May 31 Response

Graff and Leff, in their chapter “Revisionist Historiography and Rhetorical Tradition(s),”  investigate the tension between the desire to have a continuous tradition in rhetorical history in order to have a stable community of rhetoricians in the discipline and the need to use revisionist historiography to include sources, histories, and methodologies that lie outside this traditional canon. They explain the difference between the first wave and second wave of revisionism: the first wave conflated rhetoric with theory, distancing rhetoric from pedagogy. The old tradition only gave preference to those rhetorical works that added to the ideas of the ancient rhetorical theorists; the new, revisionist rhetoric saw that there could be additions and advances outside that one traditional strain. The second wave, on the other hand, was more concerned with the subjectivity of historiography; rhetorical historians like James Berlin argued that critiquing existing histories is the essential first step, as we must realize that there can be no objective history (history is rhetorical), and that histories must reflect the social/economic/political context of the time. New histories cannot be grand master narratives. The problem with these two waves, Graff and Leff argue, is that they might lead to such diverse research in the field of rhetoric that there is no common foundation for the field to claim. Graff and Leff suggest that the new history of rhetoric might be held together by a common interest in rhetorical pedagogy: “We propose to conceive the rhetorical tradition in the modest key of the history of teaching writing and speaking. Whatever else we are or do, we all teach rhetoric, so the practices of past teachers clearly constitute something we can claim as our history” (25). It can’t be just anything goes – there must be a common thread, and pedagogy seems the natural one for rhetoric. This will be a big adjustment – pedagogy is often ignored or dismissed as not important as theory and philosophy.

Sutherland, in her 2002 article “Feminist Historiography: Research Methods in Rhetoric,” notices the same tension that Graff and Leff write about in the new recovery and revisionist efforts in historiography. There is such a tremendous desire to include texts not recognized in the traditional canon that the methodologies of the scholars doing this work are not necessarily sound. She argues against the postmodern view that everything is relative and therefore everything has equal value in the field of rhetoric – there must be work that has more influence than other work. Sutherland writes that honesty is the most important virtue of a historian. You cannot read things into texts just because you want that text to support your own ideas and ideologies. She states that she has “a moral duty as a scholar not to misrepresent what the text says…[Manipulating texts]to support whatever we have already decided to promote seem to me to defeat scholarship. It is the abuse, the exploitation of the texts, and betrays both the original writer and the readers” (118). If that is the case – that the text has an identity separate from the historian – where is the line drawn? When do you go too far?

Pat Bizzell, in her article “Opportunities for Feminist Research in the History of Rhetoric,” advises current and future historians of rhetoric of the feminist methodologies that they might employ to find repressed rhetorical histories and integrate them into modern rhetorical studies with the hopes of including them in a new canon. She explains three approaches to feminist research in rhetoric: employing the “resisting reader” [“to notice aspects of the canonical texts that the reader is not supposed to notice, but that disturb, when the reader is a woman, and create resistance to the view of reality the work seems to want to purvery” (51).]; focusing on women who have done similar work to traditionally canonized male authors and argue for their place in that canon; and looking for non-traditional women’s rhetoric in places where male rhetoric is not found – to reconceive what rhetoric is. (51) I believe she would have the same concerns as Sutherland and Graff and Leff – that the feminist rhetorics that are recovered must be valuable not because they are just written by women, but because they add something new and important and different to the study of rhetoric. The postmodern fervor that swung the doors wide open for the study of rhetoric let good and bad scholarship flourish; it is essential now that the field specify what constitutes critical and significant scholarly work so that the discipline does not spiral out and become unrecognizable.

 

 

Bizzell, Patricia. “Opportunities for Feminist Research in the History of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review: 11.1 (Fall 1992) 50-58 

When writing The Rhetorical Tradition with Bruce Herzburg, Bizzell says they were surprised by the lack of critical work done outside the traditional rhetorical canon (in 1990). (50).

 

Three approaches to feminist research in rhetoric: employing the “resisting reader” [“to notice aspects of the canonical texts that the reader is not supposed to notice, but that disturb, when the reader is a woman, and create resistance to the view of reality the work seems to want to purvery” (51).] (Judith Fetterley); focus on women who have done similar work to traditionally canonized male authors and argue for their place in that canon; look for non-traditional women’s rhetoric in places where male rhetoric is not found – to reconceive what rhetoric is. (51)

 

 

Sutherland, Christine Mason. “Feminist Historiography: Research Methods in Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly: 32.1 (Winter 2002) 109-122. 

