Abstract
Serendipitously, I was planning a new PhD course on rhetorical methodologies when I began working on this review of Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric. Now complete, my review speaks to an engaging work on rhetorical theory and historiography, one that will benefit its future rhetorical readers, including practitioners and teachers of business and technical communication, as well as my current students. This anthology is inclusive; that is, it covers a range of issues rather than just one or two. And while I do not necessarily agree with each and every argument espoused, I find that each and every argument furthers the book’s overall goal: to rekindle past enthusiasm about historiography and methods as evoked in the 1980s and 1990s debates involving such scholars as Schiappa and Poulakos, Biesecker and Kohrs Campbell, and Crowley (see “Octalog,” 1988) and Vitanza (1994). As Baillif explains in the Introduction, this volume revisits these questions by “working to theorize—or to metatheorize—not only what it might mean to write histories of rhetoric, but what it might mean to rewrite histories of rhetoric by regendering them or by revising them” (p. 1). Indeed, it is high time for the rhetorical community to return not just to writing about history but also to theorizing about writing about history; such theorizing provides consistent and ethical groundings for practitioners and teachers of business and technical communication. The book’s authors, some members of that earlier generation and some newer scholars, provide an excellent background on those past debates, discuss current perspectives, and offer guidance for future efforts.
In addition to the Introduction by editor Bailiff and an Afterward by Sharon Crowley, Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric comprises 11 chapters. These chapters are arranged both chronologically and thematically, and following that plan, the first two chapters focus on how to incorporate context into discussions about the past. In Chapter 1, “Theory, Validity, and the Historiography of Classical Rhetoric: A Discussion of Archaeological Rhetoric,” Richard Leo Enos continues his call for scholars to integrate “nontraditional resources as archeological evidence” in an “effort to reconstruct the physical and the cognitive that will enhance our current methods of research into classical rhetoric” (p. 9). Specifically, Enos asks us to not just analyze words but also to reconstruct the mentality within which a particular culture conceptualizes communication. Accordingly, technical communication scholars must recognize that all cultures are, to varying degrees, oral and reconsider any assumptions about dominant classical modes (i.e., Athenian) that they bring to the task of analysis.
Steven Mailloux’s Chapter 2, “Enactment History, Jesuit Practices, and Rhetorical Hermeneutics,” is linked to Enos’s chapter both chronologically and in its concern with nontextual rhetorical hermeneutics focused on past artifacts. After asking how scholars can examine the past without contaminating it with contemporary assumptions, Mailloux looks to Heidegger’s notion of enactment and the Other. By applying the resulting rhetorical hermeneutics to texts and cultural issues associated with the reformation, Mailloux demonstrates how rhetoric can inform our understanding of history (and vice versa) without imposing a kind of Otherness on that past. His work also applies to business and technical communication practitioners’ attempts to speak to audiences of various cultures.
Retaining interests in the Other as well as ethical and appropriately situated writing, the next four chapters shift from considering how we examine the past to how we examine the discourse of the marginalized. In Chapter 3, “Writing the Other into the Histories of Rhetorics: Theorizing the Art of Recontextualization,” LuMing Mao considers cross-cultural rhetorical history and methodology. Despite growing scholarship in this area, Mao suggests, this work often perpetuates existing binaries and assumptions involving the rhetorician and analyst or the culture and rhetorician or text. To avoid such practices, Mao offers a methodology that proceeds from the alternative perspective. Applying this approach to the classic Chinese text Daodejing allows Mao to demonstrate what his approach, “recontextualization,” as he calls it, offers as an important corrective to those who make false attributions about such cross-cultural texts.
Chapter 4, “Releasing Hold: Feminist Historiography Without the Tradition,” by Jessica Enoch, addresses another standard category of Otherness, that of gender, as it engages with issues of material rhetoric. As Enoch notes, thus far feminist rhetorical historiographies have sought to recover this history and reread gender within it. To move analysis to a deeper level, Enoch looks at scholarship remembering past female writers and their histories while recovering and analyzing their gendered practices; these activities address the rhetorical nature of delivery and the bodily other. By recovering some “outliers” (p. 69) to the now standard feminist historiographical approaches, Enoch practices what she preaches, providing a model for writers in any discipline, including those interested in various modes of communication.
Because feminist rhetorics evoke issues involving the body and race, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation or identity, Enoch’s essay leads to Chapter 5, “Queer Archives/Archival Queers.” Here, Charles E. Morris III and J. K. Rawson demonstrate how embodiment, affect, and delivery contribute to “queering” the archives. This perspective, by definition available to all, acknowledges that archives are products of rhetorical invention and, as such, subject to rhetorical analysis. Accordingly, they encourage analysts to demonstrate a queer attitude by examining archives as documents that produce public and private memories to which the viewer can respond affectively. These insights apply to those who write business and technical documents for many audiences from many kinds of sources.
