It was, after all, the spokenword—speech—that originally bound rhetoricians to folks in theatre, oral inter-

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pretation, radio speaking, speech correction, and debate. Today, only debateremains. Yet, somehow, rhetoricians continue to find a home under the banner ofcommunication, just as others have long found a home in departments of Eng-lish, language and literature, or composition. The study of rhetoric is alive andwell and dwelling someplace, maybe several places, on campus.

The theory and practice of rhetorical criticism has driven much of what Icall the “rhetorical renaissance” in communication studies. It is hard to know,even in retrospect, when the renaissance began. One could point to several dif-ferent moments, several different factors, in the flowering of rhetorical studiesover the course of the last thirty or forty years. To my mind there were three sig-nificant “moments” that allowed the renaissance to develop: (1) the publicationof Edwin Black’s Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method in 1965, (2) the swirlof reactions to and extensions of Black’s attack on neo-Aristotelianism between1965 and 1980, and (3) the development of sustained programs of rhetorical re-search, leading to the systematic publication of books from 1981 to the present. Ihave traced these developments elsewhere and set forth in some detail what I seeas the essential markers of this renewal.1 I will not repeat myself, except to saythat I see an organic unity between and among these three “moments,” with eachbuilding upon the one that preceded it.

Today, rhetorical criticism is a vital force within the larger world of rhetori-cal studies and an important mode of scholarly investigation. When I first beganstudying rhetorical criticism in the 1970s, I thought of it as a way of analyzingtexts and thus took my primary job to be the mastery of as many different“methods” of analysis as possible. I filled my theoretical “toolbox” not only withAristotle and Cicero but with Burke and Weaver, Toulmin and Perelman, Langerand Richards, as well as many lesser lights. I practiced mythic criticism, genericcriticism, Burkean criticism, Weaverian criticism, stylistic criticism, metaphoriccriticism, neo-Aristotelian criticism, historical criticism, biographical criticism,psychological criticism, iconographic criticism, and close reading. I applied mytools to speeches, cartoons, prayers, films, radio news commentary, television,pamphlets, and advertisements. To have come of age in the 1970s was to cele-brate pluralism in both theory and method.

As exciting and productive as the 1965–1980 era was, it eventually led to anoveremphasis on theory and method, often to the exclusion of knowledgegrounded in practice and analysis. Some scholars came to hold that the only kindof criticism worth practicing was that which contributed directly to theory-build-ing or methodological sophistication.2 By the end of the 1980s, this descent intotheory for the sake of theory caused me to reconsider the place of criticism in thescholarly enterprise. And while I did, once, advise “‘just say no’ to theory,”3 Idid so partly with tongue in cheek and entirely with a practiced hyperbole. Like

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two of the critics I most admire, Stephen E. Lucas and David Zarefsky, I believethat every significant critical act blends theory, history, and criticism in uniqueways to produce useful knowledge.4

Today, I no longer worry about theory or method. I now consider rhetoricalcriticism to be a mode of investigation rather than a method of analysis. Whileone certainly can study rhetoric as a subject matter unto itself, I now use rhetoricas the odós or pathway into public affairs. I try to think about public affairs froma rhetorical point of view, to use the resources of rhetoric to reveal matters some-times far beyond the realm of rhetoric proper. For me, rhetoric is a mode ofthinking, doing, and, ultimately, being.5 Rhetoric is a mode of analytical think-ing that helps the critic ask important questions and explore significant dimen-sions of public culture—dimensions that our friends in history, political science,and sociology often miss. It is also a mode of doing, a way of performing the actof analysis and criticism. In short, I think Isocrates had it about right. Rhetoric isa way of teaching that approaches knowledge not as a set of theoretical princi-ples to be understood but as a set of problems, grounded in a historical context,to be analyzed, interpreted, and judged with respect to the kind of action re-quired. Rhetoric is both a strategic and a productive art directly related to leader-ship in public contexts.

