JAC Volume 12 Issue 2

This is a wonderful book--engaging, persuasive, and well written. The only problem I have with it is its thesis. Let me explain. There are two basic attitudes about the intellectual respectability of nineteenth-century rhetoric: the traditional view is that it is an embarrassment. As Nan Johnson describes it, the era is generally regarded as "that period most responsible for the theoretical impoverishment of the rhetoric of composition and the academic marginalization of rhetoric studies in modern English studies." This view is associated with the names of Albert Kitzhaber, Donald Stewart, and James Berlin, and I must confess it is one that I pretty much share.

Johnson's present book may be the most articulate and comprehensive statement now available of the opposing view. However, as ably presented as it is here, I do not believe this will be the last word on the subject. Johnson argues, I think unfairly, that the customary "pejorative critiques" arise from an undue reverence for the classical tradition, and (much more persuasively) from what she calls "a praxis bias," a tendency to focus attention on selected features (invention and style, for example) instead of examining the nineteenth-century tradition on its own terms. Her sensible, well-taken point is that rhetoric evolves along with the culture and in response to it. But there's the rub: if the rhetoric lags behind cultural change, might we not be justified in considering the result a kind of "theoretical impoverishment"? This is, in my opinion, exactly what happened to nineteenth-century rhetoric.

While I recognize the obligation to review the book that has been written rather than the one I might wish had been written, the point is so central to the understanding of the nineteenth-century that I'd like to belabor it just a bit. At issue is a key term, faculty psychology, the meaning of which suffered pejoration by its association with the "faculties" of the phrenologists, and then, apparently, broadened into a sort of innocuous generality leaving behind most of its theoretical baggage. That the terminology of the faculties and mental discipline continued to dominate nineteenth-century rhetoric may go a long way to explaining the traditional view that the era is one of "theoretical impoverishment."

Deeply implicated in the confusion over the meaning of faculty psychology as well as the disparagement of nineteenth-century pedagogical rhetoric is Alexander Bain. The notion of mental faculties with autonomous existence as independent powers had long been discredited and indeed was explicitly rejected by Bain himself in the Preface to the first volume of the first edition of his psychology text (1855)--a text, I might add, that in its several editions dominated nineteenth-century psychology until the turn of the century. During the last half of the nineteenth-century, Bain was the man to be refuted in psychology. The fact that so many readings of his English Composition and Rhetoric, particularly the 1866 edition, so frequently produce the conclusion that Bain must have been a faculty psychologist does not redound to the credit of nineteenth-century rhetorical theory.

This does not mean that Nan Johnson is wrong in her analysis. She argues, quite cogently it seems to me, that "the most reliable generalization" about nineteenth-century rhetorical theory is that it draws its "epistemological justification" from the rhetorics of Hugh Blair, George Campbell, and Richard Whately. It is really Campbell who provides the epistemological foundation, and the intellectual respectability, to eighteenth-century rhetorical theory. Beginning with a modest number of faculties--the understanding, the emotions, the imagination, and the will--Campbell links them to rhetorical aims through the processes of association (for Bain, primarily contiguity and similarity). By the time the relationship between aim and faculty was petrified into the "four modes of discourse" by Bain, the "epistemological justification" was no longer theoretically viable and, more to the point, Bain himself knew it. We should not be reassured by the fact that Johnson can line up quotations demonstrating the reliability of the generalization from Newman's 1834 text (in the heat of the phrenology controversy) to Genung's 1900 text--a decade after William James had so neatly refuted, yet again, the faculty psychology explanation for mental behavior.

One of the biggest problems with the "faculty" explanation of mental behavior is validating what constitutes a faculty. The phrenologists Gall and Spurzheim had amassed lists of from thirty-five to thirty-eight, including such concepts as amativeness, conscientiousness, eventuality, and causality; and they did, indeed, claim to be quite scientific about the whole thing. Blair was more successful than the phrenologists when he added "taste" (associated with the faculty of imagination) to the so-called scientific rhetorical tradition, and he was certainly more intellectually justified than the nineteenth-century scientific critics who used the faculty psychology rationale to validate their own Anglo-Saxon, male, and upperclass literary preferences. It makes no sense to rail against Campbell and Blair; they were, in fact, in the intellectual vanguard of their era. However, when nineteenth-century rhetoricians synthesized and extended their epistemological and belletristic foundations, they were bringing up the rear. It is noteworthy that Richard Whately (1828) did not explicitly invoke the faculty psychology rationale, even though he continues and more rigorously systematizes the relationship between conviction, "arguments from the understanding," and persuasion, "arguments to the will."

Although Johnson begins with the assertion that rhetorical pedagogy "model[s] dominant philosophical and social values," it is beyond the scope of her book or, certainly, so short a review of her book to explore the philosophical and social forces impinging upon it. Were it not for the fact that a firestorm of intellectual change, largely driven by the implications of evolutionary theory, utterly transformed philosophy and psychology and alienated rhetorical theory from both during the period she traces in detail, I wouldn't mention it. She doesn't note Herbert Spencer, and the history she traces stops just short of Fred Newton Scott and Gertrude Buck, whose grounding in evolutionary theory marks the beginning of a new era in rhetoric.

The era that Nan Johnson traces in excellent detail is a relatively stable period grounded in a caricature of an outmoded psychology. Let me hasten to add that this is my characterization of the period, not hers. As I read the book I was struck again and again by the peculiarity of the sort of timeless quality of so many of the references. An 1895 passage from A.S. Hill can be juxtaposed seamlessly in a paragraph with an 1834 reference to Newman; Quackenbos's 1884 text is used to demonstrate a point from Blair; and the faculties saturate the book. It's a great read, but a disconcerting one.