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Rhetoric Society Quarterly

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Rhetorical disciplines and rhetorical disciplinarity: A response to Mailloux

Michael Leff
a a

Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University

Version of record first published: 02 Jun 2009

To cite this article: Michael Leff (2000): Rhetorical disciplines and rhetorical disciplinarity: A response to Mailloux, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 30:4, 83-93 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02773940009391189

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Michael Leff RHETORICAL DISCIPLINES AND RHETORICAL DISCIPLINARITY: A RESPONSE TO MAILLOUX

Abstract. In his essay "Disciplinary Identities: On the Rhetorical Paths between English and Communication Studies," Steven Mailloux laments the separation between rhetoricians in English and Communication and issues a callfor them to join a multi-disciplinary coalition. Mailloux tries to connect the two by studying their disciplinary histories, and I respond to his account of developments in Communication. While his history of the discipline seems flawed in detail, I argue that his main point holds true and is a matter of considerable importance: Communication- rhetoricians generally have adhered to a scientific rather than a "rhetorical, hermenemic" conception of disciplinarity, and this commitment has hampered their ability to enter into interdisciplinary endeavors. But there is also another significant difference between rhetoricians in the two disciplines. Communication rhetoricians, for a variety of reasons, have a weaker sense of internal disciplinarity, and I argue that an unstable disciplinary self-conception results in a confusion between disciplinary rhetoric located at a particular academic site and the global rhetoric of disciplinarity. Dealingwith this problem presents a major problem for Communication-rhetoricians and for those who seek to establish effective interdisciplinary ties between English and Communication.

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n the Spring issue of this journal, Steve Mailloux laments the separa tion between rhetoric as studied in English and in Communication departments and issues a call for the two separate but related domains to join a multi-disciplinary coalition. Events of the last few months seem to underscore the timeliness and importance of this call. In May, just as Mailloux's article appeared, more than one hundred rhetoricians from both camps met at a special session of the RSA convention in Washington and discussed avenues for increasing cooperation. The original motive for the meeting was a simple and straight-forward effort to improve communication between the two groups and to find practical means for making the scholarship in each domain better known and more available to the other. But that motive soon became entangled with more complicated issues concerning the location of rhetorical studies within the two disciplines. On both sides, there was a sense that existing professional institutions and associations failed to address the needs of rhetorical scholarship adequately. Among those in Communication, many believed that 83 RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly
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the National Communication Association has gravitated toward social scientific interests that do not fit comfortably with rhetoric, or at least with rhetoric in any of its traditionally recognizable forms. And many compositionists felt stifled within departments devoted mainly to literary studies and expressed skepticism about how well the CCCC can accommodate their interests. Thus, the meeting expanded its agenda and includ ed discussion about how RSA might serve as a focal point for rhetorical scholarship that could encompass both disciplines. The meeting was amicable, and some specific cooperative actions were approved. Nevertheless, an exchange in H-Rhetor soon demonstrated that relations between the two groups were not untroubled. Some contributors to this discussion expressed the normal academic reservations: They were worried about losing the distinctiveness that comes from different approaches to rhetoric, warned against the dangers of homogenizing scholarship, and registered concern about the consequences of forming a single group out of marginalized parts. Other responses, however, bristled with anger. There were reports of "bad blood" between the two camps, of insults and exclusionary tactics, and of graduate students who could only shake their heads and walk away from conflicts between faculty in English and Communication. Even those, such as Ed Schiappa and Laurie Cubbison, who had not experienced this kind of nasty conflict, acknowledged that scholars in their discipline knew very little about what was happening on the other side of the rhetorical fence. ' Consequently, we seem placed in a difficult situation. Many of us agree with Mailloux that we have an opportunity to form an effective coalition and that the rewards for doing so are significant. Yet, current relationships are problematic and not just because of lost opportunities in the past or the inertia of benign neglect. Judging by the responses in H-Rhetor, there is also much misunderstanding and hostility, and despite the affinity of the subjects and topics we study, we still seem cramped by the disciplinary confines in which we work. These complications would hardly surprise Mailloux, who is an experienced and wily student of disciplinary politics and interdisciplinary squabbles. In fact, one great virtue of his essay is that Mailloux does not preach to us in the abstract. Instead, he wants to find points of connection that are grounded in the concrete experience of disciplinary history. What is at stake for him is not the accumulation of objective knowledge about rhetoric, but the rhetorical achievement of an enlarged and improved community. This is a task that demands historical narrative, and Mailloux tells a tale about both Communication-rhetoric and English-rhetoric that focuses upon their disciplinary self-conceptions. In what follows, I want to join Mailloux in his call for coalition, and I will do so by commenting upon his story about Communication.2 I will try to provide an insider's view of this story that sometimes reinforces and sometimes cor-

