JENNIFER DEWINTER The University of Arizona A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism While conducting research for this article, I often came across this claim: Rhetorical criticism has traditionally been housed in speech communication departments.1 One look at the bibliography for this article seems only to validate this claim; almost all of the journals and books are written by and for speech communication scholars. And really, this comes as little surprise when we consider that the majority of the New Rhetoricians are communication theorists or that speech communication scholarship has been interested in analyzing specific communication situations. In all, the work of these scholars attempts to define the strategies employed, determine whether those strategies were effective to a specific rhetorical situation, and from that, articulate theories based on this careful observation about different approaches to rhetorical criticism. However, I remain uncomfortable with making the claim that rhetorical criticism grew up in speech communication, which to me implies that the field of rhetoric and composition does not have a history with rhetorical criticism. Yet many of the publications in our field give lie to that implied claim—Shirley Wilson Logan’s “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of NineteenthCentury Black Women, for example, conducts rhetorical criticism of the public discourses and speeches of nineteenth-century black women, while Ken McAllister’s Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture conducts an in-depth rhetorical analysis of computer games in an effort to articulate a rhetorical theory that can account for games as a rhetorical text. The reason that rhetorical criticism has historically “belonged” to speech communication may simply be the fact that speech communication scholars have attempted to define and theorize it as a legitimate disciplinary concern. The purpose of this bibliographic synthesis is to provide rhetoric and composition scholars with a broad understanding of the field so that we can begin to theorize the work we do with rhetorical criticism and think through the ways in which we can enrich our own scholarship. Due to page-length limitations, I am unable to provide a synthesis of all the different approaches to rhetorical criticism. I have chosen to limit my scope to definitions, general methodology, and objects of rhetorical criticism, which comprise the first three sections. The final section will summarize four textbooks on rhetorical criticism, all four of which provide excellent starting places for those 388 Rhetoric Review, Vol. 25, No. 4, 388–407 Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 389 interested in the approaches of rhetorical criticism. And finally, the symposium in this issue of Rhetoric Review provides useful materials for those interested in working with rhetorical criticism. Definitions and Purposes of Rhetorical Criticism Defining rhetorical criticism is akin to defining rhetoric; everyone seems to have a slightly different version, and that difference is both necessary and significant. Probably the most important book in contemporary rhetorical theory has been Edwin Black’s 1965 Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. In this book Black attempts to open the spaces of rhetoric, which were previously dominated by Neo-Aristotelian rhetorical criticism as spearheaded by Wicheln in 1925. Wicheln defined rhetorical criticism as “necessarily analytic,” including, as Aristotle does, careful attention to speaker, audience, style, and habit, while adding to that a need to study both the oral and the written text. He then argues “[. . .] throughout such a study one must conceive of the public man as influencing the men of his own times by the power of his discourse” (39). In his book Black analyzes different texts with a neo-Aristotelian lens, thereby exposing the limitations of this rhetorical theory. Neo-Aristotelian criticism, Black concludes, “[. . .] is founded upon a restricted view of human behavior, that there are discourses which function in ways not dreamed of in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and that there are discourses not designed for rational judges, but for men as they are” (131). And it is this book that is often cited as ringing the death knell of neoAristotelian criticism. Black’s work, in many ways, opened the field of rhetorical criticism, and in response to this opening, the Wingspread Conference (1970) invited twelve scholars to present position papers on the prospects of rhetoric in the second half of the twentieth century. These papers and responses to them were collected into an edited book titled The Prospect of Rhetoric, and in these pages we see a turn from neo-Aristotelian to rhetorical theories that take into account communicative technologies, the necessary widening of scope in both theory and practice, a clarified theory of reason as it relates to rhetoric, the restoration of rational invention, and cultural and historical specificity in rhetorical situations (238–39). From this moment the definitions of rhetorical criticism diversify—still recognizably rhetorical criticism but now trying to account for complex understandings of knowledge creation, social and historical situatedness, purposes, and so on. Rhetorical criticism is, in its most umbrella-like form, simply criticism that attends to rhetoric. For Charles Stewart it is “the study of man’s past attempts to change the behavior of fellow man primarily through verbal sym- 390 Rhetoric Review bols” (1). Further, in “Words Like Most Things,” Leff and Sachs define rhetorical criticism (and the critic’s role) as the following: “Working from the evidence within the text, the critic proceeds to make inferences about what the work is designed to do, how it is designed to do it, and how well that design functions to structure and transmit meanings within the realm of public experience” while framing that discourse within its context (256). And, as Black tells us, “[r]hetoric is an architectonic art, ‘an art of structuring all principles and products of knowing, doing, and making’—meaning that it