Remembering Edwin Black

Our doctoral advisers teach us what it means to be scholars, teachers, and colleagues. Edwin Black's expectations of a critic were implied in the first graduate courses he offered at the University of Wisconsin: critics wrote illuminating criticism because their sensibilities not their methods permitted them to mine nonobvious insight from stubborn texts. At the same time, Black did not believe that most should aspire to be rhetorical critics. He said as much in his dissertation-turned-book: "Except in the hands of a very, very few men, the critical methodology that minimizes the personal responses, peculiar tastes, and singularities of the critic will be superior to the one that does not. In this regard, neo-Aristotelian criticism has undeniable value."¹ Since he provisionally and later patently rejected the notion that there was a method to rhetorical criticism, I focused on trying to figure out how to get into the category of "very, very few men" without a gender change and on determining how, absent the comfort of a method, one could acquire the sensibilities of a critic.

The lessons I took from his classes and publications are various. Our capacity as critics could be expanded if we read widely and well. Black's reading lists included: Plato, Aristotle, Marx, Freud, Richard Hofstadter, Perry Miller, T.S. Eliot, and Lionel Trilling. A critic's taste could be refined by exposure to great literature: Crime and Punishment, The Grapes of Wrath, Paradise Lost, The Symposium. We could learn to recognize and appreciate exemplary pieces of rhetoric and instances of criticism. Kenneth Burke had written "some of our subtlest psychological criticism."² Martin Maloney on Clarence Darrow was "an extraordinary study . . . sensitively conceived and written in a style that is exactly suited to its subject."³ Newman's Apologia was epiphanic.⁴ A critic was able to assess a work in part because she commanded such "touchstones of rhetorical excellence—Demosthenes, Cicero, Edmund Burke, for example—and [could] show the relative merit of discourse by comparing it to these touchstones."⁵ There are concepts in great works that invite reflection. Consider Wittgenstein's statement at the end of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."⁶ The lessons of that sentence changed as one turned it at different angles to the light.

Under it all was one identified skill: a good critic knew how to argue persuasively. There are occasional moments in Black's published work that resurrect flash-frozen memories from my time in graduate school. When he critiqued an assigned reading, he took no prisoners. It all came back to me as I read a footnote to the first chapter of Rhetorical Questions in which he annotated his argument that "We cannot postulate a choice without a chooser, and inasmuch as we talk of convictions as objects of decision and responsibility, then a social identity based on conviction implicitly assumes the prior existence of an individual will."⁷ Buried at the back of the book, the appended thought reads:

Without meaning to be defiant, I have to remind the reader who would dissent from this argument that such a dissent, in effect, absolves me of responsibility for being wrong. If people are not responsible for their convictions, then how can I be responsible for mine? And if I am responsible for mine, then there must be other people who are responsible for theirs. If no one is responsible for his or her belief, then why should any belief (including the present one) ever be objected to? Do people object to other "natural" phenomena? Has the reader objected to a storm or an earthquake? If so, to whom?⁸

A cascade of rhetorical questions designed to end argument: a Blackean signature move.

The author of Rhetorical Questions deployed questions for a different purpose when advising. In office hours, Ed shaped chapter after chapter of my dissertation simply by asking questions designed to provoke thought. Is it possible that you and the pope define natural law very differently, he wondered? What would prompt a pope to issue an encyclical rather than some other...