Historical and Comparative Rhetorical Studies

Christine Mason Sutherland (in Chapter 3) takes up directly the matter of inclusion and exclusion, the questions of what figures and what uses of language should be counted as rhetoric. She begins her consideration

of Early Modern women rhetoricians with the question of period boundaries: Should these be drawn by date, by language, by genre, or by a combination of factors? She locates those women rhetoricians who lived before the 16th century as belonging to the Middle Ages, based on the traditional dating of Modern English to 1485. In this context, Julian of Norwich becomes even more important as the first author writing in (Middle) English, but also problematic as a woman rhetorician because she so clearly renounces her own authorship, for the complicated reasons Sutherland explains and explores. On the other end of the Early Modern period, Sutherland observes, Margaret Fell continues to be located as a Renaissance figure, even though she was writing up to the end of the 17th century and did not die until the early 18th century. Nonetheless, Sutherland suggests, 1688 presents a reasonable end date for the Renaissance because on several fronts the reign of William and Mary may be said to inaugurate the Enlightenment.

Concerning the inclusion and exclusion of individual figures and genres, Sutherland forges a middle ground somewhere between including everything written by women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and restricting the choices to women who clearly and self-consciously identify themselves as rhetorical, either in practice or theory. In the first section, dealing with public discourse, she includes women whose works have been studied from a rhetorical point of view by historians of rhetoric today, even when the women studied did not at the time identify themselves or their writings as rhetorical. They may have simply taken it for granted in an oral/rhetorical age. They may have declined the title or role for any of a number of reasons. Nonetheless, they are now regularly studied from a rhetorical point of view by historians of rhetoric. Similarly, in the second section, on semiprivate and private discourses, Sutherland selects figures based on those already studied from rhetorical perspectives today. The third section, an examination of social practices, provides additional examinations of rhetorical actions, spaces, and contexts shaped by new understandings of women as rhetorical in the Early Modern period. As to genres, within each section, Sutherland has decided to exclude historical fiction, drama, verse, and works of translation-even though women were active translators during these periods. Nonetheless, she proposes that in our studies of women's rhetorics we extend the genre boundaries of what has been considered rhetoric to include polythetic and enthymematic forms of reasoning recognized as early as Aristotle as "inartistic" modes of rhetoric, as well as Cicero's distinction between contentio and sermo: public adversarial debate versus "conversational," informal, colloquial dialogue: the paradigm after all, for sermons. Sutherland's rich and ample examination of a bounty of new figures, as well as of contemporary studies of those figures, provides a valuable guide to the newly recovered women of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

In Chapter 4, Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Elizabeth Tasker's study of rhetorics in the 18th and 19th centuries begins where Sutherland leaves us, with the modernization of rhetoric during the Enlightenment, beginning in the late 17th century. Along with the question of what, exactly, was modernized, Gaillet and Tasker examine the push and pull of successive waves of neoclassicism during these periods and after, providing further evidence that rhetoric has always had a hard time giving up or shaking off its classical beginnings. They identify four movements that developed within Enlightenment rhetoric: neoclassical, belletristic, elocutionary, and psychological-epistemological (often called "the new rhetoric"). Like Enos and Sutherland, Gaillet and Tasker propose improved, multilayered methodologies for studying rhetorics in these periods: (1) further recovery of primary texts, (2) interpretation, analysis, and rereading, and (3) conversation and scholarly debate about the rhetoric of the period (Horner, 1990, pp. 138-139). When this threefold method is extended to encompass the traditional fourfold division of the 18th century rhetorics, we begin to see new patterns, particularly when works by women and nonelite, marginalized groups are thrown into the mix. Thomas Miller's (1997) work The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces provides particularly good examples of the multiple enlightenments, neoclassicisms, and vernacular rhetorics that were shaping both the theory and the practice of rhetoric in the period. Regarding the 19th century, Gaillet and Tasker emphasize the goldmines yet to be explored in this century that has so often been written off as a rhetorical dead end, somewhere between the brilliant innovations of the Enlightenment and the new sciences of 20th-century rhetoric and linguistics. At the same time, they note, 19th-century rhetorical studies have formed one of the headwaters for recent feminist studies in rhetoric because so many women activists became public rhetorical figures in the 19th century, in both Britain and America, advancing the abolitionist, social reform, and women's suffrage causes (Campbell, 1989). Nineteenth-century rhetorical pedagogy, particularly in the United States, provides an additional object of recovered study as we begin to observe more keenly the roots of current-traditional rhetoric in the 20th century (Johnson, 1991). An unexpected bonus in Gaillet and Tasker's discussion is the consideration of Native American and non-Western traditions whose study is providing rich new understandings by comparing different cultures' understandings of the public sphere, community, eloquence, and gendered aspects of rhetoric. The fruits of these comparative rhetorical studies are yet to be fully defined, but their movement beyond "recovery-of-lost-figures" mode and into the processes of interpretation and con-Sage © 2009 by SAGE Publications, Inc. textualization has begun. We can now see that just as the Enlightenment did not happen solely among the elites of Europe, rhetorical practices and innovations developed, were taught, and were practiced far from the rhetorical textbooks and classrooms of Western universities.

