No More Learning

Second, we find in the conjunction of postclassical and postmodern rhet- orics a confirmation of "free speech" as a stance or posture rather than a reve- lation of the truth itself. Sophistic tactics combine parrhe^sia with the arts of irony, allusion, and generic experimentation, tactics at present more at home in electronic media than print or face-to-face contexts both in and out of school. 36 Rhetoric and writing in twentieth-century U. S. schools have most commonly occupied the domains of the pragmatic and instrumental, the earnest and straightforward, the clear and self-present. We specialize in the arts of free speech: of rational argument, logic, clear thinking. No doubt these arts, in all their complexity and power, should remain a strong emphasis for rhetoric studies. Perhaps the twist in the postmodern paideia has to do with how we represent their status and effects, their place within the poikilos nature--the pied, multicolored, mottled, intricate, changeful, unstable, wily ways--of twenty-first-century communications. Reimagining pedagogical mixes of instrumental and literary is clearly not a call to set the aside logos, nor would it entail the wholesale adoption of an ancient curriculum. 37 In the work of public rhetoric of this volume, the logos is often embedded within other genres: the academic conference (Condit), the meeting (Grabill), and the online exchange (Cushman). As pedagogues, public works rhetors, like their predecessors, construct practice sessions: mock scenarios in which students with disabilities can invent terminologies for their conditions and experi- ment with and restructure their emotional stances (Flower). Coogan's literacy group works in expressive modes--producing stories in recognizably literary forms--to which publics responded powerfully.
The 2008 presidential campaign gives us a striking example of how far we have to go--we academics and we citizens--in mastering the codes of free speech and figured discourse. Barack Obama's success as a memoirist prior to
The Prospects for the Public Work of Rhetoric 293
his candidacy for the highest office made front-page news in an article titled "The Story of Obama, Written by Obama. " Obama's self-presentation in Dreams from my Father, writes Janny Scott, "leaves an impression of candidness and authenticity that gives it much of its power. " The article goes on to quote Stanford English professor Arnold Rampersad, author of a biography of Ralph Ellison: "The book is so literary. . . . It is so full of clever tricks--inventions for literary effect--that I was taken aback, even astonished. But make no mistake, these are simply the tricks that art trades in, and out of these tricks is sup- posed to come our realization of truth. "38 The journalist gets what the English professor finds "astonishing": that truth is realized though persuasive discourse.
Of the many truths realized by the public rhetors in this volume, I close by nominating as the most vividly hopeful the Richmond teens' "sanctuary" mural (see this book's dust jacket). A powerful fusion of word and image that becomes a public argument, this act of fabrication reminded me, in all of its colorful, courageous improbability, of the evocations of peace and harmony echoing through Greek rhetoric under empire. 39 Publics have always been constructed in the absence of and hope for an ideal. With their act of fabri- cation, the teens create a public space of appearance, asserting their "reality" in Arendt's sense, and their hope: "Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal. "40
Notes
1. Arendt, Human Condition, 198.
2. See Royster, "Disciplinary Landscape," on traditions.
3. Ignatieff, "Burden," 22.
4. Foster, "Rediscovery," 2-3.
5. Kagan, Schmitt, and Donnelly, "Rebuilding," 1, iv. See also Hartnett and Stengrim,
Globalization, 1-39.
6. Mendelsohn, "Theatres," 79-84.
7. Such a direction could also be understood as the historical equivalent of anthro-
pology's turn toward "studying up. " See Nader, "Up the Anthropologist," 284-311.
8. Hartnett and Stengrim, Globalization, 267-92.
9. San Francisco Chronicle, February 19, 2003. Bush made these informal remarks in
reference to worldwide protests the day before in conversation with reporters after an unrelated event at the White House. Numerous national and international newspapers quoted the remarks on February 19, 2003.
10. Haussamen, "Editorial. " For a longer history, see Wines, "Ethics Violations. "
11. Smith and Low, Introduction, 1-16. See also Hauser, Vernacular Voices, 1-30.
12. See recent studies by Goldhill, Erotic Edge, 1-28; Pernot, Rhetoric, 128-201; and
Whitmarsh, Greek Literature, 1-38, for general discussions of this group, including the problematic nature of the "Second Sophistic" label, and for an extensive bibliography. All subsequent dates will be in the Common Era unless specified.
13. Carolyn Miller's chapter in this volume provides an illuminating and carefully documented discussion of "concealment" as a transhistorical feature of rhetorical practice. The question here concerns the choice of tactics under specific historical and material circumstances.
294 Susan C. Jarratt
14. Brown, Power and Persuasion, 51-52. 15. Konstan, Emotions, 31.
16. Foucault, Fearless Speech, 12.
17. Connolly, "Virile Tongues," 86.
18. Ahl, "Art of Safe Criticism," 184, 203. 19. Foucault, Fearless Speech, 22.
20. See, for example, Jarratt, "George W. Bush. " 21. Philostratus, Lives, 21.
22. For accounts of the reigns of the two emperors who became the epitomes of vio- lent misrule, see Suetonius, Twelve Caesars, 213-46, 299-314.