is everywhere, that it saturates human activity,” which means that rhetorical criticism analyzes all human activity (Prospect 23). Brummett, like Black, argues in Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture that rhetoric infuses all culture (including popular culture), but he works to demarcate the different types of rhetoric to make them more accessible for analysis. The three levels Brummett identifies are exigent, quotidian, and conditional, with exigent operating on the surface in an obvious way, conditional working at the level of ideology, and quotidian functioning at a level between the two extremes. The danger of rhetorical criticism, notes McGee, is that when the emphasis is on “criticism,” making rhetoric subordinate to that term, one of two things can happen: “From one angle, emphasis on ‘criticism’ dissolves rhetoric into philosophy. [. . .] From another angle, the emphasis on ‘criticism’ dissolves rhetoric into literary theory” (“Text” 275–76). McGee is interested in keeping the orality and performativity of rhetoric alive during the process of rhetorical criticism: “Rhetoric is artful, but it is artful as a performance, not as an artifact. When rhetoric dissolves into literary criticism, the performative skills of the rhetorician are devalued, buried in literature’s deep association with religion and the sacred text” (276). Therefore, the rhetorical critic needs to attend to the historical and cultural situation within which rhetoric is performed, for as Herzberg argues in “Foucault’s Rhetorical Theory,” “Foucault makes it clear that the notion of argument and persuasion must be contextualized within discursive formations supported by systems of authority and control. Context itself has been a key term in the development of critical rhetoric” or rhetorical criticism for that matter (78). Finally, rhetorical criticism must do something; what it is that rhetoric must do, however, is equally as vague. For Wayne Brockriede, “useful criticism, whatever else it may be, must function as an argument” (165), which will invite response or confrontation and “may begin or continue a process enhancing an understanding of a rhetorical experience or of rhetoric. [. . .] The product of the process of confrontation by argument and counterargument is a more dependable understanding of rhetorical experience and of rhetoric” (174). Thus rhetorical criticism as argument can posit readings of texts to add to our understanding of how speeches work by building on previous speeches and means of persua- A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 391 sion (such as Leff and Mohrmann’s seminal article “Lincoln at Cooper Station”). It can work to understand components of rhetoric and how they work in conjunction with or against one another (such as genre theory and rhetorical criticism). It can be used to expose inequality and oppression (such as rhetorical critics who use feminist, Native American, queer, and other lenses). Rhetorical Criticism Methodologies In his book Rhetorical Questions, Black places rhetorical criticism against New Criticism, deconstructionism, and semanticism, making the claim that the basic methodology of rhetorical criticism leans toward comparative judgment and generic understandings. As a result of this, he continues, “[t]he rhetorical critic is free to view discourse historically, comparatively, generically, or isolatedly” (9). Still, this methodological position is driven by conceptual orientation, which James Jasinski takes exception to in “The Status of Theory and Method in Rhetorical Criticism”: Methodologically driven criticism generally proceeds through a process of deduction: a general method is applied to a specific case or object. What I want to refer to as conceptually oriented criticism, however, proceeds more through a process of abduction which might be thought of as a back and forth tacking movement between text and the concept or concepts that are being investigated simultaneously. (256) Jasinski attributes both Browne and Leff for introducing conceptually critical methodologies and then proceeds to trace other scholars who have engaged with rhetorical criticism using this model in order to begin to provide a “thick” account of rhetorical concepts and situations. Of course, other theorists have presented theories that attempt to break out of the strict structures of methodologically driven criticism. In Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault explores signs, logoi, and discourses, claiming that there appears to be a general sense of “logophobia” to which Foucault responds: If we wish—I will not say to efface this fear—but to analyze it in its conditions, its activity and its effects, I believe we must resolve ourselves to accept three decisions which our current thinking rather tends to resist, and which belong to the three groups of function I have just mentioned: to question our will to truth; to restore to dis- 392 Rhetoric Review course its character as an event; to abolish the sovereignty of the signifier. (229) Rhetoric, for Foucault, must be contextualized within discursive formations, and those formations are always situated within history and culture. While Foucault is not a rhetorical criticism scholar, many scholars in both rhetoric and composition and speech communication have employed his theories on the discursive practices of knowledge within historiographies. Also, because Foucault is not a rhetorical critic, an unquestioned adoption of his ideas into the field of rhetoric is challenged, and rightly so. Carole Blair, for example, argues that equating rhetoric with symbolicity leads to disciplinary oblivion: “Symbolicity diverts us from rhetoric’s fundamental capacity to do things, rather than simply mean something” (32). And it is this concern for rhetorical criticism (and rhetoric) to mean something that lies at the heart of the etic/emic approach debate. As Campbell writes in his introduction to the 1990 Western Journal of Speech Communication’s2 special issue on rhetorical criticism: “Whatever a critic’s programmatic orientation, the basic questions of how to negotiate the tension between a general model and a particular