all terms was probably “discourse,” but by that point in the acceptance speech the damage already had been done.
For several years I thought a great deal about that moment. Perhaps, I considered, this event was an aberration and, at the moment, I had committed an unwarranted generalization. I think not. I am convinced that this faux pas uncovered a serious problem that constrains the field today: the belief that research in rhetoric is retrospective or, at best, static. That night’s audience associated the study of the history of rhetoric as an out-of-step phase of their march toward research excellence and believed that the terms “oratory” and “rhetoric” conjured up methods and topics that the discipline had outgrown. NCA has a large and growing stake in research methods and topics associated with the social sciences. This perspective has been represented in ways that make it appear to be incompatible with the tradition of humanistic scholarship that characterizes much of the field’s history. The growing intolerance toward the humanistic study of rhetoric has serious, detrimental consequences not only to the field in question but also for the entire temperament about research and what such research contributes. This introduction is an effort to reveal those consequences and to argue for the benefits of a more inclusive attitude than the one exhibited by listeners on that night.
It is important to emphasize that while I am convinced that this attitude existed with many in the audience on that day, such a perspective is not shared by scholars in other disciplines. Let me demonstrate a different perspective on rhetoric and oratory, one that comes from outside Communication. Classicists such as Eric Havelock, anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, sociologists such as Jack Goody and Ian Watt, and rhetoricians from English such as Walter Ong rushed to use such shared terms as “orality” and “oral” unabashedly (Havelock, Muse 24–29). Father Ong even dared to give it marquee status in his book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Since Father Ong’s book has just recently been translated into its seventh language I felt that saying “oratory” would have been tolerated with that night’s NCA elite, but it is clear that I had been the little boy who matter-of-factly told the Emperor that he was wearing no clothes. I had reminded my immediate audience of a past that some apparently did not wish to recognize. An anachronism that some no longer wished to associate with as a part of their present discipline had been exhumed for all.
This curious dissociation from the past preoccupies my thoughts. I wonder what those audience members back in 1985 would think about what I learned at our recent 1995 NCA Convention in San Antonio when the eminent classicist, Professor Michael Gagarin, told me over lunch that he recently had become the general editor of a multiple-volume series on the Attic Orators for The University of Texas Press. I learned that The University of Texas Press was delighted to acquire this project, and that it was also heavily sought after by at least one other prestigious press. What a fascinating condition! “Oratory” was embraced by distinguished presses, but I was at a conference composed of some members who wished the term to go away. On a personal level, I can tell you that there is no topic more engaging to graduate students in my English Department at TCU than orality and literacy, and in that respect, they mirror the interest emanating from both CCCC and MLA. In fact, some years ago, I reviewed a manuscript for PMLA on orality and literacy in St. Augustine’s work and was delighted that John D. Schaeffer’s fine essay was published in the October 1996 issue of PMLA. Oratory is alive and well everywhere . . . but in its home discipline. It is now widely accepted in the field of English that one route to studying literature historically is to understand the relationship between oratorical practices and literary habits.
What does all this related interest in orality tell me about that audience’s reaction twenty-five years ago? I believe that the explanation is quite simple: a lack of education and understanding. In little more than one generation of scholars we have almost lost the knowledge of our discipline and the lessons our predecessors taught us. To paraphrase the words of Sir Kenneth Clarke, we are hanging on to our “civilization” by the skin of our teeth. I believe, however, that the discomfort felt by those audience members on that night was grounded in ignorance, that a recognition of the fine research for which scholars such as Wilbur Samuel Howell have been justly honored was lost to some members of that audience due to a lack of understanding. I feel that this lack of understanding led to a lack of appreciation that, in turn, prompted many to seek other academic communities. Some historians of rhetoric and oratory have responded with a conservative and even reactionary approach. Many have walked away from their critics by voting with their feet, establishing their own journals and associations. The Rhetoric Society of America and The International Society for the History of Rhetoric are two examples of associations that came into existence because of the need for an arena and a voice for research in rhetoric and oratory.
Those who anticipate that I will now launch into a tirade vilifying any sort of research that is non-humanistic will be disappointed. No reactionary musings. No gloom and doom laments for pristine days now gone with the wind . . . quite the opposite! I wish to engage in the most fundamental benefits of history: to learn lessons from the past. The saving grace in NCA’s history of scholarship has been its multimodality, the willing disposition to make topics and methods inclusive. There was a time in the history of American universities when the opposite was true in other disciplines. Robert Scholes argues in his brilliant book, The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline, that one of the chief reasons leading to bitter arguments in literature over the last two decades can be traced back to the problem of having a canon based on authors rather than a canon based on methods. Unlike literature, Scholes argues, rhetoric’s canon is grounded in invention and based on methods. Scholes believes that one reason that rhetoric has risen in this century is because modifications to its canon have sought to increase the sensitivity of understanding discourse rather than to replace one set of favored authors with another. Despite Scholes’s praise for rhetoric, even a canon based on methods can have its own share of problems. In an effort to search for a disciplinary identity some rhetoricians have sought to define themselves by methods rather than problems. Like cancer, these educators sought to make all cells in the organism look like themselves and destroyed those that did not match. Following a German model of universities, departments became specialized and isolated. In that milieu of purity disciplines sought respect. Some in NCA are advocating such a path, and I suspect that the reaction I experienced in 1985 was a manifestation of that “sweep under the rug” mentality. Today, the idea of a university is changing, moving away from Balkanized, autonomous departments, moving toward interacting and even collaborating. Universities are again becoming interdisciplinary in action and mentality. It is not that they are returning to interdisciplinarity but that they are becoming so in a new and different way. I believe that the route to understanding the reaction of that night’s audience and the internal problems that led up to it can best be found by examining the research methods and topics most currently practiced.
Basic Research and Primary Scholarship: Treading Up a Slippery Slope
One of the biggest problems in recovering the lost art of researching the history of rhetoric is an obvious one: so few of us are doing historical research in rhetoric. On the surface, this statement appears ludicrous. Our journals regularly publish a number of essays where the most appropriate descriptive adjective is “historical.” In addition to articles, one could argue, a number of important books dealing with historical studies have been published. Finally, organizations such as the International Society for the History of Rhetoric and the American Society for the History of Rhetoric are thriving; in fact, at the 1997 NCA Convention in Chicago there were approximately twenty panels from ASHR appearing on the convention program. Yet, much of what is done in our discipline is not basic research, that is, new primary scholarship. Rather, what are presented as historical studies are critiques on secondary scholarship, speculative essays on meta-theory and point/counter-point debates over characterizations of ideologies. As I will discuss later, these approaches have value and deserve to be heard. They do not, however, equate with basic historical research. Specific illustrations will anchor my point. Over the last several years I have been involved in projects that require a re-examination of pioneering work in rhetoric and oratory. I contributed to the classical sections of Winifred Bryan Horner’s Historical Rhetoric and both of her editions of The Present