In response to Enos’ lament that no one does research in rhetoric: “[Primary research] has most engaged me. The excitement of bringing some forgotten text to the attention of my colleagues in rhetoric has been one of my greatest pleasures: it makes me feel like a benefactor.” It is essential to read primary texts before secondary texts: “Only after we had made our own response, however naïve or mistaken it might be, should we proceed to expand and adjust our ideas by reading scholarly discussion” (111).

 

“One of the dangers of traditional scholarship is the false notion that what is your idea cannot be my idea too; it leads to the ridiculous assumption that ideas spring from a single mind, as if the mind existed in a vacuum, and was not necessarily affected by the insights of others. Much feminist research, on the contrary, is typically not competitive, but cooperative, in a number of different ways” (112).

 

Note on Weaver: to talk of human beings in pure scientific, non-emotional language is unethical – it’s denying a portion of their humanity. (115)

 

Good point: “Some feminist scholars make a gratuitous assumption of deliberate ill-will on the part of men for which we don not always have enough evidence. I am sometimes uneasy with the use of the word ‘erasure’ in this context: it suggests a deliberate policy on the part of men which was probably not, or not always, the case” (116).

 

“Feminism, Marxism, post-colonialism and postmodern theories which are often also ideologies have valuable critiques to offer: but I see them as correctional, as restoring a necessary balance. Taken too far they do not promote peace and understanding – quite the reverse” (116).

 

What to do with the postmodern dilemma that everything is relative? Her response: “My own position – the position from which I conduct my research – is fundamentally traditional. I believe that there is such a ting as ultimate truth; I also believe that it is impossible for a single person or party to reach it. We must all strive to find it, but must be modest in our claims to have done so. Above all, we must co-operate: only so can we hope even to approach it. And we must search for it honestly. We must not exploit the postmodernist perception of the fuzzy boundaries between fact and fiction to invent the truth…Some Platonic ideal of an absolute truth (however unfashionable such an idea appears to be at the moment) might prevent us from constructing evil realities” (117).

 

Honesty is most important – you can’t just say something because you like it and it agrees with your ideologies.

“I have a moral duty as a scholar not to misrepresent what the text says” (118).

 

“This recommended manipulation of the text to support whatever we have already decided to promote seems to me to defeat scholarship. It is the abuse, the exploitation of the texts, and betrays both the original writer and the readers” (118).

 

The rhetoric of historical women doesn’t have to be applicable today to justify doing primary research on it – they can just be unknown and good works. (120)

 

Graff, Richard, and Michael Leff. “Revisionist Historiography and Rhetorical Tradition(s).” In The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition. Eds. Richard Graff, Arthur E. Walzer, and Janet M. Atwill.
Albany: SUNY Press. 

“[The revisionist effort] does capture something important about the temper of our times, does reveal serious limitations in our conventional historical scholarship, and does make a strong case for complicating and expanding our efforts…Such work demonstrates that, at minimum, we no longer can assume that the history of rhetoric consists in a stable, neutral record open to disinterested inquiry” (12).

 

The revisionist direction in modern historiography of rhetoric threatens to undermine any sense of a tradition. “Without a tradition against which we can measure our innovations, we may lose the minimum level of coherence necessary to sustain an academic community…While the received view of tradition is no longer acceptable, if we lack a usable sense of tradition, we risk dispersal, dismemberment, and the loss of any semblance of a collective identity” (12).

 

Purpose is to investigate revisionist history and see how it can be married with a sense of tradition and a theory that can keep the field cohesive.

 

Where does the crux of rhetoric lie? Before the mid-twentieth century, rhetoric was tied to pedagogy, but beginning with Duhamel, historians of rhetoric began to look at how history was written in regards to the philosophical ideologies of the rhetorician/writer. Was rhetoric going to become more in lie with philosophy than with practice? (14)

 

First Wave of Revisionism: conflating rhetoric with theory, distancing rhetoric from pedagogy. The old tradition only gave preference to those rhetorical works that added to the work of the ancient rhetorical theorists (influence), the new rhetoric saw that there could be additions and advances outside that one strain.

 

“[Blair exhibits] a bias that she inherits from the earlier school of revisionism and its modernist attitudes toward rhetorical theory as a static body of substantive principles rather than as a dynamic and evolving activity” (19).

