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.