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1. A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism
While conducting research for this article, I often came across this claim:
Rhetorical criticism has traditionally been housed in speech communication de-
partments.1 One look at the bibliography for this article seems only to validate
this claim; almost all of the journals and books are written by and for speech
communication scholars. And really, this comes as little surprise when we con-
sider that the majority of the New Rhetoricians are communication theorists or
that speech communication scholarship has been interested in analyzing specific
communication situations. In all, the work of these scholars attempts to define
the strategies employed, determine whether those strategies were effective to a
specific rhetorical situation, and from that, articulate theories based on this care-
ful observation about different approaches to rhetorical criticism.
However, I remain uncomfortable with making the claim that rhetorical crit-
icism grew up in speech communication, which to me implies that the field of
rhetoric and composition does not have a history with rhetorical criticism. Yet
many of the publications in our field give lie to that implied claim—Shirley
Wilson Logan’s “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-
Century Black Women, for example, conducts rhetorical criticism of the public
discourses and speeches of nineteenth-century black women, while Ken
McAllister’s Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture con-
ducts an in-depth rhetorical analysis of computer games in an effort to articulate
a rhetorical theory that can account for games as a rhetorical text. The reason
that rhetorical criticism has historically “belonged” to speech communication
may simply be the fact that speech communication scholars have attempted to
define and theorize it as a legitimate disciplinary concern. The purpose of this
bibliographic synthesis is to provide rhetoric and composition scholars with a
broad understanding of the field so that we can begin to theorize the work we do
with rhetorical criticism and think through the ways in which we can enrich our
own scholarship.
Due to page-length limitations, I am unable to provide a synthesis of all the
different approaches to rhetorical criticism. I have chosen to limit my scope to
definitions, general methodology, and objects of rhetorical criticism, which com-
prise the first three sections. The final section will summarize four textbooks on
rhetorical criticism, all four of which provide excellent starting places for those
Rhetoric Review, Vol. 25, No. 4, 388–407
388 Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
JENNIFER DEWINTER
The University of Arizona

2. interested in the approaches of rhetorical criticism. And finally, the symposium
in this issue of Rhetoric Review provides useful materials for those interested in
working with rhetorical criticism.
Definitions and Purposes of Rhetorical Criticism
Defining rhetorical criticism is akin to defining rhetoric; everyone seems to
have a slightly different version, and that difference is both necessary and signif-
icant. Probably the most important book in contemporary rhetorical theory has
been Edwin Black’s 1965 Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. In this book
Black attempts to open the spaces of rhetoric, which were previously dominated
by Neo-Aristotelian rhetorical criticism as spearheaded by Wicheln in 1925.
Wicheln defined rhetorical criticism as “necessarily analytic,” including, as Aris-
totle does, careful attention to speaker, audience, style, and habit, while adding
to that a need to study both the oral and the written text. He then argues “[. . .]
throughout such a study one must conceive of the public man as influencing the
men of his own times by the power of his discourse” (39). In his book Black an-
alyzes different texts with a neo-Aristotelian lens, thereby exposing the limita-
tions of this rhetorical theory. Neo-Aristotelian criticism, Black concludes,
“[. . .] is founded upon a restricted view of human behavior, that there are dis-
courses which function in ways not dreamed of in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and that
there are discourses not designed for rational judges, but for men as they are”
(131). And it is this book that is often cited as ringing the death knell of neo-
Aristotelian criticism.
Black’s work, in many ways, opened the field of rhetorical criticism, and
in response to this opening, the Wingspread Conference (1970) invited twelve
scholars to present position papers on the prospects of rhetoric in the second
half of the twentieth century. These papers and responses to them were col-
lected into an edited book titled The Prospect of Rhetoric, and in these pages
we see a turn from neo-Aristotelian to rhetorical theories that take into account
communicative technologies, the necessary widening of scope in both theory
and practice, a clarified theory of reason as it relates to rhetoric, the restoration
of rational invention, and cultural and historical specificity in rhetorical situa-
tions (238–39). From this moment the definitions of rhetorical criticism diver-
sify—still recognizably rhetorical criticism but now trying to account for com-
plex understandings of knowledge creation, social and historical situatedness,
purposes, and so on.
Rhetorical criticism is, in its most umbrella-like form, simply criticism
that attends to rhetoric. For Charles Stewart it is “the study of man’s past at-
tempts to change the behavior of fellow man primarily through verbal sym-
A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 389