What does this stance mean for my practice of criticism? First, it means thatI now study important matters of public concern. Such matters are usually en-compassed by terms such as policy or doctrine or ideology. I study these mattersfrom a rhetorical point of view to be sure, but what I seek to learn is not just les-sons about rhetoric, but lessons about Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program6

or Kennedy’s policy on nuclear testing7 or the narrative structure and policy con-sequences of the national debate over same-sex marriage.8 I’m interested in thepotential effects of religious rhetoric on the practice of democratic governanceand in the role of speechwriting on policy formation and articulation.9 In short, Iam interested in substantive matters, which I choose to study through the instru-mentality of rhetoric.

To focus on matters of public affairs is to incur the responsibility to under-stand, as best one can, the factors that contribute to those affairs. This means dis-covering the best sources, considering the extant theories, interrogating the avail-able evidence, and constructing original arguments that seek to account for thesituational matrix that defines public policy debate. It also means, in many cases,going beyond the printed sources to engage directly those involved in the cre-ation and execution of policy, whether through participant observation, inter-viewing, ethnography, or other field methods. Rhetorical criticism is a powerfulmode of investigation that operates through the analysis and interpretation ofsymbols within their respective contexts, and context always includes the audi-

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ences that are addressed, whether directly or indirectly, immediately or at somefuture moment.

To perform this kind of investigation into public matters, the critic mustknow rhetorical theory and practice, but not only that. Rhetoric is an inherentlyinterdisciplinary art and, as applied to public affairs, is necessarily an interdisci-plinary undertaking. One always starts with the rhetorical, but one ends withsomething beyond the purely rhetorical, something that inevitably speaks to thesubject matter under investigation, something that is extrarhetorical in insight orimplication. This is what I strive to achieve in my criticism. Not surprisingly, Iam often chastised for not contributing enough to rhetoric generally or rhetoricaltheory in particular. And that’s a fair critique because I’m not trying to contrib-ute to a general understanding of rhetoric. I am trying to use rhetoric to contrib-ute to a general understanding of public affairs. If that makes me more of a rhe-torical historian than an historian of rhetoric, then so be it.

Notes

1On the historical development of these three “movements,” see Martin J. Medhurst, “The Aca-demic Study of Public Address: A Tradition in Transition,” Landmark Essays on American PublicAddress, ed. Martin J. Medhurst (Davis, CA: Hermagoras P, 1993), xi–xliii. On the “rhetorical re-naissance,” see Martin J. Medhurst, “Public Address and Significant Scholarship: Four Challenges tothe Rhetorical Renaissance,” Texts in Context: Critical Dialogues on Significant Episodes in Ameri-can Political Rhetoric, ed. Michael J. Leff and Fred J. Kauffeld (Davis, CA: Hermagoras P, 1989),29–42; Martin J. Medhurst, “The Rhetorical Renaissance: A Battlefield Report,” Southern Communi-cation Journal 63 (1998), 309–14; Martin J. Medhurst, “The Contemporary Study of Public Ad-dress: Renewal, Recovery, and Reconfiguration,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 4 (2001), 495–511; Mar-tin J. Medhurst, “William Norwood Brigance and the Democracy of the Dead: Toward a Genealogyof the Rhetorical Renaissance,” Rhetoric and Democratic Citizenship, ed. Todd McDorman and Da-vid Timmerman (East Lansing: Michigan State UP, forthcoming).

2See, for example, Roderick P. Hart, “Contemporary Scholarship in Public Address: A Re-search Editorial,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 50 (1986); Roderick P. Hart, “Wan-dering with Rhetorical Criticism,” Critical Questions: Invention, Creativity, and the Criticism of Dis-course and Media, ed. William L. Nothstine, Carole Blair, and Gary A. Copeland (New York: St.Martin’s P, 1994), 71–81; Roderick P. Hart, “Doing Criticism My Way: A Response to Darsey,”Western Journal of Communication 58 (1994), 308–12.

