Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle. Richard Leo Enos
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somehow knew that it did! Looking back now I see that I should have asked more basic questions and challenged more assumptions, although I am sure that my former professors will readily say that I did more than my share of “resisting” as a student. Perhaps a kinder and fairer answer would be for me to admit that these professors did not know the answer to such questions because we, as a profession, had not sought to find them out and supply them with such information. We had not directed our efforts at finding out answers as our founding fathers and mothers had done. Now that my beard is grayer and my hair is shorter and thinner, I see the constraints my former teachers had much more clearly, and I even see those Guru papers differently. I appreciate great scholars sharing the wisdom they acquired over a lifetime of research and teaching, the type of knowledge that is the consequence of talent, practice and experience over years. Yet, I also see that, as a profession, we fell short in giving our teachers the information they needed to enrich the knowledge of our discipline for our future students.
I still feel the need and importance of basic research that I first sensed as a graduate student is present. While my views about the worth of critical commentaries has modified, the concerns are still present, principally because there is a dark side to this brilliant coin. I am concerned because I see a genre emerging which is a variant of the sort of “Guru papers” that I once chided but now admire—particularly in the area of historical research—and I feel that it is a problem that affects the training and preparation of our students to do primary historical scholarship. Over the last decade I have seen basic research in the history of rhetoric replaced by critical posturing, speculative theory and meta-historiography. These enterprises, although varying from criticism to theory to method, all share a trait—interpretation—often without advancing basic knowledge. In short, these are “Guru papers” but not advanced as the consequence of a career of careful historical research or years of classroom experience. Rather, such statements stand in as replacements for (and become) the research itself.
At this point, I would like to nip some possible inferences in the bud. I am not against criticism; I am not opposed to advancing warranted interpretation; I am not opposed to self-reflection on our methods. These enterprises are valuable and deserve their place in our field. What I am concerned about is these enterprises operating independently from basic research and existing as ends in themselves. Our first and necessary obligation is to provide new information, new material evidence, new data. Then we can use the tools of criticism and interpretation to understand this evidence and, if needed, to develop new methods to refine our theories and analyses. When we understand this important perspective, the agenda for educating students to engage in historical scholarship will become clearer.
In the April 1977 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Barnett Baskerville wrote an important essay, “Must We All Be ‘Rhetorical Critics’?” The essay was important because it was itself a telling criticism about rhetorical criticism. Baskerville’s concern was that the interest in critical work was so fashionable that it lured students away from the more laborious work of historical scholarship. Quoting Donald C. Bryant, Baskerville asserted, “rhetorical criticism must depend almost entirely upon historical knowledge for its effectiveness” (112). In his own words, Baskerville concluded his argument by stating: “In our field, as in most fields, there is a need for scholars who can record accurately and artistically the history of our art as it relates to more general history, to delineate its place in and contributions to the cultural history of the nation” (116).
Baskerville expressed his concern in 1977, and I believe that his voice responds to a problem we have today. In the May 1995 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Speech, the editor, Robert L. Ivie, prefaced the issue with his introduction, “The Social Relevance of Rhetorical Scholarship” (138). Ivie expressed his concern over the current separation between rhetorical theory and social criticism. In much the same way that Baskerville argued for historical scholarship as a grounding for criticism, Ivie expressed his belief “that the language of rhetorical theory, which academic criticism subscribes to and attempts to refine, should prove of heuristic value to those who would engage in significant social criticism and that theory would benefit from its increased accountability as a social heuristic” (138). The point is clear in both arguments. Sensitive criticism—whether it concerns historical or contemporary issues—must be grounded in basic research. Understanding what we criticize is as essential as how we analyze. This point is particularly evident in historical studies. Our students are being trained in the history of rhetoric as critics at the expense of, and not complementary with, training in historiography. Certainly the problem I pose is not a new one. In the past century alone I can think of three such related situations. In the early decades of the twentieth century literary scholars expressed concern that literary history was being replaced by literary criticism. In the middle of that century Communication scholars expressed concern that the history and criticism of public address was becoming less history and exclusively criticism. Lastly, our present condition in the history of rhetoric is such that the actual chronicling of rhetoric’s history is being replaced by criticism content to comment upon and refine what has already been recorded rather than advancing any new historical information.
Baskerville’s concerns remind me of the voice of another even earlier scholar, the seventeenth century father of archaeology, Jacob Spön. Spön believed that the monopoly of classical philology as the sole route to understanding Antiquity unnecessarily constrained advancements toward understanding Ancient Greece. Spön believed that non-literary sources were also material evidence that should no longer be ignored. He recommended expanding the research domain of philology to areas such as archaeology and epigraphy. Spön also recommended that scholars arise from their arm chairs, actually go to Greece and engage in field work. He saw ancient remains as “books whose stone and marble pages have been written on with iron points and chisels” (Etienne 38). We too must expand our domain beyond the established canon of literary texts of rhetoric, for texts—including theoretical treatises—are only one form of material evidence. And that form, at best, is a transmitted one, corrupted necessarily by generations of well-intentioned scribes and the unsympathetic ravages of time.
The contributions made by the past century’s historians are remarkable, and they must be acknowledged, but there are concerns with the present direction. We have many critics who have not demonstrated the talents or skills that they see lacking in others. This type of posturing and orientation—often done in the classroom—indirectly encourages students to passively respond to research rather than to actively produce it. The quality of such responses, moreover, is often judged by how telling the criticism is; that is, the quality of a student’s performance is adjudicated by how well he or she can deconstruct the work of another rather than an orientation that encourages students to advance their own findings and make their own contributions.
A second concern about current work in the history of rhetoric is an over-emphasis in historiography as an abstract topic of discussion without the development of new, sensitive methods of historical research. In other words, a great deal of emphasis is spent not on the actual activity of doing history but abstract discussion about the notions and presuppositions about doing history. Certainly, both before and throughout the time that one engages in historical work serious concerns about method and analysis must always be asked. This process, however, is inextricably bound with the activity of research in the history of rhetoric; the epistemology of writing history is a process that is done during the act. Engaging in questions of historiography without eventually performing historical research, however, leaves historiography on the level of the speculative—work done that may possibly be effective but never performed. That determination of effectiveness, however, is only consequenced by actually writing history.
One manifestation of this trend in historiography is lap-top research that encourages students only to look at the exegesis of the text. Many would argue that “new criticism” or the analysis of the text as an entity unto itself is no longer practiced. Yet, much of our current work in the history of rhetoric is based on the idea of “close readings” of works, confusing this act with the philological labor of textual criticism or the painstaking scholarship required to provide a careful translation. Analysis as “close readings” that presuppose the text to be the only source of knowledge has attractions. The work is facile; one does not need to go across the world seeking evidence but only to slide one’s chair over to the book case and