3. bols” (1). Further, in “Words Like Most Things,” Leff and Sachs define rhetor-
ical criticism (and the critic’s role) as the following: “Working from the
evidence within the text, the critic proceeds to make inferences about what the
work is designed to do, how it is designed to do it, and how well that design
functions to structure and transmit meanings within the realm of public experi-
ence” while framing that discourse within its context (256). And, as Black tells
us, “[r]hetoric is an architectonic art, ‘an art of structuring all principles and
products of knowing, doing, and making’—meaning that it is everywhere, that
it saturates human activity,” which means that rhetorical criticism analyzes all
human activity (Prospect 23). Brummett, like Black, argues in Rhetorical Di-
mensions of Popular Culture that rhetoric infuses all culture (including popular
culture), but he works to demarcate the different types of rhetoric to make
them more accessible for analysis. The three levels Brummett identifies are ex-
igent, quotidian, and conditional, with exigent operating on the surface in an
obvious way, conditional working at the level of ideology, and quotidian func-
tioning at a level between the two extremes.
The danger of rhetorical criticism, notes McGee, is that when the emphasis
is on “criticism,” making rhetoric subordinate to that term, one of two things can
happen: “From one angle, emphasis on ‘criticism’ dissolves rhetoric into philos-
ophy. [. . .] From another angle, the emphasis on ‘criticism’ dissolves rhetoric
into literary theory” (“Text” 275–76). McGee is interested in keeping the orality
and performativity of rhetoric alive during the process of rhetorical criticism:
“Rhetoric is artful, but it is artful as a performance, not as an artifact. When
rhetoric dissolves into literary criticism, the performative skills of the rhetorician
are devalued, buried in literature’s deep association with religion and the sacred
text” (276). Therefore, the rhetorical critic needs to attend to the historical and
cultural situation within which rhetoric is performed, for as Herzberg argues in
“Foucault’s Rhetorical Theory,” “Foucault makes it clear that the notion of argu-
ment and persuasion must be contextualized within discursive formations sup-
ported by systems of authority and control. Context itself has been a key term in
the development of critical rhetoric” or rhetorical criticism for that matter (78).
Finally, rhetorical criticism must do something; what it is that rhetoric must
do, however, is equally as vague. For Wayne Brockriede, “useful criticism, what-
ever else it may be, must function as an argument” (165), which will invite re-
sponse or confrontation and “may begin or continue a process enhancing an un-
derstanding of a rhetorical experience or of rhetoric. [. . .] The product of the
process of confrontation by argument and counterargument is a more depend-
able understanding of rhetorical experience and of rhetoric” (174). Thus rhetori-
cal criticism as argument can posit readings of texts to add to our understanding
of how speeches work by building on previous speeches and means of persua-
390 Rhetoric Review

4. sion (such as Leff and Mohrmann’s seminal article “Lincoln at Cooper Station”).
It can work to understand components of rhetoric and how they work in con-
junction with or against one another (such as genre theory and rhetorical criti-
cism). It can be used to expose inequality and oppression (such as rhetorical crit-
ics who use feminist, Native American, queer, and other lenses).
Rhetorical Criticism Methodologies
In his book Rhetorical Questions, Black places rhetorical criticism against
New Criticism, deconstructionism, and semanticism, making the claim that the
basic methodology of rhetorical criticism leans toward comparative judgment
and generic understandings. As a result of this, he continues, “[t]he rhetorical
critic is free to view discourse historically, comparatively, generically, or
isolatedly” (9). Still, this methodological position is driven by conceptual orien-
tation, which James Jasinski takes exception to in “The Status of Theory and
Method in Rhetorical Criticism”:
Methodologically driven criticism generally proceeds through a pro-
cess of deduction: a general method is applied to a specific case or
object. What I want to refer to as conceptually oriented criticism,
however, proceeds more through a process of abduction which
might be thought of as a back and forth tacking movement between
text and the concept or concepts that are being investigated simulta-
neously. (256)
Jasinski attributes both Browne and Leff for introducing conceptually critical
methodologies and then proceeds to trace other scholars who have engaged with
rhetorical criticism using this model in order to begin to provide a “thick” ac-
count of rhetorical concepts and situations.
Of course, other theorists have presented theories that attempt to break out
of the strict structures of methodologically driven criticism. In Archeology of
Knowledge, Foucault explores signs, logoi, and discourses, claiming that there
appears to be a general sense of “logophobia” to which Foucault responds:
If we wish—I will not say to efface this fear—but to analyze it in its
conditions, its activity and its effects, I believe we must resolve our-
selves to accept three decisions which our current thinking rather
tends to resist, and which belong to the three groups of function I
have just mentioned: to question our will to truth; to restore to dis-
A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 391