local instance of rhetorical action remain contested” (250). In the etic approach, the critic is concerned with generalized statements about rhetoric that are derived from well-defined methodological procedures (much like the statement that I quoted by Black at the beginning of this section). The emic approach, on the other hand, is completely situated within one rhetorical situation as it is contextualized in culture and history; thus the observations or patterns described can only be valid in relation to that one particular setting and cannot be described by a generalized theory that is imposed on a particular rhetorical situation. In “Interpretation and the Art of the Rhetorical Critic,” Leff warns that the role of the emic critic is a more demanding one: Emic interpretation stresses the role of the critic, and in doing so, it shifts the standards of rigor from the method of investigation to the person of the investigator. The standards imposed on emic critics are severe. They must have a thorough knowledge gained not primarily through the study of theory but through intensive analysis of specific critical studies. And they must also have a detailed, intimate, and sympathetic understanding of the subject under investigation. (349) This position is quite different from the role of the etic critic, who “presupposes that what is known in rhetoric is embodied in rhetorical theory and that what is not known—in the case of criticism, the interpretation of a particular rhetorical A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 393 transaction—is to be apprehended only through what is known” (Black, “A Note” 332). Black concludes that regardless of the critic’s positioning, the critic is still an actor/actress who must navigate the requirements of new ideas or the textures of alien experiences (“A Note” 336). The etic/emic approaches are not the only entrance into rhetorical criticism. W. Barnett Pearce’s chapter in Speech Communication in the 20th Century traces scientific research methods, noting the move toward method-driven innovations that employed the t- and F-texts, ANOVA, and a number of other statistical lenses, as well as a move toward a metatheory for communication, both invigorating the field by sparking intense debates. Herman Cohen, in “Development of Research in Speech Communication: A Historical Perspective,” also discusses the debates surrounding the positivist paradigm, but to this, he records the movement toward social science methodologies. While Cohen limits interest in the social science era to the 50s and 60s (the book in which this article appears, Speech Communication in the 20th Century, was published in 1985), Hart’s 1994 article continues to argue for a social scientific methodology, but one that is combined with humanist assumptions. In his article Hart is replying to Darsey’s criticism that “Hart [. . .] seems to require that every study suggest its own generalizability, adumbrate its own mosaic” (176). To this, Hart responds simply that precise is good and social science is not necessarily barbarous. The Western Journal of Communication’s summer 1990 special issue on rhetorical criticism complicates and opens up the possibilities of methodologies in rhetorical criticism. This issue, in many ways, explores how postmodernism combined with rhetorical theory challenges and influences the ways in which we must consider the texts of rhetorical criticism. The editors invited McGee and Leff and Sachs to write two position papers and then invited a series of responses from other rhetorical critics, such as Gaonkar, Cox, Condit, Campbell, Baxter and Goldsmith, Tailor, and Troester and Mester. In “Words the Most Like Things: Iconicity and the Rhetorical Text,” Leff and Sachs criticize the form/content dichotomy, arguing that neo-Aristotelian criticism attempts to reveal the logical structure of an argument, which will then enable the rhetorical critic to expose the underlying form. Leff and Sachs offer iconicity as a means of revealing “a cooperative interaction between form and meaning” (260), which will provide the rhetorical critic the available theoretical tools to engage a text without falling into the neo-Aristotelian trap. Their article then reads Edmund Burke’s Bristol speech in order to show that content and style are inseparable: “Form and meaning are imbricated at every level—the sentence, the paragraph, and the discourse as a whole, and all the elements of Burke’s rhetoric interact cooperatively to produce a structure of meaning” (268–69). Condit critiques Leff and Sachs, not for addressing the form/context dichotomy, but for addressing 394 Rhetoric Review that at the expense of the text/context dichotomy. By focusing on only canonical texts and the sentence-level stylistics of those texts, argues Condit, Leff and Sachs “tend to redesolve themselves into the form/content split on the other side, exploring and appreciating style over content” (339). Further, seeking only discourse that is praiseworthy impoverishes rhetoric by ignoring the text and context of the rhetorical situation. Gaonkar, on the other hand, responds to Leff and Sachs’ text in quite a different manner, noting that Leff and Sachs, through privileging the disciplined act of reading, recovers the object of rhetoric by rejecting, in many ways, the postmodern destruction of that same object. McGee’s article “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture” takes a wholly (or fragmentary) different approach to reading rhetorical texts, focusing instead on text and context within a postmodern culture: My way of stating the case (using the concept “fragment” to collapse “context” into “text”) emphasizes an important truth about discourse: Discourse ceases to be what it is whenever parts of it are taken “out of context.” Failing to account for “context,” or reducing “context” to one or two of its parts, means quite simply that one is no longer dealing with discourse as it appears in the world. (283) In order to keep discourse in context, McGee argues for analyzing the structural relationships between apparently finished discourse and its sources, culture, and influences (280). Additionally, text and context