Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Chautauqua: the reasons for failure?

It's perhaps difficult for many to understand the importance of public lectures and sermons in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We tend to think of lectures as "take or leave" in our day and age--something we might go to or should go to or occasionally as something we can't miss because the person is so well-known for their PRINT persona and ideas. But imagine a public lecture as EDIFICATION AND ENTERTAINMENT, as something you would want to go to, something you would travel many miles for in an open buggy in the cold or searing heat so you could hear someone speak for two hours or sometimes more. Think of certain speakers as celebrities--well known for their platform personas, their exciting ideas, their manner of fiery speaking. As we've been reading this week, oratorical culture in the 19th c. that was being transformed in specific cultural, social, and economic ways.

Now think of Chautauqua--the lecture and circuit series founded "on the shores of New Yorks' Lake Chautauqua in 1873" (211). According to Frederick J. Antczak and Edith Siemers (referred to heretofore as A & S), authors of "The Divergence of Purpose and Practice on the Chautauqua: Keith Vawter's Self-Defense," the series in the summer "drew thousands. . . to be part of educational programs addressed particularly to teachers" (211). Rev. John Heyl Vincent and Lewis Miller, the founders of the series, wanted to start a series in which well-known speakers and thinkers from the east would come to speak and educate those who would soon be teaching or were teaching those in the "West"--the teachers. The program was thought of as "an early form of [an] extension program in education" (211), a precursor to the Summer Institutes for teachers that we have now.

Notables such as the philosopher William James, Thomas Edison. U.S. senators, and others would hold forth on a variety of topics of interest and public value. Religious leaders also addressed spiritual and moral issues (211). So engaged were some of the participants that they would go back to their home communities and try to establish a Chautauqua-like series, which sparked the circuit series that Vawter became involved in. The Chautauqua circuit system arose in response to that need, which I will address later in this posting.

Now why 1870? Why did that time period give rise to such a series? The explanation offered in the article is the assessment by Gould that this was a time period of social unrest and economic change, a time in which people saw "the arrogance of the railroads and the trusts, a prolonged and severe economic depression, political corruption in city, state, and federal government, a 'stolen" Presidential election (Hayes-Tilden), and a wave of bitter strikes" (Gould qtd in Antczak and Siemers 212). Sounds pretty contemporary to me! The implication was that series helped people sort through vital and pressing issues of the day such as the "eight-hour day, the conservation of natural resources, pure food and drug legislation, city planning," etc ((212). While A and S spend a few pages extolling the successes of Chautauqua, their focus is on the demise of the program. I have to admit as a reader that I didn't want to hear about the decline of the series. I wanted to hear about it in its hey-day, and I wanted to hear about its circulation and effects throughout the 19th/early 20th century communities that it touched. But this is not the story the authors wish to tell. The story to tell is about its "ultimate failure" (213) and the role of Vawter in that failure.

Ironically, Vawter was responsible for Chautauqua's success as a circuit system even as he is hailed as the reason for its failure. Vawter's idea was to create a "circuit system" where towns in proximity with each other could maximize opportunities by booking a specific speaker into a regional area. The idea was to have "centralized control on the same schedule with the same 'talent'" (214). This system was to be a way to maximize efficiency. Speakers would move from town to town on a "tight booking" system. A system of quality control was applied where speakers moving from one town to another were "advised" about how to handle themselves given their performance at the previous town. This supposedly lead to the more fiery speakers being asked to "tone it down" so as not to offend the locals. The sentiment was that local organizing committees of the Chautauqua circuit began to lean toward "pap" rather than substance and that it began to get away from the civic motives that once guided it.

While there were good things about this system--reliable booking system, guarantee of a steady circuit--there were problems. Sometimes host towns came upon financial difficulties or bad weather or local organizing boards that didn't want specific topics or speakers. Vawter worked to make local organizing committees more responsible for ensuring a good turn-out and for being liable for the monies to pay the speakers once they agreed to a booking. Chautauqua became, more and more, a business enterprise, and local organizing committees began to want to promote only "crowd-pleasers" because they wanted to be able to sell tickets and not be left with having to pay-out to make up the difference. To illustrate the difference, A & S cite an example of a 1909 bill about lecturers vs.a 1925 bill that shows how Chautauqua's public function was taken over by "entertainment" interests: Tyrolean Alpine Singers and Yodelers for instance.

