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  • Edwin Black: The Myth, the Man, and the Memory
  • Martin J. Medhurst (bio)

It was the fall of 1974, and I was a beginning MA student at Northern Illinois University. The course was "The Rhetoric of Social Protest," the instructor Richard L. Johannesen. That was the context in which I first heard the name Edwin Black. I was working on a term paper about the radical religious right and was required to read an essay titled "The Second Persona," which had appeared in Quarterly Journal of Speech three years earlier. The author was Edwin Black. I would soon learn that Black had written the book on rhetorical criticism and that if one aspired to be a critic, one had better embrace the critique of "neo-Aristotelianism" set forth in Black's book and build one's critical and theoretical apparatus from the inside out, using one's own creativity rather than some preformulated method to understand the rhetorical dynamics of a text. This was heady stuff. At the end of my first year of graduate study, I purchased a copy of Black's book from Professor Margaret Wood, who was retiring after many years of service to the profession. Black's little green book was not the sole influence on my decision to switch from media studies to rhetoric (much credit must go to Dick Johannesen), but it was far from inconsequential.

By the time I arrived at Penn State in 1976, I had read Black's book and as many of his articles as I could locate. The graduate director at my new PhD program was Richard B. Gregg, one of the finest rhetorical critics in the land. Anyone who spent much time around Dick Gregg quickly learned that he [End Page 476] had been a student of Edwin Black's at the University of Pittsburgh. To Gregg, Black was the epitome of critical excellence. He spoke of his mentor in terms that bordered on the reverential. My new advisor, Thomas W. Benson, also held Black in high regard. Benson had been an MA student at Cornell, working on his thesis under Herbert A. Wichelns, while Black was completing his dissertation in absentia under the same adviser. Even though their paths never crossed at Cornell, Benson looked on Black as a fellow Wichelnsian who was carrying on the Cornell tradition. And then there was that living embodiment of Cornell—Carroll Arnold. Arnold had been a member of Black's PhD committee. He spoke from time to time about his famous student. It was, in fact, from Carroll Arnold that I learned that Black had invented the term "neo-Aristotelianism" to describe the cookie-cutter approach then in vogue among speech critics. Though Arnold and I had several exchanges over the years about the Cornell tradition, he never spoke about the pivotal role he played in securing the approval of Black's dissertation, a story that Tom Benson tells for the first time in this issue.

When I left Penn State in 1979 to take my first full-time position at the University of California–Davis, I had not yet met Ed Black but felt almost as though I knew him, having read practically everything he had ever published. I soon learned that Black had just been at UC–Davis as a visiting professor in 1978, and that my new colleagues Mike Leff and G. P. Mohrmann had a high regard for him. Leff was working on the special issue on rhetorical criticism for the 1980 volume of the Western Journal of Speech Communication, and we spent a good deal of time talking about the essays, including Black's elegant "A Note on Theory and Practice in Rhetorical Criticism." A year later Leff was gone, snatched away by the University of Wisconsin and Edwin Black. Somewhere in this era, between 1981 and 1985, I met Edwin Black for the first time. Time has dimmed my memory of the specific place and time, but I do clearly recall my initial reactions. After only a few moments, it was clear that one was in the presence of a master rhetorician. And that voice—the unusual phrasings, the elongation of syllables, the voice...

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