What is rhetoric?

Long time no post!  It's been a busy quarter.  I finished my PhD applications, and I'm now in the enviable position of choosing from some fantastic funded offers at the University of Cincinnati and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (with a few other waitlists sitting around, as well).  I've just submitted revisions for my first publication at Harlot (issue 6! out on April 15th-ish!) and I'm a few days away from attending my first CCCC, to present at the RNF.

What I should have done last quarter was use this blog more regularly to work through my weekly seminar readings (like allison carr) for my professional writing theory course and contexts in lit course centered on the urban novel. Ah, well; hindsight, as they say.

So, in an effort to get into the habit of blogging regularly once more, and in the interest of experimenting with my writing, I'm going to use my blog to work through my seminar readings this quarter.  Because I'm on a teaching release this quarter (woohoo!), I get to take three seminars.  I'll be reading for Rhetoric II, the MA Capstone course, and a Problems in Shakespeare course focused on Hamlet.  My guess is that most of the blog posts will center on the Rhet course and the Shakespeare course, since they already require weekly responses, but we shall see.

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This week our readings for Rhetoric II revolved around the question of what rhetoric is and the history of rhetorical theory.  Our assignment:

So, then, what is rhetoric? Working from the readings, sketch a theory of rhetoric in short passages. Try this impressionistically, working in pieces or fragments in order to emphasize a tentative reading, thinking, and writing process. Resist trying to bring everything together into a complete whole.

When I teach, I tend to use a broad definition of rhetoric: I call it the act of communicating a message and affecting the audience in some way.  This, I think, can relate to how Covino and Jolliffe define rhetoric, as a practice—"a primarily verbal, situationally contingent, epistemic art that is both philosophical and practical and gives rise to potentially active texts" (5)—and as an art. Art is something that is created, through intention, work, training, and/or talent: I think it makes a profitable likening to rhetoric.  (Indeed, Covino and Jolliffe support the idea of rhetoric as an art throughout, though never explicitly. They also say that rhetoric creates potentially active texts, an idea which is linked to intent and intentions of the rhetor behind the text.)

Further, instead of thinking it as a practice that shapes speech or a text (and gives rhetoric sinister connotations), however, Covino and Jolliffe posit that rhetoric is the study and practice of featuring content, of selection and privileging, which makes it an especially effective tool for special-interest groups. The word selection has come up in many of my past discussions of rhetoric, and I think it's really apt; sometimes we don't shape meaning only through originality and generating new texts, but by re-arranging or selecting from existing texts (I think here of discussions on remix, or of DeCertau's essay on "Walking in the City").

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McKeon really highlights this idea of rhetoric as an art, calling rhetoric an architectonic art, or "an art of structuring all principles and products of knowing, doing, and making" (2). Rhetoric can be a way of not only looking at composing as an act of creating meaning, but a way of looking at social practices of all kinds as ways of making knowledge. McKeon especially agrees with my latter point: "An architectonic art," he says, "is an art of doing" (3).

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Covino and Jolliffe also take the historical tack of discussing "the development and diversification of theories of rhetoric." As they note, rhetorical study can involve a variety of approaches (textual analysis, criticism, composition pedagogy, etc.) and go in many different directions .

I can see a correlation in Bender and Wellbery, in their conception of rhetoricality:

Modernism is an age not of rhetoric, but of rhetoricality, the age, that is, of generalized rhetoric that penetrates to the deepest levels of human experience. The classical rhetorical tradition rarified speech and fixed it within a gridwork of limitations: it was a rule-governed domain whose procedures themselves were delimited by the institutions... Rhetoricality, by contrast, is bound to no specific set of institutions. It manifests the groundless, infinitely ramifying character of discourse in the modern world. For this reason, it allows for no explanatory metadiscourse that is not already itself rhetorical. Rhetoric is no longer the title of a doctrine and a practice, nor a form of cultural memory; it becomes instead something like the condition of our existence. (25; emphasis original)

They argue for a specific concept of ancient rhetoric (as an act of intertextual orientation; as a topical act, not an original one; of a highly governed, almost rote process) and contrast it with that of the fluid, shifty nature of rhetoricality.  Rhetoricality, they say, is a condition.

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I don't think rhetoric can or should be just one thing. Last quarter with Kathy I spent a lot of time thinking about postmodern, rhizomatic ways of thinking and theorizing, and I think it could be a profitable way to consider rhetoric. It can be about knowledge-making; it can be about lived experiences and relationships. But maybe that's because I am working from a really broad definition of rhetoric (as noted in opening).

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While Covino and Jolliffe discuss changes over time to terms/definitions/conceptions of the major elements of rhetoric—rhetorical situation, audience (which has turned to discourse communities), Aristotle's pisteis (ethos, logos, pathos), and the five canons (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery)—and Bender and Wellbery discuss the differences they perceive between classical rhetoric and modern rhetoricality, McKeon sees continuity. While rhetoric has a long, ambiguous, and "variegated" history, McKeon says, it has also persisted—the same terms are still being used, even if they are being used in different ways. Rhetoric is "a continuous art undergoing revolutionary changes" (2).