3This phrase was part of my oral presentation at the 1988 Public Address Conference held atthe University of Wisconsin, Madison. I was playing off of Nancy Reagan’s famous phrase, “Just sayno to drugs.” I did (and do) see some analogues between narcotics and some brands of theory. WhenI revised my paper for publication in Texts in Context, I removed this tongue-in-cheek comment. Itwas preserved, however, in the paper of another conference participant who was intent on singing thepraises of theory. See James Arnt Aune, “Public Address and Rhetorical Theory,” Texts in Context,43.

4See Stephen E. Lucas, “The Schism in Rhetorical Scholarship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech67 (1981), 1–20; David Zarefsky, “The State of the Art in Public Address Scholarship,” Texts in Con-text, 13–27; David Zarefsky, “Four Senses of Rhetorical History,” Doing Rhetorical History: Con-

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cepts and Cases, ed. Kathleen J. Turner (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1998), 19–32. These “theoret-ical” positions are instantiated in their criticism. See, for example, Stephen E. Lucas, “TheRhetorical Ancestry of the Declaration of Independence,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 1 (1998),143–84; David Zarefsky, “Consistency and Change in Lincoln’s Rhetoric about Equality,” Rhetoric& Public Affairs 1 (1998), 21–44.

5I did not, of course, originate this idea. See Thomas W. Benson, “Rhetoric and Autobiogra-phy: The Case of Malcolm X,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (1974): 1–13; Thomas W. Benson,“Rhetoric as a Way of Being,” American Rhetoric: Context and Criticism, ed. Thomas W. Benson(Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989), 293–322; Martin J. Medhurst, “Afterword: The Ways ofRhetoric,” Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency, ed. Martin J. Medhurst (College Station: Texas A&MUP, 1996), 218–26.

6Martin J. Medhurst, “Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ Speech: A Case Study in the StrategicUse of Language,” Communication Monographs 54 (1987), 204–20.

7Martin J. Medhurst, “Rhetorical Portraiture: John F. Kennedy’s March 2, 1962, Speech on theResumption of Atmospheric Tests,” in Martin J. Medhurst, Robert L. Ivie, Philip Wander, and RobertL. Scott, Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor, and Ideology, rev. ed. (East Lansing: MichiganState UP, 1997), 51–68.

8Martin J. Medhurst, “George W. Bush and the Debate over Same-Sex Marriage,” The Prospectof Presidential Rhetoric, ed. James Arnt Aune and Martin J. Medhurst (College Station: Texas A&MUP, forthcoming); Martin J. Medhurst, “Public Moral Argument in the Debate over Same-Sex Mar-riage: A Sophistic Approach.” Paper delivered to the 9th Biennial Public Address Conference, Wash-ington, DC, October 7–10, 2004.

9Martin J. Medhurst, “Religious Rhetoric and the Ethos of Democracy: A Case Study of the2000 Presidential Campaign,” The Ethos of Rhetoric, ed. Michael J. Hyde (Columbia: U SouthCarolina P, 2004), 114–35; Kurt Ritter and Martin J. Medhurst, eds. Presidential Speechwriting:From the New Deal to the Reagan Revolution and Beyond (College Station: Texas A&M UP, 2003).

David ZarefskyNorthwestern University

Reflections on Rhetorical Criticism

For all intents and purposes, the subfield of rhetorical criticism began withan essay by Herbert Wichelns, “The Literary Criticism of Oratory,” published in1925. Along with the early-twentieth-century renewal of interest in classicalsources and the publication of multivolume anthologies of speeches Wichelnscalled for the critical study of oratorical works. The goal was understanding andappreciation of these canonical texts, comparable to the appreciation of greatworks of literature. But the key difference between rhetorical and traditional lit-erary criticism, as Wichelns saw it, lay in the practical nature of the rhetoricalart: It was concerned, he wrote, not with permanence or beauty but with effect.

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Accordingly, critical studies of oratory ought to focus on the effects of theseworks on their audiences.

