Edwin Black: A Tribute

It is the happy custom of the public address conference, now in its seventh meeting, to celebrate at its banquet the work of a fellow scholar. We are met tonight to honor the work of our colleague and friend Edwin Black, Professor Emeritus of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin. The occasion demands that our tribute be brief, and I am sharply aware of my own inadequacy to give a sufficient account of the work of a scholar who has been the subject of doctoral comprehensive examinations either given or taken by almost everyone in this room--sometimes both. Our gratitude to Ed and our indebtedness to his work have been central to our academic lives for decades. Most of the people in this room have known Ed as a teacher or colleague, have studied his work in their classes, and have taught his work to their students. Each of you will have your own special memories and your sense of how Ed Black's work has influenced your own.

I want especially to address our younger colleagues and students this evening, and to begin by trying to recover a sense of the influence of Ed's first book, based on his 1962 Cornell doctoral dissertation, written under the direction of Herbert A. Wichelns. Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method was published in 1965, and for the discipline of rhetorical criticism everything changed. The book had the effect of enhancing the reputation of a discipline that was still struggling for legitimacy in the academy. In addition, and virtually by itself, this little book introduced several new lines of thinking into the field that have proved productive and transforming.

Consider just a few of the lines of inquiry started by this book. Although there had been occasional essays in our journals about critical method, Ed's book put the matter permanently on the agenda, and with the counterintuitive claim that it was important to study method not so that we could produce a method, or the method, and thereafter generate fully warranted, method-driven criticism, but on the contrary that the study of method demonstrated the stultifying effect of the pious practice of orthodox procedures. The book did not produce the Black method, but a clamor of competing methods, and it made room for practicing critics who professed no particular method at all. On this subject, Ed famously concluded his book with these words:

We have not evolved any system of rhetorical criticism, but only, at best, an orientation to it. An orientation, together with taste and intelligence, is all that the critic needs. If his criticism is fruitful, he may end with a system, but he should not, in our present state of knowledge, begin with one. We simply do not know enough yet about rhetorical discourse to place our faith in systems, and it is only through imaginative criticism that we are likely to learn more. ¹

Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method may be said to be the starting point for a reexamination of the idea that rhetorical intention could be taken for granted, and that such intention was invariably the tactical deployment of argumentative resources for the creation of an immediate persuasive effect on auditors in the presence of a speaker. Before Black, it was more or less taken for granted that the rhetorical agent was a speaker, an orator; Black taught us to consider the more precise and more comprehensive term "rhetor," a term that the Oxford English Dictionary traces to the fourteenth century in English, but which had fallen into obsolescence until revived by Ed Black.

By questioning the standard Aristotelian categories of forensic, deliberative, and epideictic, Ed stimulated a highly productive reexamination of the status of genre theory in rhetoric.

In his famous analysis of John Jay Chapman's Coatesville address, Black introduced the claim that the rhetorical critic and the rhetorical audience were and are moral agents. The notion that there was an explicitly...