In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Silhouette of a Discipline: Taking Stock of Silent Presumptions, Voids, and Issues in Rhetoric and Public Address
  • Lester C. Olson (bio)
The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address. Edited by Shawn J. Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010; pp. xiii + 496. $209.95 cloth.

An invaluable reference for scholarship on rhetoric and public address, Shawn J. Parry-Giles’s and J. Michael Hogan’s edited Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address will be essential reading for communication scholars interested in learning about the subject matter and, for experts, a landmark in the history of rhetoric and public address. The nineteen contributors to this collection represent a relatively diverse “who’s who” among accomplished scholars in public address. The coeditors affirm their primary reasons for undertaking this voluminous Handbook: “In taking stock of the discipline at the start of the twenty-first century, we hope to reinvigorate the historical and critical study of public address and inspire a new generation of scholars in the field” (xiv). Their coauthored introduction observes in general, “Since the late 1960s, the field of public [End Page 401] address has expanded dramatically in terms of both subject matter and critical perspectives. While some public address scholars continue to focus on great speakers and speeches, others have embarked upon recovery projects, giving voice to those who have historically been marginalized or excluded from the canon of great speakers” (3). Parry-Giles and Hogan underscore, “Most public address scholars still focus on persuasion in the public sphere, but studies in public address now encompass a broader range of voices and a greater variety of written and mass mediated texts, including advertisements, autobiographies, cartoons, films, manifestoes, memorials, photographs, television and print news, and many other forms of discourse” (3). In addition to the coauthored introduction, the edited collection consists of 17 chapters, which have been organized into five major sections, or parts.

In this review essay, I want to suggest that, in some ways, this Handbook is symptomatic of the ways that scholars in public address and rhetoric have conceived of the field. While the Handbook may do a good job of reflecting the current state of scholarly interests and certain presumptions within the field, including notable omissions and silent assumptions that characterize so much contemporary scholarship, the Handbook does not do as much to correct these omissions and assumptions as it should have—and could have—given the high profile and influence of the scholars who have contributed substantive essays to it. Here I offer my commentary to readers in a spirit of diagnosing larger problems, issues, and voids within the field rather than as criticisms of the work of particular scholars. In that regard, in this review I join with Parry-Giles and Hogan in hoping to reinvigorate historical and critical scholarship in public address, while offering readers some potential lines of research for future work.

The first of the five parts concerns the history and prospects of rhetoric and public address with contributions by Martin J. Medhurst, David Zarefsky, and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. Medhurst’s chapter “The History of Public Address as an Academic Study” is possibly the finest concise treatment of the discipline’s history that I have ever read (I read most, if not all, of them while trying to encapsulate diverse approaches to conceiving of the relationships between rhetorical criticism and theory in my contribution to James Chesebro’s edited collection, A Century of Transformation, published by Oxford University Press in 2010). Medhurst’s chapter is characterized by rich historical detail and careful documentation, a keen appreciation for the [End Page 402] rivalries among past generations of scholars, and lively prose portraying their heartfelt debates concerning how best to undertake rhetoric and public address scholarship over the decades. Examples of these academic debates include early exchanges among James A. Winans, Charles Henry Woolbert, and Everett Lee Hunt (25–28), plus Herbert Wichelns and, in reply some decades later, Wayland Maxfield Parrish (33, 42), and, on one side, William Norwood Brigance and, on the other side, Ernest Wrage and Loren Reid, although for different reasons (36–41). Medhurst’s chapter takes readers into the history of the rhetoric curriculum...

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