Main History of Rhetoric Relating to the history of rhetoric Michael Leff: The second mark of disciplinary rhetoric has to do with its grounding in teaching. I mean here specifically the teaching of composition, public speaking, argumentation, and persuasion. People who teach such subjects regularly and seriously have common interests that surface whenever they talk together, and this classroom experience is as close to a bedrock for disciplinary rhetoric as anything that I have encountered. In fact (here I am shifting to the history of rhetoric), the history of rhetoric is largely a history of teaching. Jeff Walker has made this point several times, but he made it again and impressively in his talk at the conference. We have good reason to be skeptical about a single, coherent rhetorical tradition. Even when we follow the “mainstream” developments, we find striking differences (e.g. Plato v. Isocrates, Cicero v. the Atticists, Aristotle v. the “writers of the handbooks”) that present a scene of persistent controversy rather than of neatly settled orthodoxy. Moreover, this same history reveals striking shifts in the conceptions of the nature, subject-matter, and scope of rhetoric over time. Sometimes rhetoric is a civic art (as in Cicero), sometimes an abstract discipline of argument (as in Boethius), sometimes a tool for practical business (as in the medieval artes dictaminis), sometimes an aesthetic instrument (as in the medieval artes poetriae or the early modern appropriations of ars rhetorica in music and art). And a commitment to a single tradition also sets a trap for us because it might cause us to overlook the omissions and exclusions (e.g. women, under classes, and outcasts). What does seem at once narrow enough to preserve a meaningful identify for rhetoric and yet broad enough to capture its mutability and robust diversity is its history as a teaching discipline. From the ancient Greeks to the present, there is a continuous tradition (if I may use that word) of teaching students to write, speak, argue, and express themselves. To see ourselves as part of that tradition gives us a sense of identity that persists across time and circumstance even as times and circumstances change. Rhetoric's rich history Michael Leff: As Walker and others have demonstrated, this is rich history, and we should have no reason to be embarrassed by it. But it is also a history that raises some problems for us. In the modern academy, the pursuit of “pure” knowledge has earned the place of privilege, and so a discipline grounded in something as messy and practical as teaching eighteen-year-olds to write or speak doesn’t get much respect. More recently, with the advent of consumerism, we have had privilege (in some circles) awarded to the purely practical—teaching students what they need to know to get ahead in a competitive world and nothing else. And here too rhetoric (at least as most of us teach it) can’t earn much respect: It is insufficiently practical; too much concerned about making the student a good citizen capable of arguing intelligently and speaking or writing eloquently; these concerns about deliberative and aesthetic virtues, about pausing to understand what lies beneath the surface of tradition and custom, are not the stuff of efficient business communication. Sometimes rhetoricians have tended to move toward one side or another of this polarity (adopting, for example, George Campbell’s view that rhetoric is best conceived as the source for a philosophical psychology or, on the other side, the straight-forward pragmatism of the medieval dictatores). But history suggests that rhetoric does not sit comfortably at the margins of purity. It seems always to drift toward the impure and ambiguous territory where expediency and the virtue, practice and the theory, and action and knowledge mingle together in a blend that keeps stirring around concrete circumstances. Viewed from this perspective, rhetoric is a teaching discipline in a sense that brings more complexity and dignity to teaching than either the modern research university or the contemporary business college might allow. Andrea Lunsford: If ARS did nothing other than engage scholars across disciplines in attending to the key importance of teaching—to knowledge formation and dissemination as well as to disciplinarity in general—it would have been enormously worthwhile. Mike is perhaps understating the degree to which teaching is devalued in the contemporary research university, and especially that teaching that focuses on first- and second-year students. Rhetoric’s long and rich tradition of taking this teaching very seriously is one of its greatest strengths, as Jeff Walker and others at the conference argued. Connecting theory and practice Michael Leff: If there is something in this reflection about teaching as the core of what we do, and if our teaching really is a special mix between theory and practice, then we need to work together to explain what we do and its value in an academic and public context where complex, impure endeavors run against the grain. This is the dominant thought that I take from the conference. Andrea Lunsford: The vision of rhetoric as a teaching subject was the most encouraging and hopeful part of this meeting to me, and I (and lots of others) was deeply grateful to Jeff Walker for framing the idea so cogently. Teaching is what connects theory and practice—at a number of different levels, and I agree with Mike that this is a “dominant thought” many of us took from the conference. One question I have is how to continue articulating what this means and the implications it has for scholar/teachers of rhetoric. A bridge across the ocean Michael Leff: One final reflection on history and rhetoric: After the conference I received an email from one of the foreign participants. He was impressed by what he had seen. After attending many of these events in the United States, he expected a lot of self-congratulation and the like. What he found instead was a group of colleagues eager to talk with another and committed to the work that they do as teachers and scholars and capable of talking about it in a rigorous manner. I hope others had a similar experience. Because of the peculiar history of rhetoric in American higher education, rhetoricians have not only been marginalized but also scattered. In coming together at Evanston, they seemed to discover a match of interests that call for rigorous common inquiry. The conversation was productive, and it is the function of ARS to keep it going. Top Main