5. course its character as an event; to abolish the sovereignty of the
signifier. (229)
Rhetoric, for Foucault, must be contextualized within discursive formations, and
those formations are always situated within history and culture. While Foucault
is not a rhetorical criticism scholar, many scholars in both rhetoric and composi-
tion and speech communication have employed his theories on the discursive
practices of knowledge within historiographies. Also, because Foucault is not a
rhetorical critic, an unquestioned adoption of his ideas into the field of rhetoric
is challenged, and rightly so. Carole Blair, for example, argues that equating
rhetoric with symbolicity leads to disciplinary oblivion: “Symbolicity diverts us
from rhetoric’s fundamental capacity to do things, rather than simply mean
something” (32). And it is this concern for rhetorical criticism (and rhetoric) to
mean something that lies at the heart of the etic/emic approach debate.
As Campbell writes in his introduction to the 1990 Western Journal of
Speech Communication’s2 special issue on rhetorical criticism: “Whatever a
critic’s programmatic orientation, the basic questions of how to negotiate the
tension between a general model and a particular local instance of rhetorical ac-
tion remain contested” (250). In the etic approach, the critic is concerned with
generalized statements about rhetoric that are derived from well-defined meth-
odological procedures (much like the statement that I quoted by Black at the be-
ginning of this section). The emic approach, on the other hand, is completely sit-
uated within one rhetorical situation as it is contextualized in culture and history;
thus the observations or patterns described can only be valid in relation to that
one particular setting and cannot be described by a generalized theory that is im-
posed on a particular rhetorical situation. In “Interpretation and the Art of the
Rhetorical Critic,” Leff warns that the role of the emic critic is a more demand-
ing one:
Emic interpretation stresses the role of the critic, and in doing so, it
shifts the standards of rigor from the method of investigation to the
person of the investigator. The standards imposed on emic critics are
severe. They must have a thorough knowledge gained not primarily
through the study of theory but through intensive analysis of specific
critical studies. And they must also have a detailed, intimate, and
sympathetic understanding of the subject under investigation. (349)
This position is quite different from the role of the etic critic, who “presupposes
that what is known in rhetoric is embodied in rhetorical theory and that what is
not known—in the case of criticism, the interpretation of a particular rhetorical
392 Rhetoric Review

6. transaction—is to be apprehended only through what is known” (Black, “A
Note” 332). Black concludes that regardless of the critic’s positioning, the critic
is still an actor/actress who must navigate the requirements of new ideas or the
textures of alien experiences (“A Note” 336).
The etic/emic approaches are not the only entrance into rhetorical criticism.
W. Barnett Pearce’s chapter in Speech Communication in the 20th Century traces
scientific research methods, noting the move toward method-driven innovations
that employed the t- and F-texts, ANOVA, and a number of other statistical
lenses, as well as a move toward a metatheory for communication, both invigo-
rating the field by sparking intense debates. Herman Cohen, in “Development of
Research in Speech Communication: A Historical Perspective,” also discusses
the debates surrounding the positivist paradigm, but to this, he records the move-
ment toward social science methodologies. While Cohen limits interest in the
social science era to the 50s and 60s (the book in which this article appears,
Speech Communication in the 20th Century, was published in 1985), Hart’s 1994
article continues to argue for a social scientific methodology, but one that is
combined with humanist assumptions. In his article Hart is replying to Darsey’s
criticism that “Hart [. . .] seems to require that every study suggest its own
generalizability, adumbrate its own mosaic” (176). To this, Hart responds simply
that precise is good and social science is not necessarily barbarous.
The Western Journal of Communication’s summer 1990 special issue on
rhetorical criticism complicates and opens up the possibilities of methodologies
in rhetorical criticism. This issue, in many ways, explores how postmodernism
combined with rhetorical theory challenges and influences the ways in which we
must consider the texts of rhetorical criticism. The editors invited McGee and
Leff and Sachs to write two position papers and then invited a series of re-
sponses from other rhetorical critics, such as Gaonkar, Cox, Condit, Campbell,
Baxter and Goldsmith, Tailor, and Troester and Mester. In “Words the Most Like
Things: Iconicity and the Rhetorical Text,” Leff and Sachs criticize the
form/content dichotomy, arguing that neo-Aristotelian criticism attempts to re-
veal the logical structure of an argument, which will then enable the rhetorical
critic to expose the underlying form. Leff and Sachs offer iconicity as a means of
revealing “a cooperative interaction between form and meaning” (260), which
will provide the rhetorical critic the available theoretical tools to engage a text
without falling into the neo-Aristotelian trap. Their article then reads Edmund
Burke’s Bristol speech in order to show that content and style are inseparable:
“Form and meaning are imbricated at every level—the sentence, the paragraph,
and the discourse as a whole, and all the elements of Burke’s rhetoric interact
cooperatively to produce a structure of meaning” (268–69). Condit critiques Leff
and Sachs, not for addressing the form/context dichotomy, but for addressing
A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 393

7. that at the expense of the text/context dichotomy. By focusing on only canonical
texts and the sentence-level stylistics of those texts, argues Condit, Leff and
Sachs “tend to redesolve themselves into the form/content split on the other side,
exploring and appreciating style over content” (339). Further, seeking only dis-
course that is praiseworthy impoverishes rhetoric by ignoring the text and con-
text of the rhetorical situation. Gaonkar, on the other hand, responds to Leff and
Sachs’ text in quite a different manner, noting that Leff and Sachs, through privi-
leging the disciplined act of reading, recovers the object of rhetoric by rejecting,
in many ways, the postmodern destruction of that same object.
McGee’s article “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary
Culture” takes a wholly (or fragmentary) different approach to reading rhetorical
texts, focusing instead on text and context within a postmodern culture:
My way of stating the case (using the concept “fragment” to col-
lapse “context” into “text”) emphasizes an important truth about dis-
course: Discourse ceases to be what it is whenever parts of it are
taken “out of context.” Failing to account for “context,” or reducing
“context” to one or two of its parts, means quite simply that one is
no longer dealing with discourse as it appears in the world. (283)
In order to keep discourse in context, McGee argues for analyzing the struc-
tural relationships between apparently finished discourse and its sources, cul-
ture, and influences (280). Additionally, text and context cannot be fully com-
prehended without appreciating the role of the audience/consumers: “The only
way to ‘say it all’ in our fractured culture is to provide readers/audiences with
dense, truncated fragments which cue them to produce a finished discourse in
their minds. In short, text construction is now something done more by the
consumers than by the producers of discourse” (McGee 288). McGee is not
alone in arguing that the fragmentation of texts necessarily changes how we
must approach rhetorical criticism. In “Bitzer’s Model Reconstructed,” a revi-
sionist look at Lloyd Bitzer’s seminal article “The Rhetorical Situation,” Smith
and Lybarger argue that texts, audiences, and exigencies are all fragmented,
and multiple exigencies exist for every rhetorical situation, necessitating multi-
ple and fragmented audiences (205).
In response to McGee’s article, Celeste Condit thinks through McGee’s ar-
gument about the powerful role of the audience when reading postmodern text
fragments. She questions McGee’s statement that text construction is now syn-
onymous with decoding or reading a text, eventually concluding that they are not
the same thing. “Moreover,” continues Condit,
394 Rhetoric Review