But as A & S put it, this is not a neat and tidy narrative. Vawter was "keenly aware of the decline" and felt torn between keeping the circuit going financially and keeping its public purpose alive. Vawter's papers reveal this struggle between "profitability" and a passion for civic virtue. The story of what happened to Chautauqua's circuit series is an interesting and unresolved one. A & S go on to suggest a number of interpretations of the archival materials and published accounts of what happened to the circuit program. The questions appear to be about the nature of the circuit's demise: Did it fail due to bureaucracy and commodification of speakers that Vawter encouraged in order to keep the series going? Did it fail because the "local committees" dumbed it down to the point where it lost its edge and social value? In other words, did it fail because local organizing committees "sold" out to entertainment over public edification? Did it fail because of oratorical culture losing its sway? Did it fail because the radio came along as an instrument of public entertainment and the automobile came along to transport people to far away towns and cities for amusements of other kinds like drinking illegal whiskey? This last question is mine, of course ;-). But the point here in the article is to be careful about how we interpret Vawter's involvement in the demise and to be aware of what we take on when we try to determine what happened to the Chautauqua series.

At any rate, the answers to these questions are not entirely clear, but what the Vawter-Chautauqua test case reveals is interesting for the examination of oratorical culture. As A & S put it, the example of Vawter asks us to think more about how "rhetorical values are in fact institutionalized and to examine what happenes to them. . . when they are" (224). I think this article raises interesting questions about institutionalized rhetoric as well as social histories. How are we to intepret the failure of a rhetorical enterprise? When something dies, why does it do so? Competing values, shifting interests, someone's big gaffe? The point A & S make is that we must "complicate our stories, stories of the tensions between the roles of the individual and the stories for the tensions betwen prinicples of cultural discrimination and the interests of institutions in their own material survival" (224).

Some of the discussion here made me think of Sinclair Lewis's novel _Main Street_, which offers a send-up of small town culture and its desire for entertainment and conservative forces moreso than challenges. But Lewis also treats small towns as complex enterprises as well.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Archives as Scenes of Collective Invention

“The Archive as a Scene of Invention” Rhetoric and Public Affairs

Biesecker maintains that whatever the archive is, it is, above all, “ a settled scene of our collective invention, of our collective invention of us and it” (124). I think that this is a fascinating statement. The archive, then, is a scene of “doubled invention” rather than one of “singular discovery” (124). Biesecker notes as well the crisis in historical knowledge and questioning and movement away from master narratives (Lyotard) that has been a part of her field—communication studies—and every other major field in the humanities or social sciences where “History” has been “histories.” Even with the questioning of the master narratives that have guided history, Biesecker reminds readers that there has been a turn back to the archives as a potential unmediated passage back to the past since it contains material artifacts. She cites a series of cautionary articles that remind readers of the problems entailed in a turn back to the archives—that all archives are a mere “trace” (Derrida) of the past and that when we are dealing with archives, we are dealing with the ghostly traces of the past-not the full past. The effect, then, of the first four pages of the article is to raise a whole series of questions about the indeterminacy of using archives as a point for gathering material artifacts from which to reconstruct histories.

After raising a whole series of questions about archives, Biesecker turns to the cancellation of the “Enola Gay” exhibit proposed for the National Air and Space Museum in the nineties. The Enola Gay was the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Museum’s exhibit was to omit mention of Japanese victims of the blasts, but instead was to narrate the historic flights as those that ended the war. The exhibit was poised to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the bombings. The controversy hinged over whether or not to include “bits of the archive”—photographic evidence of the effects of the blast on survivors on the ground. Another piece of the controversy rested on having only part of the B-29 present for the exhibit—“mutilated” as some veterans argued. Both sides of the controversy were debating how to include bits of the archive and what effects those “bits” would have on the viewing public. Would they view the Enola Gay differently? As an engine of death, which, of course, all bombers are. Or as an engine of freedom that ended the war and eliminated unnecessary suffering even as plenty of unnecessary suffering happened because of the bombings?

. But Biesecker’s point, though, is calling into question what both sides were questioning about the archival evidence causing viewers to question the U.S. decision to use the bomb against the Japanese. In contrast, the documentary film “Price for Peace” (aired 2002) narrated the costs of the blast told from the perspective of Japanese survivors as well as the story of the flight. The documentary was, interestingly, not objected to by veterans, was introduced by Tom Brokaw (author of The Greatest Generation). So the question was not really over the effects, but over what “bits” and what those bits would do, how they would used.

So Biesecker’s point is that we need to investigate the archive itself rather than ut the archival evidence. Her point is that the archive cannot authenticate, but it can authorize (130). So she argues we need rhetorical histories of the archive, “critical histories of the situated and strategic uses to which the archives have been put” (130).

