Blogora Classic: A 20th Century Theory Canon, November 05, 2004

November 05, 2004

A 20th Century Theory Canon

I'm doing my book orders for spring. I'm teaching a seminar on 20th century rhetorical theory. As usual, I can't decide whether to go for depth or breadth. The last time I taught it I used an extended case study of the Salem witchcraft trials as a basis for applying/comparing different theories, and then divided the course into what I consider to be the 3 main trajectories of 20th century rhetorical theory: argument (Perelman, Toulmin), dramatism (Burke), and power/knowledge (Foucault). That seemed to work all right, although it left out what I personally find to be the richest recent work: rhetoric of science (Gross), politics (Hariman's Political Style), law (James Boyd White), and economics (Deirdre McCloskey).

So I thought I'd pose a desert-island question for the readers of Blogora. If you had to list the 10 most important works in rhetorical theory of the 20th century, what would they be?

My list:

Kenneth Burke, A Grammar and Rhetoric of Motives
Richard Weaver, Visions of Order and The Ethics of Rhetoric
Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert Hariman, Political Style
Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture
James Crosswhite, The Rhetoric of Reason
Deirdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics
James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meanings
Alan Gross, The Rhetoric of Science

(I will add that I am not including the work of theorists who have been important for theorizing rhetoric, e.g. Foucault or Althusser, who simply did not write with any awareness of the rhetorical problematic.)

Posted by jim at November 5, 2004 09:53 PM

I'm not sure what my exact list would be....but my first reaction, jim, is: where are the women and the queers and the thinkers of color...and embarrassed etc? Let's spice it up a bit! I'll start--but it's just a start:

Imho, Avital Ronell's "Support Our Tropes" is one of the most important rhetorical theory texts of the last few decades--it analyzes the first Bush presidency and the rhetoric of the gulf war by exposing and explicating what she calls the rhetorical unconscious.

I'd also add Judith Butler's _Excitable Speech_ to the list, inasmuch as it extends and critiques and applies certain aspects of speech act theory.

Both of these theorists are also rhetoricians, accutely aware of "the rhetorical problematic" and critically engaged with pressing social issues.

Posted by: ddd at November 7, 2004 06:33 AM

This is very helpful. I'm not trying to start any canon wars, please remember, but simply trying to figure out, given the limited attention-space of a seminar, what resources give students the best starting point.

Posted by: Jim at November 7, 2004 06:47 PM

Flusser: We may yet succeed in changing our culture before it changes us.

"We are frustrated by our culture, whether we participate [rather, have the opportunity to attempt to participate] in elite culture.  The frustration of the elite is due to its growing feeling of isolation...  We cannot 'realise' ourselves in such a situation, unless we become specialists, which means no longer fully human.  Of course, our situation may come to transform us into something no longer human...

"We may yet succeed in changing our culture before it changes us."  -- Vilem Flusser

Flusser: Our cultural system has become far simpler, and it works incomparably better. Thus, it has become more impoverished

"Our cultural system has become far simpler, and it works incomparably better.  Thus, it has become more impoverished."  -- Vilem Flusser

Flusser: The Western universal level became thus truly 'universal,' although in a tyrannical sense of the term

"The Western cultural system is the result of the revolution caused by the invention of printing, which disrupted Catholicism's cultural system, with relatively little feedback from other contemporary systems, although of course some Eastern and African elements did penetrate the West.  But the West's discursive dynamism, especially as far as scientific models are concerned, was responsible, in its later stages, for what is called 'Western Imperialism.'  During the nineteenth century, the Western cultural system dominated the Earth and disrupted all other cultural systems, without being itself very much informed by them.  The Western universal level became thus truly 'universal,' although in a tyrannical sense of the term, and at the same time the popular level of Western Civilization became slowly disrupted[...] and degraded into folklore." -- Vilem Flusser

Flusser: We must become, all of us, 'systems analysts,' rather than trying to become second-rate computers..

"We must become, all of us, 'systems analysts,' rather than trying to become second-rate computers..."