23. Dio Chrysostom, "Kingship Discourses. "
24. On the literal level, the comment may be taken to refer to language differences, although translator Wilmer Cave Wright comments "that Trajan understood Greek is probable. " Philostratus, Lives, 20-21 n. 5. The best education was in Attic Greek, but Roman public life and legal actions were conducted in Latin, which not all of the Greek intelligentsia deigned to learn. It is assumed that were many vernacular languages spo- ken in the empire, although very few written records remain. Among them would have been demotic Greek, Celtic, Coptic, Punic, Aramaic, Syriac, and numerous others. On this topic, see Brunt, Roman Imperial Themes, 277-80, for an overview and bibliography.
25. See Whitmarsh, Greek Literature, 181-246.
26. Brunt, Roman Imperial Themes, 268.
27. See Whitmarsh, Greek Literature, 207, 246. Whitemarsh argues the unlikelihood
that any of these orations were presented to Trajan. Within Whitmarsh's theoretical paradigm, searching for extratextual contexts and effects dooms the historian/critic to an "expressive-realist" methodology (see 20-38). His emphasis on the textuality of sec- ond sophistic rhetoric is accompanied by a severely diminished recognition of material circumstances. In my view, exile is more than a trope.
28. Rose, "Cicero," 367. See also Poulakos, Speaking, 4, on the political orientation of Isocrates' rhetoric in the classical era.
29. For a reading of figured discourse in Anna Comnena's Byzantine era history, Alex- iad, see Quandahl and Jarratt, "'To Recall Him,'" 301-35.
30. Too late to fall under Philostratus's designation "Second Sophist," Libanius none- theless belongs with them, as he carries on the rhetorical practices of the Greek revival in the Roman East. For background on Libanius, see Libanius, Autobiography; Norman, General Introduction, xi-xviii; Cribiore, School of Libanius, 13-41.
31. Norman, General Introduction, xi-xiii.
32. Libanius, "Oration 11," 31.
33. For Libanius's financial circumstances, see his own extensive Autobiography and
Norman, General Introduction. On Libanius's school, see Cribiore, School of Libanius, 111-73.
34. Homer, Iliad, "Book 8," 231-50. (Fagles translates the key term as "cable. ")
35. Libanius, "Oration 11," 34-36.
36. See Fishman et al. , "Performing Writing," 224-52, on student performance within
the academic sphere.
37. See Brady, "Review," 70-81, for a review of new books on composition and literature. 38. Scott, "Story of Obama," 22 (emphasis added).
39. See, for example, Aristides' encomium of Rome. Oliver, "Ruling Power," 901-3. See
George, "From Analysis to Design," 11-39, on visual design as argument. 40. Arendt, Human Condition, 199-200.
The Prospects for the Public Work of Rhetoric 295
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Contributors
John M. Ackerman is an associate professor of communication at the University of Colo- rado at Boulder. He directs the Program for Writing and Rhetoric and holds the Ineva Baldwin Chair of Arts and Sciences. He codirects the 2011 Rhetoric Society of America Institute in Boulder and has chaired the Doctoral Consortium of Rhetoric and Compo- sition. His research on disciplinarity, architecture, and everyday life has appeared in various journals and edited collections; an article with Louise Phelps on disciplinary visibility will appear in the sixty-year commemorative issue of College Composition and Communication.
M. Lane Bruner is currently professor of rhetoric and politics in the Department of Com- munication at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the author of Democ- racy's Debt (2009) and Strategies of Remembrance (2002), and he is a coeditor of Market Democracy in Post-Communist Russia (2005). He has written numerous essays appearing in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Discourse and Society, and Text and Performance Quarterly. His current research is on political psy- choses, artful resistance, and the aesthetic state.
Ralph Cintron is an associate professor of English studies as well as Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He is the author of Angel- stown: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday, which received honorable mention for the Victor Turner prize in ethnographic writing from the American Anthropological Association. He has also been a Rockefeller Foundation fellow; a Ful- bright scholar at the University of Prishtina in Kosova, where he taught political sci- ence; and twice a Great Cities Institute scholar at the College of Urban Planning and Public Administration at UIC. He has been elected to the executive boards of the Col- lege Conference on Composition and Communication and the Rhetoric Society of America. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled "Democracy as Fetish: Rhetoric, Ethnography, and the Expansion of Life" and coediting with Robert Hariman Power, Rhetoric, and Political Culture: The Texture of Political Action.