I like this piece a lot, and I find I want to read more by Biesecker after reading it. I’d like to see Biesecker draw out further the implications of the Enola Gay controversy, but, of course, she can’t because this was a response essay in a special issue on archives for the journal.

I think it is interesting to think of writing critical rhetorical histories of archives and their situated and strategic uses. I think that is a important claim, especially in light of the ways in which specific archives have been used and reused to authorize our rhetorical and composition histories in the field—the Widener Library’s special collections at Harvard for instance. The use of that archive so frequently has guaranteed that many of the histories of the field are about east coast, elite colleges and universities and not about other places, spaces, and types of institutions—although many historians are now looking elsewhere.

I’d like to talk more about how archives are scenes of collective invention. What do we invent? For whom? And for what stakes? And what are the ways in which we create national identities and nationalisms from our archives?

Monday, September 17, 2007

Blogging from Fargo/book launch

Greetings from Fargo. I am at Bobb's Coffee house, a Taste of Seattle in Fargo, North Dakota, which is emblazoned with a Space Needle logo. As a former Seattleite, I was quite pleased to discover this Seattle-like coffee place NOTE: NOT STARBUCKS!. I was surprised, but pleased to find this place beckoning me as a drove a rental mini-van through the streets of Fargo (more on that later--they gave away all the sedans, and I'm stuck with a MINI-VAN). This coffee place does look a little like a Seattle coffee place--tin ceilings, wood floors, exposed brick. Anyway, I'm here waiting for my co-author Charlotte Hogg to fly in so we can join our other co-author Kim Donehower at the University of North Dakota. We are going to be give a lecture and sign books tomorrow. Our book _Rural Literacies_ (Southern Illinois UP) was released this summer, and this is our official book launch. I thought it was fitting that I could smell the cut wheat fields when I landed.

Anyway, I'll blog more tonight from Grand Forks, ND, and I'll write about Biesecker's article. If anyone from 751 is out there, think about this question: WHAT IS AN ARCHIVE? Biesecker offers some answers. It will be interesting to compare her answers with DeCerteau's.

More later! I'll check out everyone's blogs tonight.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

History as "Cemeteries within Cities"

Some questions to consider about history and historiography as we blog and get ready for class. I'll add more to this list.

--What do we make of Marx's claim that history is the history of class struggle?
--And in what ways do you see Marx's claims anchoring the future study of social histories? In what ways are we indebted to Marx, but also, in what ways, has the crisis in historical materialism shifted the emphasis in social histories?
--How might we tie Marx into DeCerteau's point on p. 58 that "all historiographical research is articulated over a socioeconomic, political, and cultural place of production" (58).

--I was interested in DeCerteau's point about the archive and information retrieval. I think he poses some interesting points about the archive as an institutionalized informatics of retrieval (the sciences of information). After reading DeCerteau, what statements are you formulating about the archive as an entity, a technology, a place?

Take a look at the passage on p. 87 of DeCerteau--the "cemeteries within cities":

"it [history] functions as an inverted image: it gives way to lack and yet hides it; it creates these naratives of th epast which are the equivalent of cemeteries within cities; it exorcises and confesses a presence of death amidst the living" (87). HIstoriography produces history and tells stories (87). How does writing, how does narrative shape history? Bringing in rhetoric and logic, DeCerteau addresses how history draws on syllogism and enthymeme (for explication).

There is a "French connection" at work here in the readings--Foucault and DeCerteau. Discuss the synergies and distinctions across these texts and account for the role of the French context on both.

I'd like to address geneaology as Foucault defines it in relation to historical discourse.

More on Nietzsche later. He requires his own blog post!

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Teaching Rhetorical Histories

“Rhetoric and Graduate Studies: Teaching in a Postmodern Age” Mountford and Reynolds _Rhetoric Review 15.1 (Fall 1996): 192-214.

I think Mountford and Reynolds make good points about how “rhetoric may be taught as a set of transdisciplinary theories of discourse that frame and inform the study of communicative practices as they vary and shift across multiple cultural sites” (193).

I’m particularly interested in the overview they provide of research on rhetorical education for graduate students. There is a focus on historical “sweeps” or surveys of the history of rhetoric. T.J. Miller is cited as wondering how revisionary rhetoric is accounted for in these surveys. Are these canonical surveys without revisionary content? Miller calls for scholars/teachers of the history of rhetoric to examine rhetorical history from a rhetorical perspective. I think that is very important—the rhetoricity of rhetorical history. It is clear from the overview that there are many questions to be considered about the way the history of rhetoric gets taught—“patterning rhetoric courses after traditional literature survey-courses and/or in service of composition may limit the study fo rhetoric and the potential of rhetoricality in ways that need no longer be reproduced” (200). Mountford and Reynolds present two alternative models that can be used in tandem.
1) dialogical; 2) transdisciplinary. The idea with dialogical is to pair/cluster readings across historical period to demonstrate similarities and differences—Aristotle and Burke, for instance. They argue that we need to “replace the study of history with historiography’’ a move that foregrounds theory and social practice” (201).