 

Second Wave of Revisionism: Pre/Text,
Berlin – critique existing histories is the first step; realize that there can be no objective history (history is rhetorical), that repressed voices are not represented in traditional histories, histories must reflect the social/economic/political context of the time, bias bias bias! New histories cannot be grand master narratives.

 

“The new historiography is to be, above all, critical; it searches for biases and exclusions, for disguised tactics of repression and marginalization, and it applies that critical sensibility to the act of writing history itself” (21).

 

“The choice of research methods, periods, and objects of study are indeed choices and the products of argument…The resulting historical accounts [of revisionist historiography] should confront contingency and change, eschew the need for continuity and the imperative to tell a seamless and unified story” (21).

Two strands of this new type of historiography: 1. Rereading (reading Aristotle through a Marxist lens, for example) and 2. recovery (discovering and bringing to light new traditions, like women’s rhetorics or working class rhetorics or non-Western rhetorics) (22)

 

“Is it possible to imagine a tradition that is both broad enough to resonate across disciplinary lines and flexible enough to allow for the diversity demanded by new approaches to our subject and its history?” (24)

 

Graff and Leff suggest that the new history of rhetoric be centered around pedagogy: “We propose to conceive the rhetorical tradition in the modest key of the history of teaching writing and speaking. Whatever else we are or do, we all teach rhetoric, so the practices of past teachers clearly constitute something we can claim as our history” (25). This will be a big adjustment – pedagogy is often ignored or dismissed as not important as theory and philosophy.

 

Current histories of writing pedagogy have been limited to “modern, institutionalized forms of college writing instruction in English-speaking countries.

 

“The teaching of rhetoric is a point of continuity in Western history, but teaching practices themselves vary and change. Thus, the teaching of rhetoric as a practice offers a stable referent for a historical tradition, but it does not lock us into grand narratives or perspectives that move us outside a local context” (27) Their big idea – we have teaching rhetoric in common, look at history through that lens.

 

Mattingly, Carol. “Telling Evidence: Rethinking What Counts in Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly: 32.1 (Winter 2002) 99-108. 

Fear in the feminist recovery effort that “by promoting individual rather than collective women, early feminist recovery efforts duplicate traditional canon formation and patriarchal hierarchical patterns” (100).

 

Mattingly’s questions: Why are some figures like Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony given more preference in the history of women’s rhetoric than other women? Isn’t that anti-feminist?

 

Scholars are often nervous about the “conservative” or “religious” overtones of temperance leagues, but the concerns of those women mirror the concerns of women today, like domestic abuse. (103)

 

“With additional time to delve deeply into extant texts of nineteenth-century culture, and the dedicated efforts to create a fair and accurate understanding of nineteenth-century women’s rhetorical patterns, we can construct a more comprehensive and authentic tradition. We can, I think, learn to appreciate the many women who were rhetorically effective rather than focusing only on a few” (104).

 

“We must immerse ourselves in a broad range of historical texts, across genres, including but not limited to texts of speeches, to gain a clearer understanding of both the politically active women in our history and the evidence that demonstrates their facility with rhetorical matters (105).

19^th century women had rhetorical concerns that men did not: they paid particular attention to their dress: “Their appearance, marking gender (feminine) and intersecting with location (public and improper for women), might instantly preclude a credible ethos and negate efforts to employ logical and pathetic appeals” (105).

 

“How can we possibly judge women’s rhetoric according to masculine standards? We cannot do so fairly. We cannot do so if we want a full understanding of the rhetorical context of our tradition”(107).

 

“Rewriting the rhetorical tradition will be a lengthy process involving relearning history – not only specifics involved in the discovery of new information about women, but also in the way we think about history…We need time to see rhetoric in new ways” (107). Need to explore and find sources not considered in traditional historical studies.

 

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. “Consciousness Raising: Linking Theory, Criticism, and Practice.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly: 32.1 (Winter 2002) 45-64. 

Her argument: “consciousness-raising is the thread that links the recovery of texts, their recuperation through criticism, and the extraction of theoretical principles that underlie women’s ways of persuading” (45). She looks at the recovery of texts, the recuperative process of criticism, and feminist theory.

 

“No matter what contemporary scholars do, the historical record will remain profoundly distorted, skewed toward those lucky enough to be literate, educated, and middle or upper class and whose works appeared in mainstream outlets with wider circulation” (46).

 

“Constraints on who may speak, on what issues, in what sites, on what occasions and using what styles and appeals have been the primary means by which women (and others) have been excluded from rhetorical action” (48).

