Literacy and Rhetoric as Complementary Keywords

Abstract

and Arts of Oklahoma B renda Glascott's "Constricting Keywords: Rhetoric and Literacy in our History Writing, " one of six feature articles that headlined Literacy in Composition Studies' inaugural 2013 issue, strikes me as an important essay-specifically, as one of those rare disciplinary metacommentaries that brings once unstated terminological tension into sharp relief. This sort of work matters now especially because, amid the growing push to integrate literacy studies further into the disciplinary fold of rhetoric and composition, scholars in the field will have to reckon with the opportunities and limitations that our evolving constellation of keywords entails. Glascott does this with candor. Rhetoric, for Glascott, constitutes a "constricting keyword" insofar as its predominance across composition histories "privileg[es] an audience-driven. .. approach" above any more "self-exploratory" approach that she associates with the keyword literacy (23). Literacy, by contrast, allows for Glascott the bidirectional analysis of language as both other-directed and self-directed. Apart from remarks by symposium respondents to LiCS' first issue (see Bizzell; Goldblatt; Kynard; Qualley; Salvatori), there has been little commentary on Glascott's terminological distinction of rhetoric as other-directed and literacy as bidirectional but emphasizing the self. This distinction is provocative and potentially useful. It is also, I suspect, likely to grate against the convictions of many avowed rhetoricians (present company included). But I don't say this dismissively. In this symposium essay, I take Glascott's literacy-rhetoric division as a point of departure. I first address Glascott's charges against rhetoric in order to revise the sense of the term her essay provides. I then specifically revisit Glascott's commentary on Jaqueline Jones Royster's Traces of a Stream and, finally, offer several ideas toward refiguring literacy and rhetoric as complementary keywords, perhaps to the detriment of composition. While I disagree with Glascott on several important points, my purpose is less to refute her position than to extend the conversation she introduces in a new direction. Above all, I appreciate that Glascott has broached the issue of rhetoric and literacy's mutual relationship. The modest defense of rhetoric I wish to mount here stresses the conceptual elasticity necessary for rhetoric and literacy to become mutually complementary rather than oppositional ideas. I pursue this goal by responding specifically to three of Glascott's charges against rhetoric. Each of Glascott's theses, in my view, entails some truth and some oversimplification.