Here at the University of Illinois, we're lucky enough to have a rhetorical reading group sponsored by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. We were more lucky last night; we played host to Professor Vanessa Beasley from Vanderbilt University. Well, actually, we hosted her for several days. She was good enough to participate in my graduate seminar on Monday as well as join a panel discussion about the 2008 election on Tuesday afternoon at the IPRH with Brian Gaines of the UI's political science department, your humble oratorical animal, and our moderate moderator, Cara Finnegan, aka first efforts. It's been great to have Vanessa here and, in a tradition pioneered by blogos (What is it about UI and blogging?), I thought I'd post on a few of the issues suggested by Vanessa's work. Of course, first efforts digests the evening differently.
The discussion sorted itself out through three threads--or, as my students would say, I automatically imposed the rule of three on it. At any rate, our evening moderator, Ned O'Gorman, kicked off a long and useful discussion about longitudinal studies--that is, the obstacles and advantages that come with looking at large chunks of discourse over long periods of time. To a large extent, Vanessa said and we nodded vigorously in concurrence, you've got to be careful with your goals. Scholarship like hers won't necessarily get at the texture of discourse--the natural metaphors in FDR's First Inaugural and why a "warm comfort" and a "clean satisfaction" might appeal to a cold and homeless audience. But, in a phrase I liked quite a lot, one starts to get at the cultural work done by big bodies of discourse--why do presidents consistently, for instance, engage in "local address?" Talk to the Rotary in Rhode Island and the Knights of Columbus in New York? And why do they do such talk in much the same way across administrations? It's got to have something to do with the ways in which they knit us together--the making one out of many. That sort of cultural work, we suspect, is important.
As well as banal. We had a good time talking about the fact that Vanessa has, perhaps, spent more time with more awful public speech than any other rhetorical critic in the United States. But the banal does its work--insidiously, he says with an evil laugh, dripping onto your brain pan until you can no longer resist! Well, maybe, but its more likely that the grease of banal rituality ("I'm so happy to be here in Boise today. When I look out over this blue football field, I swear I can see America...") lubricates the wheels of public debate in the polity. We need ritualistic unity, I suspect, to survive deliberative division.
And division, interest groups, pluralism--all these concepts threaded through the discussion as well. One thing struck me--Vanessa works very well with the traditional literature on pluralism out of political science and political theory. I'm not so sure rhetoricians read that work as well as they should, but they do tend to address those problems--groups, unities, divisions--through publics and public spheres. Might be useful, we all decided, to arrange a blind date between these two lovely bodies of literature and see what sparks fly.
Of course, Vanessa's engagement with that literature also ties closely to the title of this post; she's one of the rare scholars who engages, rather than talks about engaging, those of other disciplines. We had a long productive discussion of just how one deals with critics or reviewers who come at the world with an entirely different set of assumptions about scholarship, research, or even knowledge itself. Much fun.
At any rate, it's been a great couple of days--good time spent with a former colleague I miss dearly--and we went away feeling like scholars and intellectuals. Which is rare mid-semester. Rare indeed. And so I'm grateful.
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