Oldspeak/Newspeak: Rhetorical Transformations, I might as well note at the beginning, is a painful example of what new and cheaper printing technologies are doing to scholarly publishing. Each manuscript (the volume is a collection of essays) seems to have been prepared on a different typewriter/printer: some have justified margins, others ragged; some have readable type, some not. However, since the volume’s sponsor, the Rhetoric Society of America, has one of the least-expensive dues schedules of any professional organization, perhaps complaints should be muted accordingly.

OldspeaklNewspeak: Rhetorical Transformations, the volume’s introduction informs us, is a collection of a third of the papers presented at an identically named conference held in July 1984. With few exceptions the participants appear to have glanced at the Orwell-inspired theme and then gone their own ways. Neither the handful of papers on Orwell nor any of the others use “transformation” in its title though one or two at least deal with Burkean transformations without emphasizing the fact. The editor, Charles W. Kneupper, has divided the papers into three sections. The first is the keynote address by Lloyd Bitzer, “George Orwell’s Rejection of Tyrannical Rhetoric”; the second is called “Critical Essays” and includes all of the other essays on Orwell, plus examinations of political rhetoric of various types; and the third is called “Essays in the History and Theory of Rhetoric”

Most of the essays are worthwhile, though it is dispiriting to discover how few of the participants writing on 1984 have the slightest knowledge, apart from that work, of the author’s two-and-a-half decade career, during which he wrote hardly anything that was not political and much that was contradictory. A greater knowledge of the man (e.g. that he earned the epithet “conscience of the Left”) might have made some critics of Reagan, the Moral Majority, and the New Right a little more humble and less complacent. It is not that their analyses are wrong, but is their implication that only the Right is rhetorically dishonest a fair one? Orwell, at least in his own time, did not think so—and to this day much of the British Left has yet to forgive this scourge from their own camp.

Of the 21 essays, at least ten ought to be of interest to the instructor of advanced composition. No composition instructor who also teaches literature is likely to find Professor Bitzer’s address new or interesting, but two of the essays directly addressing 1984 plus at least two of the examinations of more contemporary political rhetoric should prove useful in any class concerned with the ways in which language can mislead or distort. Specifically, the essays by Dennis Rohatyn and Larry Williamson (“1984: A Dramatistic Approach”), Douglas N. Freeman (“Contemporary Applications of Orwell’s Concept of Newspeak in 1984: An Analysis of Intentionally Misleading Rhetoric”), James R. Bennett, (“Doublethink and the Rhetoric of Crisis: President Reagan’s October 22, 1983 Speech on Arms Reduction”), and Caroline Whitson (“In the Beginning Is the Word. Orwellian Reality Control and the New Christian Right’) all contain insights and examples which should help students analyze the world of prose and examine their own writing practices more acutely.

But the teacher of advanced composition is likely to be more impressed by a handful of essays in the third part of the volume. Charles Kneupper, for example in “Developing Rhetoric as a Modern Discipline: Lessons from the Classical Tradition,” reminds us of the need to develop a modern rhetoric which will overcome the “separation between wisdom and eloquence, between knowledge and the ability to communicate, between vision and the capacity to inspire.” His reading of the past suggests that there is at least a possibility of our succeeding in meeting this need. If Kneupper is more inspiring than original, Frank D’Angelo is more cogent and lucid than innovative. That is, his “Topoi, Paradigms, and Rhetorical Enthymemes” is more of an elegant restatement of his earlier work on the topoi as verbal schemata, and as such it has great value for any one looking for a reason why “methods of developing paragraphs” still manage to survive so many smug assaults. And in the most impressively researched and argued essay in the collection, James Porter (“Reading Presences in Texts: Audience as Discourse Communities”) examines the assumptions of the variety of literary criticism with the closest ties to rhetoric. His comments on different types of writer-reader relationships within a “discourse community” and on the limitations of anthologies of reprinted essays (ripped away, as it were, from their original “intertextuality”) are well worth pondering.

Finally, there are two essays concerned with the nature of epistemic reality. It is unfortunate that neither writer on the subject seems to know Richard Ohmann’s work (now over 20 years old) on epistemic stylistics, but both Richard Fulkerson and James Berlin have interesting things to say about rhetoric as a way of structuring reality. Fulkerson (“On Theories of Rhetoric as Epistemic: A Bi-disciphnary View”) Is useful in distinguishing the various ways that “epistemic” has been defined in English and Speech departments, and he is refreshing in his ability to separate practical benefits (for the teacher) from pitfalls and convincing theories from “solipsistic” excesses that are “pedagogically and critically useless.” Berlin sees epistemic rhetoric as one side of an argument forever being fought in American universities. That argument, needless to say, is over the proper role of writing instruction, and the epistemicist’s dialectical opponents are, of course, those who put correctness in style and arrangement above all else. As presented in this essay, Berlin’s history of writing in American universities may seem a bit sketchy, but he manages, I believe, to justify his final reminder to his readers:

Berlin’s and Fulkerson’s essays serve as a fine dialectic on an extremely important topic and remind us that rhetoric studies are currently in a satisfying state of intellectual ferment. Issues always implicit in the teaching of composition are now being explored with rigor from a refreshing depth of knowledge. By themselves these two essays would make this volume a welcome addition to the field.