Classical Rhetoric Retold: Re-Mapping the Territory
Cheryl Glenn1993
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Abstract
In the process of delegitimating the master narratives that have sustained Western civilization in the past, Postmodernism provoked a "crisis in narrative" which Francois Lyotard describes as narrativity that presents a sense of loss but not of what is lost. Recent histories of rhetoric have promulgated the view that rhetorical maps never reflect a neutral reality, but despite attempts at objectivity, unavoidably reflect the writer's perspective. Fortunately, rhetorical scholars of every stripe are involved in various re-tellings and remappings of rhetorical history, all acknowledging the political nature of their work and the biases mined in their own rhetorical territory. In particular, the recent body of historiography in which feminist researchers recover and recuperate women's contributions to the broad history of culture-making constitutes a new, more scenic excursion into the history of rhetoric. By following the arguments set forth by Joan Wallach Scott,Thomas Laqueur, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and others, (that culture and gender are overlapping, symbiotic, mutually imprinting, ever-evolving categories) it is possible to more accurately chart and account for those gendered limits and powers that lie on the borders of rhetorical history. As the histories of rhetoric are retold a new frontier is crossed. But it is well to be wary, for narratives of gender analysis can harbor the same overly grandiose and totalizing concepts as those now-disputed "grand narratives" of old to which Lyotard refers. (Twenty-eight references and two illustrations are attached.) (SAM)
Key takeaways
- We could pull the neatly folded history of rhetoric out of our glove compartment, unfold it, and navigate our course through the web of lines that connected the principal centers of rhetoric.'
- Historiographic practices, then, have become so firmly situated in the postmodern critique of rhetoric, that to say that the history of rhetoric is [now] pluralistic is to utter a commonplace" (199)--so Robert Scott tells us in the latest issue of Pre/Text, for pluralism, he writes, was "born of the bewilderment that postmodernist slants bring together" (199).
- As Carole Blair and Mary Kahn demonstrate in their "Revising the History of Rhetorical Theory," such challenges to the map of rhetoric will not only restore women to rhetorical history and rhetorical history to women, but the restoration itself revitalizes theory by shaking the conceptual foundations of rhetorical study.
- Thus, the newest, most interesting, and perhaps most scenic route into rhetorical history may well be via contemporary gender theory.
- One particularly interesting juncture of gender studies and rhetorical history is the Enlightenment.