It was easy to misunderstand this advice. “Effect” suggests an empiricalphenomenon, so the task of the rhetorical critic might be thought to be determin-ing what the effects of a speech were. This was a usually futile quest that oftenproduced bad scholarship. Single speeches rarely have discernible effects; theywork together with many other causal forces and as part of the broad social andcultural frame in which they are embedded. Moreover, the science of measuringeffects of messages on audience attitudes and behavior is inexact at best. All toooften, newspaper editorials or other evaluative judgments were used in place ofdirect measures of effect. The claims advanced in such scholarship usually out-ran the evidence offered and all too often were superficial.

It seems unlikely that this is what Wichelns was trying to encourage. Hisconcern, after all, was with criticism, not empirical measurement. Focusingcriticism on effects meant that the questions critics were to ask were about therelationship between the text and its possible effects. What does the text revealabout the effects its author might have been seeking? How does the construc-tion of the text invite certain reactions and discourage others? What frame ofreference does the text assume and how does this compare with the frame at-tributed to the audience? What role might this specific text play in a morecomprehensive campaign to modify attitudes or behavior? Who are the variouspossible audiences for the speech? These are examples of critical questionsthat relate to effects. They involve interpretation and judgment, not measure-ment. They are answerable not by empirical observation but by reasoned argu-ment. The critic’s task is to make claims on a reader’s judgment and to supportthose claims by argument, and this is as true of rhetorical criticism as of anyother kind (Brockriede).

Many early studies in rhetorical criticism were not critical, though—at leastnot in this sense. Not only did they try to answer the question of what the effectsof a speech were, but they also sought to answer it through an almost mechanicalapplication of a set of categories derived from Aristotle’s Rhetoric. They investi-gated the speaker’s background and training, major lines of argument, use oflogical, emotional, and ethical appeals, organizational structure, generic classifi-cation of speeches as deliberative, forensic, or epideictic, and so on. In retro-spect, studies of this type have been derided as “cookie-cutter” applications ofneo-Aristotelianism. It is easy to see why because the principal contribution ofthe work is a demonstration that the mold can be applied to any object ratherthan illumination and insight into the work itself.

One account of disciplinary history classifies almost all rhetorical criticismprior to the mid 1960s as formulaic in this manner and hence of little enduring

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value. But that is surely an oversimplified reading of the early years of thesubfield. Those years also saw the publication of more extended rhetorical biog-raphies such as those by Bower Aly on Alexander Hamilton and by WilliamNorwood Brigance on Jeremiah Sullivan Black, a book-length rhetorical studyof the Presidential election campaign of 1840 (Gunderson), studies of persuasionin social movements as well as by individual orators in individual speeches(Crandell; Griffin), and the study of ideas in transmission championed by ErnestWrage and his students (Wrage), to cite a few examples. When Edwin Black is-sued his call for the dethronement of neo-Aristotelianism, he was able to citeseveral of these works as exemplars of the alternative, and broader, concept ofcriticism he had in mind. Many of these earlier works still can be read withprofit.

Nor was neo-Aristotelianism the only formulaic approach to which rhetori-cal criticism was susceptible. Like most disciplines in the humanities and socialsciences, rhetoric was profoundly affected by the insights of Kenneth Burke. Theconception of life as drama and of texts as symbolic enactments provided a newframework in which to explain rhetorical action, and the pentad of act, scene,agent, agency, and purpose provided convenient tools for analysis and explana-tion. Too convenient, as it turned out. A raft of studies with titles beginning “apentadic analysis of . . .” or “a Burkeian analysis of . . .” offered some interestingperspectives on the objects they examined, but primarily ended up suggestingthat Burke’s theory could be applied to a very wide range of objects. SinceBurke’s is a general theory of human behavior, that is not very surprising. Thesame conclusion could be reached about any attempt to apply general theories(whether genre theory, postmodernism, poststructuralism, feminism, or any ofthe other general theories that have been popular in recent years) to specifictexts. Doing so helps to show that the theories have application value, which isimportant, but it does not do much to shed new light on the texts or to advanceunderstanding of rhetorical criticism.