The transdisciplinary piece involves understanding how rhetorical study and rhetorical practice can extend and influence other arenas: law, public policy, etc. A rhetorical issue or practice can be traced across a number of domains. Mountford and Reynolds offer some really useful advice about how to create transdisciplinary clusters of pieces that illuminate new ways of studying and addressing rhetorics.

p. 209: I’d like to discuss the passage here that Mountford and Reyolds draw from Porter’s piece about creating boundaries around rhetoric and other fields. This tension is an interesting one—between making rhetoric the study of everything to rhetoric as a particular domain and discourse. What is the happy medium here? This is worth discussing, and it’s worth discussing in terms of our rhetoric curriculum of 731, 751, and 711, which are the required rhetoric track courses. One of the distinctions that I’d like to make is between the “rhetoric of,” which is rhetoric being used as a synonym for discourse or language, to rhetoric as an analytic, as a method, and a methodology. I think that the rub lies between these two uses of rhetoric.

Miller's piece is a good (earlier) companion with this one. I think both pieces constitute a hugely valuable resource. Every graduate student before going on the job market should read these pieces and plan a graduate course and an undergraduate upper-division course in the history of rhetoric that accounts for the different models presented here. Every faculty member should read these pieces before putting together a history of rhetoric survey and/or rhetorical theory course.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Social History as Imperative

Why study and write social histories of rhetoric?


I must begin at home--with my home community,which has had a hand in creating a social history.

As part of a multi-generation farm family in eastern Washington state, I grew up surrounded by the paraphernalia of former generations. My great grandfather Frank A. Schell's Model T truck sat below our family’s barn, its slatted sides long ago rotted away, its wheels sunk into the mud. Our family’s barn rose above the truck to a grand height, one of the largest barns left standing in the neighborhood, its drafty and dim exterior and multiple hay lofts called to mind its former occupants: the cows, horses, and goats of previous generations. In the late fall in the 1920s and 1930s, the barn served as an apple shed where my great grandfather, my grandfather, my grandmother, and hired men packed the fall's apple harvest into boxes before hauling them to the railroad depot to be taken to market. In the 1960s and 1970s, the barn became a storage shed for the old and the new. I wandered through it many afternoons, gazing up at the tall stack of homemade apple boxes that rose to the rafters. Stacks of old wooden ladders and new lightweight aluminum ones leaned against the hand-hewn beams. My great grandfather's tools hung on the walls of the hay loft: cross-cut blades, scythes, shingle making equipment, horseshoes, and saddles. Even the feed boxes for the animals were still intact. The barn, once a vital site of production, now housed the equipment, tools, and treasures of former generations, and my grandmother, the caretaker of the family museum, spent hours puttering in the barn’s dim interior arranging relics from the past.

Being constantly surrounded by the past made me, in some ways, obsessed with the past, with history, with the way things once were and the way things came to be. I spent hours talking to my grandmother about the past, listening to her stories, and later typing them for her as she wrote her memoirs in her late eighties (she is now 99 years old). It seemed to me that I didn’t have any choice but to be interested in social history—being part of a farm family guarantees your line in history. But there was more to it than being indebted to the past and the unbroken line of continuity that comes from tracing one’s past. It was a sense of responsibility and duty to acknowledge those how came before and those who got ignored along the way. For our farm once existed and co-existed originally with the Native people—the Wenatchis—who made their home in the Wenatchee Valley for centuries before the trappers. miners, traders, and farmer-settlers came.