"we must learn structures:  empty, formal disciplines, like logics, mathematics, computer languages; theories like the theory of information, decision-making, and cybernetics.  In sum, we must abandon the model 'what to know,' and shift to the model 'how to know.'" -- Vilem Flusser

Flusser: [T]here is still hope for those who believe that humans may recognize themselves in others

"If present tendencies continue, we shall all be inserted, very shortly, into a cosmic circus of demagogic broadcast, 'panem et circenses' [...] But there is still hope for those who believe that humans may recognize themselves in others."  -- Vilem Flusser

Flusser: "Those who pay for technology have no interest to provoke responsible, namely political, answers to the messages that the established power broadcasts

"Those who pay for technology have no interest to provoke responsible, namely political, answers to the messages that the established power broadcasts."  -- Vilem Flusser

Flusser: There is no technological reason why our dialogic systems should not be as technically advanced as our discursive systems

"There is no technological reason why our dialogic systems should not be as technically advanced as our discursive systems."  -- Vilem Flusser, nearly fifty years ago

Flusser: Symbolic communication is what gives us the illusion of dignity in the world

"[C]ommunication is not really subject to the second principle of thermodynamics, because since it is not real, it is not really natural;  it is artificial; it goes against nature, though not really.  Symbolic communication is what gives us the illusion of dignity in the world."  -- Vilem Flusser

Flusser: [W]hat is clear and distinct about humans is their surface, and that the deeper we delve into them, the more complicated they get

"We no longer believe that humans are complicated on the surface but reasonably 'clear and distinct' i essence.  Today, we tend to believe, on the contrary, that what is clear and distinct about humans is their surface, and that the deeper we delve into them, the more complicated they get."  -- Vilem Flusser

Flusser: Unwittingly, the specialists have become servants to the establishment that manipulates society by manipulating ever more efficiently the obvious and not so obvious communication media.

"The more objects we accumulate, the lonelier we are, because they fence us in.  On the other hand, however, any object whatsoever may become a means to reach the other person:  a medium for communication.  The walls of prison cells are meant to be, and are in fact, objects that isolate those who find themselves between them.  But if one taps a codified message against them they become the communication medium of prisons... The other side of that dialectic is that objects meant to be media may obstruct communication.  The TV set stands as an obstacle between family members.  Thus, the field of research in which communicologists work, should include all objects.  In fact, however, the specialists' interests have so far been focused only upon objects that are meant to be media, those who own them, and those who manipulate them:  TV, the press, posters and so forth.  Unwittingly, the specialists have become servants to the establishment that manipulates society by manipulating ever more efficiently the obvious and not so obvious communication media."  -- Vilem Flusser

Flusser: Communication is the process that liberates us from the flux of time by making us ever more competent for decisions against time

"Communication is the process that liberates us from the flux of time by making us ever more competent for decisions against time." --Vilem Flusser

Communication and information are the inverse of each other

"Communication and information are the inverse of each other:  the better one communicates the less one informs, and the more one informs the more difficult it is to communicate. 

"The strategy for communication is to find an optimum:  a maximum of information, within a minimum of redundancy necessary for communication."  --Vilem Flusser 

Flusser: Society is a net that connects memories of different structures.

"[The rings in the trunks of] trees are one type of memory structure, libraries are another type, and what is called 'the mind' is yet another.  Society is a net that connects memories of different structures." -- Vilem Flusser

Vilem Flusser on Mortality and Comunication

"I believe that this is the true motive of our commitment to communication:  to become immortal within others -- because it is a fact that we know we shall die, and yet we cannot, and indeed must not, accept such knowledge.  Our rebellion against death [which is our rebellion against the human condition] has always taken, is taking, and will probably always take the form, the incredibly surprising form, of human communication."-- Vilem Flusser

Elizabeth Parks on Listening

Flusser on Communication

"We are committed to communication despite what may be called our 'nature' as mortals and despite what may be called the 'nature' of communication. Our commitment to communication is antinatural in several senses of the term, because communication is society, and society is not natural to the human animal. Communication is that situation which causes neuroses and psychoses, and it is antinatural because communication is culture, and culture is anti-nature, since it changes nature and fights against it. Communication is antinatural, because it is history, and history is a negation of natural determination, since it is a quest for freedom. But most of all, our commitment to communication is antinatural because the process of communication is opposed in its very tendency to the process of nature. Nature as a whole is a process that tends toward entropy, towards progressive loss of information and ever-greater chaos. Human communication as a whole tends toward the progressive increase of information, towards increasingly complex organization." --Vilem Flusser

