Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric ed. by Michelle Ballif (review)

Let me not postpone the news of this anthology’s excellence. This book renews in a powerful way the theoretical exploration of history writing in rhetorical studies.

Editor Michelle Ballif begins with the curiosity of what happened to the once lively theorizing in histories of rhetoric that defined rhetorical studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Ballif describes that after what she calls this quite fertile period—a period that created the now classic contests as those between John Poulakos and Edward Schiappa, and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Barbara Beisecker, and such provocative theoretical collections as Ballif’s mentor Victor Vitanza’s Writing Histories of Rhetoric (1994) and what Ballif describes as the infamous “Octalog” (1988) published in Rhetoric Review—such theoretical work in histories of rhetoric seemed to stop. In its place, the productive work of doing histories of rhetoric exploded. Ballif offers The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric (2010) edited by Lynée Lewis Gaillet with Winifred Bryan Horner as evidence of what Ballif describes as the awe-inspiring number and quality of histories of rhetorics that have been generated since the 1990 original edition of that work (2).

As one who “grew up” in rhetorical studies during this fertile period of theorization about historiography in rhetorical studies, and who has wondered, as Ballif does, where did all the theory go, I find this to be a most welcome volume, as I suspect many others across the disciplines of rhetoric, composition, and communication will. To complement the continuing work being done generating histories of rhetoric, this volume generates theories about doing histories of rhetoric that expand our visions about our practices, including our purposes, methodologies, ideological motivations, politics, and ethics.

The ethical problem, as Ballif articulates it, is this: to write any history of anything in general or rhetoric in particular demands “systematic exclusions” of figures, events, and artifacts—all that stand as exceptions to the historical narrative (3). The ethical task, as Ballif writes it, is to search for these exclusions. Yet Ballif notes that a conundrum arises when we try to include the excluded, as writing the excluded into history inevitably produces more exclusions, because any history, remembrance, or memorial, is made by forgetting. Ballif’s volume acknowledges this conundrum and positions historians as confronted with an exigency to retheorize the writing of histories of rhetoric. She describes the works collected in this volume as provoking us to search and search again for the excluded at large, but in particular the excluded methodology of writing histories of rhetoric (4). These essays query established historiography for how it precludes and occludes the excluded. Moreover, she describes these works as inviting us to see alternative ways to attend to the excluded (4).

An array of scholars in rhetorical studies respond in this volume to Ballif’s call to question “what it means, what it should mean, what it could mean” to write histories of rhetoric (3): Richard Leo Enos, Steven Mailloux, LuMing Mao, Jessica Enoch, Charles E. Morris III and K. J. Rawson, Debra Hawhee and Christa J. Olson, Byron Hawk, Jane S. Sutton, Michelle Ballif herself offering a response to her own query, G. L. Ercolini and Pat J. Gehrke, and Victor J. Vitanza, with Sharon Crowley offering an afterword. Each scholar, across the disciplines of rhetoric, composition, and communication, and across identities within disciplines, from public address to rhetorical theory, offers us a chance to consider again our work in theorizing histories of rhetoric.

Richard Leo Enos, in “Theory, Validity, and the Historiography of Classical Rhetoric: A Discussion of Archaeological Rhetoric,” critiques the literary or textual privilege of historiographical methods and calls for, among other things, an archeological intervention that would diversify our sources of evidence for contextualizing and interpreting rhetoric’s various histories. Steven Mailloux, in “Enactment History, Jesuit Practices, and Rhetorical Hermeneutics,” theorizes a way of avoiding the problem of appropriation when interpreting the past, because the past presents itself as foreign...