JAC Volume 14 Issue 2

I strongly recommend Rhetorical Memory and Delivery (RMD) to readers of JAC. This unequivocal endorsement was shaped in a number of ways. Of course, and as I will mention later, there are specific contributions: the unity of the eleven-essay collection, the particular insights of individual contribu­tors, and the resulting synthetic thesis that they all make together. My opinions, however, were also shaped in other, more indirect ways. I found myself eager to read and return to the volume. I found myself recommending particular essays to doctoral students. I found myself recommending the book to my colleagues and discussing it in classes. I found myself eager to write notes not only for this review, but also to save (and thereby preserve) the insights I read. Finally, I must confess that I found myself tempted to start writing this review even before I had finished the book (a temptation I ultimately resisted) so that I could share my views with JAC readers as I had with my students and colleagues. What better endorsement can a volume have?

In addition to the particular essays of this collection, there is an overall contribution which must be underscored, for it is the volume’s greatest achievement. RMD takes what are commonly regarded as the two “lost canons” of rhetoric—memory and delivery—and demonstrates their central importance in respect to the new technologies of composition and commu­nication. Winifred Bryan Homer best expresses this point in her “Introduc­tion” by seeing this book as “a turning point in the history of rhetoric” because “its revival of the classical canons of memory and delivery.., reaches into the past to explain the present and suggest possibilities for the future.” Readers will recall that Homer forever changed notions of delivery for composition in her Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition (St. Martin’s, 1988) when she reconceptualized delivery as presentation and showed how delivery can be an important aspect of literacy as well as orality. Contributors to RMD have also repositioned these two classical canons to show how delivery and memory provide a more sensitive awareness of current, mediated discourse practices. While none will deny the newness of these insights, the adaptions of canons to new systems of expression is consistent with rhetoric’s history. What is particularly noteworthy is how well it is executed in this volume. Will future historians of rhetoric be able to say one day that the rediscovery of the lost canons of memory and delivery began in the latter decades of the twentieth century? I think that the answer is “yes” and that Rhetorical Memory and Delivery will be cited along with Walter J. Ong’s Oralily and Literacy (Methuen, 1982) and Eric A. Havelock’s The Muse Learns to Write (Yale, 1986) as an illustration of such an awareness. It will be included with the Ong/Havelock volumes because it serves the same function: important contributions are made in their own right but, and of equal importance, this text also stimulates readers to direct continued research and scholarship toward these topics.

There is not sufficient space to discuss how each essay serves to stimulate continued work, but certain contributions serve as illustrations. As Kathleen E. Welch says best in “Reconfiguring Writing and Delivery in Secondary Orality,” “memory and delivery do not wither with the growing dominance of writing; rather, they change form.” Readers will see how contributors Welch, Sharon Crowley, and Robert J. Connors extend their own established work on technology, memory, and delivery and foreshadow the agendas of their future projects. Virginia Allen’s essay “The Faculty of Memory” is the best essay-length historical treatment of the topic that I have read. Sam Dragga’s “The Ethics of Delivery” is an insightful treatment of how docu­ment-design decisions are intertwined with rhetorical ethics issues. Jay David Bolter’s “Hypertext and the Rhetorical Canons” was among the most educational pieces in this collection for me. Bolter, well versed in and comfortable with both classical rhetoric and computer studies, explores the implications of hypertext in a manner that shows its impacts on classical rhetoric. The clarity of Bolter’s treatment of this complex topic is notewor­thy, especially when he discusses memory as not only repetition but also possession.

Reynolds edited his volume with the intent of approaching memory and delivery from a variety of perspectives, and the final four essays in his collection continue this eclectic orientation. Joyce Irene Middleton weaves an analysis of orality and literacy with such control over Ong’s insights that she provides readers of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon with a paradigm for examining authorial voice, cultural memory, and the impact of cultural literacy. David Marc’s futuristic mass-media analysis provides provocative (but depressing) views of media control, bringing into focus the fear that Generation X may be the vanguard of cultural change and not, as we all hope, an aberration to be corrected. Lucid and stirring, Marc’s tenor of the media is so jarring that it will invite active class discussion. Those who read Bruce E. Gronbeck’s insightful introduction to his festschnift honoring Father Ong, Media, Consciousness, and Culture (Sage, 1991), will again find him weaving orality and literacy into the fabric of cultural studies. Here, Gronbeck’s extension of Ong gives special attention to “the phonocentmic and ocularcentric dimensions of rhetorical discourse” by emphasizing the “visu­al/remembered” and the “spoken/recollected.” Well grounded in historical rhetoric, Gronbeck is able to use this base to make salient prognostications about culture, and thus meritoriously advance himself beyond the majority of cultural critics who write with no apparent historical knowledge. Finally, the personal “Afterwords” of Sheri L. Helsley, then a graduate student at Old Dominion under Reynolds, are a uniquely appropriate synthesis to the volume, for they place the implications of this scholarship into the perspec­tive of those students who are now putting themselves into career paths that will extend such work.

Two final points need to be made if Rhetorical Memory and Delivery is to be evaluated properly. First, anyone who has edited a volume such as this leaves that experience with a profound appreciation for the complexity of the task. Reynolds is lobe commended for his finely edited volume, his vision to recognize its potential impact, and his diligence in seeing the project through to completion. Second, the editor and contributors of RMD have issued a challenge to their readers. We may choose to discuss the implications of memory and delivery among ourselves, engage in speculation, do derivative work (along with the inevitable arguments that result), and thereby elect to remain insular by choosing to write and communicate only with ourselves. I feel, however, that this collection invites its readers to take another, less traveled route. We should build on the work here by marshalling historical scholarship, critical analysis, and empirical research to test our views. We should reach out to fields like speech communication, whose people have done impressive work on delivery. In a similar spirit, we should benefit from the excellent work in cognitive psychology on memory. Our interactions with kindred disciplines will provide, as they have in so many ways before, the basis for helping us to a more thorough knowledge of memory and delivery. Rhetorical Memory and Delivery is not only valuable, then, for what it tells readers (delivery), but also for what it reminds us (memory) about how to proceed.