 

“Based on Western cultural history, the role of rhetor has been gendered masculine, one reason that women’s assumption of it was resisted; skillful women found ways to meet its traditional expectations for cogent argument, appropriate evidence, and refutation of opposing positions while incorporating stylistic elements that projected femininity, such as inductive structure, which increases audience agency, or the use of personal experience, the single area of expertise acknowledged for women” (51).

 

“The task of recovery is unending; recuperation, however, requires the analytical and interpretive work of critics. The most productive theorizing seems to be grounded in the discursive practices of specific women” (59).

 

“Because women have had little conferred authority, their discursive practices inevitably have involved struggles to shape an identity that gave them voice and assumed subordinate or egalitarian relationships to those addressed, which, in turn, presume an epistemic stance based on shared experience, participatory interaction in arriving at conclusions, strategic indirection in presenting evidence and argument, and conversation as the predominant mode through which influence occurs” (60).

 

 

Short Paper on Kellner

Laura J. Davies

May 23, 2007

CCR 720 – Agnew

Short Paper 1

 

            In his chapter, “After the Fall,” in the collection Writing Histories of Rhetoric, Hans Kellner maps out what he sees as the three paths a historian might take in writing history. Through his discussion, he argues what a history of rhetoric might look like, but whether or not that vision is possible (or repeatable or teachable through a method) is debatable; history writing is rhetorical, and therefore context-specific and shaped by the constraints of purpose and audience. The first type of historian is the traditional one, who approaches the past with reverence and attempts to fit together textual evidence like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The completed puzzle is a finished, comprehensible picture that tells a contained story of the past. This historian seems primarily concerned with his audience, as his aim is to create a narrative that can be understood. The first historian trusts his ability to translate the reality of the past through language. The second type of historian, on the other hand, approaches the reality of the past more hesitantly and critically. She sees the sources used by the first historian as markers for the untold stories, much like the tops of glaciers signal a much vaster, more complex structure beneath the waterline. This second historian is interested in recovering the repressed histories of the people who are not represented in the first historian’s chronicle. This historian is driven by her present purpose, and her ideological agenda shapes her reading of the past – what she looks to include in her history, what she ignores, and what she celebrates. However, even though the second historian might see herself in direct opposition to the second historian, Kellner points out that “all forms of historicization, and their number is legion, mythologize their subjects” (28). The cultural critic, in writing a history, does participate in hero-making just as much as the traditional historian; the difference is only who those heroes are and whether we now in the present designate them the winners or losers in history.

            The third type of historian, who Kellner likens to Victor Vitanza, is a rarity: it is an academic who sheds the stiff and serious academic style and instead finds truth through playing with language in a subversive discourse. This history, unlike the first two, relies almost completely on the individual historian and focuses on how language of the sources tells a story not contained in the overarching narrative of the history. It is a performance, whether it is written or proclaimed, and therefore, is not repeatable. It is like a play: the actors in the theater create meaning with each other and with the audience, but after the two-hour show, the magic in that space that led to profound meaning-making disappears. The truths that were understood in that dark theater cannot be captured in a bottle; what happened was an experience that cannot be repeated, only recalled by those who were there. The heights of what can be known through this third type of history cannot be reached by the other two historians, but because it is so unique and specific to the performer (the historian), a method cannot be made from it. And that is why, according to Kellner, “the victorious antirhetorical professionalism of the mid-nineteenth century won out because it made possible for scholars of very limited gifts to make usable (or, as historians like to say, ‘solid’) contributions to the enterprise…A program needs a method; charismatic sub/version, although it can be imitated, cannot be built upon” (Kellner 29).

            Kellner goes on to celebrate Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, which contains a chapter that discusses the history of the Dark Ages through a reading of Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks, as an example of this third type of history. Auerbach was not just interested in what was happening in those chaotic times; he paid attention to how Gregory made meaning of that world – how Gregory used rhetoric to build a reality for himself and for his audience. Gregory’s prose showed, according to Kellner, “in its diction and syntax [his] struggle between the old and the new social worlds” (33). By focusing on the words and the construction of his history (on not just what he wrote about, but how he wrote it), Auerbach breaks through the barrier of evidence that holds back the first and second historian from seeing the depths that their sources contain. It is as if the first and second historians see the text as the lowest common denominator of evidence, like scientists who believed that matter could only be deconstructed to the point of the individual atom. The third historian is like Niels Bohr, who showed that the atom could be further dismantled into a dense nucleus circulated by tiny electrons. The third historian breaks down the text and sees it not as straight evidence, to be linked with other texts to form a chain of meaning, but rather as a history in itself, to be analyzed and understood rhetorically. For texts are not objective; they are shaped and formed purposefully by their authors, and contain worlds within their words.

