kirtwilson@psu.edu – Errors of Rhetorical Construction

Academic Life in the age of COVID-19

March 15, 2020November 3, 2020
by kirtwilson@psu.edu

There are multiple ways to embody and perform scholarship in the academy. At most universities and colleges, professional activities are divided into three basic categories–research, instruction, service. Each year, professors undergo “annual review,” an assessment of how they have performed in each of these areas over the past 12 months. Depending on the institution and a scholar’s contract, the weights and importance of each area will differ. Precisely what constitutes research or service, instruction or research is not always clear, and in any given annum, the specific activities performed in one category may look different even though the category itself is static year to year. These differences are amplified when the predictable patterns of academic life are disrupted by unexpected circumstances, opportunities or crises. Throughout my career, I have never witnessed circumstances as disruptive as those produced by the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the present moment, it might be impossible to over-estimate the impact of the novel coronavirus on higher education. Universities and colleges across the United States canceled study-abroad programs, first in Italy and then throughout much of Europe. As early as March 3, institutions began to cancel non-essential international travel followed by domestic travel less than ten days later. Academic organizations with conferences in March and April canceled their events, while societies with conference plans in May and June are in a holding pattern, as they wait to see how events develop. Face to face instruction is prohibited at most institutions, and faculty have spent the past week figuring out how to move their courses online and precisely what it means to schedule a “Zoom Conference.” Students who left campuses for spring break are being told that they cannot return, and other students, especially international students, who did not travel for break find themselves in a difficult position and are sometimes forced to leave their campus dorm. From the recruitment of new graduate students to the hiring of faculty and staff, the normal modes of doing business in higher education seems to be up for grabs.

And yet, at this moment, I am reminded again of the privileges provided by the academic profession, privileges that many workers in our global economy deserve but do not often receive. As instructors, we can move many of our classes online, continuing to teach students at a distance. Research is disrupted, especially in those disciplines that require team collaboration and lab processes, but other forms of research can be pursued. So far it would seem that colleges and universities will continue to pay faculty, researchers, and staff and one can hope that institutions of higher education will not panic or walk away from the employees that have made their institutions successful.

Ironically, one of the most tenuous categories of faculty on college campuses, the tenured or tenured track professor of humanities, may be in the most privileged position of all. Much of the secondary literature that informs their scholarship is online or can be ordered from Amazon.com. Because they perform significant aspects of their research alone, with books and archived or digital media spread around them, they can continue to write and publish even though they are working from home. Learning how to teach online is a challenge, but moving a humanities course into a virtual environment is much easier than transferring an engineering lab or chemistry class to the web. Thus, in many ways, even though the research, teaching, and service of everyone in higher education will be disrupted for months, it is important to recognize some of these privileges.

Unfortunately, these privileges are not distributed equally. Contingent faculty, graduate students, and university staff experience more precarity than tenured associate and full professors. Scholars who rely on equipment or processes that cannot be moved into a house will struggle more than those who have a home office identical to their campus office. In the weeks to come, we must be sure to protect the labor of everyone who works on a college campus or university. The COVID-19 pandemic will subside at some point. The two questions that we might ask ourselves today are what do we want to preserve about our labor through this experience and what new modes of work–especially research, instruction, and service–should we develop among these disruptive circumstances?

Rhetoric

Is it Literature or Rhetoric?

February 28, 2020November 3, 2020
by kirtwilson@psu.edu

On March 3, the Atlantic Monthly Press will publish a book titled Every Drop of Blood, a history of the 24 hours surrounding Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Penned by Edward Achorn, Every Drop of Blood is another popular press foray into history and oratory. Sometimes, as in the case of Lend Me Your Ears by William Safire, the author considers multiple speeches and their contexts. In other instances, as with Garry Will’s famous Lincoln at Gettysburg, the historical narrative revolves around a single speech text.

Ed Achorn is a journalist best known for his books on nineteenth-century baseball. Who could resist a book with the title, The Summer of Beer and Whiskey: How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies, Immigrants, and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America’s Game? Every Drop of Blood probably will be as, if not more, popular. It already has received positive press coverage. The New York Times interviewed Achorn, last week, which will no doubt boost its sales. Reading that interview, two things stand out to me.

