DONALD C. BRYANT'S "RHETORIC: ITS FUNCTIONS AND ITS SCOPE" FIFTY YEARS LATER I first encountered Donald C. Bryant's "Rhetoric: Its Function and its Scope" (1953) almost 20 years ago, when it was assigned to me in a class taught by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. I read it as an obligationwe were reading lots of musings on the definition of rhetoric and the parameters of our field of study- but it did stick with me, particularly the claim that rhetoric has "the function of adjusting ideas to people and people to ideas" (413). This was a suitably expansive definition for my purposes, as I ended up choosing to study kinds of discourse that many considered non-traditional at the time-entertainment television programming being the central example. A decade later, when preparing the introduction to my book on feminism and entertainment television (Dow 1996), I read Bryant's essay again. The task I had given myself in that introduction was to justify the study of television as a rhetorical enterprise-indeed, I made an argument in that introduction that the study of popular entertainment had kinship with the study of nineteenth century public address. This was not an uninformed assertion- for the first two years of my graduate study I was trained almost exclusively as a public address critic. I found Bryant useful to make that link, and here is what I wrote in that introduction: Aristotle's definition of rhetoric, "the faculty of observing ... the available means of persuasion" and, more recently, Donald Bryant's, "adjusting ideas to people and people to ideas," are useful for understanding not only the rhetoric of social reformers but also the attempts of television producers to respond to a changing social climate . . . I am most interested, then, in television that works rhetorically to negotiate social issues: to define them, to represent them, and, ultimately, to offer visions of their meanings and implications. I am convinced that entertainment television does some of the cultural work that formerly was done through public speeches. (xv) It was important to me to be able to make this link between my work and accepted definitions of rhetoric, because I wished then, as Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/jhr/article-pdf/7/1/205/1426311/jhistrhetoric_7_1_205.pdf by guest on 29 March 2022 Bonnie J. Dow University of Georgia 206 BONNIE J. DOW Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/jhr/article-pdf/7/1/205/1426311/jhistrhetoric_7_1_205.pdf by guest on 29 March 2022 today, to identify myself first and foremost as a rhetorical critic whose objects of study, because of the questions that interest me, happen to include television. Bryant's words gave me the ability to make that link-to situate my work primarily within rhetorical studies, rather than, say, television studies, or cultural studies. Committed to the idea that rhetoric is "method, not subject" (406), Bryant's catholic perspective was perfect for someone like me, who wished to both bring television within the boundaries of rhetoric as well as to expand the boundaries of rhetorical criticism. Because the potential purview of rhetorical studies is so wide, we produce a great deal of discourse attempting to either usefully limit what our concerns are, so as to preserve a sense of uniqueness and integrity as a field, or we take the opposite path, toward universalization, as Dilip Gaonkar (1993) has termed this tendency, in which we argue that anything can be rhetorical, thus potentially widening our status and influence within the humanities. This is not a battle I wish to enter today; I mention it for two reasons. The first is that Bryant's essay seems quite prescient in this context, because his attempt to define function and scope in 1953 is a harbinger of the many engagements with that issue that would follow. Indeed, he highlights the issue at hand early in his essay when he notes that "unless we are to claim practically all interhuman activity as the field of rhetoric, however, some limits must be admitted" (405). Second, Bryant deserves respect not just for raising the issue early, but for approaching it so responsibly, rather than with an eye toward protecting traditional objects of study. In 1953, barely five years after the advent of commercial television, he treats seriously, rather than dismissively, the rhetorical dimensions of news, advertising, and propaganda. Of course, Bryant's task, as he saw it, was not to explain the role of rhetorical analysis, but to explain what makes something rhetorical. When he said that rhetoric is "method, not subject," he was not speaking of rhetorical analysis as a method used by critics, but of the method used by those who would produce that which should be considered rhetorical; as he put it, "no matter what the audience, when the speaker evinces skill in getting into their minds, he evinces rhetorical skill" (406). Yet, the effect of expanding the scope of rhetoric is, inevitably, to expand the scope of rhetorical criticism. The way in which I believe that we have moved beyond Bryant-also an inevitability-is that we BRYANT'S "RHETORIC" FIFTY YEARS LATER 207 Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/jhr/article-pdf/7/1/205/1426311/jhistrhetoric_7_1_205.pdf by guest on 29 March 2022 are far more concerned, fifty years later, with what the suitable subjects for rhetorical analysis are and how we will warrant the claims that we make about those objects. And we do this, for the most part, with little remaining concern over a priori definitions of rhetoric. Our concern is not with what rhetoric is, but with what can be fruitfully read as rhetoric and how. Gaonkar has summarized this most efficiently with his claim that "what is rhetorical in any given case is invariably an effect of one's reading rather than a quality intrinsic to the object being read" (1993, 261 ). He makes this claim in a discussion of the implications of the pursuit of the "rhetoric of science." That bit of context shows his distance from Bryant, who, following Aristotle, makes a distinction between those things that are contingent and thus addressable through rhetoric, and those things that are certain and thus outside rhetoric's purview. Bryant's example of the latter is physics (406). Debt to Aristotle is clear in Bryant, and brings to the fore the distinction I wish to draw here between defining rhetoric and defining its academic study. Gaonkar notes in the same essay that "our critical studies are sustained by the vocabulary of classical rhetoric, a