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rects Mailloux, but always tries to keep the conversation directed toward the same goal. To begin, I want to note that Mailloux's account departs from the conventional story about the two groups that relies upon the specific objects of study (i.e. the kind of texts they typically engage) to mark the essential difference between them. On this view, English-rhetoricians come from a background where literary texts are the focal concern, while the Communication-rhetoricians concentrate upon political discourse, and from this crucial difference, other characteristic differences follow. This story now seems dated, rendered obsolete by the advent of postmodernism and the blurring of the lines that once demarcated the aesthetic from the political. This development has left "literary works" open to situated political interpretation, while it has also revealed the aesthetic dimensions of "practical" discourse. Consistent with this realignment of terms, the recent history of both disciplines shows a strong tendency to step outside the old boundaries. Within the field of English, studies of literary fiction are now supplemented by attention to texts such as the oratory of Fanny Wright and Frederick Douglass or the proceedings of Congressional committees that once were grist only for the mills of Speech-Communication. Meanwhile, critics in Speech-Communication no longer sustain concentrated attention on oratorical texts and overtly political issues but have appropriated a variety of objects for study, including scientific monographs, fiction film, and material artifacts such as monuments and museums, that fall outside the ambit of public rhetoric as traditionally conceived. The distinction has not disappeared entirely, for as Jim Aune has noted, there probably is a temperamental difference between those who are attracted to written communication as opposed to those attracted to the oral medium.3 Like Aune and myself, communication- rhetoricians ordinarily begin with an interest in public debate and controversy, whereas rhetoricians in English departments ordinarily begin with a more irenic interest in language. Nevertheless, if the aesthetic/political distinction ever had an essential or categorical force, it certainly does not at this moment. Other elements need to enter the story if we are to account for the distance between the two camps. Mailloux's version rests upon an account of the disciplinary rhetoric that the two groups of rhetoricians use to explain and justify their work. There are, he maintains, two rhetorics normally used for disciplinary justification in our time. One of them is scientific and tries to establish a discipline on the basis of objective knowledge and abstract rationality. The other is "rhetorical hermeneutic," and it treats disciplines as communities constructed through the discursive and interpretive practices of its members. These two rhetorics are signs of different types of disciplinary identity, and according to Mailloux, we can sort out the difference

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between Composition and Communication rhetoricians in relation to the strength and durability of their commitment to the scientific as opposed to the rhetorical hermeneutic model. Mailloux's story about Communication begins with and focuses upon its origins as the discipline of Speech during the years just before World War I. Citing an interesting and undoubtedly important article by Charles Woolbert (published in 1916), Mailloux notes that Woolbert does not distinguish Speech from English simply because the one studies a practical and the other a literary subject, but also, and more fundamentally, because Speech (in at least some of its aspects) is closer to the "pure sciences." This is so because Speech encompasses interests akin to those of physics, physiology, anatomy, and psychology, while literary studies are unable to rise to anything higher in the scientific firmament than philology. This orientation, Mailjoux implies, casts the die for Speech and its later incarnations as Speech Communication or Communication. It is a discipline whose self-understanding was born in and deeply attached to the rhetoric of science, and from this unhappy origin, hangs the mournful tale of Speech rhetoric, its stodgy modernism, its marginalization of pre-modern rhetorics, its clinging to the fossil of textual autonomy long after English departments had interred the bones of New Criticism, and its desperately slow crawl toward self-understanding in the interpretative world of post-structuralism. A discipline absorbed in the task of making itself scientific hardly was in a position to dance gracefully to the hermeneutic tunes of the late twentieth century, and so Speech rhetoric, on this view, has proved to be the caboose of the new rhetoric movement. Of course, my bald summary oversimplifies Mailloux's argument, but even when read in full detail, the story has many gaps and disquieting leaps of inference. For example, I am not at all sure how Mailloux can link his early disciplinary history to the critique of Gaonkar for adhering to an outmoded, formalistic model of textuality. Worse yet, Mailloux treats Woolbert as though he were the only founding presence in the discipline. In fact, however, contempoary with and set against Woolbert were a group of humanistically oriented scholarsHunt, Hudson, Wichelns, and the other leaders of what came to be known as the "Cornell School." In response to Woolbert and other adherents of scienticism, Hunt wrote essays that invoked the humanistic tradition and decried efforts to reduce rhetoric to "impersonal knowledge." At the same time, Hudson and Wichelns invoked and refurbished pre-modern rhetorical lore more than forty years before the revival of rhetoric that Mailloux applauds. Moreover, the Cornell tradition established a program of graduate studies in the history of rhetoric and public address that set the standard for more than half a century and that still exercises some influence on the way both English and Communication departments structure PhD programs. 4 All these efforts have had an impact on the discipline that is well known to everyone in it or to

