Michael Leff and the Return of the Rhetorical Text

The decades of the 1970s and 1980s wrought fundamental changes across the humanities. Everywhere, it seemed, assumptions long thought secure were being challenged, loyalties shaken, and disciplines reordered to accommodate the new verities of scholarly exploration. In retrospect, many of the issues that then seemed so controversial now appear tame, if not altogether passé: Meaning is not an objective property? Of course not. The nature of authorship is complex and multifaceted? None would argue otherwise. The products of culture can (ought) to be read as artifacts of culture? Sure enough. Some issues, however, have retained their power to unsettle basic convictions about the work of interpretation, and none more so that the status of the text as a site of critical inquiry. For those working in the humanities during that period, it could seem that many of their colleagues were bent on inventing reasons not to talk about texts. Materialist models guided us away from the text toward the economic conditions of their production: Lacanians toward the unconscious, Foucaultians toward epistemes, and so on. Rhetorical studies, for better or worse, underwent similar challenges, and we are today living very much on the horizon of that distant time.

A small but formidable group of critics at the University of Wisconsin during our period staked positions against this retreat from the text as text. They did so from different perspectives and interests, of course, but they shared a common investment in the work of criticism as it was grounded in and applied to actual texts. Thus Edwin Black could submit a highly nuanced reading of a New York Times editorial; thus Stephen Lucas could afford to the Declaration of Independence its most comprehensive rhetorical analysis to date; and thus Michael Leff could explore in exquisite detail the internal economy of a speech by Abraham Lincoln. And although each of these figures held firm to his convictions, Leff in particular took it as his responsibility to articulate publicly the theoretical rationale for doing so. His passing accordingly provides a fitting opportunity to revisit his writing about the nature of texts and the attendant practice of rhetorical criticism. In the following portion of this essay, I identify three of his essays that seem especially illustrative of his thoughts on the subject. Tellingly, they address certain textual dynamics from three different corners of the discipline: from classics, an essay on Cicero's Pro Murena; from argumentation, an essay on Perelman, ethos, and W. E. B. Du Bois; and from public address, an essay on Abraham Lincoln.

Readers familiar with Leff's scholarship know that his areas of interest and competence are famously diverse, but they know, too, that he was not merely ecumenical. Indeed, as we will see, cutting across these three areas of inquiry is an abiding set of concerns that, I believe, shaped his thought generally and is the foundation of his legacy. This much is not to suggest that he would necessarily agree with my interpretation—he rarely did—but it does offer a basis for disagreement, and this he always welcomed. Above all, it seems, Leff was concerned to articulate the conditions under which a balance could be struck between the competing claims of abstract theory—the general—and of grounded performance—the particular. The challenge was not to assert one set over the other, nor to bracket out either on an as-needed basis; it was, rather, to formulate a disciplined reading practice that acknowledged and deployed both. The result, as the three essays demonstrate, was a form of criticism conceptually informed but nonetheless respectful of the lived moment constituting the rhetorical act.

Classical Studies

In Volume 1, Number 1 of this journal, Leff published an essay entitled "Cicero's Pro Murena and the Strong Case for Rhetoric."¹ The author had been preoccupied with Cicero throughout his career, and here he devoted considerable space to a detailed examination of the famed orator's recorded text. I will not gloss in any great detail the contours of its argument, but will use it to feature some characteristic lines of thought we...