Ghost in the Wire

I wonder if what it will take for the gap to fill is for the younger generation of scholars to begin to get tenure and so free up their time to produce such textbooks...

I'd like to say no, that it might happen sooner than that, but given the politics of publishing, I'm thinking that sadly, yes, we're probably talking abother 5-10 years, and as I'm lagging a bit behind the curve, it will take someone a bit older and wiser and marketable than myself :)

(Though I'd join in! Heh.)

Ken, thanks for the post and the link to Josh's. I've posted about this in a new blog I'm trying to develop:

Ad Populum

But be forewarned, the blog is undone, and in its infancy. I expect to have a more robust blog up and running a bit later this week, if not the weekend. Still, trying to get it up and running so that I can divert my more academic posts in that direction.

Thanks again!

I've gone ahead and moved Ad Populum into the blogroll under your name, assuming that's alright.

I will say, from a design perspective, you do quite a bit with that typepad layout. I like it.

So what do you use as primary texts when talking out rhetorical sensitivity? And if there were "methods" you could do without, what would they be? I've been thinking about this with some urgency of late, as I think I need to have a better thought out strategy for this class.

Thanks Ken. I need to finish the blog.

Last time I taught our Rhetorical Criticism was a few years ago, and I tried using: Sillars, Malcolm O. and Gronbeck, Bruce E. (2001). Communication Criticism Rhetoric, Social Codes, Cultural Studies. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. That is not a bad approach, although I would not use their classification system (divided into large "traditions" - Rhetorical, Social, Cultural, and including social, values, narrative, ideological, psychoanalytic, semiotic codes, etc.). Some parts of the book were more useful than others, I did not use that "value" approach for example. Mainly, the book helps if one wants to provide an understanding of different motivations for reading texts. It is communication criticism so it aims at a broader picture. Unfortunately, Visual and Media are not represented.

I just taught about six weeks of crit. review for my senior seminar, and I had them read from Burgchardt's Readings in Contemporary Criticism. The plan was to read, have students present, and then discuss the piece, etc. Some difficulties were not enough time with each piece, and trying to break my student's inclination for using the latest stuff they learn in a class. In th is case, they had taken either narrative or media framing and they liked framing a bit too much.

Throughout my other classes when we talk criticism, I use a collection of pieces I think are helpful in helping students get a sense for rhetorical sensitivity. Again, I'm not saying I have this right, in fact, I think this is always in play, but these have helped some:

- Reid & Klumpp, Introduction, in American Rhetorical Discourse (helpful in getting to a basic understanding of public discourse from a public address perspective, but students get it, and we can move to discussing why we do what we do, etc.). This is an intro so it has info about the book chapters, etc. that I just skip.

- Robert Scholes, “Reading the World: Textual Realities” (from The Crafty Reader). Again, simple, from an English (disciplinarily speaking) perspective, but helpful in having students understand some of the richness of texts and intertextuality, and the complexity of reading critically. It is also rather simple and accessible for undergraduates.

- Kenneth Burke, Psychology and Form, from Counter-Statement (This is a simple reading with a simple scheme that students just gobble up [they know how to memorize], but it presents me with a perfect vehicle to speak later about attachment to form, devotion, piety, rupture, the power of the aesthetic, and how we crave and create form, hierarchy, frames, etc. It is a nice way to get them thinking about what discourse and "rhetoric" does for us. Some bits from the Lexicon Rhetoricae are also helpful.

- Dann L. Pierce has a book on Rhetorical Criticism that has a chapter on Visual. It is basic, but that makes for a good introduction to basic thinking about the power of the visual (we have a couple of classes on Visual, so all I need do is introduce). I talk more about iconography in my classes, and for that I use an essay of mine that touches on the "god in the image," and others on icons)

- Murray Edelman's "Political Language and Political Reality" from Constructing the Political Spectacle. Yep, functionalist, but helpful for students to start thinking about social construction and the formative power, or constitutive force of discourse. This generates good conversations in class, and thus I can expand.

- Umberto Eco, "Lady Barbara" and "Casablanca:" to be sure there are other short pieces that hare helpful in the book, Travels in Hyper-Reality, but these two allow us to talk about form, piety, expectation, mediation, and gets students thinking about music and film (which they love to do)

- Said's The Text, the World, the Critic in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (1979), is at times helpful, this is pretty old by now, but has some things that precipitate the kinds of rupture that I seek for my students about what it means to do criticism.