            But can historians of rhetoric take Auerbach’s history as a model? Or should they strive to fashion themselves as clones of Vitanza? This road, though it might seem logical, is illogical for future third historians. Only Auerbach can read Gregory as he does; only Vitanza can write as he does. Instead of looking at their words in the hopes of deducing a method to repeat their genius, historians of rhetoric should, in the spirit of the third historian, look to “read crookedly,” as Kellner says. Kellner doesn’t want an all-encomopassing history of rhetoric, whether in the traditional or in the critical model. He sees the future of the history of rhetoric as a collection of spectacular, individual contributions that see truth not in wide expanses of the past but instead, in small, perhaps seemingly unimportant or mundane, but completely human moments. We learn most from a history that reflects an individual’s own ideals and perspectives; what matters is not the chronicle of the past displayed, but rather the interpretation of what is important, for human truth can be found in small circumstances.

 

 

Notes from Writing Histories of Rhetoric

These are just my own notes – probably not anything comprehensible to anyone else.

Schlib “Future Historiographies of Rhetoric and the Present Age of Anxiety”

Lists the anxieties of historians of rhetoric – “taxonomies, philosophies, canons, heritages, and disciplines” (135)

 

Histories of rhetoric that rely on negative critique have just as much “assurance” as traditional histories. “The ‘task,’ if anything, is to make lack of ‘assurance’ a constructive partner in our work” (138)

 

When we categorize, we begin to focus too much on the differences between the categories instead of the differences within the categories (129)

 

We like dividing things into three categories (129)

 

 

Rhetoricians have an obsession with establishing canons – “rhetoric encompasses a wide range of discourse: not only scholarly texts, but also the transactions of everyday life” – then why do we want to make a canon of classics? (131)

 

“One of deconstruction’s most illuminating moves is, in fact, to avoid simply reversing classic ethical dualisms and instead to question dualism itself” (132)

 

We should also be wary of drawing on the past (golden age thinking) when we want to revolutionize – battle cries, names invoked, etc. But why do we do that? Isn’t there something human about that? What if we didn’t do that?

 

What did students learn from the classics of rhetoric? What are we missing? (134)

 

Enos “Recovering the Lost Art”

Graduate students’ contributions are “often judged by how telling the criticism is; that is, the quality of a student’s performance is adjudicated by how well he or she can deconstruct the work of another rather than an orientation that encourages students to advance their own findings, to make their own contributions” (14)

 

“Much of our current work in the history of rhetoric is based on the idea of ‘close readings’ of works, confusing this act with the philological labor of textual criticism or the painstaking scholarship required to provide a careful translation. Analysis as ‘close readigns’ that presuppose the text to be the only source of knowledge has attractions. The work is facile, one does not need to go across the world seeking evidence, but only to slide one’s chair over to the book case and reach for a volume. Most scholars agree, however, that works are best understood when viewed not as isolated and autonomous events but as intertextual, that even discrete texts are part of a diachronic chain of being” (14)

 

Cool! Figure out the arguments of the British side of the Revolutionary War (16)

 

It is essential that we start to do historical research.

 

“All that is necessary for ignorance to prevail in our discipline is for historians of rhetoric to forget their primary job of doing history” (19)

 

 

How to enact all this rhetoric? Kellner provided an example, but pointed out that it was impossible to duplicate exactly – there is no method.

 

Kellner

History

 

All history is hero-making – who is your hero?

 

Rhetoric breaks down the documents like parts of an atom.

 

History is a projection of the historian.

 

A good history of rhetoric contains the individual historian.

 

We learn most from a history that reflects an individual’s own ideals and perspectives; what matters is not the chronicle of the past displayed, but rather the interpretation of what is important, for human truth can be found in small circumstances.

 

Three ways of viewing history.

 

“All forms of historicization, and their number is legion, mythologize their subjects, either by showing how unnatural a discursive system is in order to transform it, as in the case of Marx, or to show how adequately it conforms to the ‘order of things,’ as with Ranke or John Quincy Adams” (Kellner 28).

