Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition (review)

Steven Mailloux’s Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition makes a significant contribution to the vibrant, ongoing debate among rhetoric scholars about rhetorical paths in English and communication studies. Two events in spring 2000 launched the most recent round of this debate. The first was Mailloux’s publication in Rhetoric Society Quarterly (RSQ) of “Disciplinary Identities” (an early version of the first chapter of his book); the second was a special session arranged by Michael Leff at the 2000 Rhetoric Society of America Conference in which rhetoric scholars from English studies and communication met to discuss the future of rhetoric as a discipline. At that meeting, Leff raised two concerns: (1) the lack of adequate lines of communication among rhetoric scholars in different disciplines and departments, and (2) the ongoing difficulties scholars in both English and communication face in promoting rhetorical studies within their institutions and professional organizations. Steven Mailloux’s Disciplinary Identities effectively addresses these pressing challenges. Since 2003, this topic has served as a special feature in the winter issues of RSQ with contributions from Mailloux, Sharon Crowley, Thomas P. Miller, and Brian Jackson.

In Disciplinary Identities, Mailloux offers both a map (shared rhetorical topics) and a vehicle (a critical rhetorical practice) to help rhetoric scholars who are separated by departmental, institutional, professional, and disciplinary affiliations to foster interdisciplinary discussions. Indeed, one of the major contributions of Mailloux’s book is his careful explication of what he terms rhetorical hermeneutics, a critical theoretical practice he introduced in his 1989 Rhetorical Power and outlined in his 1998 Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics. To counter past critiques of rhetorical hermeneutics—concerns that postmodern rhetoric has come to focus on strategic approaches to reading texts to the detriment of exploring and theorizing rhetoric as praxis or poesis—Mailloux takes great pains to show how rhetorical hermeneutics can be best understood as concerned with both rhetorical production and reception. He defines rhetorical hermeneutics as “the use of rhetoric to practice theory by doing”and goes on to argue that “the only hermeneutic theory passing rhetorical muster in the present antifoundationalist moment involves persuasive descriptions of historical acts of interpretations” (42). In each of his six chapters, Mailloux works to offer “persuasive descriptions of historical acts of interpretations” for each of the topics he covers: history, theory, tradition, identity, politics, and places in time.

In the first chapter, Mailloux recounts the disparate disciplinary paths of rhetoric in English, composition, and communication studies. Beginning with the 1914 separation of speech communication from English, he traces a series of missed opportunities in the twentieth century for disciplinary collaborations among these three areas. These include the 1947 joint meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English and the Speech Association of America on communication in first-year college courses; the 1980s paradigm shift in composition studies that reinvigorated attention on rhetoric; and the concurrent rhetorical turn in literary and cultural studies. His chapter shows how “by the middle of the twentieth century, rhetoric as the study of language arts found itself radically fragmented into separate disciplinary domains with faculties that did not, and, for the most part, still do not talk to each other” (32).

In his second chapter, Mailloux traces the scholarly reception of Aristotle’s phronêsis to show how rhetorical phronesis “functions as the pivot of praxis between” reception and production. That is, if phronesis “involves deliberations over what is the good for people in particular situations, [if] it determines right actions, including the timely use of appropriate speech” (45), then it is, like rhetorical hermeneutics itself, both interpretative and productive. Here Mailloux mounts his strongest argument for understanding that “rhetorical hermeneutics stresses this inseparability of interpretive and rhetorical acts” (51). His choice for exploring receptions of phronesis—of all the rhetorical theoretical constructs he might have chosen—is a wise one, for it permits him to launch a compelling argument for the...