A Century of Communication Studies

The Unfinished Conversation

Pat J. Gehrke, William M. Keith, Pat J. Gehrke, William M. Keith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134062867
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume chronicles the development of communication studies as a discipline, providing a history of the field and identifying opportunities for future growth. Editors Pat J. Gehrke and William M. Keith have assembled an exceptional list of communication scholars who, in the thirteen chapters contained in this book, cover the breadth and depth of the field. Organized around themes and concepts that have enduring historical significance and wide appeal across numerous subfields of communication, A Century of Communication Studies bridges research and pedagogy, addressing themes that connect classroom practice and publication.

Published in the 100th anniversary year of the National Communication Association, this collection highlights the evolution of communication studies and will serve future generations of scholars as a window into not only our past but also the field's collective possibilities.

1.

DISCOVERING COMMUNICATION

Five Turns toward Discipline and Association

J. Michael Sproule

The one-hundredth anniversary of the National Communication Association provides occasion to explore connections between our organization and the emergence of communication as a fully realized academic area focused on human interaction as variously mediated by speech, writing, print, electronic channels, and culture. What we find is a three-century transformation by which the term communication transitioned from a designator for the purpose underlying various oral-literate media to a high-level disciplinary moniker unifying both channels and socio-cultural processes. This more explicit awareness of the holistic connection between audience and source represents the outcome of five successive, although not always harmonious, turning points. The tale first takes us to the early eighteenth century when the term communication gained currency as part of the project to elevate vernacular English as a purposive vehicle in both spoken and written formats. Somewhat diminishing this early emphasis on source– audience connectivity was a second turn, after the 1820s, by which theorists and teachers separately elaborated the expressive instrumentalities of elocution and composition. A third important transformation point dates to the years after 1915 when proponents of public speaking began to re-emphasize the pivotal role of communicative objectives in expressive speech. Separately, in fin de siècle social science, we find the beginnings of a fourth key turn whereby communication increasingly functioned as a conceptual lever for understanding the societal implications of symbolic exchange. Parallel projects of 1940s wartime scholarship and teaching further advanced this purposive-societal perspective. Here quantitative social scientists undertook studies of mass communication while at the same time teachers of speech and composition joined forces in unified communication courses that integrated speaking, writing, listening, and reading. Finally giving communication study its full disciplinary breadth was a fifth conceptual-disciplinary metamorphosis after the 1960s whereby scholars and teachers expanded the bailiwick of communication study by giving more explicit attention to culture’s role in social interaction.

Elevating the Vernacular

The 1700s represents an apt starting point for communication history in view of several transformations of rhetorical theory and pedagogy flowing from the mania for improving the English language as discursive medium. Because English, speech, and journalism all grew from a shared purpose to widen interaction through the common tongue, we may presumptively give an affirmative answer to the yet persisting question, “Is communication a discipline?” Such an interpretation stands in opposition to the discipline’s supposed original sin of having been conceived in irredeemable fragmentation as allegedly proved by latter-day fissures among composition, literature, speaking, news, compliance gaining, marketing, electronic media, and so on.

When examined holistically, the works of major eighteenth-century British rhetoricians all point in the direction of a vernacular synthesis variously useful for bringing provincial elites to the King’s English, introducing the middle class to literary culture, and enabling the democracy of debating societies.¹ Accordingly, classicists John Lawson (1758) and John Ward (1759) both blended ancient oratorical rhetoric with eighteenth-century considerations of genius, taste, the sublime, prose writers and genres, stylistic purity and perspicuity, and the composition of sentences. Thomas Sheridan (1780 and 1781) and John Walker’s (1810, 1834, and 1971) broad intent to reform and regularize both oral and written English becomes evident when we juxtapose their lectures on elocutionary reading (respectively, 1762 and 1781) to their equally important rhetorical grammars (respectively, 1781 and 1785) and pronouncing dictionaries (respectively, 1780 and 1791). Finally, the works that Wilbur Howell designates as constituting a British New Rhetoric emerge as the treatises most influential in edifying the English vernacular in both its oral and written iterations. Best represented by George Campbell (1776), Hugh Blair (1783), and later Richard Whately (1828), the New Rhetoric theorists promoted wide-ranging vernacular interchange not only by treating written grammar, usage, sentence construction, style, and literary taste, but also by elucidating the oral elements of pronunciation, articulation, purposive speaking, expres sive literary reading, and (in Blair and Whately) gesture.

The orientation of rhetoricians to an audience-accessible vernacular further becomes clear from their pedagogical writings that followed John Locke (1692) and Benjamin Franklin (1749) in making English pronunciation, writing, and literature central to education. James Burgh (1745) favored schooling grounded in the correct and intelligible speaking and writing of the mother tongue; and Sheridan (1769) circulated a plan to “methodize the whole of the English language” through college-preparatory English grammar, oral reading of English prose and poetry, and reinstating “the lost art of speaking.” Similarly, Joseph Priestley (1796) and Noah Webster (1790) lamented how the modern languages, though central to social and intellectual life, currently were insufficiently cultivated. To remedy this deficiency, Samuel Knox (1799), Principal of Baltimore College and author of a synthetic rhetoric textbook, wanted “the study and thorough knowledge of the native language” to become “the leading consideration” of liberal education through a regimen of composition, pronunciation, rhetoric, elocution, oratory, belles lettres, taste, and criticism. With British and American rhetoricians championing a broad-based English education, Douglas Ehninger’s tidy apportionment of Enlightenmentera rhetoric into four schools of thought (classical, psychological-epistemological, belletristic, elocutionary) obscures the common-language imperative by diverting attention to what were differing starting points in a like-minded theoretical-pedagogical enterprise.²

