Rethinking Rhetorical Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy: The Living Art of Michael C. Leff ed. by Antonio De Velasco, John Angus Campbell, and David Henry (review)

Michael C. Leff was a scholar of the humanities who gained prominence in an era when one could gain tenure and promotion without authoring a scholarly book. Many of my heroes in the field are similarly situated, which presents a challenge when doctoral students ask for book recommendations for their general exam reading lists. After Leff's untimely death, his literary executor, Antonio De Velasco, and two of his contemporaries, John Angus Campbell and David Henry, resolved that problem by curating a collection of his essays and earned my profound gratitude.

The decision about what to include and exclude in such a volume was a difficult one. As they point out in their introductory essay, his archive of papers includes more than 160 items. Therefore, this should be considered a sampler, a choice box of 24 assorted treats from his complete oeuvre. Some will undoubtedly read the book and complain that their favorite is missing, and they will be right; some really good ones are not there. However, the editors had to make some cuts or it would not fit between the covers. I found this particular collection to be an excellent melding of popular tunes and essays that I had never before encountered.

As De Velasco et al. summarize in the introduction, this book "discloses the story of an inimitable scholar's evolving, self-reflexive, and distinctly rhetorical intervention into the very meaning, and thus the future, of humanistic studies" (x). Although they acknowledge that they constructed this text from a series of fragments (thus invoking Leff's intellectual rival, Michael McGee), they also recognize the truth of the matter—that Leff's work was all part of "an integrated rhetorical vision" (xi). This is a unified text, but not because the editors constructed it as such; however, their careful introductions to each section, with essential "further reading" lists, help to bring some unifying themes to the fore. Intending no slight to the editors, I suspect that this collection has such a fluid through-argument because the man who wrote these essays had such an integrated world view.

I always admired and envied Leff for that. Most of the rest of us struggle to develop a consistent scholarly vision. We might identify a particular area of study but then move from project to project without a cohesive philosophy to hold it all together. Leff had a unified perspective. What he did not have was a single area of study. He notably worked as a top scholar in several fields, including the history of rhetoric, argumentation studies, and public address. De Velasco et al. divided the book into five sections that distributed Leff's work in a defensible way: Greek and Latin rhetorical theory, contemporary extensions of classical rhetorical theory, theories of criticism, the practice of rhetorical criticism, and rhetorical pedagogy. These categories serve as practical divisions for the student of rhetoric who picks up the volume, but they do not serve to compartmentalize the vision of the man.

Despite his diversity of focal areas, Leff always weaved together a consistent set of arguments. Sadly, there is no index to the book, but it is easy to perform a computer search in the electronic version to trace terms such as decorum (which appears over one hundred times), individuals such as Cicero (who, at almost three hundred mentions, beats out every other theorist), and even particular metaphors, such as metabolism (five times) and texture (ten times). Scholarly topoi that recur in all five sections include the understanding that rhetorical theory is not an abstract scientific system but rather a flexible set of practices that have no existence apart from particular cases (50, 146, 235, 397, 466) and the idea that rhetors participate in the long arc of a...