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Essay on Rhetorical and Communication Studies
In many ways, rhetorical studies as it was practiced in speech/communication circles during the 1960s was an uneasy, even anxious, discipline. The neoclassical thrust of rhetorical criticism was decisively critiqued in the mid-years by Edwin Black (1965) and appeared too inelastic to be stretched around the challenges posed by antiestablishment social-political movements. Traditional, classically oriented rhetorical theory, too, had been encrusted by such metaphors as its "dead hand" (Thompson, 1963), as unexamined "old starting points" (Walter, 1963), and as "sterile" (Simons, 1967/1971). Movement to remake or modernize it was its only constant.
Marie Hochmuth Nichols ( 1952, 1958) had undertaken the definition of the "new" in the so-called "New Rhetorics" in her studies of Kenneth Burke and I. A. Richards, trying to refurbish traditional conceptions and practices, while Daniel Fogarty (1959/1968) added the General Semanticists (especially S. I. Hayakawa) to that duo in his effort to expand and make more technically sophisticated a new rhetoric understood as oral and written prose expression.1 And yet, the New Rhetorics had not led to a mass revival in rhetorical studies.Prior to and at this time, "speech" departments did not exist in America.............
