The Contemporary Study of Public Address: Renewal, Recovery, and Reconfiguration

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the state of the art in public address scholarship is strong. In academic year 2000-2001, scholars in rhetoric, communication studies, English, literature--and even a few political scientists, historians, and sociologists--will host multiple conferences, produce dozens of books and chapters, and write scores of articles and reviews, all dealing, in one form or another, with public discourse.

What a difference one century has made! In the year 1901, there was almost no scholarly study of public address. As Carroll Arnold, John Wilson, Herbert Wichelns, and others have noted, criticism of public discourse was then primarily the realm of the amateur, the journalist, the occasional essayist, the wayward grammarian. Writing of the "lay criticism" practiced at the turn of the last century, Wilson noted that "it is impressionistic and the topics are treated in random fashion. . . . the criticism is usually a by-product of the primary aim of the writer. . . . While judgments are made, they are most often generalizations lacking in support, that is to say, opinions based upon the critic's glands rather than upon objective evidence." ¹

Looking back from the perspective of 1925, Herbert Wichelns noted, "We have not much serious criticism of oratory. The reasons are patent. Oratory is intimately associated with statecraft; it is bound up with the things of the moment; its occasion, its terms, its background, can often be understood only by the careful student of history." ²

Yet we know that things changed shortly thereafter and that by 1943 a two-volume work titled A History and Criticism of American Public Address had appeared. I shall not dwell on this historical development. I have traced it in some detail in my introduction to Landmark Essays on American Public Address. ³ But this foundational period from 1925 until 1965 is crucial to a proper understanding of what has happened in our more recent history.

That recent history starts with the publication, in 1965, of Edwin Black's Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. In fact, I shall argue that Black's book began a three-part movement that continues even to this moment. The first movement was one of renewal--the kind of renewal that is brought about by a cleansing or purging of the soul. Oftentimes such moments of renewal seem to those on the outside to be periods of crisis. They mistake a shakedown cruise for having struck an iceberg.

Still today, uninformed people often view Black's book as the death of public address studies rather than their renewal. I was reminded of this just a few months ago when I reviewed a book manuscript that purported to describe the development of the field of communication studies. According to the author the story of the field was rather straightforward. Before Black, rhetoric and public address scholars were in the majority and the study of speeches dominated the field. Then Black wrote this book, which demonstrated that the study of public address was old-fashioned and out of step with the times. Thereafter, scholars adopted scientific methods of research and produced scholarship of real and lasting value. Public address fell by the wayside and, if these authors are to be believed, Ed Black disappeared from the face of the earth, because he is nowhere to be found in their rendering of the field after 1965.

Talk about the rhetoric of history! Now that rendering of our story is obviously false, not to mention defamatory and insulting. But the really sad thing about that book manuscript is that it was written by a person trained in rhetoric and public address under Robert Gunderson, to whom the manuscript was dedicated. Sadder still, the author had nothing to say about public address from 1965 to the present, as though nothing of significance had happened during those years.

I want to set the...