November 21, 2004
A Rhetorical Agenda
One of my friends remarked at NCA last week that the Blogora is a sign that ddd, rhosa, and jim seem to have an awful lot of time on their hands. The implication, I guess, was that blogging is somehow separate from the "real" work of the teacher-scholar. In addition, though, to connecting rhetorical concepts and methods with daily life in the public sphere, I hope we can have some extended conversations about "what should rhetoric be now?" (I'm reminded of a book published a few years ago entitled What Should Political Theory Be Now? )
In just the last ten years we have developed a critical mass of folks interested in rhetoric in both rhet/comp and in Communication, with a smattering of others in political science and elsewhere. Rhetorical studies, however, is still all over the academic map, without a clear research trajectory. I got into some trouble a few years ago at Penn State when I suggested that doctoral students in rhetoric should connect their dissertation work with the research program of their advisor (I found out I was accused of wanting to create "clones"--go figure). My point was that academic fields progress when attention-space is relatively narrow, and there are a common set of questions and debates with which everyone is familiar. One reason for the greater success of the social sciences in Communication, I think, is their insistence on coordinating research programs. A more practical problem develops when scholarship is all over the place: people don't buy each others' books, which has led to a recurring problem with book series in rhetoric at various university presses. I don't want to belabor the point, but rather to get to my discussion question: what would be a list of focused topics in rhetorical studies that we could look back at ten years from now and say we've made some progress? The best example of what I'm talking about is the string of books and articles published in Presidential Rhetoric in the last ten years; we now know a lot about American presidents and their rhetorical leadership.
One topic I would like to see more about is the historiography of rhetorical theory. We continue to produce great monograph-style works on key texts and moments in the history of rhetoric, but we still lack a synthesis of what rhetoric in the European tradition has meant, how it has changed, etc. The birth-death-resurrection metaphor I learned in graduate school just doesn't work well any more. What could replace it?
Categories: The Profession
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