Fleming, David. Rhetoric as a Course of Study. College English 61.

2 (1998):
169-191. http://www.jstor.org/stable/378878

RHETORIC

AS A COURSE

OF STUDY

David Fleming

appears in a growing number of journal articles, conference papers, scholarly

monographs, and graduateseminars;is used by scholars and researchersacross
the humanities and beyond; and, in the academy at least, has been transformed
once again "from a pejorativeto an honorific term" (Enos and Brown ix). Given the
status of the word at the beginning of the century, this is an astounding "turn"
indeed. An insufficiently examined feature of this revival,however, is its relative failure at the level of undergraduateeducation; as a coherent and attractive course of
study, "rhetoric"remains unrevived. This may seem an extraordinaryclaim given
that the word'srediscoveryhas been largely an academicphenomenon. But what the
intellectual scene presents us with today,I believe, is the simultaneousrise of rhetorical theory and continued decline of rhetorical education. My purpose in this paper
is to examine this situation furtherand to suggest ways in which it might be changed.
The word "rhetoric,"I claimed above, is now frequently,widely, and favorably
used; but what exactly does it mean? While no single definition is adequate to its
many uses, a certain shape is nonetheless discernible.First, contemporary"rhetoric"
typically denotes a type or dimension of human activity,that is, afirst-orderphenomenon present in the cultural environment and roughly coextensive with such words
as "language,""communication,"and "persuasion."A representativegloss for this
"rhetoric"might be "symbolic inducement," a phrase associated with the work of
Kenneth Burke (see, e.g., Rhetoric43); for Burke, every human "action" exhibits
"rhetoric"-exhibits, that is, symbol use "forpurposesof cooperation or competition"
David Fleming is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he
teaches writing, argument, and rhetorical theory in the undergraduatewriting program and the Composition and Rhetoric PhD program. He has published articles on the rhetoric of design in Text,Language and LearningAcrossthe Disciplines,ArgumentationandAdvocacy,and DesignIssues.He is currently at
work on a manuscript exploring the role of the city in rhetorical theory and education.

COLLEGE

ENGLISH,

VOLUME

61,

NUMBER

2,

NOVEMBER

1998

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169

Fleming, David. Rhetoric as a Course of Study. College English 61.2 (1998):

169-191. http://www.jstor.org/stable/378878

170

COLLEGE ENGLISH

("Rhetoric"296). Earlier definitions of "rhetoric,"by contrast, typically construed it

as a second-order
phenomenon: an art of, theory about, or schooling in language,
communication, or persuasion.But in contemporaryusage, the word appearsto have
acquired the status of anthropological fact. "Rhetoric"is now a "naturalsocial phenomenon" (McGee 38).
Of course, once rhetoric is so naturalized, and once we admit, with George
Kennedy, that "individualseverywhere seek to persuade others to take or refrain
from some action, or to hold or discard some belief" (Comparative3), the word's
range of application becomes virtually unlimited. Kennedy has gone so far as to
claim that rhetoric is "manifestin all animal life and existed long before the evolution of human beings" ("Hoot" 4). But universalizationoccurs even when the word
is confined to our species. "If,"Dilip ParameshwarGaonkar writes, "we allow ourselves a simple equation between rhetoric and persuasion, we will find a staggering
amount of rhetoric in our daily life" ("Idea"29).
Finally, contemporary "rhetoric"refers to something its producers can be expected routinely to deny.It has become a tool of critique, an unwelcome reminder
that reality,belief, and language are not lined up as unproblematicallyas people would
like (see De Man, Resistance15). So seen, "rhetoric"is a weapon in the postmodern
war against grammar,logic, and science; and the "rhetorician"is he or she who has
sworn allegiance to the non-serious side of a whole range of philosophical oppositions: inner/outer, reason/passion, necessary/contingent, things/words, fact/opinion,
neutral/partisan(Fish 205).
These features of the new "rhetoric"-its transformationinto a synonym for
persuasion, its subsequent universalization,and its deployment in "debunking"projects (Gaonkar,"Revival"69)-combine to give the word enormous range and power.
But they may also have served to separateit from its own history.It is perhapsunsurprising, then, that from quarterswhere rhetoric was not a recent discovery (notably
Departments of Speech Communication and Classics)there would come attempts to
restrainits globalization and dispersal.For example, against the current tendency to
see the theories and practices of the Older Sophists (e.g., Protagorasand Gorgias) as
"rhetoric,"Edward Schiappa contends that the word was probably coined by Plato
and that references to a sophistic "rhetoric"-in the sense of "a conceptualized, discrete verbal art with a body of identifiable teachings" (68)-are therefore suspect.
Rhetorike,Schiappa claims, was Plato's attempt to delimit precisely an art or skill of
the public speaker,a tekhneof the rbhtor(the Athenian citizen active in the law courts
and assembly). So seen, the word did not denote a broad philosophy of logos or
peitho;it referredto a "discipline"(40) narrowlyconcerned with political speech. Further, when Plato talked about "rhetoric,"he was thinking specifically of trainingin
the rhetor'sart, something he associatedat firstwith the school of Isocratesbut would
later include as a legitimate course of study in the Academy.
Eugene Garver also embeds "rhetoric"in the specific context of fourth-century
philosophizing about Athenian political discourse. In his interpretation, Aristotle's

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