Celeste M. Condit is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia. Her work on the social impacts of genet- ics has been supported by the National Institutes of Health's Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) Program, and she has been a project PI in the CDC-funded South- ern Center for Communication, Health, and Poverty at the University of Georgia. In addition to approximately a hundred scholarly essays, she has published five books, including The Meanings of the Gene (1999) and, with John Lucaites, Crafting Equality: America's Anglo-African Word (1994). She was elected to the National Communication Association's Distinguished Scholars in 2002.
David J. Coogan is an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth Univer- sity. His work on community literacy, rhetorical theory, and social change has appeared in the journals College Composition and Communication, College English, and Community
298 Contributors
Literacy and in the book Active Voices, edited by Patty Malesh and Sharon Stetson. He is currently finishing a second book, The Prison inside Me: Writing beyond the Bars, the healing story of a writing workshop that began at the Richmond City Jail, followed twelve men into prison, and ended with their return to society.
Ellen Cushman is an associate professor of writing, rhetoric, and American cultures. She is currently finishing a book on the evolution of the Cherokee syllabary, based on four years of ethnohistorical research. She is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and currently serves as a Sequoyah commissioner. In addition to The Struggle and the Tools (1998) and Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook, edited with Eugene Kintgen, Barry Kroll, and Mike Rose Bedford (2001), her research on literacy studies has included publications in College English, College Composition and Communication, Research in the Teaching of English, Reflections, and Kairos and is forthcoming in Pedagogy and Ethnohistory.
David Fleming is an associate professor of English and director of the Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of City of Rhetoric: Revital- izing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America (2008) and On the Hinge of History: Fresh- man Composition and the Long Sixties, 1958-1974 (forthcoming). He is currently at work on a book about rhetorical education: past, present, and future.
Linda Flower is a professor of rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University and has been co- director of the National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon and of the Carnegie Mellon Center for Community Outreach. She is the author of Construction of Negotiated Meaning: A Social Cognitive Theory of Writing (1994) and Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement, which won the 2009 RSA book award.
Diana George is professor of rhetoric and writing at Virginia Tech, where she currently serves as director of composition and the Writing Center. Her work has appeared in a number of collections and journals including College English, College Composition and Communication, and Reflections. She is a past Braddock Award winner and co-author with John Trimbur of the textbook Reading Culture.
Jeffrey T. Grabill is a professor of rhetoric and professional writing and codirector of the Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center at Michigan State University. He is the author of Community Literacy Programs and the Politics of Change (2001) and Writing Community Change: Designing Technologies for Citizen Action (2007). His essays have appeared in College Composition and Communication, Technical Communication Quar- terly, Computers and Composition, and English Education.
Erik Green is currently a Ph. D. student in the Department of Education at University of California, Santa Cruz, with a concentration on language, literacy, and culture, and a recipient of the Chancellor's Fellowship. A graduate from Michigan State University, he received a B. A. in English and an M. A. in critical studies in literacy and pedagogy. His research interests include the use of personal narrative in developing identity, queer lit- eracies, and the sponsorship of nondominant discourses.
Gerard A. Hauser is a professor of communication and College Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is editor of Philosophy and Rhetoric. His pub- lications include Introduction to Rhetorical Theory, second edition (2002) and Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (1999), recipient of the National Com- munication Association's Hochmuth-Nichols Book Award. He is past president of the Rhetoric Society of America and recipient of its George Yoos Distinguished Service
Contributors 299 Award. He is an RSA Fellow and an NCA Distinguished Scholar. His current research
focuses on vernacular rhetoric and rhetorics of resistance.
Susan C. Jarratt is professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine and the past coordinator of the University of California, Irvine's Writing Pro- gram. Her research interests include public writing broadly construed, from ancient Greco-Roman rhetoric to contemporary writing, feminism, and critical pedagogy. She is the author of Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured and is currently work- ing on a new manuscript, "Chain of Gold," about the Second Sophists.
David A. Jolliffe is professor of English and curriculum and instruction at the Univer- sity of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where he holds the Brown Chair in English Literacy. He is the co-author, with William Covino, of Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries. His most recent book, with Hephzibah Roskelly, is Everyday Use: Rhetoric at Work in Reading and Writing.
Erik Juergensmeyer is an assistant professor of composition and rhetoric at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. Beyond his work in action research, argumentation, and assessment, he has recently started a peace and conflict studies program and a commu- nity mediation center that seek to create increased opportunities for restorative justice. His past work appears in Composition Studies, Rhetoric Review, and WPA Journal.
Paula Mathieu is an associate professor of English and director of First-Year Writing at Boston College. Her writing, which focuses on public discourse, economics, homeless- ness, and university-community partnerships, includes a book, Tactics of Hope: The Pub- lic Turn in English Composition, and two coedited collections, Beyond English, Inc. with Claude Hurlbert and David Downing and Writing Places with Tim Lindgren, George Grattan and Staci Shultz, as well as articles in CCCs, Rhetoric Review, and Works and Days.