8. it is not even clear how frequently audiences exercise their creative
capacities. I am dismayed at my students’ whole-hearted attempt to
live themselves unreflexively into the text of a Michelob Light com-
mercial. I doubt that “text construction is not something done more
by the consumers than by the producers of discourse.” (340)
Like Condit, J. Robert Cox is left with some very real concerns about McGee’s
claims. Cox questions the apparent eroding of rhetorical sources, which would
lead to an equal eroding of rhetoric (322). In this article Cox theorizes frag-
mented or unfinished texts and wonders if a text can ever be whole and if so,
how. He concludes with this changing definition of what rhetorical critics are be-
coming in postmodernity:
[. . . T]he fragmentation of a culture’s mediating function requires a
departure from critics’ usual academic practice. Critics of rhetoric in
post-modern culture may be forced by circumstances to become so-
cial critics. At a minimum, such critics may be called upon not only
to identify those conditions that are logically and socially prior to a
discursively competent public, but also to identify what systemati-
cally distorts the possibility of such publics. (327)
The question then becomes: How does a theorist fulfill both prior conditions and
public distortions?
One possibility and a methodology that is gaining support in rhetorical criti-
cism is through longitudinal studies. Historically, rhetorical criticism has fo-
cused on a close reading of an isolated text or a specific rhetorical situation. For
example, the 1970 textbook Speech Criticism by Lester Thonssen, A. Craig
Baird, and Waldo W. Braden dictates that in order to conduct effective rhetorical
criticism, the critic must first establish the authenticity of texts, reconstruct the
social settings, and then have a full understanding of the speaker and his/her
background, all outlined in Part IV: Preliminary Aspects of Rhetorical Criticism.
Following this, the critic analyzes the actual rhetorical moment or text. Camp-
bell challenges this traditional methodology, arguing that we cannot truly under-
stand the rhetorical nature of texts—whether they were successfully persua-
sive—unless we engage in a longitudinal case study. No longer is it enough to
just look at the historical and social setting; we must also look to rhetoric’s
long-lasting effects:
[A] close textual analysis could proceed very much in the manner of
current close textual studies, but be enriched by the longitudinal per-
A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 395

9. spective in at least two significant ways. First, a close reading in-
formed by a longitudinal perspective would attend not only to the
text’s immediate situated context, but to how the text’s seemingly
given context was not the creation of yesterday or of local forces
only, but of a tradition of interpretation. Second, a close reading in-
formed by the longitudinal perspective would seek to honor equally
the art of the speaker and the interpretive traditions of the audience
or audiences. Such a reading would place a lessened emphasis on the
need for the critic to provide a single magisterial reading of the invi-
tation of the text and—while honoring the art of the rhetor—would
also honor the audience by attending to the insurgent polysemy of
the text and to how the speaker, despite himself or herself, invites al-
ternative readings by different interpretive communities. (369)
Campbell presents Darwin’s writings as an example of how rhetoric continues to
enter public arenas and continues to be persuasive long after its historical “mo-
ment.” While Campbell’s longitudinal study implores critics to look to long last-
ing future effects, Bruner argues for a longitudinal study that looks toward a
complicated past, arguing that critics “must analyze a wide range of antiquarian
histories, including histories provided by defenders of dominant narrative ac-
counts” (290) in order to “identify the dominant strategies of remembrance, as
well as the chronological historical absences required of those articulations”
(296). Likewise, Leah Ceccarelli also argues for a longitudinal study of texts and
response texts, arguing that this approach would enable rhetorical critics to ana-
lyze rhetoric as polysemic—each text has multiple meanings that exist outside of
the hegemonic control of the original author. This approach, according to
Ceccarelli, offers greater hermeneutic depth:
[I]t is possible to reconstruct the interpretations of at least some au-
diences. By engaging a close analysis of both the primary text and
the texts that are produced in response to it, the critic can recognize
both polysemic potential and the actualization of that potential by
audiences. In so doing, we can learn a great deal about the power of
audiences to subvert the rhetor’s intent, as well as the power of rhe-
tors to manipulate conflicting groups into harmonious adjustment.
(407)
Regardless of the methodology, it is important to keep in mind that rhetori-
cal criticism should serve a purpose, whether that purpose adds to knowledge in
such a way that others can engage with that knowledge creation or theorizes and
396 Rhetoric Review