Moving from the archive as invention, Chapter 6, “Pan-Historiography: The Challenges of Writing History Across Time and Space,” considers broader issues involving archival content. Debra Hawhee and Christa J. Olson argue that current methodological interest in conducting restricted studies is fine, but not to the exclusion of studies that span larger time periods. Latter efforts offer what more limited studies cannot. To be effectively conducted, however, broader work must not pit large studies against the small. Instead of evoking such binaries in their applications, Hawhee and Olson recommend “time-slicing,” or looking across a corpus for consistencies and change, especially as measured in topoi. To support these practices, they also ask that we see ourselves as working with archives rather than an archive, each of which is itself constructed along various lines and contexts. To examine these lines, we must look for movement, performance, and the rhetorical invention in the particular archive.
After addressing issues involving the body and performance as well as the Other and archives, the next five chapters offer a 21st-century perspective on contemporary issues of history itself, issues initially voiced in the founding works of the 1980s and 1990s. In Chapter 7, “Stitching Together Events: Of Joints, Folds, and Assemblages,” Bryon Hawk examines how historiographical methodology turns “events” into “narratives” (p. 107). To that end, he incorporates jazz improvisation in his approach, thereby moving beyond traditional, revisionist, and subversive historiographies to a networked emergent perspective. In Chapter 8, “Rhetoric’s Nose: What Can Rhetorical Historiography Make of It?” (pp. 128–138), Jane S. Sutton takes a methodological risk: She asks how Aristotle’s metaphors of the nose (in the Rhetoric and Politics, among other works) inform contemporary discussions of democracy and deliberation. She discovers a way to look at the role of the accidental occurrence in historical methodology.
In Chapter 9, “Historiography as Hauntology: Paranormal Investigations into the History of Rhetoric” (pp. 129–153), Balliff responds to Derrida’s (2006) notion that a historical methodology should “speak with the dead.” Doing so, she suggests, allows the researcher to look from the past to the future in a manner that incorporates the ethical, the uncanny, the temporal, and the body in rhetorical historical methodology. Derrida is also at the center of Chapter 10, “Writing Future Rhetoric” (pp. 154–171). Drawing on Derrida’s notion of prediction, G. L. Ercolini and Pat J. Gehrke look to the future, crafting an historical methodology based on “ficture” or “a mutagenic space that alters out consciousness of the present and past, a fictive future (as if there could be any other type) that fissures our present-progressive” (p. 155).
The anthology ends on a practical and fitting note with the work of a key figure in rhetorical historiography. In Chapter 11, “A Philology for a Future Anterior: An Essay-as-Seminar” (pp. 172–189), Victor J. Vitanza offers a “seminar-as essay on philology” (p. 173) that prompts readers and potential students to question how the past, present, and future interact. “Let’s finally come to an understanding that anachronisms are an error in chronology. Not in time. We must ask the ignored question of What is chronology an error in?” (p. 184).
To conclude, Crowley’s “Afterward: A Reminiscence” points out that since the 1980s and 1990s, scholars have added many alternative theories to our study of rhetorical historiography while rhetoric has gained much needed disciplinary validation. Nonetheless, she urges the current generation of scholars to develop and express the kind of passion about theory and history that the first wave showed and, most significantly, to sustain that strong interest from now forward; readers of this journal should include themselves in this current generation and look forward to future ones.
Given its goal, its wide range, and the overall quality of its chapters, this anthology will be useful to scholars of rhetoric, to those who practice and teach professional communication as well as to those who practice rhetoric in their scholarship but do not necessarily name it as such. Because the chapters are carefully arranged, the book is accessible as a whole and for its parts. As a whole, authors share concerns about resisting binaries, identifying assumptions, avoiding the Other, and including the body and mind (i.e., various mode and modalities) in our discussions of rhetorical theory and its applications for creating and analyzing actual documents. In so doing, they ask us to consider more than content alone; we should examine how context shapes content and, in turn, our communication theories and practices. We must also look at how these theories and practices shape the materials we use to conduct and present research. Clearly, these issues are central to those engaged in professional communication. The chapters also provide an excellent background and bibliography on relevant literatures and issues.
As for the anthology’s parts, I prefer the earlier chapters that offer more tangible ways of conducting research while considering audience and the culture within which a document is constructed; they also locate artifacts in contexts rather than provide more abstract discussions of history, thereby blurring the lines between past and present. This sentiment may well apply to this journal’s readership. The anthology’s broad approach renders certain issues silent. It would be beneficial to consider in more depth visual, aural, and performative rhetoric and historiography. Ideally, some of the chapters would demonstrate how the methodologies work. Such applications could help to return scholarly interest to the actual inquiries that the anthology envisions. But all books are subject to editorial constraints, and this work’s gaps can be remedied in subsequent works. The many topics treated in Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, however, do reflect and serve well the spirit of Baillif’s opening and Crowley’s closing call, to renew our interest in the subject and offer us some potential issues to consider. Let us now respond with vigor.