Other Sources of Maria Sanford's Income, from the Minnesota Historical Society

Quotations Celebrating Maria Sanford, the First Professor of Rhetoric in Minnesota

More Recommendations for Maria Sanford, the first woman professor in Minnesota [and a professor of Rhetoric]

Lonergan on Making Knowledge [Dialectic]

The Scissors-Like Nature of Inquiry 
from Ronald McKinney in The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review

In Insight, Lonergan refers to dialectic as both a" method" 1 and a "pure form with general implications." By "method," S.J. Lonergan in Insight is referring to a " set of directives that serve to guide a process towards a result."

The relationship between a " method " and a " pure form " is first established in Lonergan 's dissertation. Gratia Operans:" Here, Lonergan speaks of the " pincer " movement of inquiry: the going from both the general to the particular and from the particular to the general. The first movement, which is what Lonergan means by a " pure form ", is an a priori scheme which guides the " methodical " assembling of the particulars constituting the second movement .

In Insight, Lonergan generally substitutes the term" heuristic structure " for " pure form " and replaces the terminology of the two " pincer " movements with the "scissors " terminology of " upper and lower blades." According to Lonergan, every inquiry operates in a scissors-like manner. There is an upper blade, i.e., heuristic structure, and a corresponding lower blade of concrete techniques, i.e., a method. The heuristic structure of an inquiry provides an a priori, general outline which anticipates the nature of the phenomenon under scrutiny. It is the framework of background knowledge within which the inquirer is able to formulate the relevant questions that need answering. Hence, there exists a heuristic structure whenever an object of inquiry admits antecedent determinations of a general nature. It is the task of the lower blade of techniques to fill in the specifics of this general outline, to answer the questions raised by a heuristic structure.

Maria Sanford's Complex Streams of Income

Frank Lentricchia on Marxism and the Subject

Frank Lentricchia on Marxism and the Subject...

“Marxism has a way of jarring the subject out of its historical orbit.” [Ariel and the Police 23]

Jane Gallop: "There is a certain pederasty implicit in pedagogy."

Reading Jane Gallop, thinking through Ronell, reflecting on graduate education, mentorship...
Jane Gallop, The Father's Seduction:

“There is a certain pederasty implicit in pedagogy. A greater man penetrates a lesser man with his knowledge.  The homosexuality means that both are measurable by the same standards, by which measure one is greater than the other...  These structures necessarily exclude women, but are unquestioned because sublimated-raised from suspect homosexuality to secure homology, to the sexually indifferent logos, science, logic” (1984: 63).

"Irigaray impertinently asks a few questions, as if the student, the women, the reader were not merely a lack waiting to be filled with Freud's knowledge, but a real interlocutor, a second view point.  And in her questions a certain desire comes through, not a desire for a 'simple answer,' but for an encounter, a hetero-sexual dialogue.  Not in the customary way we think heterosexual -- the dream of symmetry, two opposite sexes complementing each other.  In that dream the woman/student reader ends up functioning as mirror, giving back a coherent, framed representation to the appropriately masculine subject..." (1984: 66).

"In the transcribed seminar, Irigaray says: 'What I desire and what I am waiting for, is what men will do and say if if their sexuality gets loose from the empire of phallocratism'" (1984: 66).

Michael Warner: Uncritical Reading

"Uncritical Reading" by Michael Warner

Students who come to my literature classes, I find, read in all the ways they aren’t supposed to. They identify with characters. They fall in love with authors. They mime what they take to be authorized sentiment. They stock themselves with material for showing off, or for performing class membership. They shop around among taste-publics, venturing into social worlds of fanhood and geekdom. They warm with pride over the national heritage. They thrill at the exotic and take reassurance in the familiar. They condemn as boring what they don’t already recognize. They look for representations that will remediate stigma by giving them “positive self-images.” They cultivate reverence and piety. They try to anticipate what the teacher wants, and sometimes to one-up the other students. They grope for the clichés that they are sure the text comes down to. Their attention wanders; they skim; they skip around. They mark pages with pink and yellow highlighters. They get caught up in suspense. They laugh; they cry. They get aroused (and stay quiet about it in class). They lose themselves in books, distracting themselves from everything else, especially homework like the reading I assign.