cannot be fully comprehended without appreciating the role of the audience/consumers: “The only way to ‘say it all’ in our fractured culture is to provide readers/audiences with dense, truncated fragments which cue them to produce a finished discourse in their minds. In short, text construction is now something done more by the consumers than by the producers of discourse” (McGee 288). McGee is not alone in arguing that the fragmentation of texts necessarily changes how we must approach rhetorical criticism. In “Bitzer’s Model Reconstructed,” a revisionist look at Lloyd Bitzer’s seminal article “The Rhetorical Situation,” Smith and Lybarger argue that texts, audiences, and exigencies are all fragmented, and multiple exigencies exist for every rhetorical situation, necessitating multiple and fragmented audiences (205). In response to McGee’s article, Celeste Condit thinks through McGee’s argument about the powerful role of the audience when reading postmodern text fragments. She questions McGee’s statement that text construction is now synonymous with decoding or reading a text, eventually concluding that they are not the same thing. “Moreover,” continues Condit, A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 395 it is not even clear how frequently audiences exercise their creative capacities. I am dismayed at my students’ whole-hearted attempt to live themselves unreflexively into the text of a Michelob Light commercial. I doubt that “text construction is not something done more by the consumers than by the producers of discourse.” (340) Like Condit, J. Robert Cox is left with some very real concerns about McGee’s claims. Cox questions the apparent eroding of rhetorical sources, which would lead to an equal eroding of rhetoric (322). In this article Cox theorizes fragmented or unfinished texts and wonders if a text can ever be whole and if so, how. He concludes with this changing definition of what rhetorical critics are becoming in postmodernity: [. . . T]he fragmentation of a culture’s mediating function requires a departure from critics’ usual academic practice. Critics of rhetoric in post-modern culture may be forced by circumstances to become social critics. At a minimum, such critics may be called upon not only to identify those conditions that are logically and socially prior to a discursively competent public, but also to identify what systematically distorts the possibility of such publics. (327) The question then becomes: How does a theorist fulfill both prior conditions and public distortions? One possibility and a methodology that is gaining support in rhetorical criticism is through longitudinal studies. Historically, rhetorical criticism has focused on a close reading of an isolated text or a specific rhetorical situation. For example, the 1970 textbook Speech Criticism by Lester Thonssen, A. Craig Baird, and Waldo W. Braden dictates that in order to conduct effective rhetorical criticism, the critic must first establish the authenticity of texts, reconstruct the social settings, and then have a full understanding of the speaker and his/her background, all outlined in Part IV: Preliminary Aspects of Rhetorical Criticism. Following this, the critic analyzes the actual rhetorical moment or text. Campbell challenges this traditional methodology, arguing that we cannot truly understand the rhetorical nature of texts—whether they were successfully persuasive—unless we engage in a longitudinal case study. No longer is it enough to just look at the historical and social setting; we must also look to rhetoric’s long-lasting effects: [A] close textual analysis could proceed very much in the manner of current close textual studies, but be enriched by the longitudinal per- 396 Rhetoric Review spective in at least two significant ways. First, a close reading informed by a longitudinal perspective would attend not only to the text’s immediate situated context, but to how the text’s seemingly given context was not the creation of yesterday or of local forces only, but of a tradition of interpretation. Second, a close reading informed by the longitudinal perspective would seek to honor equally the art of the speaker and the interpretive traditions of the audience or audiences. Such a reading would place a lessened emphasis on the need for the critic to provide a single magisterial reading of the invitation of the text and—while honoring the art of the rhetor—would also honor the audience by attending to the insurgent polysemy of the text and to how the speaker, despite himself or herself, invites alternative readings by different interpretive communities. (369) Campbell presents Darwin’s writings as an example of how rhetoric continues to enter public arenas and continues to be persuasive long after its historical “moment.” While Campbell’s longitudinal study implores critics to look to long lasting future effects, Bruner argues for a longitudinal study that looks toward a complicated past, arguing that critics “must analyze a wide range of antiquarian histories, including histories provided by defenders of dominant narrative accounts” (290) in order to “identify the dominant strategies of remembrance, as well as the chronological historical absences required of those articulations” (296). Likewise, Leah Ceccarelli also argues for a longitudinal study of texts and response texts, arguing that this approach would enable rhetorical critics to analyze rhetoric as polysemic—each text has multiple meanings that exist outside of the hegemonic control of the original author. This approach, according to Ceccarelli, offers greater hermeneutic depth: [I]t is possible to reconstruct the interpretations of at least some audiences. By engaging a close analysis of both the primary text and the texts that are produced in response to it, the critic can recognize both polysemic potential and the actualization of that potential by audiences. In so doing, we can learn a great deal about the power of audiences to subvert the rhetor’s intent, as well as the power of rhetors to manipulate conflicting groups into harmonious adjustment. (407) Regardless of the methodology, it is important to keep in mind that rhetorical criticism