Learning to Read

Michael Leff was my teacher. I share this good fortune with many others, of course, and of his charity and wisdom in that role I can offer little by way of unique testimonial. His knowledge of rhetoric was both encyclopedic and fluent, yet he tended to inspire more often than intimidate; in the classroom, he could deliver lectures of remarkable historical and theoretical sweep, yet he also could instigate discussions of such focused intensity that he sometimes would have to interrupt a lively seminar to urge his students to attend to the next sentence of a text; he was a textual critic of unmatched subtlety and power, but when reading even his students' most faltering drafts he was generous, patient, and encouraging. I believe that just about everyone who had the pleasure to be Leff's student, whether as undergraduate, graduate, or colleague, would recall similar impressions.

But when I first encountered the work of Michael Leff, I was someone else's student. Tom Rosteck—another of Leff's students, as fate would have it—was teaching rhetorical criticism at the University of Arkansas in the spring of 1991, and on his syllabus was Leff's iconic 1983 Van Zelst lecture, "Rhetorical Timing in Lincoln's 'House Divided' Speech."¹ I wasn't especially interested in Lincoln, nor in the history of public address. I had no knowledge of 1850s politics, and wasn't looking to learn more.² In my second semester of graduate school, I lacked the ability to appreciate the skill with which Leff positioned his reading of the speech against those provided by historians. I missed entirely the significance of Leff's insistence that Lincoln's speech should be considered a "masterpiece of oratorical eloquence" (4) as I was entirely ignorant about ancient and ongoing disciplinary squabbles.³ And as I had but scant understanding of the rhetorical tradition, the neoclassical foundations of Leff's approach were utterly obscure to me. But it was clear, even to me and even then, that in reading his essay I was being taught something quite significant about the art of rhetorical criticism.

I want to attend closely to Leff's essay with the purpose of finally setting down some of the reactions I had to it when I first read it but have only learned how to articulate after many subsequent readings of it together with some reading of other things. In particular, I want to try to understand the pedagogical implications of Leff's essay, to understand it as an object lesson in the art to which I have devoted my professional life. I think this is fitting because I believe that Leff's scholarship is animated by deeply pedagogical motives, so that any adequate tribute to his work and its influence should take this into account.

Praelectio

After a few introductory remarks, Leff's essay begins with a lengthy quotation from Lincoln's speech. With this, he immediately establishes his priorities: in this work of criticism, the text will be given pride of place. He does follow up this quotation with the rationale traditional to studies of public address—Lincoln's text is significant, extant readings are insufficient—and he does provide a thorough yet efficient review of the historical context for the address. But the text comes first. The effect is to present his reading as an unmediated encounter between critic and text, with no theoretical apparatus, no description of method, and only the slightest intrusion of jargon. This is a fiction, of course, as Leff later acknowledged: "I have discovered," he would proclaim in 1992, "much to my own surprise—that … my work does not simply promote a direct encounter with rhetorical texts, but that it involves something very like a 'theory' of rhetorical reading."⁴ Even his surprise sounds suspiciously like a fiction, for it is unlikely that a reader as savvy as Michael Leff could be deceived by his own critical practice. In fact, in the "House Divided" essay itself, Leff reveals something of his theory by noting that the distinguishing feature of a rhetorical criticism (as opposed to a historical one) [End...