Abridged versions designed for colleges and academies helped diffuse the vernacular-English mission of the New-Rhetoric treatises, most notably the numerous abstracted treatments of Blair’s Lectures. Even more influential were compilations drawing from multiple works. These schoolbooks, best designated as advanced rhetorics, offered college and academy students an integrated introduction to vernacular English by selectively drawing from Blair, Campbell, Whately, and other contemporary handbooks such as those of John Holmes (1755) and John Stirling (1733). Here Knox’s rhetoric (1809) and other treatise-synthesizing textbooks continued the pattern of combining writing and speaking, most often by appropriating from Blair’s sections on composing and literature, also typically including Campbell’s treatments of usage and verbal criticism. Later advanced rhetorics drew from Whately on argument types, refutation, presumption, and burden of proof. Initially somewhat idiosyncratic in their borrowings, advanced rhetorics progressively took on a more conventionalized aspect, transitioning into the English composition book. Yet the earliest composition texts shared the integrative orality-literacy approach of the treatises and advanced rhetorics, most notably by including the oration as one important context for composing.³

Treatise books—and related advanced rhetorics and composition manuals—typically garner the greatest attention in rhetorical history for having served as mainstays of academy and college instruction. Yet it is clear that the vernacular imperative encompassed more than the horizontal span of subject-matter orality and literacy found in higher-level works. The project also included a vertical component relating to levels of instruction beginning with elementary primers, spellers, grammars, and readers. The pedagogical and cultural influence of these humbler works stemmed less from intellectual weight and more from their reaching a far larger audience in a time when less than 1% of students graduated from high school.⁴ Primers and spellers uniformly utilized an ascending oral-recitation method that commenced with sounding out letters, syllables, words, and sentences and that continued with upper-grade pupils delivering longer selections (the religious orientation of which resulted from the prior-day practice of using catechisms, psalters, and Bibles for reading lessons). Some early introductory textbooks brought together spelling, grammar, and reading as in Thomas Dilworth’s popular New Guide (1740). However, by the later eighteenth century, separate spellers, grammars, and readers collectively provided a broad-based vernacular pedagogy of language recognition, pronunciation, recitation, and appreciative literary expression. Even grammar study, seemingly an apotheosis of print-on-page English, then included as one of its four standard departments something called prosody, defined as the correct and appropriate pronunciation and delivery of prose together with the principles of versification.

In a context where reading aloud to the class constituted the basic pedagogy from grade school to college, rhetorical readers ultimately became the pivotal schoolbook used in locales spanning grammar school, academy (an institution sometimes equivalent to first-year college), university, and adult learning. Rhetorical readers may be recognized by their two-part organization, first, a brief introductory section covering principles of oral expression followed by a far lengthier classified anthology of essays, speeches, plays, and poems. This speaking/writing amalgamation of purposive and literary texts represented a pedagogical synthesis ideal for many settings. In grammar schools, speaking-oriented readers facilitated declamation in the upper grades; in academies, they provided the fundamentals of elocution (oral reading plus speech delivery); and across the educational spectrum, they constituted the earliest available literary anthologies—accounting for their extensive presence in university libraries. Initially most popular were rhetorical readers imported from England, notably those of Burgh (1761), William Enfield (1774), William Scott (1779), and Lindley Murray (1799). Burgh’s evocative instruc tions for expressing seventy-seven passions made his text a particular favorite until after the Revolution, when British imports increasingly were replaced by American-authored readers, notably those of Webster (1785/1806) and Caleb Bingham (1797). Rhetorical readers were particularly sought out by adult learners such as Lincoln who studied from Scott, and Frederick Douglass who took “every opportunity” to read Bingham.⁵ Autodidacts had reference not only to school books—spellers, grammars, and readers—but also to handbooks specifically designed for private study or workaday reference, manuals adapted principally to business and secondarily to polite society. Practical guidebooks chiefly offered either classified letters (e.g., requesting payment) or business arithmetic (e.g., weights and measures), although many combined model letters and numerics and added exemplary legal documents (e.g., powers of attorney) and/or useful social graces such as forms of address and “familiar letters” (i.e., polite social correspondence). A few, such as George Fisher’s American Instructor (1748), undertook an additional, explicitly English-vernacular mission variously embracing pronunciation, oral reading, physical delivery, style (tropes and figures), and rhetorical organization.

Not only was the notion of close audience–source connection inherent in all academic and popular works promising competency in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Brief History of the National Communication Association
• 1. Discovering Communication: Five Turns toward Discipline and Association
• 2. Paying Lip Service to “Speech” In Disciplinary Naming, 1914–1954
• 3. The Silencing of Speech in the Late Twentieth Century
• 4. Epistemological Movements in Communication: An Analysis of Empirical and Rhetorical/Critical Scholarship
• 5. The Scholarly Communication of Communication Scholars: Centennial Trends in a Surging Conversation
• 6. Sexing Communication: Hearing, Feeling, Remembering Sex/Gender and Sexuality in the NCA
• 7. Liberalism and its Discontents: Black Rhetoric and the Cultural Transformation of Rhetorical Studies in the Twentieth Century
• 8. A Critical History of the “Live” Body in Performance Within the National Communication Association
• 9. Listening Research in the Communication Discipline
• 10 Conceptualizing Meaning in Communication Studies
• 11 Communicative Meeting: From Pangloss to Tenacious Hope
• Afterword: What Next?
• Index