The past 15 years have produced directions for studies in historical and comparative rhetoric comprising new knowledge and new definitions based on recovered individuals and communities. As such studies developed innovations in methodology for studying earlier periods; they began to include debates about how and how much to approach marginalized and non-Western rhetorical traditions. The debates surrounding these new inclusions are as interesting as the inclusions themselves. Early modern vernacular rhetoric now includes the speech and writing of women and nonelite males whose rhetoric until recently was not studied as rhetoric at all. Paradoxically, in literary studies, this reunion of early modern vernaculars with rhetorical studies has returned both rhetoric and literature to a union that they held for a very long time in the curricula of the late medieval and early modern periods: rhetoric as an art of stylistics and early modern vernacular literature as one of its often playful products. Although some of these studies are no news to scholars in comparative literature, they are new to historians of rhetoric who have focused at times too singularly on the curriculum of the late medieval schools and too little on the contrapuntal relationships among schooled Latin rhetoric and burgeoning oral-and then written-vernaculars. Conversely, medieval and early modern comparative literature scholars are often unfamiliar with rhetorical history and theory, and have increasingly learned from these fields how to read for the text within the oral word, and the oral word within the text. Early Modern and 18thcentury studies of rhetorical figures and practices now range widely among traditional and recently incorporated materials, allowing for better understandings of rhetorical practices among nonelite communities.

As nontraditional rhetorics are incorporated into the rhetorical canon, the aims of rhetorical research have changed to accommodate the new materials. The Early Modern and 18th-century studies, reviewed here by women of the past and present, going back to the Bible, which most women then and subsequently knew and could quote from. Yet the list was repeatedly rebuked and suppressed outside women's communities, for reasons that are now being documented and studied. Ronald's chapter compasses the numerous recent studies that have extended these examinations into the past and across the present. Kate Ronald's history of feminist rhetorical studies picks up the thread of reclamation and reinterpretation that has shaped so much recent historical scholarship in rhetoric. "Reclaiming," "rereading," and "regendering" became beacons for many feminist scholars as they worked on reworking the definitions of the field and its objects of study. Always in concert with their surrounding cultures and dominant communities, marginalized groups found inventive ways to appropriate and employ what Frederick Douglass called "the master's voice."

That process continues and is now being extended to the study of emerging democracies and related political reforms throughout the world (Hum and Lyon, Chapter 9, this volume; Salazar, 2002). Just as feminist scholars have studied feminist rhetorics, gendered rhetorics, and rhetorics about gender, scholars from diverse minority cultures have also taken up the study of their rhetorics, alongside the rhetoric about them. A noteworthy parallel between feminist and comparative cultural rhetorics has been the recognition that rhetorical practices regarded as "feminine" in the West are in other cultures regarded as elegant, elite, and educated (Lu, 1998;Lyon, 2004). Chinese protocols regarding silence, understatement, and deference, for example, resemble Western feminine practices that in the West are often encoded as weak or negative. Context," Wu reads Margaret Cavendish not in comparison with, but through the lens of contemporary Chinese women's discourse. In examining the material conditions of women, she is able to argue for a broader definition of what constitutes rhetoric. Wu's work gives hope that, just as Aristotle has become the subject of feminist readings, someday soon he may be interpreted through a Confucian tradition (Wu, 2005;You, 2006).

Regarding comparative rhetorical studies more generally, Hum and Lyon observe that a significant obstacle has been the lack of publication of analysis and theory by scholars in and from non-Western cultures. A small but established body of work that compares European rhetorics and Chinese rhetorical studies has just begun to accumulate a body of scholarship large enough for response, dialogue, and engagement with other cultures. Too much non-Western scholarship, when it does appear, has been subsumed to Western rhetoric.

Very little has been examined in its own terms until recently. If one wanted to develop a project, for example, on South Asia, one would have trouble finding a starting point. The dearth of South Asian, Southeast Asian, or East Asian (outside China) research is illustrated by Bo Wang's 2004 survey of research in Asian rhetoric:

All the scholars interviewed were sinologists. There are some studies of Gandhi, but Gandhi's rhetoric has too often been analyzed, Hum and Lyon propose, because his impeccable English allows him to be seen as a "stand-in Euro." They conclude,