should serve a purpose, whether that purpose adds to knowledge in such a way that others can engage with that knowledge creation or theorizes and A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 397 humanizes rhetoric as performance. Further, the critic, argues Nichols, also has a job: “He must serve his society and himself by revealing and evaluating the public speaker’s interpretation of the world around him and the peculiar means of expressing that interpretation to his generation” (78). This is a gigantic undertaking as the objects of rhetorical criticism are many, and it is sometimes difficult to decide what to look at and how to look at it. The following sections will attempt to define the objects of rhetorical criticism. Defining the Texts of Rhetorical Criticism What we choose to rhetorically critique is as important as how we choose to do it. The history of rhetorical criticism is filled with analysis of great men speaking well. For example, A History and Criticism of American Public Address, volumes 1–3, are filled with careful analysis and critique of great US orators. As Marie Hochmuth argues in her introduction to volume three of this series, “when speeches are being evaluated the speaker is of paramount importance” (9), and this emphasis on speaker structures this series. After five chapters in volume one that define historical periods of public address in the US, each subsequent chapter offers a careful rhetorical critique of specific orators, from Henry Grady and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Criticism, edited by Thomas W. Benson, is similarly structured. In this collection Benson collected a series of previously published articles and book chapters that masterfully examine canonical rhetorical figures such as Lincoln and Hitler. Each chapter presents a careful analysis of the rhetorical effectiveness of specific orators/rhetors, and by carefully analyzing specific speech situations, the authors identify emerging forms of rhetoric that are suited for specific rhetorical situations. This emphasis on major rhetoricians, while important, can sometimes lead to the silencing of other rhetorical traditions or other ways of reading the same situations. For example, Marouf Hasian, Jr. in “Silences and Articulations in Modern Rhetorical Criticism” points out that judicial rhetoric is not always limited to lawmakers. To illustrate his point, Hasian analyzes the Homer Plessy incident in Louisiana in order to expose “[. . .] the multiple theoretical ways that subalterns have contributed to our jurisprudential norms. [. . . M]any ordinary citizens performed their own versions of what it meant to live in a democratic society, and it would only be later that court opinions came up with rationalizations that legitimized these activities” (298). Like Hasian, Jamieson recognizes the power of the subaltern as a powerful but often ignored rhetor. In “The Cunning Rhetor, the Complicitous Audience, the Conned Censor, and the Critic,” she looks at different instances in history in which allegory and the encoded 398 Rhetoric Review encounter enable rhetors to speak to audiences who understand the veiled critique of society in such a way that social censors could not punish those participating in the rhetorical act. However, Jamieson does recognize that this form of rhetoric poses unique problems for the critic: “As time obscures the deciphering cues and the complicitous audience dies away, the ready ability to study the phenomenon erodes” (77). Even with this added complication, the field of rhetorical criticism benefits for analysis of both canonical texts and those texts that do not enter the list of great speeches. This is exactly the position of rhetorical scholars who work with gender, class, race, sexuality, and formations of cultural power. More often than not, the canonized speeches are constructed by those in power, which leaves disempowered groups silent or absent. Rhetorical critics are analyzing how the rhetorics of certain groups are entering the arena of public discourse, adapting traditional forms of rhetoric for their own purposes or creating new arenas for discourse. For example, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. analyzes the ways in which African-American rhetoric plays with Signifyin(g) as an African-American trope: “When one text Signifies upon another text, by tropological revision or repetition and difference, the double-voiced utterance allows us to chart discrete formal relationships in Afro-American literary history. Signifyin(g), then, is a metaphor for textual revision” (1223). While Gates is arguing for a hybridized and even an appropriated definition of signifying, Scott Lyons argues for a hybridized rhetorical tradition for peoples of Native American descent: And so a mixed-blood rhetoric of tradition is at play in the fields of our Lord and Trickster, eagles and vultures, wild rice, and Pepsi. Rather than producing winners and losers, and resisting a retreat into rhetorics of separation and essentialism, this oral mixed-blood rhetoric provides space and time to collectively forge new ethnic strategies and seek traditional (re)visions. (130) Feminist scholarship, too, attempts to understand how women are using rhetoric and how they act within previously determined rhetorical systems. In their analysis of women who have survived different forms of sexual assault, Alcoff and Gray note that the growing number of public forums provide women a chance to speak: The feminist movement has helped to reduce the effectiveness of silencing techniques by creating forums where survivors can speak— in magazines, newsletters, journals, support groups, and demonstrations. As a result, the dominant discourse has shifted its emphasis A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 399 from strategies of silencing to the development of strategies of recuperation. (268) Alcoff and Gray acknowledge some of the possible dangers of the confessional, but more to the point is the fact that women’s experiences and their articulation of those experiences are equally valid texts for rhetorical criticism. Whether broadly defined (book, speech, movie, song, and