JAC Volume 14 Issue 1

Learning from the Histories of Rhetoric: Essays in Honor of Winifred Bryan Horner, ed. Theresa Enos (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993, 183 pages).

Book Review by Robert L. McDonald, Virginia Military Institute

Based on the information Theresa Enos provides in "A Brand New World: Using Our Professional and Personal Histories of Rhetoric," her introduction to this volume, one might be tempted to describe the academic career of Winifred Bryan Horner as a series of exceptions-to-the-rules. Or, perhaps more accurately, it might be described as a series of episodes in remaking the rules of what is possible, of visions of the past uniquely wedded to visions of the future.

Whatever the attempt at imaging, the facts of the matter affirm that Win Horner's career has indeed been an extraordinary one. For instance, many people are surprised to learn that Horner didn't receive her Michigan Ph.D. until 1975--and that was after having raised a family, having begun work for the M.A. in literature at age thirty-nine, and having worked as an instructor at the University of Missouri for some fifteen years. Her story becomes all the more remarkable when we note that by 1985, just ten years after earning the doctorate, Horner had given the profession Historical Rhetoric: An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Sources in English (1980), Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap (1983), as well as the first edition of The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric (1983), and on the basis of these and other accomplishments, she had become the first woman to be awarded a twentieth-century chair in rhetoric when Texas Christian University named her the first Lillian Radford Chair of Rhetoric and Composition.

Learning from the Histories of Rhetoric is a fitting tribute to a scholarly career consistently dedicated, as Enos says, to better understanding "the place of writing in the humanities, the ways in which human beings think through their ideas and communicate those ideas to others both in written and spoken language." We don't need the extensive contributors' notes to tell us that Enos has assembled some of the very finest people working in historical rhetoric for this occasion. In essays divided into two sections--"Studying the Histories of Rhetoric" and "Teaching the Histories of Rhetoric"--ten contributors address topics which invariably remind us all that "rhetoric and composition" must remain a "conjunctive" phrase, an idea of complementary functions manifest in a discipline whose "special nature" is that "it theorizes practice and applies theory as its central act."

Richard Lloyd-Jones begins part one with the first of two outstanding pieces in the volume, an essay that is so engaging, so thoughtful, that the margins of my copy are literally filled with notes to "quote this." In fact, it will take some restraint to keep from excerpting it to pieces, so let me simply try to summarize it this way: "Using the History of Rhetoric" recounts Lloyd-Jones's evolving understanding of the uses of "history," from his rejection of a schoolteacher's explanation that "one studied History for its own sake, because it was a pleasure in itself, not because it was useful," to his own sense of the necessary relationship between historical detail and "context," informed by a vision of historians as "people who collect 'other ways' tried in other times." Lloyd-Jones's ethos, his voice, by the way, is as charming as his message is relevant and worth some pondering by anyone interested in the uses of history, whatever the discipline.

Following Lloyd-Jones is Thomas P. Miller's "Reinventing Rhetorical Traditions," in which Miller insists that "the rhetorical tradition is a fiction that has just about outlasted its usefulness" and makes his case for combining "a broader historicism with our own developing understanding of rhetoric as social praxis." Then, in "A Model for Our Time: Fred Newton Scott's Rhetoric Program at Michigan," Donald C. Stewart delivers a stunning challenge to Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg's suggestion in The Rhetorical Tradition that Scott lacked innovative heft and vision. Stewart describes Scott's curriculum and repeats some of his students' memories of him to demonstrate that Scott in fact offered "rich alternatives to Harvard's current-traditional approach to the teaching of rhetoric and composition," many of which seem modern even now. And finally in this section, in "Writing Program Administration," Edward P.J. Corbett mixes some established disciplinary history with what he calls "oral history dredged up from [his] memories . . . as a graduate student and beginning teacher" in order to outline general stages that have legitimized writing programs and "fully enfranchised" WPAs.

Part two begins with "Sapphic Pedagogy: Searching for Women's Difference in History and the Classroom" by Susan C. Jarratt, who, incidentally, recently succeeded Horner as Radford Chair. Jarratt turns to Sappho for ideas on creating an acceptable place for women within, not separate from, "the fraternal affective structure of academic life," and formulates a pedagogy that "does not simply fall back into the male pattern" but which "participates in it, with a difference." Then, in a very difficult essay entitled "Some Techniques of Teaching Rhetorical Poetics in the Schools of Medieval Europe," Marjorie Curry Woods examines parallels in John of Salisbury's description of the pedagogy of Bernard of Chartres (in the Metalogicon) and the later teaching of Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova. And in "Dialectics and Rhetoric in Renaissance Pedagogy," Joan Dietz Moss explores the classical relationship between rhetoric and dialectic as defined in the work of two late-Renaissance scholars, Antonio Riccobono and Ludovico Carbone, and she sketches some modern advantages to retaining "the distinctive aims" of the two arts.

Kathleen E. Welch also considers these in her essay, "Dialectic/ Rhetoric/ Writing," which, despite its rather trendy title, is the second of the two superior contributions to this volume. Welch argues particularly for the importance of dialectic, which she takes in its Platonic definition to mean "an investigation of the Forms, including the ways that the Forms combine and divide to create reality." She is most intriguing as she recommends three methods for bringing dialectic to life in the writing course, and her reasoning seems unassailable: writing classes are typically "boring" because they are "pasive," "static," and deny "the idea that all language is a kind of flux." "Dialectic," she contends, "explodes this problem through the creation of energy." Although I am a little wary of her apparent reluctance to try somehow to tame that "flux," or channel some of that energy towards "closure" (dare I say make it yield an acceptable product?) Welch herself writes powerfully and clearly in effecting a solid argument for rethinking not only the designs of writing courses, but their aims as well.

The final two essays also implicitly address the aims of writing courses by making connections to classical concepts. In an essay entitled "Classical Rhetoric and Group Writing: A Warranted Relationship," Richard Leo Enos discusses ways that "a modification of the heuristics of classical rhetoric within the context of group deliberation facilitates writing processes and the modalities of collaborative interaction." And the volume concludes with S. Michael Halloran's provocative "Conversation Versus Declamation as Models of Written Discourse," in which he suggests that the common "analogy between written discourse and conversation" has been too quickly accepted as the ideal model for the teaching of writing. Instead, Halloran seeks a complementary relationship between what he calls the "conversational model" and the "declamatory model." He writes, "Conversation emphasizes the need to observe established proprieties of discourse, to say what is expected and advance the thinking of a group in a more-or-less predictable direction. Declamation emphasizes the possibility of saying something surprising, of disappointing expectations and striking off in a new direction that may or may not prove fruitful."

As this overview should indicate, the essays Enos has gathered here explore a plurality of angles on disciplinary "histories"--personal, professional, and sometimes combinations thereof. But in a spirit truly appropriate to honoring Win Horner's work in rhetoric and composition, each of the essays adheres to a fundamental principle: that "studying the rhetorics of history can and should have strong and immediate connections to where we spend much of our time--in the classroom helping students become aware of their many rhetorical choices in various kinds of discourse." For me and doubtless many other JAC readers, this is the real value in Learning from the Histories of Rhetoric«this and the chance to reflect a moment on a career which has always linked history and possibility.