 

“Still, we should not fail to note that, whatever its flaws, the victorious antirhetorical professionalism of the mid-nineteenth century historiography won out because it made it possible for scholars of very limited gifts to make usable (or, as historians like to say, ‘solid’) contributions to the enterprise. Rankean history was not all built by masters like Ranke. Nor were all Ciceronians geniuses like
Cicero. A program needs a method; charismatic sub/version, although it can be imitated, cannot be built upon” (Kellner 29).

What good is knowledge that cannot be built upon?

What is the aim of historiography? Can only a few people do it right? What does that do to multiple perspectives?

 

How historians read: “This mode of reading sees the text as a document, a piece of information in a mass of knowledge, a thread in a ‘strand of meaning’ that must be untangled, straightened out. To do this, the first step, almost inevitably, is to repress the textuality itself, to eliminate the rhetorical joker from the deck” (Kellner 31).

Rhetoricians must look into the context and how the text was made, not just what the text is about. Looking only at content is like having only one leg on a three-leg stool; atom analogy

 

“Rhetoric and reality, as everyone knows, are oil and water; rhetoric is precisely the existential projection of our inability to apprehend reality. If we had reality, if we could hold and share it, why would we need rhetoric at all? Or history?” (Kellner 36).

 

“Historiographical progress does not take place through the amassing and ordering of an ever-broadermass of information, or ever-more-refined theories of social or political development. Historical discourse progresses, if that is the right word, by producing classics, in all their individuality and, often, wrongness” (Kellner 34).

What makes a classic?

 

Berlin  “Revisionary Histories of Rhetoric”

Narratives outside of the traditional trajectory of the history of rhetoric: “Disruptions in this trajectory, of repeating the past while discovering the already prefigured new in it, are historical aberrations, temporary displacements. These are to be explained away as the products of failed cultures – the most frequently named being that of the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century” (112)

 

Berlin tries to resist making the heroes villains and the villains heroes when writing history (114)

 

“The mission of the revisionary historian of rhetoric I have in mind is to resist the notion of rhetoric as a unified, coherent, and univocal collection of texts stretching over time, texts that support either truth or virtue on the one hand, or error and vice on the other” (115).

 

Instead, we must locate the moment in history and investigate all the rhetorics that took place at that time – dominant and repressed.

 

Good historical study of rhetoric realizes that rhetorics are created in a specific historical/economic/social context, and “they reflect and, of equal importance, refract the conditions of their creation and functioning…They codify who can and cannot speak…what can and cannot be said…who can and cannot listen and act…and the very nature of the language to be used” (116) These decisions are made by the power structures in play.

 

The problem with the traditional history of rhetoric (Corbett, Kennedy): they present their history as if the “reader need look no further” (119) They are incomplete and the reader needs to know that.

 

The historian needs to “acknowledge the principles – primarily ideological in nature – that are to govern [his] interpretation” (121) It’s about the historian as much as the history. That’s how we decide what’s important, what to include, exclude, etc.

 

“I am arguing finally for a dialectic between past and present. Our conceptions of the present guide us in looking at the past, but in looking for our other we discover disruption in our conceptions so that past and present are simultaneously reconceived” (123) This process never ceases – it is always necessary, as the present changes, to reconceive the past.

 

History cannot be sweeping – it is only local, offering small local truths. “Postmodern turn” (124)

 

“Any investigation of human behavior must be historically specific in its methods and materials, never resting secure in any ahistorical, universal mode of thought” (127)

 

Berlin’s historiographic method: It “demands honesty of the historian, a candid acknowledgement of her ideological stance, her conception of perfect economic, social, and political arrangements, her vision of utopia. The historian is never simply writing an account of the past. She is also writing an account of the present and, of equal importance, a hope and vision of the future. In telling us what happened, the historian is telling us what ought to happen now and tomorrow” (127)

That’s what all historians are doing, though. Is
Berlin just arguing with the politics of the traditional historians, who probably disagree with his view of what’s important – now and in the past? What good is small, situated truths?

 

 

Atwill “Contingencies of Historical Representation”

“Histories do not simply provide windows on the past; rather, they perform signifying functions in the present” (109)

 

“Alternative histories of rhetoric will not be written until alternative subjects begin both to define the function of those histories and to alter the conditions in which they are produced…WE will only begin to redress the silences created by histories when we are willing to allow our own disciplinary idioms to be challenged” (110).

 

These histories will not and cannot be stable or give stability. They only rock the boat further.

