6/7510 - Session 1: Introduction to the Study of Rhetoric

Although ENGL 6/7510 surveys the history of rhetoric from the early-modern period to the present, I am devoting our first session to an overview of contemporary rhetoric studies. On this page, you will find my introductory remarks on the topics and readings for this opening session, along with a brief assignment.

The subject matter of this course is, of course, the history of rhetoric from the early-modern period to our own time. However, as a seminar much of our attention will focus on the study of this subject matter; that is, I have designed the seminar with the goal of providing you with (1) an introduction to the history of rhetoric and (2) an introduction to contemporary studies of that history. Thus, my hope is that, by the end of the semester, you will have acquired a solid background in both the history of rhetoric and in contemporary scholarship on that history.

Many of you, I know, have been introduced to some uses of rhetoric within composition pedagogy (via teacher-training courses like 6560/7560); and some of you, I imagine, may have been exposed to the idea of rhetoric in your study of literature, either as an aspect of literary history (e.g., the influence of Milton's rhetorical schooling on his writings) or as a theoretical perspective (e.g., de Man's definition of literature as the indirect critique of positive knowledge through the use of figurative language). Nevertheless, such courses, by their nature, can offer only minimal information on the idea of rhetoric and little, if any, grounding in the study of rhetoric. So, instead of beginning with our historical readings from the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, I think it best to start the semester with an introduction to the study of rhetoric. (And if you do have some formal background in the study of rhetoric, you are welcome to supplement my introduction with your own knowledge.)

Our first session, then, will be devoted to an overview of the study of rhetoric as it is currently practiced in our own educational and professional setting, that is, the North American academy. I plan to divide our time into three parts:

  1. The Contexts of Rhetoric Studies: Who Studies Rhetoric, Why, and How?
  2. The Idea of a Rhetorical Tradition
  3. Tradition, Interpretation, and an Ethics of Reading

Reading Assignment: Our points of departure for each of these sections will be a set of readings, which I introduce below. All these readings are journal articles, available in the periodical section of Walker Library and available online via Walker's subscription to JSTOR, MUSE and CMMC (Communication and Mass Media Complete). As you may know, Walker only makes these databases available to students while registered for classes; so, for those of you who do not have access to these databases over the summer, I am making the four required readings available online until the beginning of the semester. In addition to the links below, you will find a list of links to these texts at this URL:

http://www.mtsu.edu/~jcomas/6510/readings.html

Please come to class prepared to offer your observations and questions on these readings.

Additional Assignment: In addition to this reading assignment, I would like you to bring a passage (from any text) that illustrates a contemporary interest in the idea of rhetoric. For example, I will bring several passages, including one in which the author offers her reasons for grounding composition pedagogy in rhetorical theory. Please bring enough copies for everyone in the seminar (10); or, if you give me your passage by noon on Wednesday, Sep 02, I will make copies for you. Finally, in addition to bringing a passage, please be prepared to tell us something about it, including your reason(s) for selecting it.

Below, you will find brief descriptions of the three sections, including introductions to the readings.

1. The Contexts of Rhetoric Studies: Who Studies Rhetoric, Why, and How?

As an introduction to the current state of rhetoric studies, we will discuss David Zarefsky's "Institutional and Social Goals for Rhetoric" (2004). As you will see when you begin reading this piece, Zarefsky reports on one of four sections of the important 2003 conference on the status and future of rhetoric studies, organized by the Affiliation of Rhetoric Societies (ARS). For our purposes, an especially important part of this piece is the section "Rhetoric's Position," in which Zarefsky sketches the complex condition of rhetorical studies in the North American academy, that is, a condition in which rhetoric is studied by scholars in departments of English, communications, and many departments in the human sciences. For our class, I will supplement Zarefsky's description with information on the other three sections of the ARS conference.

Required Reading

Recommended Reading

The ARS plenary papers that Zarefsky describes have been published:

2. The Presence of the Rhetorical Tradition

One cannot study rhetoric for long without confronting the strong presence of its past. More specifically, this past appears as a tradition that stretches back to ancient Greece and, like other textual traditions, takes the form of a canon. Whether one is reading about rhetoric in composition pedagogy, in the study of literature, in the study of political and academic discourses, or, even more broadly, in the study of communication, one soon encounters references to influential thinkers from the past, especially the ancient past, thinkers like Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian. Moreover, during the last 15 years, the idea of a rhetorical tradition has become even more prominent as the result of critical, revisionist projects to expand the canon to include women, people of color, and others previously regarded as minor figures. Thus, a student of rhetoric in the early twenty-first century needs to be acquainted with the rhetorical tradition and with recent efforts to reform the tradition.

