ravages of time.
The contributions made by the past century’s historians are remarkable, and they must be acknowledged, but there are concerns with the present direction. We have many critics who have not demonstrated the talents or skills that they see lacking in others. This type of posturing and orientation—often done in the classroom—indirectly encourages students to passively respond to research rather than to actively produce it. The quality of such responses, moreover, is 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 and make their own contributions.
A second concern about current work in the history of rhetoric is an over-emphasis in historiography as an abstract topic of discussion without the development of new, sensitive methods of historical research. In other words, a great deal of emphasis is spent not on the actual activity of doing history but abstract discussion about the notions and presuppositions about doing history. Certainly, both before and throughout the time that one engages in historical work serious concerns about method and analysis must always be asked. This process, however, is inextricably bound with the activity of research in the history of rhetoric; the epistemology of writing history is a process that is done during the act. Engaging in questions of historiography without eventually performing historical research, however, leaves historiography on the level of the speculative—work done that may possibly be effective but never performed. That determination of effectiveness, however, is only consequenced by actually writing history.
One manifestation of this trend in historiography is lap-top research that encourages students only to look at the exegesis of the text. Many would argue that “new criticism” or the analysis of the text as an entity unto itself is no longer practiced. Yet, 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 readings” 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. That is, there is a sense of intertextuality, of texts building upon or departing from one another, but interactive nonetheless. I am encouraging us to elaborate the notion of intertextuality to include not only the positioning of texts but also contextual methods that will help us to position them.
The orientation toward speculative historiography and passive criticism affects students in other ways. By default, such an orientation reduces the time and emphasis of basic research so that students do not have adequate exposure to the activity of historical work in progress during their education. There is a danger that we could unwittingly be encouraging our students to be dilettantes; that is, to dabble in historical study and commentary without method and without basic knowledge (Etienne 146). What methods will avoid these concerns in the preparation for historical research? Studying the social and political history of the period will provide knowledge of the context of the rhetoric. Attention to the nature and general orthography of the primary language will further inform our contextual knowledge since language habits are often influenced by social and political forces as well as linguistic phenomena. Studying the material evidence of a culture by expanding our notion of “texts” to archaeological and epigraphical sources will further specify our understanding of the rhetoric and oratory that operated. Such an effort, however, will require students to learn techniques to assimilate data and procedures for fieldwork. Since all such evidence must be interpreted, it is essential that we emphasize and learn how to argue for interpretations of evidence that account for verifiable explanations and provide the source from which to advance theories.
Winning the Right to Research Rhetoric
Historians of rhetoric exist in a tacit community. The community participates in a dialectic in which research is offered and responded to primarily through journal essays, books and reviews. Not enough attention, however, is paid to the categories of evidence brought under analysis or to the creation of new methodologies. Some of us equate historical research with antiquated methods of scholarship. The two—topic and method—are not the same and do not have to co-exist. For the sake of the pristine and the venerable, a conservative orientation to what constitutes valid evidence in historiography has promoted 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. Here is an analogy that applies to research in the history of rhetoric. Heinrich Schliemann, the father of modern archaeology, was vilified because others believed that dirtying one’s hands through actually going to see what was at Troy was something scholars should not do. Rather, the accepted mode of scholarly operation was to make armchair explanations based solely upon the Iliad and the Odyssey. Schliemann had many faults, but one of them was not a lack of zeal for knowing. Dissatisfied with the wrangling and speculations of scholars whose weight of interpretation was often grounded more on personal authority than evidence, Schliemann literally went right to the source, and his innovative methods of archaeological research established new methods and insights into the Homeric world. Unfortunately, many researchers in the history of rhetoric and oratory have taken the prevailing disposition of our scholarly community with tacit acceptance. Our students are tempted to think that an argument is right based on the persona of the author and not the weight of the evidence. At the same time, non-experts outside our immediate community (but within the academy) are not swept away by ethos-posturing but await insights based on new discoveries that make sense to them. Many of us, however, have not learned from Schliemann and have been reluctant to “dirty our hands” in such a manner of research, but rather perpetuate and even glorify the armchair, venerated methods of analysis.
Would it be, for us, a question of “dirty hands,” for example, to actually go to Sicily and examine artifacts that may tell us more about Corax, Tisias, and Gorgias, than what literary fragments alone would yield? Would it be unthinkable to immerse oneself in the study of Greek archaeology and history in order to learn about cultural forces shaping Greek rhetoric and oratory? Why would we not, for example, wish to journey to the Clements Library at The University of Michigan and examine first-hand the arguments of the British side of the Revolutionary War? And lastly, would it be unthinkable for us, like our colleagues who have done such a good job in the social sciences, to develop new methodologies and new theories to try to account for the evidence that they present in the formulation of their theories? The truth is that the reaction to the words “rhetoric” and “oratory” on the part of those members of that SCA audience was the response of closed minds that had made a knee-jerk reaction. They were inappropriate. From our side, the type of primary scholarship that earned Professor Howell such praise had lost its growth and trajectory. We are lacking on that count. Excellent research will make not only the merits of the observation obvious but will underscore the worth of the subject itself. Recovering the lost art of researching the history of rhetoric means not going back but progressing forward by providing new basic research and sensitive methods for acquiring and assessing that information.
The development of new methods is of obvious importance if we hope to continue making sensitive explanations, but of shared, if not equally obvious, importance is the discipline’s openness to receiving new methods. The benefits of developing new methods for research apply to rhetoric that is both written and oral. Seeing relationships between orality and literacy, however, can come at great personal cost, especially if a community is resistant. The importance of seeing the relationship between orality and literacy is no better illustrated than in Kevin Robb’s Literacy & Paideia in Ancient Greece. Robb, often a critic of Eric Havelock’s pioneering work, is nonetheless convinced of the relationship of oral and written discourse. It may sound odd to say this, but arguing for the relationship of orality and literacy has taken considerable personal courage. We know the opposition that Eric Havelock received when he made the