- I have a longish and very basic handout on the "constitutive force" of discourse that I give my students. Instead of having them read Charland (my seniors have to read that piece), and the list of things I believe would b e necessary behind that, I give them in essence a brief literature review. Fairly limited to Rhetoric. I usually end up complementing that with much more.

- Norman K. Denzin's "The Poststructural Crisis in the Social Sciences: Learning f rom James Joyce" in Richard Harvey Brown's Postmodern Representations, (the best version of the Denzin essay has appeared under a slightly different title in at least another place), is a good basic piece to understand what Denzin dubs the challenges of Legitimation, Representation, and Praxis. I think it continues to get students to understand "moves" rather than methods, and helps them see some of the issues that come up in a larger world of discourse, criticism, etc. Again, the second version of that (I'm missing where I got it now) is the best.

- Robert Audi's "The Place of Religious Argument in a Free and Democratic Society" (San Diego Law Review, 1993, 30, Rev. 677). This is not criticism at all, but it provides a simple category scheme that allows students to get into some of the issues related to religious language, arguments, and their intersection with public policy, and usually we end up talking about how to read religious language and arguments, what critical skills we can bring to the task, etc.

- Jeffrey Murray's " A Dialogue of Motives" in Philosophy and Rhetoric is a good piece to get students to think about irony, Levinasian ethics, and subjectivity. This is a harder piece for my students to get into, but it inevitably leads to good conversations about being rhetorically sensitive.

- Mark Twain's The War Prayer. Short, simple, sweet, and a great perspective by incongruity example, not to mention eye opening for students about a critical question: what might language "will" as it works?

- I'm missing the title and source right now (it is online) but Marci Hamilton's review of Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition is not a bad piece at all for teaching about the unexpressed, unsayable, or masked things (especially about religion and democracy). Its value is not in any criticism or critical orientation, but in creating space for classroom conversations about how we might read, and look deeply, as rhetorical critics

- Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter From Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963, and Lincoln's Second Inaugural (including the Leff article on it) are very helpful to point out a variety of things for critics, some very traditional, but these texts are so rich in texture that one can pull much out of that, and students can also).

- Jasinski, James. "A Constitutional Framework for Rhetorical Historiography: Toward an Understanding of the Discursive (Re)Constitution of "Constitution" in the Federalist Papers." In Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, edited by Kathleen J. Turner. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1998. This is a good piece to continue talking to students about the erecting of symbolic frameworks and how those support values, etc. More stuff on the constitutive force of public discourse.

- Kharkhordin, Oleg. "Nation, Nature and Natality: New Dimensions of Political Action." European Journal of Social Theory 4 (2001): 459-78. I use this to highlight the homology between nation, nature, and natality, and to point to homology, and articulation (the article is not about this, but I bring it up). As part of developing rhetorical sensitivity I want students to understand that play of language, articulation.

- with the above, I also use a piece by C. Patton, on Reconfiguring Social Ground (I don't have the cite with me right now), that is very helpful for seeing rhetorical interventions and their complications/implications.

- McGee, Michael C. ""the Ideograph: A Link between Rhetoric and Ideology"." Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (February 1980): 1-16.
———. "In Search of 'the People:' A Rhetorical Alternative." Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (October 1975): 235-49.
(both are staples for my students, along with:

Scott, Robert. "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic." Central States Speech Journal 18 (1967): 9-17.
———. "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic: Ten Years Later." Central States Speech Journal 27 (1976): 258-66.

Oh, we could go on, but mainly I want my students to get a feel for the figural displacement, dislocation, and dismantling that rhetorical activity engenders. I want them thinking rhetorically, and the pieces I select go toward cultivating that kind of disposition.

Sorry this took so long Ken, I have them read all sorts of non-criticism stuff also. I would venture to say that primary texts for rhetorical sensitivity are not criticism essays that appear in our journals. I prefer such things as the Eco, Denzin, Twain, Scholes, the Patton, and Hamilton essays because they see some rhetorical mindsets in action, they get to feel the play that I think ennervates their understanding of rhetorical sensitivity.