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anyone who studies its history with care. Consequently, when Mailloux grinds his lenses so that he sees nothing but Woolbert, he produces a considerable distortion of the disciplinary history. After some reflection, however, I have come to think of Mailloux's narrative as a useful and creative misreading. He certainly ignores important elements in the story, but his sweeping view from the outside reveals something basic about rhetorical studies within the discipline of Communication. To a far greater degree than rhetoricians in English Departments, Communication-rhetoricians have to had to work within a scientistic milieu. (Anyone who wants to confirm this point, need only glance at a NCA convention program or the list of course offerings in a typical Communication Department.) However much rhetoricians in the field may have tried to resist the pull of scientific rhetoric, it has always been there and has exerted an influence so profound that they are sometimes unaware of its presence. As I thought about this point, a few examples came to mind, more or less as anecdotes, that confirmed the tendency that Mailloux has noted. Three of these seem especially important, and I want to consider each of them briefly. First, I thought of Edwin Black's Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. Originally published in 1965, the book was the single most important influence on rhetorical studies in the discipline for several decades. It was clearly a product of the Cornell tradition, Black being both a student and a great admirer of Herbert Wichelns. Nevertheless, the book has a Woolbertian imprint. The word method in the subtitle is a significant clue, and more obviously, the book opens with observations about the status of the scientist "as one of the cultural heroes of our age," and Black offers a rather extensive comparison between critics and scientist. In later work, Black would abandon interest in method and avoid explicit comparisons between criticism and science. Yet, the fact remains that his most important book reflects a preoccupation with science and scientific method that is located very close to the center of the Cornell tradition. Secondly, and perhaps more directly to the point, I recalled my first graduate course. It was a course in "research methods," and it was essentially the same course that graduate students throughout the discipline were required to take at that time. The textbook, authored by J. Jeffery Auer, treated method uniformly. All "research" in the discipline, whether it had to do with studying glottal stops, order effects in persuasion, or Lincoln's oratory, should proceed through the same steps, and these steps consisted of formulating a thesis, testing it by reference to the data, and then developing reliable generalizations. Science ruled. Third, at about the same time that I read Mailloux's essay, I also read a paper by Jim Jasinski that surveys the recent literature in rhetorical criticism. Jasinski works through the disciplinary literature carefully and in detail, and