Required Reading

I have selected two articles, each of which presents a different attitude towards the rhetorical tradition and, when considered together, illustrate a dramatic change of temperament that characterizes contemporary rhetoric studies. In "Aspects of the Rhetorical Tradition" (1950), Donald C. Bryant presents a comprehensive defense of the study of rhetoric by grounding it in two basic aspects of the rhetorical tradition:

  1. an intellectual program, the objective of which is "to understand human life and the world of things, thoughts, and feelings in which men live and have lived" (171) and
  2. an attentiveness to the emotional dimension of human life, which has situated the study of rhetoric "between the politico-social and the literary studies" (332).

Because Bryant's defense focuses on ancient Greek and Roman authors (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian), those of you without a background in the classical tradition may find this article a helpful introduction. Later in the semester, we will compare Bryant's defense of the study of rhetoric to another program of rhetoric studies published in 1950, Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives. Bryant's article was published originally in two parts:

Whereas Bryant grounds his defense of the study of rhetoric in the rhetorical tradition, Patricia Bizzell's "Editing the Rhetorical Tradition" (2003) shows us that the contemporary study of rhetoric has been permeated by a much more critical attitude toward tradition. The emergence and development of this critical attitude is traced by Bizzell as she reveals the concerns and interests that guided the editing of the latest edition of The Rhetorical Tradition (2001), the anthology we will be using. More specifically, this article helps to document the revisionist turn which, since the first edition of The Rhetorical Tradition in 1990, has resulted in expanding the canon by refocusing attention on previously marginalized writings (especially those of women and of men and women of color). By doing so, the article provides a rare look into the making of an anthology (a genre which is, after all, the pedagogical core of text-based fields of study). In addition, Bizzell's piece provided the basis for a set of articles on the idea of the rhetorical tradition, published in a special issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric in 2003 (see "recommended readings" below).

Recommended Readings

Here are the other articles that accompanied Bizzell's article in the special issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric [available via MUSE]:

The 2003 ARS conference (discussed in Zarefsky's article) included a section devoted to recent questions regarding the rhetorical tradition. A report on this section, written by Patricia Bizzell and Susan Jarratt, has been published:

Another recent collection of fine essays on the topic of the rhetorical tradition is The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition, eds. Richard Graff, Arthur E. Walzer, and Janet M. Atwill (2005). On the more general questions raised by the other readings I've listed here, I strongly recommend Richard Graff and Michael Leff's "Revisionist Historiography and Rhetorical Tradition(s)" and Alan Gross's "The Rhetorical Tradition." This book will be available via Walker Library's reserve desk.

3. Tradition, Interpretation, and an Ethics of Reading

For the final part of our first session, I think it will be useful to step back from descriptions of the current state of rhetoric studies and begin to explore the idea of "tradition," itself, since this idea plays a key role both in the standard defense of rhetoric studies (e.g., Bryant) and in more recent, critical discussions on the study and teaching of rhetoric (e.g., Bizzell, et al.). To begin, the idea of "tradition" carries much different implications than the closely related idea of "history," as Maurice Charland points out in "The Constitution of Rhetoric's Tradition" (see Recommended Readings above): "Tradition is dynamic, and as such it is different from 'history,' which is kept at a distance. To receive tradition is to appropriate it, to make it one's own. History may offer a horizon, but tradition is the reanimation of a past in the present" (122). Although I agree with Charland's basic distinction between "tradition" and "history," I believe his characterization of tradition as an "appropriation" is less nuanced than it should be. Instead, I find Gerald L. Bruns's 1991 essay "What Is Tradition?" an exceptionally knowledgeable and perceptive exploration of the idea of tradition in terms of interpretation theory and the ethics of reading. Bruns's article, in addition, raises several topics that will be central during the first few weeks of our class, in particular, the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, humanism, and Cartesianism.

Required Reading

Session 2 >

[ Research | Resources | Teaching ]

Last update: 8/25/09

The contents of this page do not reflect any official positions of Middle Tennessee State University. The sole responsibility for these contents lies with the author:

Dr. James N. Comas (jcomas@mtsu.edu)
Middle Tennessee State University
English Dept., Box 70
Murfreesboro, TN 37132
615-898-2606

Creative Commons License
Unless noted otherwise, the work on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Some pages on this site contain material from my classes taught in The Department of English at Middle Tennessee State University.

This document is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and uses CSS 2.1.