Frank Lentricchia on the Poem vs. the Corpus in analysis

Frank Lentricchia on the Poem vs. the Corpus in analysis...

“To move, as I just have, from the single poem as closed, isolate, verbal system, a world unto itself, to the poem as microcosmic fragment of a poetic corpus, is to move, in a sense, not at all: for the corpus so conceived, as a synchronic whole, is likewise closed and isolate.” [Ariel and the Police 15]

Frank Lentricchia on the Poet as a unit of analysis...

Frank Lentricchia on the Poet as a unit of analysis...

“To invoke an agent called "the poet" as creator of a corpus is to invoke a subject who always contained and expressed it all, so that those temporal distinctions of career ("early," "middle," and "late") are truly gratuitous— they make no difference. Not even "career," in this interpretive context, makes much sense since the term suggests a determinate act of will to shape a life, to set an ordered narrative in motion and thereby bring your life into control [into art] by making it a story.  “The poet" so invoked as an originator is a necessary fiction (we have to invoke an individual at some point), yet at some other level he must be real [“Wallace Stevens” after all is the name is the name of a person who was born, went to Harvard, liked his mother better than his father, married, worked for an insurance company and loved it, often took vacations in Florida alone, listened to the Saturday afternoon broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera House, did not did not get a divorce, made a lot of money, died of cancer, and maybe converted on his deathbed if you want to believe the nuns who attended him at the end, which I do.” [Ariel and the Police 15-16].

Maria Sanford on "Fight Films"

Other Sources of Income for the First Woman (Rhetoric) Professor in Minnesota: Gold Mining

Maria Sanford Invests in Rubber

Maria Sanford on Gold Mining

Maria Sanford in the Papers

Maria Sanford in Brainerd

Margaret Atwood on Caravaggio

"No wonder St. Matthew looks so apprehensive in Caravaggio's painting of him, clutching his pen while a rather thuggish angel dictates to him what he must write down: the act of writing comes weighted with a burden of anxieties. The written word is so much like evidence - like something that can be used against you later" 

Maria Sanford and University Extension

Maria Sanford invests in Grapefruit

Margaret Atwood on the Identity of the Writer when not Writing...

Margaret Atwood on the Identity of the Writer when not Writing...

“What is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of ‘the writer’? The particular writer. By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward, and that other, more shadowy and altogether equivocal person who shares the same body and who, when no one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing.”

Margaret Atwood on the Cultural Role of the Writer, from Negotiating with the Dead

Margaret Atwood on the Cultural Role of the Writer, from Negotiating with the Dead

“As for writing, most people secretly believe they themselves have a book in them, which they would write if they could only find the time. And there’s some truth to this notion. A lot of people do have a book in them – that is, they have had an experience that other people might want to read about. But that is not the same as ‘being a writer.’  

"Or, to put it in a more sinister way: everyone can dig a hole in a cemetery, but not everyone is a grave-digger. The latter takes a good deal more stamina and persistence. It is also, because of the nature of the activity, a deeply symbolic role. As a grave-digger, you are not just a person who excavates. You carry upon your shoulders the weight of other people’s projections, of their fears and fantasies and anxieties and superstitions.”

On The Moment Atwood Became A Writer, from Negotiating With the Dead: a Writer on Writing

On The Moment Atwood Became A Writer, from Negotiating With the Dead: a Writer on Writing

“Nobody talked about writing as a process or a profession – something real people actually did. Given such conditions, how is it that I became a writer? … It simply happened, suddenly, in 1956, while I was crossing the football field on the way home from school. I wrote a poem in my head and then I wrote it down, and after that writing was the only thing I wanted to do. I didn’t know that this poem of mine wasn’t at all good, and if I had known, I probably wouldn’t have cared. It wasn’t the result but the experience that had hooked me: it was the electricity. My transition from not being a writer to being one was instantaneous, like the change from docile bank clerk to fanged monster in ‘B’ movies.”

Margaret Atwood on Meeting Writers...

Atwood on Meeting Writers...

There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board pinched from a magazine — "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté."

Sabbatical reading... Shelley & Goodloe is well-done.