Perhaps for this reason, many of the stronger recent studies in rhetoricalcriticism have regarded criticism not as a method but as an attitude. The task hasbeen not to apply a fixed method so much as to illumine the text. The project isguided by two master questions, which I phrase inelegantly as “What’s going onhere?” and “What about it?” The first question suggests that the text does notfully reveal itself and that the critic’s task is to look beneath the surface and be-tween the lines, in order to perceive and explicate what he or she believes to bethe underlying rhetorical dynamics of the work. The second question points tothe significance of the exercise. Typically, it explains how the analysis of thework resolves an anomaly or paradox that might relate to the understanding ofthe text, to the purposes of the rhetor, to the influence of the work in a larger

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historical context, or to whatever question has brought the critic to the text in thefirst place.

Of course, in neither case is there a “given” answer to the question. Thecritic’s task is to make a case for his or her interpretation, in keeping withBrockriede’s (1974) position that criticism is an exercise in argument. The criticestablishes that his or her interpretation is plausible through its fidelity to thetext and the circumstances. That the interpretation should compel adherence isdemonstrated by its superiority to other alternative interpretations in resolvingthe anomaly or puzzle, or at least by its ability to withstand objections that maybe raised against it. These same standards apply to the critic’s proposed answersto both of the two questions. I should note that the two questions usually are notanswered overtly or in mechanical fashion, but the answers should be easy to in-fer from the presentation of the criticism.

I have referred occasionally to the text, but recent work in rhetoricalcriticism has rendered this term problematic. In fact, there really are two sepa-rate interpretations of the term rhetorical criticism. One denotes the object ofcriticism—that is, rhetorical criticism is criticism of rhetoric. What constitutesrhetoric has long been broadened beyond the oral or written text to include non-verbal and nondiscursive representations and even actions (military campaigns,massing of bodies at protest rallies, and so on) that serve a symbolic purpose andoffer messages to audiences. The other interpretation of rhetorical criticismdenotes a type of criticism. In this sense, rhetorical criticism can be applied toanything, so long as the object of the criticism is explained by reference to rhe-torical concepts and issues. Even broad historical and cultural trends, with orwithout anything resembling a text, could be subject to rhetorical analysis.

Finally, a word should be said about the purpose of the exercise. Beyondsharpening the critic’s own insight, and using criticism to make others aware ofthe potential of rhetorical choices and maneuvers (so that they might either in-corporate them into their own practice or shy away from them, as the case maybe), rhetorical criticism explains the processes by which speakers and audiencesadapt to each other, in Bryant’s (1953) felicitous phrase, forging the commonbonds and sense of identification that are the glue holding together a society orculture as well as the basis for visions that lead people to try to fulfill their hopesand dreams.

Works Consulted

Aly, Bower. The Rhetoric of Alexander Hamilton. 1941. New York: Russell and Russell, 1965.Black, Edwin. Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. New York: Macmillan, 1965.Brigance, William Norwood. Jeremiah Sullivan Black, a Defender of the Constitution and the Ten

Commandments. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1934.

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Brockriede, Wayne. “Rhetorical Criticism as Argument.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (1974):165–74.

Bryant, Donald C. “Rhetoric: Its Functions and Its Scope.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 39 (1953):401–24.

Crandell, S. Judson. “The Beginnings of a Methodology for Social Control Studies in Public Ad-dress.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 33 (1947): 36–39.

Griffin, Leland M. “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38 (1952):184–88.

Gunderson, Robert G. The Log-Cabin Campaign. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1957.Wichelns, Herbert A. “The Literary Criticism of Oratory.” Studies in Rhetoric and Public Speaking

in Honor of James Albert Winans. Ed. A. M. Drummond. New York: Century, 1925.Wrage, Ernest J. “Public Address: A Study in Social and Intellectual History.” Quarterly Journal of

Speech 33 (1947): 451–57.

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