First, toward the end of the interview, Achorn refers to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address as a masterpiece of literature. Why literature? Why not a masterpiece of oratory or a masterpiece of rhetoric. When authors, especially journalists, praise a famous speech, they rarely identify the work as rhetoric; they typically label it “literature,” as though that title bestows some special status on the work. And perhaps it does. Even among folks who don’t view rhetoric as a negative or pejorative speech act, the label “rhetoric” connotes the idea of an ephemeral or transitory expression. Literature, on the other hand, endures; the label grants the object the status of a high art form, transcending the moment of its creation. The problem, of course, is that the norms of rhetoric and the norms of literature both overlap and diverge. Oratory can be high art just as surely as War and Peace. But even in its most eloquent examples, oratory that endures and becomes a part of national identity is written for an immediate purpose. Lincoln may be one of the most important prose stylists of US political culture, but every word he wrote—no matter how much he hoped it would stand the test of time—was meant to persuade the “public mind” in the immediate moment of its expression. The fact that a speech is “rhetorical” should not disqualify it as art worthy of the public’s attention, nor should it necessitate the speech’s relabeling as “literature” just so that it is taken seriously by readers.

Second, when books like Every Drop of Blood are published, I cannot help but wish that actual rhetoric scholars would write more books like it. Scholars of rhetoric do not have a monopoly on the study of oratory, but it is unfortunate that too often they cede that ground to journalists and historians who do not have the perspective that studying the history and practice of rhetoric provides. One reason why rhetoric scholars rarely publish books on a single speech may be because book-length studies of single speeches are not afforded the same academic value as manuscripts that examine more ambitious, which is to say theoretically dense or more expansive, subjects. There are few academic presses that regularly publish single speech studies. Texas A&M University Press is an exception. When contemplating the prospect of writing a book on a single speech, I hear a whisper in my ear that says, “No one wants to read a book-length study of just one speech text. Besides, do you want to be known as a public address scholar with such limited interests?” The external pressures of peer review, promotion and tenure, and research publication seem to discourage rhetoric scholars from working on a single address and yet these are some of the most popular books that folks want to read. There is a widespread recognition within the academy that research should connect to the lived experiences and interests of the general public. One way to make that connection is to focus our attention on the single speech, the oratorical moment that “made a difference,” however slight, in the thoughts and ideas of an audience.

Rhetoric

What is rhetoric, again?

February 15, 2020November 3, 2020
by kirtwilson@psu.edu

I approach knowledge and human experience from the intellectual traditions and theories of “Rhetoric.” This statement begs a straightforward but difficult question: “What is rhetoric?” This question has deep roots, not only in the modern academy but back to antiquity and beyond. The popular culture definition of rhetoric is that rhetoric is a form of audience manipulation–the empty promises of a politician or the use of florid language or oratorical style. Ask any student of public speaking to define rhetoric and they probably will paraphrase Aristotle’s famous statement that rhetoric is “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” The definition I use most often with students is that

Rhetoric is the use or enactment of verbal and nonverbal symbols to make meaning about the world, about human experience, and about human identities. This performance and the symbolic and material formations that result from it have intended and unintended consequences for ourselves and others.

This definition reveals several fundamental assumptions. First, most of my research focuses on questions of representation and interpretation within and through symbolic interaction. Material conditions, communicative technologies, human and non-human ecologies, media circulation, and systems of power are crucial concerns in my research, but I am primarily interested in how those extra-representational elements relate to embodied acts of human communication.

Second, I believe that human experience is broader than our capacity to capture its texture and depth symbolically; nevertheless, the meaning(s) that we attribute to experience require an act of translation, a process of transforming sensation into language and expression that we then share with others.

Third, much of what we do as human beings involves a nearly instantaneous and never-ending process of interpretation and production, reception and articulation, and the words we use and the habits of communication we perform is probably more important than what we typically think of as “thought.”

Fourth, our communication produces affects and effects, consequences and subsequent sensations. We expect and intend only a fraction of the consequences produced by our communication, which is why we spend so much time grappling with the unanticipated results of our communication.

So, when I say that I approach human experience from a rhetorical perspective, I am acknowledging more than one tradition of humanistic and philosophical inquiry that view people as “symbol using animals” that exist within multi-layered contexts of material constraint, cultural belief and value, ideology, and systems of power.