We compare rhetorics so that we may understand the limits of the term and our own conceptual frame for it. As we denationalize and denormalize our notions of rhetoric, we search for understand- Like new studies of early and not-so-early vernacular rhetorics, recent studies in religious rhetoric have amplified understandings of how oral and literate, homiletic and scriptural attitudes toward the spoken and the written word are shaped by rhetorical understandings only recently included in some areas of biblical and religious studies (Glenn, 1997;Schussler-Fiorenza, 1999;Sutherland & Sutcliffe, 1999). Zulick's discussion here explains both ancient and modern approaches to religious rhetorical topics and materials, as well as their future directions. Augustine has long been a central figure for understanding the intersection of religious and classical rhetoric and the long transition from rhetorical models of composition to hermeneutic models of interpretation (Swearingen, 1991). Recent New Testament rhetorical studies focus on the intersections between Hellenistic rhetorical schools and the composition practices of Paul and the gospel writers. Among the newest of approaches in religious rhetoric have been studies of the Hebrew scriptures, and Jewish hermeneutics, es- pecially within Hellenistic rhetorical culture, that provide new understandings of the interactions among Greek, Jew, and Gentile in the richly multicultural world that Paul addressed explicitly as a mixed audience, adapting classical models to a religious purpose (Stowers, 1994;Wire, 1995). Studies of Paul's letters, of the genre of the gospels, and of the Hebrew scriptures provide enriched understandings not only of religious rhetorics in different traditions, but also of the relationships between rhetorical persuasion and religious faith, both encoded as pistis in the lexicon of Hellenistic rhetoric and early Greek Christianity (Eriksson, Olbricht, & Ubelacker, 2002;Swearingen, 2002).

Van Eemeren's discussion of recent argumentation theory and scholarship in Chapter 6 provides a welcome cross-referencing of European rhetorical studies since the new rhetoric with developments in British and American philosophy, communication studies, and rhetoric. His analysis reminds us of the many strands that link but also become tangled in relationships among linguistics, discourse analysis, the new rhetoric, and argumentation theory in the various fields where they are studied. Toulmin and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca develop approaches that are strikingly similar, not only to one another, but also to some of Aristotle's earliest explorations of enthymemata and paradigmata, the informal logics structured by premise and conclusion. To these models, van Eemeren introduces the newer field of pragma-dialectics, an attempt to reconcile analytical dialectical models of rhetoric with the practical and pragmatic aims of rhetorical argumentation. Like several other chapters in this section, van Eemeren notes methods of reconstruction that are being developed specifically for examining and understanding various modes of implicitly argumentative discourse. Like Enos's "archaeology" and the "rereading" models that Ronald describes, reconstruction models of argumentation allow for examining beneath the surface and between the lines modes of argument and rhetoric. In studying nontraditional and non-Western rhetorics, this methodology should prove particularly valuable in making the case that there is more argumentation and rhetoric than there at first seems to be in the discourses of women or Van Eemeren concludes with a reprise of Goodnight's concerns that the public sphere is being eroded by the technical and the personal in rhetorical studies and awareness. Here again we see the concerns about mod- If it is only the powerful interests in a group that have defined communal standards, the goal of argument-as-critique is to expose this practice and to suggest alternatives, so that those who were excluded or marginalized can be brought into the process of deliberation. (van Eemeren,Chapter 6,this volume) Like Hum and Lyons' discussion of the two-edged sword of even a Habermasian notion of community, van Eemeren emphasizes the ongoing need for dialectical critique from outside the community of values and shared discourses, alongside a continuing refinement of models of dialectic, rhetoric, and argumentation in relationship to one another. Despite the recent revival of both dialectics and rhetoric in several fields, "there is a wide conceptual gap between the two perspectives on argumentation, which have been mutually isolated since their ideological separation in the 16th and 17th centuries and were viewed as incompatible paradigms" (van Eemeren, Chapter 6, this volume). But recently, scholars in argumentation theory, as well as scholars working cross-culturally, have begun to explore approaches to argumentation that do not so resolutely segregate rhetorical and dialectical understandings.

Comparative and historical studies of rhetoric's history and theory increasingly take into account the philo- Debates about communitarian and anticommunitarian rhetorical models continue, inviting reflection on how society, as distinct from culture, has been conceived of in different intellectual traditions during the 20th century (Aune, Chapter 2, this volume). The time line, the cultural domain, and the frame of analysis are addressed more and more explicitly in most contemporary discussions of the history of rhetoric. Time and place are no longer taken for granted as cultural givens, whether talking about the medieval period or Chinese uses of parallelism. We can no longer assume or impose any uniform definition of rhetoric. As a result, its very nature is being reconceived in ways that are troubling to some and exciting to others. Various uses of tropes, metaphor and chiasmus, narrative and persuasion, and all the tools of rhetoric and objects of rhetorical scrutiny are increasingly seen as local and global, with care to distinguish the two through comparison. At the same time, as Aune reminds us, the purposes and the rhetoric of our scholarship about rhetoric, the audiences and communities it addresses, have also become renewed imperatives as we consider the ethics of rhetoric, the ethics of interpretation, and our rhetoric about both.

C. JANSWEARINGENEDWARDSCHIAPPA