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he arrives at a conclusion that offers striking support for Mailloux's impressionistic commentary. For most of this century, Jasinski argues, the primary concern of Speech-Communication critics has been method, and specifically method conceived as equivalent to method in science. Critics have been concerned to cross between observations of data and theoretical generalizations, and method has been the bridge. Sometimes, Jasinski notes, the movement is from theoretical generalization to the assessment of the particular, and sometimes the movement has gone in the other direction, from the particular to the general, but in either case critics rely upon some abstract protocol to justify their findings. Jasinski maintains that the most common pattern develops through three phases: (1) an opening that explicates some theoretical source, (2) a method (that is, a sequence or procedure) that specifies how to use the theory, and (3) application of the method to cases. Based on a very extensive reading of literature that spans more than four decades, Jasinski's conclusion is: Method ruled. The past tense"ruled"is important, for Jasinski discovers evidence of a developing movement away from method-based criticism. Over the past decade, he maintains, critics have been less concerned about generating or testing hypothses and more concerned about understanding a particular case or about enriching or enlarging traditional rhetorical concepts, such as decorum or prudence, that do not rest comfortably within the "scientific" consciousness. This shift in focus is consistent with the turn toward rhetorical hermeneutics that Mailloux identifies, but Jasinski finds no evidence for it prior to 1980, and it does not achieve prominence in the scholarly literature until very recently. Moreover, the method-based approach still survives and continues to dominate the criticism textbooks.5 These observations support Mailloux's point about the degree to which the modernist rhetoric of science has shaped disciplinary identity. Interpretation has come to Speech Communication rhetoricians only at a late date and in a still incomplete form. On the English side of the fence, Mailloux reports that change occurs earlier and more decisively. Already in the 1970s, Mailloux asserts, the movement toward disciplinary identity in composition studies gives evidence of "the rise of a new rhetorical and hermeneutic paradigm for interpreting disciplinarity and the decline of earlier scientific rhetorics for disciplinary identity in the human sciences." And by 1982, articles in College Composition and Communication demonstrate, to Malloux's satisfaction, that the new approach is firmly in place. That is, almost twenty years ago, compositionists had come to define a professional discipline in terms of its communal rhetoric and shared interpretative strategies rather than in terms of an idealized rationality or an objective body of knowledge. Thus, the interdisciplinary movement toward a rhetorical view of disciplines informs composition studies well before it has a significant effect in Speech-

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Communication. Mailloux's account of developments in composition is also controversial. One might argue, for example, that scientific rhetoric has persisted longer and has had a more significant influence than Mailloux acknowledges. 6 For the moment, however, I want to place such objections to the side and accept his position as somewhat dubious in detail but accurate as a broad generalization. A rhetorical and interpretative view of disciplinarity, in my judgment, is now more fully realized in composition-rhetoric than in communication-rhetoric, and this difference ought to enter into our efforts to fathom the relations between the two groups. Moreover, if we assume for the moment that Mailloux is essentially correct, some interesting and paradoxical consequences seem to follow. In our time, composition programs and communication departments are the two institutions that have done the most to establish a disciplinary identity for rhetoric in the academy. Mailloux, however, distinguishes between a discipline of rhetoric (which can be and has been justified through a scientific rhetoric) and a rhetorical conception of disciplinarity in general. The rhetorical/interpretative frame commits itself to local knowledge and the specific discursive practices of a community as it develops in time. Both composition studies and communication have moved toward this new conception of their identity, but that movement, on Mailloux plausible account, does not result from forces indigenous to them; it comes as a response to larger, external changes in the intellectual environment. The rhetorical hermeneutic perspective on disciplinarity becomes accessible only after a global philosophical movement (directed by Kuhn, Gadamer, Perelman, and others) opens space for considering rhetorical and interpretative activity as an intellectually generative process. Apparently, then, disciplinary rhetoric engages the local, but this kind of engagement cannot become a privileged form of disciplinary identity unless and until we have globalized the conception of rhetorical and hermeneutic localism. The sites of disciplinary rhetoric can be rescued and elevated only if they are reformed through consciousness of the global value of their local commitments. Once these distinctions and paradoxes are recognized, we may be better able to appreciate some of the differences in the recent history of compositionrhetoric and communication-rhetoric. A recognition of rhetorical disciplinarity depends upon accepting a new perspective that displaces received views about objectivity and abstract method in favor of values based on shared rhetorical and interpretive practices. Attitudes toward this perspective and the ability to act on it vary according to the conditions prevailing within existing disciplinary formations, and in the case of English and Speech, these conditions are strikingly different for rhetoricians. Although it is much larger than Speech (or, as it has variously been known, Public Speaking, Speech Communication, or Communication), English has a