Thanks Ken,

N

Is it a bad sign that to show rhetorical sensitivity, the temptation is not to show discipline-recognized rhetoricians?

I think the problem, from a textbook perspective, is that the textbooks do a bad job on this particular issue, this idea of teaching a certain attention to language, either slanting the discussion towards method, which is easy, or believing that an organic approach (that really repeats later Kenneth Burke, with none of the fun of Counter-Statement) will manifest if one follows the three mechanical steps towards organic criticism.

There's quite a few essays within our field I typically try to get undergrads to read in rhet crit, organized around perspectives. Cox and Hariman's debate on MLK's I have a dream is used to discuss kairos; Kuusisto's piece in QJS a few years back to talk about metaphor, Eric Watts piece on voice as an intro (explicitly) to theorizing during criticism and (implicitly) to phenomenological/heremeneutic modes of critique, Tonn's piece on Hunting and Heritage (a classic), Hyde's Debbie piece to show that ambiguity can be critically productive and not just a problem to be solved/reduced, and there's quite a few others. For me though, there's not many good examples of what I refer to as synthetic criticism (kind of like synchronic ideographic analysis, kind of), that thorough look at a particular moment of discourse to see how an event is understood. And there's not that many examples of particularly form-sensitive media criticism (they read Deluca and Peeples, but they don't get the disciplinary stakes), though that seems to be changing. I tried to voice this latter concern in an essay that I wrote with DeLuca for EME, but I don't really like having students read stuff I write.

I don't know what the solution is, at least in terms of textbook construction. I've spent some time thinking about it, and my tendency as of present is to think rhetorical sensitivity works best by offering theory or theoretical precepts instead of method, to force the students to think language differently and then to suggest some ways in which that thinking might be used when confronted with an artifact, event, or intervention. But I think that to get this to be successful, allowances would have to be made for the radical differences between different media artifacts (speech vs radio vs television), and I think there'd need to be some serious thought given to how events are engaged differently than artifacts (and sadly, I would say that most rhet crit textooks and course plans focus on the artifact much more discretely than seems viable to me). Of course, this all presupposes that one can agree on a goal of the course, which I'm not sure is possible. Are we to teach advanced citizenry? Are we to cultivate a different relationship to language? Are we to let undergrads thinking about grad school know what's going on in our field today, and thus teach criticisms accordingly? There are other teleological possibilities, no doubt.

N or DJJJ or MF or anyone: if you were going to compile a list of theoretical concepts that might benefit rhetorical sensitivity, what would it look like? Mine would include at least: kairos, mimesis, mediation, public, the political, the subject, representation.

Ken, I agree with you on the theoretical. I think exposing students to good theoretical pieces is very helpful. The pieces you mention are good indeed. I think that trying to teach rhetorical sensitivity should offer both pieces outside the disciplinary boundaries and some within it. Even within it they will be arrayed in different places, and I would suggest looking for pieces that might be in the periphery. But lots of rhetorical work, and critical work which might be perhaps more important, gets done outside of the classification "rhetoric." For me, teaching rhetorical sensitivity means teaching students to develop their critical imagination and impulse, to refine it, and to do so from a vantage point that privileges the kind of concerns, issues, questions, and intersections that a Rhetoric perspective raises. So the task is in guiding that understanding, moving along increasing that orientation.

As for theoretical concepts, your list does a good job. I include invention, I also include ethos (in classical understanding, but also as Hyde et al talk about it as dwelling place), I speak about positionality, and connect it with the Burkean concept of Motive, which leads me to include Identification, I talk about constitutive force (or formative power), and thus I talk form. Those for me are some basic starting points, and all revolve around each other easily. Again, I want my students to be sensitive to what is it that rhetoric wills as it works (pretty functional sounding, but it does open doors for them). Mediation (with more recently "transmediation"), certainly public, representation, re-presentation, and re-cognition (as in cognitive mapping), and dissociation. We spend a great deal of time talking about Emplotment (I do spend lots of time teaching narrative and identity stuff). I speak plenty about subjectivity, but I must admit I'm always trying to simplify this so that my students can find themselves seeing it well enough to deploy in their papers. That hasn't worked so far. So, if you have some suggestions along this line let me know! Thanks Ken, and sorry it took me so long to get back to this.

N