vocabulary primarily fashioned for directing performance rather than facilitating understanding" ( 1993, 263). Indeed, the performative, and by extension the intentional, bias of Bryant's formulations is not to be overlooked. When discussing rhetorical situations, he writes "what makes a situation rhetorical is the focus upon accomplishing something predetermined and directional with an audience" (411 ). Later, he claims "the rhetorical seeks a predetermined channeling of the audience's understanding or attitude" (424). The implication in Bryant is that the rhetoricity, if you will, of some kind of discourse is determined by the person who produces it, rather than by the critic who analyzes it. My own work is situated in firm opposition to this notion. Not only do I argue for the rhetorical function of texts in ways with which their creators would surely disagree, but just a couple of years ago, I wrote that rhetorical texts have no a priori existence, that critics create them, that we take a phenomenon and "make it into a particular kind of 'matter' because of how we want it to matter to our audience" (Dow 200 I, 341 ). Yet this is, as Michael Leff put it in a response to Gaonkar 's similar claim, to invert the relationship between rhetor and critic, to remove agency from the "forum, the lawcourt, and the pulpit" and relocate it in "the study, the lecture hall and 208 BONNIE J. DOW Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/jhr/article-pdf/7/1/205/1426311/jhistrhetoric_7_1_205.pdf by guest on 29 March 2022 the library" (1993, 298). Leff argues that Gaonkar's dichotomy is too rigid, and that what is needed is "a more fluid relationship between the agency of the critic and the agency represented in the texts studied by the critic" (298). Even here, however, note that Leff shies away from the language of intentionality so clear in Bryant 's writing-Leff speaks of the agency "represented" in the text. Indeed, contemporary discussions of the agency of the audience for rhetorical action have moved us even farther from the rooting of rhetoric and its influence in the motives of the rhetor. So what does this mean for "Rhetoric: Its Functions and Its Scope," fifty years later? To me it shows the maturation of the field , exemplified in the shift of agency from the rhetor to the rhetorical critic. Bryant wrote his essay when the association that would become NCA was not yet forty years old, and the study of rhetoric and oratory within that discipline, if dated from Wichelns ( 1925), was younger still. In his moment, Bryant's concern with understanding what comprised the phenomena that rhetoricians study was the appropriate task for a field that needed to understand its distinctions from the more established disciplines that he names in the essay -literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and politics. He rooted that distinction in the motivation to persuade an audience about matters of contingency. As time went on, those distinctions began to be rooted more in how we study phenomena than in what motivates those phenomena, leading to statements such as Leah Ceccarelli's that "if we can no longer differentiate our work from that of other disciplines by the domain of human communication that we study, we can still differentiate ourselves by the way we study communication" (200 1, 324). Agency moves from the rhetor to the rhetorical scholar, from the method of the rhetor to the method of the critic. This shift begins to take hold little more than ten years after Bryant, with the publication of Edwin Black's Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (1965). The explosion of critical work that followed was the appropriate move for a discipline that rightfully became less concerned with defining and legitimating its subject matter than with offering illuminating and insightful arguments about that matter. I am a somewhat generous reader of Bryant's essay. Despite his conservatism in many ways, he can be read as pointing us toward recognition of the agency of the critic. For instance, near the end BRYANT'S "RHETORIC" FIFfY YEARS LATER 209 References Black, Edwin. 1965. Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. New York: Macmillan. Bryant, Donald C. ( 1953 ). "Rhetoric: Its Functions and Its Scope." Quarterly Journal of Speech 39: 401-24. Ceccarelli, Leah M. 200 I. "Rhetoric Criticism and the Rhetoric of Science." Western Journal of Communication 65:314-30. Dow, Bonnie J. 1996. Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women s Movement since 1970. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. - - - . 200 I. "Criticism and Authority in the Artistic Mode." Western Journal of Communication 65: 336-49. Gaonkar, Dillip P. 1993. "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science." Southern Communication Journal 58: 258-96. Leff, Michael. 1993. "The Idea of Rhetoric as Interpretive Practice: A Humanist's Reply to Gaonkar." Southern Communication Journal 58: 296-301. Wichelns, Herbert A. 1925. "The Literary Criticism of Oratory." In Studies in Rhetoric and Public Speaking in Honor of James Alberts Winans, 181-216. New York: The Century Company. Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/jhr/article-pdf/7/1/205/1426311/jhistrhetoric_7_1_205.pdf by guest on 29 March 2022 of his essay, Bryant he chides scholars for emphasizing biography rather than criticism in their studies of speakers (423). On that same page, he notes the importance of bringing the audience into rhetorical study, noting that "the more we speculate about the effect of a play or any literary work on an audience, the more we become involved in metaphysical questions in which rhetoric must become involved" (423). Always a self-interested reader, I see here the hint of a rationale for my own work on television discourse, as he makes the move toward interrogating distinctions between rhetoric and poetics. This is where he gives short shrift to Kenneth Burke, as Karlyn Campbell recently reminded me. Yet it is also where he quotes Ruth Wallerstein's defense of rhetoric-poetic analysis, in which she says that "both the significance of that rhetoric and the test of my view of it will reside on its power to illuminate the poems" (424). Just so. As a rhetorical critic, the test of my working definition of the scope and function of rhetoric resides in how that definition allows me to illuminate the power of public discourse. I may have moved far from Bryant's original perspective over the years, but I think it has served me well to have begun that journey with his essay.