Death of Theresa Enos

I understand from a colleague that Theresa Enos has passed.
According to the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition (https://www.facebook.com/CFSHRC/):

As many of you have already learned, our colleague Theresa Enos has died. She and her work have been so important to so many of us. It is a great understatement to say she will be sorely missed.

I have a Theresa Enos story.

In 2008, I submitted a book review to Rhetoric Review, one of the finest independent journals in rhetorical studies (and one which exists by virtue of the strong, independent voice of Enos). The then-book review editor was an assistant professor, who replied to my submission indicating that Rhetoric Review only accepted book reviews from scholars with national reputations in the field of rhetoric.

(I was left to complete the final two steps of the syllogism on my own: "David is not a scholar with a national reputation in rhetoric. Therefore, Rhetoric Review will not accept a book review from David.")  It was a humiliating experience. Not because I had illusions about my prominence (I was an assistant professor in my third year of appointment at UMD), but because I was left to intuit my value by virtue of the way he expressed the rejection.

I mentioned this experience on social media, without mentioning the name of the journal, with no small amount of frustration, as a reminder of the stupid hierarchies which exist in academia.  A friend suggested that I ditch that unnamed journal and instead send it to Rhetoric Review.  Awkwardly, in private messages, I cracked, admitting that Rhetoric Review was the unnamed journal to which I had submitted the review.

My friend, bless his soul, had recently met Theresa, if I recall correctly, and messaged her privately to say: something seems rotten in the state of Denmark.

And so, in the summer of 2008, while doing archival research in the UK, i received an invitation to talk to Theresa Enos over the phone, "I very much want to work all this out so you won't think RR completely nuts." And we talked, about the complexities of moving from an independent journal status to being managed by Erlbaum, about the complexities of mentoring a new book review editor after years, if not decades, of doing the work on her own. (None of this changed whether my book review would be published, but I no longer felt like someone rejected because I was nobody from nowhere.)

I wasn't a fool. I had Theresa Enos on the phone. This was never going to happen again, and even if she was only on the phone with me because my feelings were hurt (though I never got a sense that this was a pity-call)... I was going to take advantage of it.

I gushed at her book, Professing the New Rhetorics, which included IA Richards and Chaim Perelman, Michel Foucault and Michael Polyani, Jurgen Habermas, Roland Barthes, and Wayne Booth -- all of the people I would have wanted to be in a collection about the major statements on rhetoric (a real improvement over the modern sections in the Bizzell and Herzberg, which seems to fetishize lit crits).  Admittedly, the author selection was more white and male than I might like now, but the book is twenty years old.
It also included
Donald C. Bryant, Rhetoric: Its Functions and Its Scope.
Robert L. Scott, On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic.
Douglas Ehninger, On Systems of Rhetoric.
Terry Eagleton, Conclusion: Political Criticism.
Walter R. Fisher, Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument.
Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa S. Ede, On Distinctions between Classical and Modern Rhetoric.
Jim W. Corder, Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love.
Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, The Illiteracy of Literacy in the United States.
James A. Berlin, Poststructuralism, Cultural Studies, and the Composition Classroom: Postmodern Theory in Practice.
(A mix of speech rhetoricians, composition rhetoricians, and a sprinkle of lit crit and critical pedagogy)

To this day, I said, I can't tell whether I love this book because it so perfectly matches the body of work that I think constitutes rhetoric at the end of the 20th century, or whether my sense of rhetoric at the end of the 2oth century was formed by this book.

Dr. Enos shared with me the energy and the process of building one version of the canon of rhetorical studies, and she seemed genuinely interested in how I was making sense of that canon in my own work -- especially, I said, how engaging it is to try to write for both composition and communication audiences, how gratifying it is to write for both, and yet how difficult it is to say "I belong to the tradition that created both Robert L. Scott and James Berlin, Donald Bryant and Wayne Booth."

Anyway. There are two kinds of ways to create a scholarly career -- a kind of self-focused careerism (so common and so irritating among my colleagues in rhetoric) and a kind of generosity.

• In editing Rhetoric Review... http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hrhr20...
• In editing the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition...
•  By co-editing Living Rhetoric and Composition, which made narratives of the ways to build a career and a discipline visible to grad students everywhere...

Theresa Enos made her career by making our community and our discipline stronger.