Rhetoric – Errors of Rhetorical Construction

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.