so on) or defined as specific generic classifications (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, fantasy, romance, and so on), genre remains another method of approaching texts to be analyzed. Bawarshi defines genre as a means of recognizing and acting within certain rhetorical situations, literary and nonliterary. In “Antecedent Genre as Rhetorical Constraint,” Jamieson posits this complexity: “Antecedent genres are capable of imposing powerful constraints. The demonstrable existence of these constraints mandates the question. How free is the rhetor’s choice from among the available means of persuasion?” (414). Genre, it would seem, determines (or overdetermines) specific rhetorical situations. Bawarshi argues in “The Genre Function” that genre enriches our understanding of the rhetorical situation in it allows “us to study the social and the rhetorical as they work on one another, reinforcing and reproducing one another and the social activities, the roles, and the relations that take place within them. This recursive process is what genre is” (357). Indeed, genre itself is a social construct in much the same way as Bitzer’s rhetorical situation. Additionally, as Carolyn Miller argues in “Genre as Social Action,” how we classify rhetorics into genres exposes something that is theoretically important about discourse: 1. Genre refers to a conventional category of discourse based in large-scale typification of rhetorical action; as action, it acquires meaning from situation and from the social context in which that situation arose. 2. As meaningful action, genre is interpretable by means of rules; genre rules occur at a relatively high level on a hierarchy of rules for symbolic interaction. 3. Genre is distinct from form: form is the more general term used at all levels of the hierarchy. Genre is a form at one particular level that is a fusion of lower-level forms and characteristic substance. 4. Genre serves as the substance of forms at higher levels; as recurrent patterns of language use, genres help constitute the substance of our cultural life. 5. A genre is a rhetorical means for mediating private intentions and social exigence; it motivates by connecting the private with the public, the singular with the recurrent. (163) 400 Rhetoric Review While genre acts as a classificatory system, texts do not necessarily fit nicely into predefined “types” of genres. In fact, rhetoric as a dynamic and performative act necessarily creates hybrids out of previously defined genres. In “Rhetorical Hybrids: Fusions of Generic Elements,” Jamieson and Campbell analyze inaugural and papal speeches, noting that the rhetorical choices that speakers often make fused together preexisting genres in a process of constant borrowing and innovation. They warn against the tendency toward minimizing idiosyncrasies in order to magnify generic commonalities: “The notion of the hybrid enjoins the critic to focus both on the recurrent and the variable, the commonalities and the idiosyncrasies, and to understand the extent to which they are compatible or incompatible” (156). In many ways this is the same argument that Howell is making in Poetics, Rhetoric, and Logic; Howell argues that the trend to think of poetry as something outside of communication ignores the fact that “it does actually convey to readers a something that they did not have before” (217). Poetics merges with rhetoric and logic to become a hybridized rhetorical genre. In fact, maybe hybridized is the wrong word to use, as Howell argues that the three have always been together, and it is simply the history of genre that has arbitrarily separated poetics from rhetoric and logic. In the same way, novels have been relegated to a place outside of rhetorical consideration, which Zahava McKeon attempts to resolve in Novels and Arguments. McKeon’s argument is brilliant in its simplicity: The history of the novel is the history of social rhetoric. She critiques a history of belles lettres, arguing “[t]wentieth-century criticism has focused on the text as a unique object to be addressed in itself regardless of context, which includes author and audience” (230). Novels, like poetics, are legitimized as a different hybrid between what we have traditionally thought of as literature and what we have traditionally thought of as rhetoric. Rhetorical Criticism Textbooks I come at last to the textbooks themselves—the easily accessible gateway into rhetorical criticism. I have included only four undergraduate textbooks for review: The Practice of Rhetorical Criticism by James R. Andrews, Rhetorical Criticism: Explorations and Practice by Sonja K. Foss, The Art of Rhetorical Criticism, edited by Jim A. Kuypers, and Communication Criticism: Approaches and Genres by Karyn Charles Rybacki and Donald Jay Rybacki. This is not to say that rhetorical criticism textbooks are limited to these four books. Winifred Horner’s The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric, Thomas W. Benson’s Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Criticism, and Carl R. Burgehardt’s Readings in Rhetorical Criticism are excellent collections of the A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 401 history and past scholarship in the field. I made my selections based on textbooks in popular use at both undergraduate and graduate levels. The Practice of Rhetorical Criticism The Practice of Rhetorical Criticism (1983) by James R. Andrews is an early example of a textbook written with undergraduates in mind. The self-proclaimed purpose of the book is as follows: “This book is designed to orient the beginning student to the nature and function of rhetorical criticism, to acquaint the student with those elements in the rhetorical situation that warrant serious attention, and to teach the student a useful strategy with which to begin to practice criticism” (viii). The reason that we engage in rhetorical criticism, according to Andrews, is not because we live in a soup of rhetoric and participate as subjects daily (this reason is noticeably missing in his accounting of why we would do rhetorical criticism); rather, it is because “[p]ersuasion invites response, and the nature to the