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more coherent disciplinary configuration (the constantly changing name of the other is evidence of its scattered and neurotic identity). The tension between composition and literary studies is well known and serious, but at least these two units share some of the same conceptual space in the academy. Both fall securely within the traditional humanities, and both are deeply concerned about texts and textuality. Thus, when compositionists turn toward a Gadamarian view of disciplinarity, their position hardly seems alien to literary theorists, many of whom are being swept along by the same intellectual currents. Communication-rhetoricians must deal with a less tractable intellectual environment. Many of their colleagues are social scientists who have little interest in or understanding of interpretative scholarship. Some of them are only dimly aware of the conceptual changes that have rocked the humanities, and those who do know about them often find them shocking and incomprehensible. Moreover, as I have indicated earlier, aspects of the social scientific world-view have insinuated themselves within the consciousness of rhetoricians and play an important, though not always well recognized, role in forming their own disciplinary identities. It is not surprising, therefore, that Communication-rhetoricians have made comparatively slow progress in adapting to changes that originate outside their own disciplinary boundaries and that resist assimilation into the existing disciplinary frame. There is also a substantial difference in the degree of internal cohesion among the two sets of rhetoricians. Because of their typical placement in English Departments, composition-rhetoricians have had to remain identified with the teaching of writing. The experience of teaching composition provides a common link for almost all of those in the field, and much of the scholarly literature arises directly from pedagogy. In Communication Departments, rhetoricians have tended to act much like literary scholars in English Departments; they have abandoned performance courses as soon as possible, leaving the teaching of public speaking, debate, and practical argumentation to adjuncts and graduate students, and their scholarship almost never refers to pedagogy.7 Moreover, as the concept of rhetoric has become globalized, the range of topics for research has exploded, and the field has lost any semblance of a core subject-matter. Thus, positioned in a larger disciplinary formation that is sprawling, diffuse, and sometimes hostile and divided among themselves into small research enclaves, Communication-rhetoricians have had trouble developing an effective disciplinary identification of any kind. Ironically, Composition-rhetoricians were better positioned to adopt a rhetorical hermeneutic view of disciplinarity than were their counterparts in Communication precisely because the compositionists had a stronger sense of disciplinary identification. People in the composition business could appreciate how a general change might affect their specific disciplinary situation, and they could toggle back and forth from the conduct of their normal research to

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broader conceptions about how such research could be amended, enlarged, and repositioned within the new world of globalized rhetoric. Communication rhetoric lacked the local stability needed to enter this globalized system without being totally absorbed into it. Or to mix Kuhnian with Marxist terms,. since Communication rhetoric had not really achieved disciplinary status, it could not move to a post-disciplinary sensibility any more easily than an economy could move from Feudalism to Socialism without going through a Capitalist phase Dilip Gaonkar's well known and controversial essay, "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science," is best read as an effort to explicate this problem. The essay is sometimes interpreted as a critique of the globalization of rhetoric, but that is a misreading. Gaonkar simply accepts the globalization of rhetoric as a fact, an established feature of the current academic landscape. The disciplinary rhetoricians in Communication did not cause this development, and they have no power to reverse it, even in the unlikely event that they would want to do so. The real issue, then, is how Communication-rhetoricians should respond to globalization from within their disciplinary position, and it is at this point that Gaonkar becomes critical, and I think, for good reason. It is not enough to applaud the globalization of rhetoric or to reiterate the general arguments justifying it. To do no more than this is to violate the spirit of a rhetorical/hermeneutical sensibility that demands a commitment to local knowledge and not just global praise of its virtues. In other words, Gaonkar wants Communication-rhetoricians to distinguish between their role within a discipline that sponsors grounded interpretive work and their position within a sweeping interdisciplinary movement. And that means Communication-rhetoricians must cease deferring attention to texts and develop interpretive practices that can account for local discursive performances.8 Mailloux finds fault with Gaonkar's program for reforming interpretive practices in the discipline, and for rather different reasons, so do 1.9 But whatever our views about Gaonkar's hermeneutic theory, his diagnosis of disciplinary conditions in Communication commands attention. If other disciplines have resisted accepting a rhetorical hermeneutic identity, Communication-rhetoricians have resisted moving beyond the articulation ofthat identity. Gaonkar, Jasinski, and others believe that this resistance, in some large measure, results from a failure to develop an interpretive frame supple enough to coordinate the intrinsic and extrinsic dimensions of any particular genre of discourse, and without some such frame Communication-rhetoric lacks the disciplinary identity needed to bring something of its own to the interdisciplinary table. The older literature of the field is so thoroughly committed to contexts or abstract theories that it almost brackets texts, and our recent efforts to return to the text without losing sight of intertexts and contexts remain unfinished and imperfect. In grappling with this problem, we have much to