Margaret Atwood on a self-identity for the writer that combines responsibility with integrity

 Margaret Atwood on a self-identity for the writer that combines responsibility with integrity...

What to do? Where to turn? How to proceed? Is there a self-identity for the writer that combines responsibility with artistic integrity? If there is, what might it be? Ask the age we live in, and it might reply—the witness. And, if possible, the eyewitness.”

What does it feel like to write? Margaret Atwood, from Negotiating with the Dead

What does it feel like to write?  Margaret Atwood, from Negotiating with the Dead 

“Obstruction, obscurity, emptiness, disorientation, twilight, blackout, often combined with a struggle or path or journey – an inability to see one’s way forward, but a feeling that there was a way forward, and that the act of going forward would eventually bring about the conditions for vision – these were the common elements in many descriptions of the process of writing.”

Why do people write? Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead

Why do people write?  Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead

 ‘To record the world as it is. To set down the past before it is all forgotten. To excavate the past because it has been forgotten. To satisfy my desire for revenge. Because I knew I had to keep writing or else I would die. Because to write is to take risks, and it is only by taking risks that we know we are alive. To produce order out of chaos. To delight and instruct (not often found after the early twentieth century, or not in that form). To please myself. To express myself. To express myself beautifully. To create a perfect work of art. To reward the virtuous and punish the guilty; or—the Marquis de Sade defense, used by ironists—vice versa. To hold a mirror up to Nature. To hold a mirror up to the reader. To paint a portrait of society and its ills. To express the unexpressed life of the masses. To name the hitherto unnamed. To defend the human spirit, and human integrity and honor. To thumb my nose at Death. To make money so my children could have shoes. To make money so that I could sneer at those who formerly sneered at me. To show the bastards. Because to create is human. Because to create is Godlike. Because I hated the idea of having a job. To say a new word. To make a new thing. To create a national consciousness, or a national conscience. To justify my failures in school. To justify my own view of myself and my life, because I couldn’t be “a writer” unless I actually did some writing. To make myself more interesting than I actually was. To attract the love of a beautiful woman. To attract the love of any woman at all. To attract the love of a beautiful man. To rectify the imperfections of my miserable childhood. To thwart my parents. To spin a fascinating tale. To amuse and please the reader. To amuse and please myself. To pass the time, even though it would have passed anyway. Graphomania. Compulsive loggorrhea. Because I was driven to it by some force outside my control. Because I was possessed. Because an angel dictated to me. Because I fell into the embrace of the Muse. Because I fell pregnant by the Muse and needed to give birth to a book (an interesting piece of cross-dressing indulged by male writers of the seventeenth century). Because I had books instead of children (several twentieth century women). To serve Art. To serve the Collective Unconscious. To serve History. To justify the ways of God toward man. To act out antisocial behaviour for which I would have been punished in real life. To master a craft. To subvert the establishment. To demonstrate that whatever is, is right. To experiment with new forms of perception. To create a recreational boudoir so the reader could go into it and have fun (translated from a Czech newspaper). Because the story took hold of me and wouldn’t let me go (the Ancient Marnier defense). To search for understanding. To cope with my depression. For my children. To make a name that would survive death. To defend a minority group. To speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. To expose appalling wrongs or atrocities. To record the times through which I have lived. To bear witness to horrifying events that I have survived. To speak for the dead. To celebrate life in all its complexity. To praise the universe. To allow for the possibility of hope and redemption. To give back something of what has been given to me.’

Rhetorical Theory is Problem-Solving:" R. L. Scott on Defining a Problem

Rhetorical Theory is Problem-Solving:"  R. L. Scott on Defining a Problem

Wichelns on "Thoughtless Choice" in College Life

Inaugural Members of the Kenneth Burke Society

Inaugural Members of the Kenneth Burke Society

Minutes of the First Meeting of the KB Society

Minutes of the First Meeting of the KB Society

KB to the TLS...

KB to the TLS...

Kenneth Burke on Austin, in Centrum (Published by the University of Minnesota) -- with a stellar TOC

Kenneth Burke on Austin, in Centrum (Published by the University of Minnesota) -- with a stellar TOC

KB on Lucky Accidents...

KB on Lucky Accidents...