response to any given message can vary widely” (4). Criticism of historical and cultural contexts, furthermore, can also help to illuminate contemporary events as they occur (10). For Andrews the texts to study are those that are canonical examples from public discourse, such as presidential speeches and political statements. The textbook itself is broken into three parts: Part I: An Introduction to the Practice of Rhetorical Criticism, Part II: A Case Study in Criticism, and Part III: Critical Examples. Part I defines the nature of criticism and defines the roles of the context and audience, speaker, and text in separate chapters. A large emphasis is placed on the ethos of the speaker in delivering the message to an audience through the text. A tremendous amount of responsibility is placed on the critic: “The critic as artist must delve deeply into the components of the communication act, understanding the basic processes of inception, construction, presentation, and reception of rhetorical messages; only then may the critic’s findings be communicated to others in a clear, reasoned, and insightful manner” (66). In Part II Andrews provides a case study of Nixon’s 1969 address to the nation to show students how to be a responsible critic. First, Andrews includes the text to be analyzed, followed by a brief background sketch that describes the historical and cultural situation in which the text first appeared. Once this foundation is set, Andrews walks through the components of the argument, discusses the consequences, and then briefly sketches responses to this speech. The following six inclusions in this section of the book are all rhetorical critiques of this same speech by different scholars. In the final part of the book, Andrews reprints landmark essays in rhetorical criticism as samples for students to read and discuss. Overall, this is a multifaceted textbook that gives a broad overview of the field, 402 Rhetoric Review takes the student step-by-step through the process, and then exposes the student to a variety of texts and approaches. Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice, Third Edition Sonja K. Foss’ Rhetorical Criticism (2004) remains one of the more popular textbooks on rhetorical criticism. Intended for undergraduates, this book invites us to engage with the symbol-saturated world in which we live. Rhetoric, according to Foss, is created by humans using symbols for the purposes of communication (4), and as such, rhetorical criticism is interested in the interplay between those three variables. The process of actually doing rhetorical criticism, for Foss, is the process of generating a research question by studying artifacts while simultaneously considering the four basic components of a rhetorical situation—rhetor, audience, situation, and message (14–15). The purpose of engaging in rhetorical criticism, argues Foss, is to contribute to rhetorical theory (a fairly intimidating proposition). This contribution can be made in one of two ways: “identifying new concepts or new relationships among concepts” (19). The first two chapters, then, address the how and why of rhetorical criticism. Following this, Foss dedicates each chapter to a different approach: neo-Aristotelian, cluster criticism, fantasy-theme criticism, feminist criticism, generic criticism, ideological criticism, metaphor criticism, narrative criticism, pentadic criticism, and generative criticism. Except for the chapter on generative criticism, all of the chapters are broken up into procedures, the process of selecting an artifact, analyzing that artifact, formulating a research question, and then writing a critical essay. Each chapter also includes three to four sample essays in which critics have engaged in this process, thereby showing the student what a rhetorical criticism paper looks like. Then, at the end of each of these chapters, Foss includes a list of references where students can look up other sample essays that employ the defined approaches. The only chapter that does not follow this schema is the one on generative criticism. Generative criticism, according to Foss, is the type of criticism that we engage in when a previously defined rhetorical approach does not satisfactorily explain an artifact. This form of criticism is arguably the most difficult as it asks the critic to sort through the codes and brainstorm possible alternative readings before generating a research question. From this the critic will have to create a new conceptual frame and then read the text. Again, Foss provides sample essays to show what this looks like as well as offering a list of additional samples that could not be included in the book. A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 403 The Art of Rhetorical Criticism Jim A. Kuypers’ The Art of Rhetorical Criticism (2005) operates on the premise that rhetoric is still a viable subject today regardless of claims about how diversity and pluralism have destroyed the consensus-building nature of rhetoric, thereby marking rhetoric as obsolete (10). Kuypers breaks the critical act into three stages: the conceptual stage in which the critic thinks about and generates ideas about a text or artifact, the communication stage in which the critic is writing the criticism out with an audience in mind (thereby making this stage quasi-public), and finally, the countercommunication stage in which the critic shares her work with others and generates debate and feedback. The textbook itself has fifteen chapters: (1) What is Rhetoric?, (2) The Art of Criticism, (3) On Objectivity and Politics in Criticism, (4) The Situational Perspective, (5) The “Traditional” Perspective, (6) Generic Rhetorical Criticism, (7) Criticism as Metaphor, (8) The Narrative Perspective, (9) Kenneth Burke’s Dramatist Form Criticism, (10) Framing Analysis, (11) Fantasy-Theme Analysis, (12) The Mythic Perspective, (13) Feminist Analysis, (14) Ideographic Criticism, and (15) Critical Rhetoric and Continual Critique. Each chapter is written by a prominent scholar in the field to a general undergraduate audience. The authors all carefully explain the purposes of each approach, breaking down the components, showing how