The Disciplinarity of Rhetoric

Steven Mailloux's new book Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition (2006) explores the current status of rhetoric in the public sphere and the academy as well as hopes for its future. Mailloux believes that rhetoric should be a discipline of its own as well as an "interdiscipline" that relies on the cooperation of scholars from many different departments. While encouraging us to look at the ties between oral and textual rhetoric and at the history of rhetoric's involvement in English, speech, and composition, he wishes "to encourage dialogue among the teachers and scholars most responsible for research and training in the language arts" (3). Mailloux focuses on the theories of individual scholars who have had a large impact on the formation of rhetorical studies, thus establishing multiple goals for the book, from celebrating rhetoric's history to providing examples of its interdisciplinary engagement in academic and public forums.

It is hard to define rhetoric since, as Mailloux demonstrates, rhetoric is complex and its boundaries are constantly changing. The strongest chapters in the book, however, use concrete examples to demonstrate Mailloux's more theoretical claims. In his fourth chapter, he provides great examples of historical rhetorical scholars who simultaneously engaged in personal and public rhetoric, demonstrating how they negotiated contradictions and divisions in their private and public lives. In chapter 5, he explores how a current event, 9/11, can bring the discussion of public versus academic rhetorics to a head and allow academics to go public with their rhetorical ideas.

Mailloux starts his argument by briefly glossing the turn-of-the-century split between speech and English departments, focusing on the point where rhetoric played an important role in both while not being accepted by either: "At the moment when a new discipline was gaining increased visibility and autonomy for public speaking, the interdiscipline of rhetoric and its humanistic tradition was not immediately dominant in that discipline and was marginalized in its former institutional home" (15). The description of the disagreement over rhetoric's function sets up Mailloux's argument for rhetoric as the useful middle child, never fully accepted in either speech or English but always full of possibilities for engagement in the public and the personal. While aiming to account for the importance of rhetoric, it becomes clear that due to its versatile nature Mailloux has a hard time explaining exactly what its function is inside and outside of the academy and thus what the future holds. Mailloux situates rhetoric as the connective tissue between the disciplines, engaging the rhetoric of science to explain how rhetoric was once viewed. According to Mailloux, the rethinking of concepts of truth allowed texts such as Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to change the way rhetoric was applied to studying disciplines: "Soon a new rhetorical hermeneutics began emphasizing communal rhetorics and shared interpretive strategies within professionalized disciplines instead of objective facts, disinterested method, and scientific truth" (16). This social turn emphasized the absence of consensus on rhetorical method.

The audience for the book seems to be those who are already familiar with traditional rhetorical history and unhappy with its current positioning in academic departments. Mailloux discusses how rhetoric loses its value, since it is not quantifiable enough in the field of English literature and not the main focus of those interested in speech communication. From the beginning, Mailloux demonstrates that he is not comfortable with rhetoric's adoption into the field of rhetoric and composition and doesn't even include it as a department in which rhetoric is currently housed, opting rather for the larger term English (2). He will maintain only a passing acknowledgment of rhetoric in the field of rhetoric and composition and thus unfortunately misses a large body of scholarship that engages rhetoric and rhetorical theory of the academy and public and visual while hinting at things that might be more fruitfully explored with the use of rhet/comp theory. This acknowledgment would be valuable for Mailloux as he...