Rosa A. Eberly

Rhetoric and the Anti-Logos Doughball: Teaching Deliberating Bodies the Practices of Participatory Democracy

Epistemology-obsessed rhetorical theories divorce theory from practice, research from teaching. This article exposes rhetorical theory to the praxis of post-philosophy (or pre-philosophy) in the service of democratic paideia and suggests that rhetoricians consider revaluing undergraduate teaching and its relation to publics-minded rhetorical theory.

Public Making and Public Doing: Rhetoric's Productive and Practical Powers

Perhaps it is partly Professor Medhurst’s perennial optimism that has made him as prolific and resilient a scholar as he has become. Still, his revisionist history of the place of public address in communication studies and his eight recommendations for reconfiguring “disciplinary practice” in graduate study strike me as dangerously rose-colored. Why dangerous? In his refusal to read “the state of the art in public address” alongside its sobering disciplinary contexts, Medhurst risks the very oblivion for public discourse studies—and for public discourse itself—that he has worked so feverishly to prevent. In his address, Medhurst laments as “sad” and “obviously false” the conclusions of a book manuscript he reviewed on the history of communication studies. The manuscript, Medhurst argues, is “uninformed” because it sees Edwin Black’s critique of public address scholarship in Rhetorical Criticism as the end—not “end” as in telos but “end” as in ain’t no mo—of rhetorical criticism of public discourse. In addition to “set[ting] the record straight” in his talk, Medhurst would have done well to pause and reflect on why the vast majority of academics in communication studies seem to be similarly uninformed. Why have rhetoric generally and public address in particular fared so poorly— at least in terms of disciplinary legitimacy within communication studies—over the past two decades? That Medhurst chose not to address the reasons for the kinds of misinformation he finds in the “sad” manuscript prompts me to share a quotidian tidbit that always reminds me of the transvaluation of values in communication studies over the last twenty years: The dialup software for my old laptop computer has a riveting way of letting me know that I’ve gotten better than a 26,400-bps connection. At such breathtaking speeds, the software interface spells out the following sentence: “Communicating at an unknown rate.” This automatically generated claim reminds me that there are some questions numbers cannot answer, some topoi they cannot generate, some places they cannot go. “Communicating at an unknown rate” reminds me that numbers can produce only one value judgment: the more or the less. This puts my rhetorician’s knickers in a particularly painful 532 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Passing Rhetoric’s Kaleidoscope

In The Iconoclastic Imagination, Ned O’Gorman sets three architectonic topoi in motion, charting them across a “range of political, aesthetic, and theological histories” (xiv). O’Gorman gives image, catastrophe, and economy greater presence in different sections of the book, enabling microscopic and macroscopic views of his particular objects of study as well as his ambitious inquiry as a whole. In method as well as conclusions The Iconoclastic Imagination provides a dynamic interplay of rhetorical history, theory, and criticism that together provide an inspiring example of what rhetorical studies—and rhetorical education—fully realized can see, make, and do. In Part 2, for instance, what O’Gorman describes as “the heart of the book,” he “attend[s] not only to the explicit rhetoric of the texts ... but also to subjectivities of spectatorship and the aesthetic logics of the technologies of representation in and against which they are situated” (xv). An example of the kind of profound insight such a method can provide comes two pages into O’Gorman’s conclusion: In the context of Hayek’s and Friedman’s argument that nation-states police economic systems, O’Gorman observes,

What Does Rhetorical Theory Do? And Is That A Stupid Question?

As part of the continuing dialogue among rhetoricians about the current state of rhetorical theory, the 2002 National Communication Association preconference seminar series offered an opportunity for rhetoric scholars to consider the functions served by rhetorical theory. Thirteen scholars gathered with pre-conference seminar co-leaders Rosa Eberly and Gerard Hauser to consider “What Does Rhetorical Theory Do? And Is That a Stupid Question?” The seminar opened with framing comments from the co-leaders, followed by brief presentations from the four featured speakers. These were followed by small group sessions in which participants explored the themes developed in their position papers; revised versions of those papers follow this overview. In processes as well as conclusions, the seminar was collaborative; by all accounts that spirit made for an energetic and enjoyably agonistic day for everyone. The seminar call and its architectonic questions recognized that the THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 3.3 (July 2003): 311–347  2003 National Communication Association