10. humanizes rhetoric as performance. Further, the critic, argues Nichols, also has a
job: “He must serve his society and himself by revealing and evaluating the pub-
lic speaker’s interpretation of the world around him and the peculiar means of
expressing that interpretation to his generation” (78). This is a gigantic undertak-
ing as the objects of rhetorical criticism are many, and it is sometimes difficult to
decide what to look at and how to look at it. The following sections will attempt
to define the objects of rhetorical criticism.
Defining the Texts of Rhetorical Criticism
What we choose to rhetorically critique is as important as how we choose
to do it. The history of rhetorical criticism is filled with analysis of great men
speaking well. For example, A History and Criticism of American Public Ad-
dress, volumes 1–3, are filled with careful analysis and critique of great US or-
ators. As Marie Hochmuth argues in her introduction to volume three of this
series, “when speeches are being evaluated the speaker is of paramount impor-
tance” (9), and this emphasis on speaker structures this series. After five chap-
ters in volume one that define historical periods of public address in the US,
each subsequent chapter offers a careful rhetorical critique of specific orators,
from Henry Grady and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Abraham Lincoln and Frank-
lin Roosevelt. Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Criticism, edited by Thomas W.
Benson, is similarly structured. In this collection Benson collected a series of
previously published articles and book chapters that masterfully examine ca-
nonical rhetorical figures such as Lincoln and Hitler. Each chapter presents a
careful analysis of the rhetorical effectiveness of specific orators/rhetors, and
by carefully analyzing specific speech situations, the authors identify emerging
forms of rhetoric that are suited for specific rhetorical situations.
This emphasis on major rhetoricians, while important, can sometimes lead
to the silencing of other rhetorical traditions or other ways of reading the same
situations. For example, Marouf Hasian, Jr. in “Silences and Articulations in
Modern Rhetorical Criticism” points out that judicial rhetoric is not always lim-
ited to lawmakers. To illustrate his point, Hasian analyzes the Homer Plessy in-
cident in Louisiana in order to expose “[. . .] the multiple theoretical ways that
subalterns have contributed to our jurisprudential norms. [. . . M]any ordinary
citizens performed their own versions of what it meant to live in a democratic
society, and it would only be later that court opinions came up with rationaliza-
tions that legitimized these activities” (298). Like Hasian, Jamieson recognizes
the power of the subaltern as a powerful but often ignored rhetor. In “The Cun-
ning Rhetor, the Complicitous Audience, the Conned Censor, and the Critic,”
she looks at different instances in history in which allegory and the encoded
A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 397

11. encounter enable rhetors to speak to audiences who understand the veiled cri-
tique of society in such a way that social censors could not punish those partici-
pating in the rhetorical act. However, Jamieson does recognize that this form of
rhetoric poses unique problems for the critic: “As time obscures the deciphering
cues and the complicitous audience dies away, the ready ability to study the phe-
nomenon erodes” (77). Even with this added complication, the field of rhetorical
criticism benefits for analysis of both canonical texts and those texts that do not
enter the list of great speeches.
This is exactly the position of rhetorical scholars who work with gender,
class, race, sexuality, and formations of cultural power. More often than not,
the canonized speeches are constructed by those in power, which leaves dis-
empowered groups silent or absent. Rhetorical critics are analyzing how the
rhetorics of certain groups are entering the arena of public discourse, adapting
traditional forms of rhetoric for their own purposes or creating new arenas for
discourse. For example, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. analyzes the ways in which
African-American rhetoric plays with Signifyin(g) as an African-American
trope: “When one text Signifies upon another text, by tropological revision or
repetition and difference, the double-voiced utterance allows us to chart dis-
crete formal relationships in Afro-American literary history. Signifyin(g), then,
is a metaphor for textual revision” (1223). While Gates is arguing for a hybrid-
ized and even an appropriated definition of signifying, Scott Lyons argues for
a hybridized rhetorical tradition for peoples of Native American descent:
And so a mixed-blood rhetoric of tradition is at play in the fields of
our Lord and Trickster, eagles and vultures, wild rice, and Pepsi.
Rather than producing winners and losers, and resisting a retreat into
rhetorics of separation and essentialism, this oral mixed-blood rheto-
ric provides space and time to collectively forge new ethnic strate-
gies and seek traditional (re)visions. (130)
Feminist scholarship, too, attempts to understand how women are using rhetoric
and how they act within previously determined rhetorical systems. In their anal-
ysis of women who have survived different forms of sexual assault, Alcoff and
Gray note that the growing number of public forums provide women a chance to
speak:
The feminist movement has helped to reduce the effectiveness of si-
lencing techniques by creating forums where survivors can speak—
in magazines, newsletters, journals, support groups, and demonstra-
tions. As a result, the dominant discourse has shifted its emphasis
398 Rhetoric Review

