JAC Volume 16 Issue 3

Editor Rosalind J. Gabin writes that Discourse Studies in Honor of James L. Kinneavy "bears witness to the range and vitality of discourse studies today," representing "pluralism in its best sense" (xxxiii). However, with fourteen essays discussing a wide array of subjects, as well as essays that pay tribute to James L. Kinneavy, the festschrift achieves pluralism at the sacrifice of focus. What generally connects these essays is that they reflect the range of Kinneavy's work, often critiquing and extending his theories. If the essays share a dominant concern, it is an interest in bringing ethics and rhetorical history into rhetoric and composition discussions today.

The authors frequently take opposing epistemological, ethical, and ideological positions, creating dialogues among some of the essays. Several discuss whether antifoundational rhetorics can support teaching from an ethical or political position. John J. Ruszkiewicz contends that they cannot, in his analysis of articles from the 1980s that categorize composition theories in order to advocate social or transactional rhetorics. However, in her essay on ethics in WAC classrooms, Gabin argues that a postmodern position can conceive "ethical consciousness not as some kind of essence but rather as an evolving personal identity worked out in our contacts with others and with language" (181).

Victor J. Vitanza presents a hermeneutics of suspicion and a rhetoric that celebrates the unconscious, "radical multiplicities," and "Comedy/Hysteria" and operates beyond "any Aristotelian notion of homological thinking" and "any notion of a Humanistic stable self' or speaking-subject'" (56). Opposing philosophical "rhetorik" with a subversive postmodern rhetoric, Vitanza argues that "The History of Rhetorik . . . fosters, among its unsuspecting students, a love for the very things—Control, Mastery, and Power—that dominate and exploit them" (65). Richard A. Cherwitz and James W. Hikins, in contrast, advocate philosophical realism and a "relationist theory of meaning." They reject the traditional position that words merely point to or represent things in reality and the postmodern position that language points to nothing other than itself. Rather, they assert that

Several essays argue for the relevance of classical rhetorics in the postmodern world. For example, Phillip Sipiora maintains that Isocrates provides "a more dynamic, open approach to the problematics of discourse production" with a paideia that rejects absolutes and emphasizes opinion, practical intelligence, and ethics (20). In one of the festschrift's most interesting essays, Janet Atwill and Janice Lauer claim that conceiving rhetoric as a techne—as a productive knowledge that draws on "a suppressed tradition of cunning intelligence" rather than logic—circumvents the theory/practice binary and "ensures that rhetoric could not authorize itself as knowledge for its own sake nor be the instrument of a specific social and political objective" (36, 29). According to Atwill and Lauer, as a techne, "rhetoric possesses the capacity not only to distribute social power but to expose its arbitrary nature—to put the terms of cultural authority into question, where they can be challenged by competing social, epistemological, and political standards" (37).

Jean Dietz Moss and George Yoos also debate the value of Aristotle's categories of knowledge, and of Kinneavy's Aristotelian discourse categories, for understanding scientific discourse. Defending Aristotle's categories, Moss opposes extending rhetoric to explain all discourse, especially scientific discourse, where ethos and pathos are inappropriate proofs. Yoos, however, advocates a rhetorical approach to studying scientific discourse because what distinguishes a science "as science" is culturally determined. Citing Thomas Kuhn, Yoos argues that when scientists are writing "normal science" within the paradigm of the field, the voice has "to reflect an author's commitment to the team's norms and standards," but when a writer "proposes an alteration in a paradigm, he redefines his colleagues" and often has to "use the whole range of techniques of rhetorical persuasion" (174).

Other essays consider the place of composition in English departments. Richard E. Young argues that the Romantic distinction between "art" and "craft" helps justify composition's lowly status in English departments. William J. McCleary discusses Kinneavy's description of the field of English in A Theory of Discourse and how, by integrating composition, literature, and linguistics, it can redefine both the college English major and the English curriculum from elementary through graduate school.

The most entertaining essay in the collection, by Donald A. McQuade, explores the close relationship of persuasion, faith, and belief in nineteenth-century patent medicine advertising. McQuade shows how patent medicine advertisements appropriated Christian revivalist rhetoric and discusses how American religion now appropriates the rhetoric of Madison Avenue. Donald F. Stewart's essay on Fred Newton Scott is notable as one of his last published writings, and its subject is a fitting one considering Stewart's role in bringing Scott back to the attention of rhetoric scholars. Although Stewart's essay incorporates previously unexamined archival material by and about Scott, it does not much revise Stewart's previous work, except for an endnote on the influence of German transcendental philosophy on Scott. Nevertheless, it does provide a good overall portrait of Scott's teaching, service, and scholarship.

One problem with Discourse Studies in Honor of James L. Kinneavy is that because of delays in publication, its articles were all written several years ago and seldom cite work since 1989. Some of the essays would have been more timely three or four years ago. Further, with the inadequate coverage of edited collections in composition bibliographies, the pluralistic nature of the festschrift may make it difficult for readers interested in the subjects here to discover these essays. That would be a shame, for this collection contributes to our knowledge and challenges readers' assumptions about rhetorical history, ethics, and epistemology and their relation to the teaching of writing.