My family’s farm stood at the mouth of Brender Canyon, the area the Sinpushquoisoh band of the Wenatchi Indians referred to as the Land of the Blackbirds. Every year the Sinpushquoisoh people traveled through the canyon past the eventual site of our family farm on their way to dig camas roots known as “itwah” or biscuit roots. I grew up hearing stories of how a Wenatchi woman known by her English name Molly traveled on her horse past our farm in June and July to dig her yearly supply of the camas root.. The camas roots were dug in a high mountain meadow in the Wenatchee Mountains known simply as the Camas Lands. The meadow, emblazoned with blue camas flowers, yielded a good harvest of the bulbous root.. The native people dug the roots with a paca, a digging stick made from hard wood or from an elk or deer antler, and they stowed the roots in woven bags around their waists. The high meadow also yielded the sukalusah, another type of camas root, which had white blossoms, and sukwim, or wild carrots . The itwah and sukalusah roots were versatile; the Wenatchis ate them raw or they boiled, baked, or dried them. The camas roots were also used to make a flour to bake cakes or bread. Nearby the Wenatchi also gathered “wild potato, wild onion, tiger lily, cattail, wild celery and pine nuts. Early ripening berries were gathered in June, this month being called Shyayuaenscht or “Service Berry Gathering Time.” (Scheuerman 30).
After gathering camas roots, Molly would stop at the farm on her way back, and my great grandmother Katie Belle Threeton Schell usually served her a meal. Typical of the hierarchical relations between the white settlers and the Indians, Molly ate her meal on the steps of the back porch while the Schell family ate inside.

This bit of social history is not one that most people in my home community of Cashmere, WA know or would even care to know. The Pioneer Village Museum in Cashmere, WA proudly features the history of white settlement in its replicas of log cabins, stores, a one-room schoolhouse, and other structures. The cultural property of the Native people of the region is present in the museum as well, but it is behind locked glass display cases. It is part of a private collection owned by a white resident Willis Carey who left his collection to the museum. Frequently Native people come to the museum and try to take their cultural property back—stone tools, arrowheads, and other items. This property was dug--actually robbed-- from their ancestor’s graves. The museum will not return it the families that come to claim it.

The Indian people in Cashmere are largely gone now—living on the Colville reservation to the north or scattered here and there. The US government never granted the Wenatchis the fishing reservation they were promised in the treaties they signed, and there was not a way to remain in the community without having access to the livelihood that came from unfettered access to the streams and lands that once sustained them.

So social histories matter because it is a history, often, of social injustice as well as the struggle to right social wrongs. Now one might say what is rhetorical about any of this? The rhetoric is in the telling or the construction of historical accounts and their persuasive nature. It is in the way that one version of history gets told—white settlement and white pride and white racism—and in the way another version—the Native people and cultural annhilation—gets completely elided or relegated to a portion of a museum as the “past,” not the future. How did it become persuasive for one story, one history to be acknowledged as the important one? What power relations, public policies, and cultural arguments allowed that to happen? This is where the social historian of rhetoric can step in to addresss the gap between “official” histories of progress and inevitability and address the ways in which such progress was at the expense of whole classes of people and/or the environment. The example I cite is one from my own community, but there are thousands more to address. This is what makes social histories of rhetoric such a powerful area of development for the field. More later!! I have more to say about Thomas Miller and others in relation to this idea of social history.

Monday, September 03, 2007

Octalog II

I enjoy the Octalogue entries (I & II) because they are mini-manifestos!
I’ll be progressively blogging over the next few days, but I wanted to comment in particular on Octalogue II, which sets an agenda, in many ways, for a course in historical study.

From Octalogue II:

“Serving Time in the Archives” “Where were the women? The people of color” (Ferreira-Buckley 26).


Ferreira-Buckley makes an excellent point about the nature of archival work: many of us do not receive training in the ways to conduct traditional research, and such research takes a lot of time and resources (travel to archives, time to sift through archival boxes, make sense of documents, etc). There is also the problem of language—knowing Hebrew, Greek, Latin well enough to read and translate texts. Ferreira Buckley worries that our obsession with theory and with its narrative structures will make for shallow or under researched histories. I find this an honest and reflective account. She raises many strong points about the nature of archival research: its material demands, in particular. But I want some thoughts from her about what it means to try to address, overcome, and/or compensate for these factors? What are ways that graduate schools should try to address these problems? With the speed-up productivity pressure around publication, how can academic departments and promotion and tenure committees factor in the time it takes to do traditional historical research?

“Storiography and Rhetoric and Composition”
Lauer writes critically of the ways in which our histories of the field are compromised by shallow methods of study.. She is particularly critical of how graduate students consume histories of the field: portraying historical figures as heroes or villains or as examples of particular theoretical categories. She makes a good point that there is a tendency to “fix” historical figures and scholars into a particular time and place instead of acknowledging how such figures/scholars grow and change over time, develop new ideas, take new directions. She opposes the static way in which some of us tend to read in the field: fixing a particular piece in time instead of trying to read it in context. What Lauer does not address are the ways in which the field itself helps perpetuate static readings through its writing of histories where hero/villain narratives are commonplace: e.g., Fred Newton Scott (hero) and Adams Sherman Hill (villain) in Berlin and Connors. I love Robin Varnum’s history of composition at Amherst College Fencing with Words because she avoids the binaries.

More later!