12. from strategies of silencing to the development of strategies of recu-
peration. (268)
Alcoff and Gray acknowledge some of the possible dangers of the confessional,
but more to the point is the fact that women’s experiences and their articulation
of those experiences are equally valid texts for rhetorical criticism.
Whether broadly defined (book, speech, movie, song, and so on) or de-
fined as specific generic classifications (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, fantasy, ro-
mance, and so on), genre remains another method of approaching texts to be
analyzed. Bawarshi defines genre as a means of recognizing and acting within
certain rhetorical situations, literary and nonliterary. In “Antecedent Genre as
Rhetorical Constraint,” Jamieson posits this complexity: “Antecedent genres
are capable of imposing powerful constraints. The demonstrable existence of
these constraints mandates the question. How free is the rhetor’s choice from
among the available means of persuasion?” (414). Genre, it would seem, deter-
mines (or overdetermines) specific rhetorical situations. Bawarshi argues in
“The Genre Function” that genre enriches our understanding of the rhetorical
situation in it allows “us to study the social and the rhetorical as they work on
one another, reinforcing and reproducing one another and the social activities,
the roles, and the relations that take place within them. This recursive process
is what genre is” (357). Indeed, genre itself is a social construct in much the
same way as Bitzer’s rhetorical situation. Additionally, as Carolyn Miller ar-
gues in “Genre as Social Action,” how we classify rhetorics into genres ex-
poses something that is theoretically important about discourse:
1. Genre refers to a conventional category of discourse based in large-scale
typification of rhetorical action; as action, it acquires meaning from situ-
ation and from the social context in which that situation arose.
2. As meaningful action, genre is interpretable by means of rules; genre
rules occur at a relatively high level on a hierarchy of rules for sym-
bolic interaction.
3. Genre is distinct from form: form is the more general term used at all
levels of the hierarchy. Genre is a form at one particular level that is a
fusion of lower-level forms and characteristic substance.
4. Genre serves as the substance of forms at higher levels; as recurrent
patterns of language use, genres help constitute the substance of our
cultural life.
5. A genre is a rhetorical means for mediating private intentions and so-
cial exigence; it motivates by connecting the private with the public, the
singular with the recurrent. (163)
A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 399

13. While genre acts as a classificatory system, texts do not necessarily fit
nicely into predefined “types” of genres. In fact, rhetoric as a dynamic and
performative act necessarily creates hybrids out of previously defined genres. In
“Rhetorical Hybrids: Fusions of Generic Elements,” Jamieson and Campbell an-
alyze inaugural and papal speeches, noting that the rhetorical choices that speak-
ers often make fused together preexisting genres in a process of constant bor-
rowing and innovation. They warn against the tendency toward minimizing
idiosyncrasies in order to magnify generic commonalities: “The notion of the
hybrid enjoins the critic to focus both on the recurrent and the variable, the com-
monalities and the idiosyncrasies, and to understand the extent to which they are
compatible or incompatible” (156). In many ways this is the same argument that
Howell is making in Poetics, Rhetoric, and Logic; Howell argues that the trend
to think of poetry as something outside of communication ignores the fact that
“it does actually convey to readers a something that they did not have before”
(217). Poetics merges with rhetoric and logic to become a hybridized rhetorical
genre. In fact, maybe hybridized is the wrong word to use, as Howell argues that
the three have always been together, and it is simply the history of genre that has
arbitrarily separated poetics from rhetoric and logic. In the same way, novels
have been relegated to a place outside of rhetorical consideration, which Zahava
McKeon attempts to resolve in Novels and Arguments. McKeon’s argument is
brilliant in its simplicity: The history of the novel is the history of social rheto-
ric. She critiques a history of belles lettres, arguing “[t]wentieth-century criti-
cism has focused on the text as a unique object to be addressed in itself regard-
less of context, which includes author and audience” (230). Novels, like poetics,
are legitimized as a different hybrid between what we have traditionally thought
of as literature and what we have traditionally thought of as rhetoric.
Rhetorical Criticism Textbooks
I come at last to the textbooks themselves—the easily accessible gateway
into rhetorical criticism. I have included only four undergraduate textbooks for
review: The Practice of Rhetorical Criticism by James R. Andrews, Rhetorical
Criticism: Explorations and Practice by Sonja K. Foss, The Art of Rhetorical
Criticism, edited by Jim A. Kuypers, and Communication Criticism: Approaches
and Genres by Karyn Charles Rybacki and Donald Jay Rybacki. This is not to
say that rhetorical criticism textbooks are limited to these four books. Winifred
Horner’s The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhet-
oric, Thomas W. Benson’s Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Criticism, and Carl
R. Burgehardt’s Readings in Rhetorical Criticism are excellent collections of the
400 Rhetoric Review