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learn from our colleagues in English who have a longer history of dealing with textuality and more sophisticated theories for understanding it. And perhaps the efforts of our discipline to work from context to text and back may have some value to English-rhetoricians as they try to work from texts to contexts and back. The problem of the inside and outside of textuality is, as Mailloux says, a matter that rhetoric is well suited to address, and a serious consideration of it may open a path to interdisciplinary cooperation. But crossing disciplinary boundaries is never easy, and if we are to succeed, we must not only continue the conversation but must also listen carefully and learn much more about the aspirations, idiosyncracies, and anxieties of our rhetorical neighbors. Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University Notes This discussion occurs in h-rhetor @h-net.msu.edu under two headings: "Is fragmentation bad?" and "Who own Rhetoric?" Although this thread continues for several weeks, my references here are all to entries dated between June 28 and June 30, 2000. 2 To be completely fair to Mailloux, I ought to engage him on his own turf and consider his account of disciplinary history in English. Unfortunately, I am not in a position to do so now, but I do think that his comparative approach to disciplinary history is useful, and I would encourage Communication-rhetoricians to read their history in relation to that of composition studies. 3 "Who owns Rhetoric," online posting. Available: et.msu.edu h-rhetor @hnet.msu.edu, 28 June 2000. Aune suggests that we might think of Communicationrhetoric and Composition-rhetoric as two "forms of life" and enumerates five differences that he has observed between the two species of rhetoricians. 4 Mailloux does mention Hunt in a footnote, but he does not appreciate how Hunt fits within a much larger development had on the subsequent history of the discipline. For more detail about the Cornell movement and its influence, see Leff and Procario, "Rhetorical Theory in Speech Communication," in Benson 3-27. 5 Jasinski's paper, "The Status of Theory and Method in Rhetorical Criticism," was presented at the Western Communication Association convention in February, 2000 and a revised version is scheduled to appear in a speech issue of the Western Communication Journal devoted to rhetorical criticism. A generally similar account of the dominance of scientifically tinctured concepts of method is presented in Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland 15-55. 6 Michael Halloran raised this point in his response to an earlier version of this paper presented at the RSA convention in May 2000. Halloran especially noted the work of Richard Young and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon as evidence of a commitment to a scientific perspective within the field of composition. 7 At the RSA session where I presented an earlier version of this paper, Carolyn Miller raised this point and emphasized its significance. She noted that composition1

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rhetoricians theorize about their direct experience in teaching rhetoric, while communication-rhetoricians do not. We might note in this respect that the only pedagogical journal published by NCA is Communication Education, and that journal is devoted almost entirely to social scientific studies. Years ago, when the journal was titled "Speech Teacher," one could find articles similar to those that continue to appear in College Composition and Communicationarticles that were grounded in classroom experience and treated such experience as a matter of general interest. Communication Education, however, offers scientific distance and a specialized, professional perspective. 8 In two papers, Gaonkar develops the notion of "deferral of the text" as a crucial element in the disciplinary history of rhetorical criticism within Communication: "The Oratorical Text: The Enigma of Arrival," in Leff and Kauffeld 255-276, and "Object and Method in Rhetorical Criticism" 290-316. Consideration of these two papers would encourage a rather different view of Gaonkar's conception of interpretation and textuality than the one that Mailloux derives from an isolated reading of "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science." 9 See my essay in Gross and Keith 89-100.

Works Cited
Benson, Thomas W., ed. Speech Communication in the Twentieth Century. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. Black, Edwin. Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. New York: MacMillan, 1965. Gaonkar, Dilip P. "The Oratorical Text: The Enigma of Arrival." In Leff and Kauffeld. 255-276. . "Object and Method in Rhetorical Criticism; From Wichelns to Leff and McGee." Western Journal of Speech Communication. 54(1990): 290-316. . "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science." In Gross and Keith. 25-85. Gross, Alan, and William Keith, eds. Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997. Jasinski, James. "The Status of Theory and Method in Rhetorical Criticism." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Western Communication Association, Sacramento, CA, February, 2000. Leff, Michael, and Margaret Organ Procario. "Rhetorical Theory in Speech Communication." In Benson. 3-27. Leff, Michael, and Fred Kauffeld, eds. Texts in Context: Critical Dialogues on Significant Episodes in American Political Rhetoric. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1989. Mailloux, Steven. "Disciplinary Identities: On the Rhetorical Paths between English Communication Studies." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (2000): 5-29. Nothstine, William L., Carole Blair, and Gary A. Copeland, eds. Critical Questions:Invention, Creativity, and the Criticism of Discourse and Media. St. Martin's Press: New York, 1994.