 

She uses the disciplinary categories of semantics, pragmatics, and syntactic to describe three ways to write history. Semantic = traditional; Pragmatic = context-driven, Syntactic = language

 

Semantics focuses on the relationship between sign and referent (content)

Pragmatics focuses on the relationship between the text and its users (audience) – it is not objective

Syntactic focuses on the language being used by the addressor (ethos) and how that establishes authority. The subject changes constantly. Customization. Subversive. Individual.

 

May 24th Response

            All the readings for today were from Victor Vitanza’s 1994 collection, Writing Histories of Rhetoric. As a whole, they were attempting to determine what a history of rhetoric is – what it looks like and what methodologies could be used to write it. Writing a history of rhetoric is more complicated than writing a “straight” history, the authors argue. It requires balancing multiple perspectives and voices from the past and paying attention to how language is used in the writing of a history.

           
Berlin, in his chapter, “Revisionary Histories of Rhetoric,” points out the importance of writing histories outside the traditional trajectory pursued in the history of rhetoric. This does not mean to just reverse the binaries of hero/villain; that is, to elevate the “losers” of history and turn them into the “winners” by focusing attention on them and vice versa. Rather, he argues that we must break down these binaries and instead of seeking a “unified, coherent, and univocal collection of texts stretching over time,” we must locate the moment in history and investigate all the rhetorics that took place at that time. Rhetoric is dependent on context, Berlin claims, and therefore good histories of rhetoric take into account the social/economic/cultural/historical circumstances of the past and reflect and “codify who and cannot speak…what can and cannot be said…who can and cannot listen and act…and the very nature of the language to be used” (116). These aspects of the past should be present in the history, for they reflect the power structures in play at the time. Since history-making is so contextual,
Berlin argues that it can never be all-encompassing or universal – a history can only attempt to explain a small, local truth. Histories that try to do more are ahistorical. However, it seems to be a human desire to have these universal truths and narratives that explain large concepts. If it is an innate desire to have coherence and understanding, does it make sense to write our histories with such disjuncture and interruption? How are these histories interpreted? Do they satisfy their audiences? What is repeatable – or to be learned – in situated truths?

            Schlib, in “Future Historiographies of Rhetoric and the Present Age of Anxiety,” picks up on the same thread as
Berlin when he argues that the “’task’ [of the writing of the history of rhetoric], if anything, is to make lack of ‘assurance’ a constructive partner in our work” (138). Schilib points out that negative critique, a popular tool of analysis taught in graduate schools and employed by current historians of rhetoric (as argued by Enos in his chapter), can be just as dogmatic and all-encompassing as “golden age” histories of rhetoric. Thus, we need a new methodology – we can’t just turn the hero narrative of Aristotle/Plato/Cicero upside down and transform it into another hero narrative of the Sophists and the other ignored figures throughout the history of rhetoric. Our methodologies must “question dualism itself” (132). Schlib wants to avoid all golden age thinking because it lends itself to supporting binaries in history, but again, it seems to be an innate human desire to create and revere heroes. Schlib mentions that during every revolution, the revolutionaries, right before they destroy their present world, which was built on a foundation of the past, turn to the past as inspiration, using slogans and names that reflect the traditional heroes of history. It’s a curious move to be sure, but I don’t think we should dismiss it as elementary or wrong – if it does occur, which it does, it must happen for a reason that shouldn’t be immediately critiqued and thrown out. Is there truth in common history? Is there a hope in universal understanding that doesn’t appear in small, situated, and individual truths?

May 21 Notes

Octalog. “The Politics of Historiography.” Rhetoric Review: 7.1 (Autumn 1988) 5-49.

This piece is a combination of a transcript from a CCCC panel in March 1988 about the politics of historiography and reflections by all eight participants. The eight participants on the panel were James Berlin, Robert J. Connors, Sharon Crowley, Richard L. Enos, Victor Vitanza, Susan Jarratt, Nan Johnson, and Jan Swearingen, and the panel was moderated by James J. Murphy. In the hour-long conversation that took place, the particpants discussed the nature of making history, the place of rhetoric as a field in the academy, and why the history of rhetoric is a necessary pursuit. The personal philosophies and theories of history of each participant was reflected in his or her opening statement, and they ranged from understanding that a history reflects and projects a certain power relationship (Berlin), to looking for evidence outside of literary texts (Enos), to realizing that the history we operate under ignores the exclusion of women and others who did not have power (Swearingen.) Towards the end of the conversation, the question “Can history even be written?” (understanding that no history can ever be complete, that all histories reflect the historian’s and society’s values and ideologies, and that historians must work with limited evidence) was raised, and in the reflections afterwards, Connors makes the point that even though these claims are true, we must write history and do so in good faith. It is essential, as Berlin states, that we have as many histories of rhetoric as possible so that we might more fully understand it.