14. history and past scholarship in the field. I made my selections based on text-
books in popular use at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
The Practice of Rhetorical Criticism
The Practice of Rhetorical Criticism (1983) by James R. Andrews is an
early example of a textbook written with undergraduates in mind. The self-pro-
claimed purpose of the book is as follows: “This book is designed to orient the
beginning student to the nature and function of rhetorical criticism, to acquaint
the student with those elements in the rhetorical situation that warrant serious at-
tention, and to teach the student a useful strategy with which to begin to practice
criticism” (viii). The reason that we engage in rhetorical criticism, according to
Andrews, is not because we live in a soup of rhetoric and participate as subjects
daily (this reason is noticeably missing in his accounting of why we would do
rhetorical criticism); rather, it is because “[p]ersuasion invites response, and the
nature to the response to any given message can vary widely” (4). Criticism of
historical and cultural contexts, furthermore, can also help to illuminate contem-
porary events as they occur (10). For Andrews the texts to study are those that
are canonical examples from public discourse, such as presidential speeches and
political statements.
The textbook itself is broken into three parts: Part I: An Introduction to the
Practice of Rhetorical Criticism, Part II: A Case Study in Criticism, and Part III:
Critical Examples. Part I defines the nature of criticism and defines the roles of
the context and audience, speaker, and text in separate chapters. A large empha-
sis is placed on the ethos of the speaker in delivering the message to an audience
through the text. A tremendous amount of responsibility is placed on the critic:
“The critic as artist must delve deeply into the components of the communica-
tion act, understanding the basic processes of inception, construction, presenta-
tion, and reception of rhetorical messages; only then may the critic’s findings be
communicated to others in a clear, reasoned, and insightful manner” (66). In Part
II Andrews provides a case study of Nixon’s 1969 address to the nation to show
students how to be a responsible critic. First, Andrews includes the text to be an-
alyzed, followed by a brief background sketch that describes the historical and
cultural situation in which the text first appeared. Once this foundation is set,
Andrews walks through the components of the argument, discusses the conse-
quences, and then briefly sketches responses to this speech. The following six
inclusions in this section of the book are all rhetorical critiques of this same
speech by different scholars. In the final part of the book, Andrews reprints land-
mark essays in rhetorical criticism as samples for students to read and discuss.
Overall, this is a multifaceted textbook that gives a broad overview of the field,
A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 401

15. takes the student step-by-step through the process, and then exposes the student
to a variety of texts and approaches.
Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice, Third Edition
Sonja K. Foss’ Rhetorical Criticism (2004) remains one of the more popu-
lar textbooks on rhetorical criticism. Intended for undergraduates, this book in-
vites us to engage with the symbol-saturated world in which we live. Rhetoric,
according to Foss, is created by humans using symbols for the purposes of
communication (4), and as such, rhetorical criticism is interested in the inter-
play between those three variables. The process of actually doing rhetorical
criticism, for Foss, is the process of generating a research question by studying
artifacts while simultaneously considering the four basic components of a rhe-
torical situation—rhetor, audience, situation, and message (14–15). The pur-
pose of engaging in rhetorical criticism, argues Foss, is to contribute to rhetori-
cal theory (a fairly intimidating proposition). This contribution can be made in
one of two ways: “identifying new concepts or new relationships among con-
cepts” (19).
The first two chapters, then, address the how and why of rhetorical criti-
cism. Following this, Foss dedicates each chapter to a different approach:
neo-Aristotelian, cluster criticism, fantasy-theme criticism, feminist criticism,
generic criticism, ideological criticism, metaphor criticism, narrative criticism,
pentadic criticism, and generative criticism. Except for the chapter on genera-
tive criticism, all of the chapters are broken up into procedures, the process of
selecting an artifact, analyzing that artifact, formulating a research question,
and then writing a critical essay. Each chapter also includes three to four sam-
ple essays in which critics have engaged in this process, thereby showing the
student what a rhetorical criticism paper looks like. Then, at the end of each of
these chapters, Foss includes a list of references where students can look up
other sample essays that employ the defined approaches. The only chapter that
does not follow this schema is the one on generative criticism. Generative criti-
cism, according to Foss, is the type of criticism that we engage in when a pre-
viously defined rhetorical approach does not satisfactorily explain an artifact.
This form of criticism is arguably the most difficult as it asks the critic to sort
through the codes and brainstorm possible alternative readings before generat-
ing a research question. From this the critic will have to create a new concep-
tual frame and then read the text. Again, Foss provides sample essays to show
what this looks like as well as offering a list of additional samples that could
not be included in the book.
402 Rhetoric Review

