contribution in the forthcoming edition) as well as Speech Communication in the 20th Century. A few years later, I was asked to write a commentary on the emergence of rhetoric journals over the last thirty years for Philosophy and Rhetoric. These projects obligated me to re-examine research that is now decades old. The reviews that I did over a sixteen-year period highlighted some demonstrable trends. One of the most dominant trends of earlier scholarship was that the typical research study done in rhetoric and oratory was primary; scholars would do archival work, field work, translate important primary material and make theoretical interpretations directed at explicating primary material not, as is often now the case, eliciting a reaction to secondary sources.
I noted this trend in contrast with the occasional opposite—the Guru paper. In the early years of my graduate education—which I characterize here as the twilight period after these pioneering studies—I noticed that much of the work published in journals was not research but rather commentary. At the time, I had little tolerance for published work based upon (what I thought was) idiosyncratic opinion. I had thought that all research should be basic research—work that provides new evidence that directly contributes to the scholarship of our field. At the time, I yearned to know the “facts,” and those essays that did not measure up to this standard seemed to me only to have the outward form of scholarly research but not the substance. My fellow graduate students and I even developed a condescending term for such pieces. We called them “Guru papers,” published essays written by (usually) prominent leaders of the field. These commentaries seemed to contain not a hint of research but a load of speculative, subjective critical remarks . . . or so I thought!
I also was bothered by assumptions that (I thought) went unchallenged. For example, when I was a student, we were led to think that Sophists were inferior thinkers about rhetoric when contrasted with Plato and Aristotle. We were also encouraged to believe that rhetoric thrived only in democracies such as Athens or republics such as Rome’s as well as believe that Athenian rhetoric equaled all Greek rhetoric and that Roman rhetoric was only a modified adaptation of Athenian rhetoric. In such a frame of mind we went from Greek to Roman rhetoric without questioning or understanding how Greek rhetoric came to influence Roman rhetoric—we just somehow knew that it did! Looking back now I see that I should have asked more basic questions and challenged more assumptions, although I am sure that my former professors will readily say that I did more than my share of “resisting” as a student. Perhaps a kinder and fairer answer would be for me to admit that these professors did not know the answer to such questions because we, as a profession, had not sought to find them out and supply them with such information. We had not directed our efforts at finding out answers as our founding fathers and mothers had done. Now that my beard is grayer and my hair is shorter and thinner, I see the constraints my former teachers had much more clearly, and I even see those Guru papers differently. I appreciate great scholars sharing the wisdom they acquired over a lifetime of research and teaching, the type of knowledge that is the consequence of talent, practice and experience over years. Yet, I also see that, as a profession, we fell short in giving our teachers the information they needed to enrich the knowledge of our discipline for our future students.
I still feel the need and importance of basic research that I first sensed as a graduate student is present. While my views about the worth of critical commentaries has modified, the concerns are still present, principally because there is a dark side to this brilliant coin. I am concerned because I see a genre emerging which is a variant of the sort of “Guru papers” that I once chided but now admire—particularly in the area of historical research—and I feel that it is a problem that affects the training and preparation of our students to do primary historical scholarship. Over the last decade I have seen basic research in the history of rhetoric replaced by critical posturing, speculative theory and meta-historiography. These enterprises, although varying from criticism to theory to method, all share a trait—interpretation—often without advancing basic knowledge. In short, these are “Guru papers” but not advanced as the consequence of a career of careful historical research or years of classroom experience. Rather, such statements stand in as replacements for (and become) the research itself.
At this point, I would like to nip some possible inferences in the bud. I am not against criticism; I am not opposed to advancing warranted interpretation; I am not opposed to self-reflection on our methods. These enterprises are valuable and deserve their place in our field. What I am concerned about is these enterprises operating independently from basic research and existing as ends in themselves. Our first and necessary obligation is to provide new information, new material evidence, new data. Then we can use the tools of criticism and interpretation to understand this evidence and, if needed, to develop new methods to refine our theories and analyses. When we understand this important perspective, the agenda for educating students to engage in historical scholarship will become clearer.
In the April 1977 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Barnett Baskerville wrote an important essay, “Must We All Be ‘Rhetorical Critics’?” The essay was important because it was itself a telling criticism about rhetorical criticism. Baskerville’s concern was that the interest in critical work was so fashionable that it lured students away from the more laborious work of historical scholarship. Quoting Donald C. Bryant, Baskerville asserted, “rhetorical criticism must depend almost entirely upon historical knowledge for its effectiveness” (112). In his own words, Baskerville concluded his argument by stating: “In our field, as in most fields, there is a need for scholars who can record accurately and artistically the history of our art as it relates to more general history, to delineate its place in and contributions to the cultural history of the nation” (116).
Baskerville expressed his concern in 1977, and I believe that his voice responds to a problem we have today. In the May 1995 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Speech, the editor, Robert L. Ivie, prefaced the issue with his introduction, “The Social Relevance of Rhetorical Scholarship” (138). Ivie expressed his concern over the current separation between rhetorical theory and social criticism. In much the same way that Baskerville argued for historical scholarship as a grounding for criticism, Ivie expressed his belief “that the language of rhetorical theory, which academic criticism subscribes to and attempts to refine, should prove of heuristic value to those who would engage in significant social criticism and that theory would benefit from its increased accountability as a social heuristic” (138). The point is clear in both arguments. Sensitive criticism—whether it concerns historical or contemporary issues—must be grounded in basic research. Understanding what we criticize is as essential as how we analyze. This point is particularly evident in historical studies. Our students are being trained in the history of rhetoric as critics at the expense of, and not complementary with, training in historiography. Certainly the problem I pose is not a new one. In the past century alone I can think of three such related situations. In the early decades of the twentieth century literary scholars expressed concern that literary history was being replaced by literary criticism. In the middle of that century Communication scholars expressed concern that the history and criticism of public address was becoming less history and exclusively criticism. Lastly, our present condition in the history of rhetoric is such that the actual chronicling of rhetoric’s history is being replaced by criticism content to comment upon and refine what has already been recorded rather than advancing any new historical information.
Baskerville’s concerns remind me of the voice of another even earlier scholar, the seventeenth century father of archaeology, Jacob Spön. Spön believed that the monopoly of classical philology as the sole route to understanding Antiquity unnecessarily constrained advancements toward understanding Ancient Greece. Spön believed that non-literary sources were also material evidence that should no longer be ignored. He recommended expanding the research domain of philology to areas such as archaeology and epigraphy. Spön also recommended that scholars arise from their arm chairs, actually go to Greece and engage in field work. He saw ancient remains as “books whose stone and marble pages have been written on with iron points and chisels” (Etienne 38). We too must expand our domain beyond the established canon of literary texts of rhetoric, for texts—including theoretical treatises—are only one form of material evidence. And that form, at best, is a transmitted one, corrupted necessarily by generations