to “read” parts of texts, and then explaining what it is that he did in a tell-show-tell fashion. At every level the lesson is explained and then reinforced. Included for analysis are contemporary texts from the public sphere, such as political speeches, popular movies, and comedy DVDs. Each chapter ends with personal commentary on the essays read, an exploration of the potentials and pitfalls of each approach, and a list of citations of relevant sources. The Art of Rhetorical Criticism gives an excellent overview of some of the primary approaches to rhetorical criticism. Additionally, by choosing popular and contemporary texts, students and instructors can engage with the rhetorical culture in which we live. Communication Criticism: Approaches and Genres, Second Edition Karyn Rybacki and Donald Rybacki’s Communication Criticism (2002), also a textbook for undergraduates, identifies six critical approaches—traditional, dramatism, symbolic convergence and fantasy theme, narrative, postmodern, and feminist—and a chapter is dedicated to each of these approaches. In addition the authors identify six genres that need careful attention—public speaking, humor, large rhetorical texts, films, television, and music. As such, the book is filled with 404 Rhetoric Review references to NASCAR, political cartoons, baseball, South Park, and many other popular texts. The purpose of this book is to help students move from a position of informal communication critics, which is just a matter of “stating what appeals to us and what does not, what messages we accept and reject in these daily encounters,” to a position of communication critics, “whose role it is to help make sense out of the use of symbols” (2). And we see this emphasis on symbolism in Rybacki and Rybacki’s definition of rhetoric: “[R]hetoric is the art of using symbols as a means of communicating with others” (3). Rybacki and Rybacki carefully walk through the purpose of rhetorical criticism, which is a form of rhetoric within itself: It is a means of taking a stance and communicating symbol-making and using to an audience (11). Thus the first two chapters, “The Purpose of Criticism” and “The Process of Criticism,” carefully describe the students’ roles as rhetorical critics who must make a rhetorical argument to an audience. Following this framing, the authors dedicate the next six chapters to the approaches mentioned above in which multiple strategies are offered for each approach. Finally, in chapters nine and ten, “The Rhetoric of Public Speaking, Humor and Large Texts” and “The Rhetoric of Film, Television and Song,” the authors move from a focus on approaches to a consideration of different genres and media. Like The Art of Rhetorical Criticism, Communication Criticism offers the scope of each approach, notes limitations, and offers additional reading. The visual layout makes this book easy to navigate and use. Conclusion The 1970 Wingspread Conference is often cited as a moment when the prospects of rhetorical criticism expanded, enabling the speech communication field to become innovative and expansive. The 1996 RSA conference accomplished a similar end for the field of rhetoric and composition. Mountford, in summarizing the proceedings of this conference, identified four new directions that rhetoric and composition scholars appear to be taking: analysis of cultural histories, comparative rhetorics, rhetorics as hermeneutics, and new vistas into new cultural arenas for rhetoric (8–10). It seems that in many ways the fields of speech communication and rhetoric and composition are concerned with very similar objectives; the next step appears to be talking to one another. It would behoove the field of rhetoric and composition to put rhetorical criticism (as theorized in speech communication departments) into conversation with our work in rhetorical analysis. In fact, we can even reach a little more by looking at what linguistics is doing with critical discourse analysis. If rhetoric is truly interdisciplinary, then we need to start talking with the other disciplines that are doing similar and equally exciting work. A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 405 Notes 1I would like to extend a special thanks to Richard Enos for all of his recommendations, kind feedback, and support; I do believe that he has read everything in rhetorical criticism. Also, I would like to thank Roxanne Mountford for providing me a starting place by sharing her materials from her rhetorical criticism class. Finally, I would like thank Theresa Enos and Jason Thompson for their feedback and help through this process. 2This is the second special issue on rhetorical criticism that the Western Journal of Speech Communication did. The first was the 1980 issue, which took up Black’s charge in Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method to open up the field of rhetorical criticism by exploring other methodologies and approaches. 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Stewart, Charles J. “Historical Survey: Rhetorical Criticism in Twentieth Century America.” Explorations in Rhetorical Criticism. Ed. G. P. Mohrmann, Charles J. Stewart, and Donovan J. Ochs. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1973. 1–31. Taylor, Bryan C. “Reminiscences of Los Alamos: Narrative, Critical Theory, and the Organizational Subject.” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54.3 (Summer 1990): 395–419. Thonssen, Lester, A. Craig Baird, and Waldo W. Braden. Speech Criticism. New York: Ronald Press, 1970. Troester, Rod, and Cathy Sargent Mester. “Peace Communication: A Survey of Current Attitudes, Curricular Practice and Research Priorities.” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54.3 (Summer 1990): 420–28. Jennifer deWinter is a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona, where she studies Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English. Her research includes histories of rhetoric with an emphasis on Japanese rhetoric, feminist postcolonial studies, and interactive technologies and media. She works closely with the Learning Games Initiative, a computer games research consortium based at the University of Arizona.