Quotable Quotes

“There must be multiple histories of rhetoric, each identifying its unique standing place – its grounds for seeing – and the terrain made available from this perspective. Most important, each history endorese an ideology, a conception of economic, social, political, and cultural arrangements that is privileged in its interpretation…In brief, historians must become aware of the rhetoricity of their own enterprise, rhetoric here being designated the uses of language in the play of power” (Berlin 6).

“The hypotheses we evolve are all either implicitly or explicitly a commentary on what is going on in the teaching of writing and its meaning in our culture today” (Connors 7). Is this the aim of comp and rhet? I don’t think the other members of the Octalog (or many people in the field today) would think that their work always must tie back practically to the college comp classroom. Connors clarifies in his reflection that he sees a distinction between composition (which is tied to the college writing classroom) and the larger discipline of rhetoric (whose aims might not be tied to college writing.)

“As daring usurper (rather than marginalized hoarder), rhetoric could step into its role as meta-discipline and create opportunities for dialogue among historians, critics, and theorists across several disciplines” (Jarratt 9).

“Historical research and writing are archaeological and rhetorical activities” (Johnson 9).

“The ideological screen makes the historical record readable to the historical, influencing what he sees as significant and what he finds to be meaningless” (Berlin 11).

“Rhetorical histories are important to the writing teacher. They explore the relationship of discourse and power, a rhetoric again being a set of rules that privilege particular power relations” (Berlin 12).

Connors statement on pg. 13 about how he has seen history as an exercise to attack problems in college comp today by tracing how they became problems.

“A conservative orientation to what constitutes valid evidence in historiography promotes a closed system that risks limited acquisition of evidence, and ultimately an imprecise understanding that fails to account adequately for forces shaping the subject under study” (Enos 15).

“What makes us read a history is the authority that it bears, its ethos” (Crowley 21).

 About the problem of realizing that you can’t cover or account for everything when writing a history, leading to a “paralysis” (Swearingen 23).

“We are 25 hundred years old. We are not a discipline. We are a meta-discipline. If we teach writing across the curriculum, doesn’t that tell us, isn’t that a self-evident experience, that we are a meta-discipline. We inform all the other disciplines. They don’t inform us” (Vitanza 31).

“We know this in our bones: To have any reasonable discourse at all, there are simply some ideas we must agree to hold in common…You agree to trust us. From there we start. You trust us not to make things up. You trust us to look carefully at the books we talk about. You trust us to try for corroborating evidence for claims. You trust us to sift evidence intelligently, not to deliberately exclude important items, not to reach closure and certainty too early. You trust us to try not to bore you when we write things up. And we try to earn your trust by doing the best job we can. Because all of us are trying, in our perhaps naive ways, to do good for you, to do good with you” (Connors 38). History is a trust relationship.

We are “the heirs of those nineteenth-century composition teachers whose specific charge was to solve a problem in the culture [literacy crisis], and we have been striving to do so ever since” (Connors 38). Composition is interested in larger social aims, so we shouldn’t sweat over doing history because we don’t want to have our knowledge stay bottled up in the academy.

“It’s time to get back to work doing what we do: history: searching in good faith through records of human experience, offering our separate, hard-won little truths to one another, and trying to approach agreement on some greater truth we can all secretly believe in” (Connors 38). I think Connors has it right on – we need to do the best we can, we need to find the foundations, and we need to just do it in good faith.

“When a history changes the way writers behave in the classroom (both instructor and student) in ways that allow for the recognition of inequity and oppression; that give voice to silence; that create the means for just action, as well as open negotiation over what constitutes “justice” – then that history is a good one” (Jarratt 45).

Enos, Richard Leo and Ann M. Blakeslee. “The Classical Period.” In The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric. Revised Edition. Ed. Winifred Bryan Horner. Columbia: U of Missouri Press. 9-44.

This is a literature review on the work done in the classical period of rhetoric. It details the primary works in rhetoric in the pre-Socratic times, the work of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Seneca the Elder, and other Roman rhetoricians. It also reviews the contemporary scholarship that has been done on classical rhetoric in reviews, bibliographies, historical studies, and current rhetoricians’ use of the ancient rhetors. At the end, it discusses the holes left in the work in classical rhetoric, such as the proto-history of rhetoric and non-Western ancient rhetoric.