16. The Art of Rhetorical Criticism
Jim A. Kuypers’ The Art of Rhetorical Criticism (2005) operates on the
premise that rhetoric is still a viable subject today regardless of claims about
how diversity and pluralism have destroyed the consensus-building nature of
rhetoric, thereby marking rhetoric as obsolete (10). Kuypers breaks the critical
act into three stages: the conceptual stage in which the critic thinks about and
generates ideas about a text or artifact, the communication stage in which the
critic is writing the criticism out with an audience in mind (thereby making this
stage quasi-public), and finally, the countercommunication stage in which the
critic shares her work with others and generates debate and feedback.
The textbook itself has fifteen chapters: (1) What is Rhetoric?, (2) The Art
of Criticism, (3) On Objectivity and Politics in Criticism, (4) The Situational
Perspective, (5) The “Traditional” Perspective, (6) Generic Rhetorical Criticism,
(7) Criticism as Metaphor, (8) The Narrative Perspective, (9) Kenneth Burke’s
Dramatist Form Criticism, (10) Framing Analysis, (11) Fantasy-Theme Analy-
sis, (12) The Mythic Perspective, (13) Feminist Analysis, (14) Ideographic Criti-
cism, and (15) Critical Rhetoric and Continual Critique. Each chapter is written
by a prominent scholar in the field to a general undergraduate audience. The au-
thors all carefully explain the purposes of each approach, breaking down the
components, showing how to “read” parts of texts, and then explaining what it is
that he did in a tell-show-tell fashion. At every level the lesson is explained and
then reinforced. Included for analysis are contemporary texts from the public
sphere, such as political speeches, popular movies, and comedy DVDs. Each
chapter ends with personal commentary on the essays read, an exploration of the
potentials and pitfalls of each approach, and a list of citations of relevant
sources.
The Art of Rhetorical Criticism gives an excellent overview of some of the
primary approaches to rhetorical criticism. Additionally, by choosing popular
and contemporary texts, students and instructors can engage with the rhetorical
culture in which we live.
Communication Criticism: Approaches and Genres, Second Edition
Karyn Rybacki and Donald Rybacki’s Communication Criticism (2002), also
a textbook for undergraduates, identifies six critical approaches—traditional,
dramatism, symbolic convergence and fantasy theme, narrative, postmodern, and
feminist—and a chapter is dedicated to each of these approaches. In addition the
authors identify six genres that need careful attention—public speaking, humor,
large rhetorical texts, films, television, and music. As such, the book is filled with
A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 403

17. references to NASCAR, political cartoons, baseball, South Park, and many other
popular texts. The purpose of this book is to help students move from a position of
informal communication critics, which is just a matter of “stating what appeals to
us and what does not, what messages we accept and reject in these daily encoun-
ters,” to a position of communication critics, “whose role it is to help make sense
out of the use of symbols” (2). And we see this emphasis on symbolism in Rybacki
and Rybacki’s definition of rhetoric: “[R]hetoric is the art of using symbols as a
means of communicating with others” (3).
Rybacki and Rybacki carefully walk through the purpose of rhetorical criti-
cism, which is a form of rhetoric within itself: It is a means of taking a stance
and communicating symbol-making and using to an audience (11). Thus the first
two chapters, “The Purpose of Criticism” and “The Process of Criticism,” care-
fully describe the students’ roles as rhetorical critics who must make a rhetorical
argument to an audience. Following this framing, the authors dedicate the next
six chapters to the approaches mentioned above in which multiple strategies are
offered for each approach. Finally, in chapters nine and ten, “The Rhetoric of
Public Speaking, Humor and Large Texts” and “The Rhetoric of Film, Televi-
sion and Song,” the authors move from a focus on approaches to a consideration
of different genres and media. Like The Art of Rhetorical Criticism, Communi-
cation Criticism offers the scope of each approach, notes limitations, and offers
additional reading. The visual layout makes this book easy to navigate and use.
Conclusion
The 1970 Wingspread Conference is often cited as a moment when the
prospects of rhetorical criticism expanded, enabling the speech communication
field to become innovative and expansive. The 1996 RSA conference accom-
plished a similar end for the field of rhetoric and composition. Mountford, in
summarizing the proceedings of this conference, identified four new directions
that rhetoric and composition scholars appear to be taking: analysis of cultural
histories, comparative rhetorics, rhetorics as hermeneutics, and new vistas into
new cultural arenas for rhetoric (8–10). It seems that in many ways the fields of
speech communication and rhetoric and composition are concerned with very
similar objectives; the next step appears to be talking to one another. It would
behoove the field of rhetoric and composition to put rhetorical criticism (as theo-
rized in speech communication departments) into conversation with our work in
rhetorical analysis. In fact, we can even reach a little more by looking at what
linguistics is doing with critical discourse analysis. If rhetoric is truly interdisci-
plinary, then we need to start talking with the other disciplines that are doing
similar and equally exciting work.
404 Rhetoric Review

18. Notes
1I would like to extend a special thanks to Richard Enos for all of his recommendations, kind
feedback, and support; I do believe that he has read everything in rhetorical criticism. Also, I would
like to thank Roxanne Mountford for providing me a starting place by sharing her materials from her
rhetorical criticism class. Finally, I would like thank Theresa Enos and Jason Thompson for their
feedback and help through this process.
2This is the second special issue on rhetorical criticism that the Western Journal of Speech
Communication did. The first was the 1980 issue, which took up Black’s charge in Rhetorical Criti-
cism: A Study in Method to open up the field of rhetorical criticism by exploring other methodolo-
gies and approaches.
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Jennifer deWinter is a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona, where she studies Rhetoric,
Composition, and the Teaching of English. Her research includes histories of rhetoric with an em-
phasis on Japanese rhetoric, feminist postcolonial studies, and interactive technologies and media.
She works closely with the Learning Games Initiative, a computer games research consortium based
at the University of Arizona.
A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism 407