So some people are sending around this interview with Berkeley grad students in their Rhetoric program as they largely avoid the question of what rhetoric is. I agree that it is not very helpful to someone trying to understand what rhetoric is and why people would study it. I would just point out that Berkeley’s Rhetoric department is wholly and entirely separate from the field of Rhetoric and Composition. This division is intentional on the part of that program and, as I understand it, an important part of their self-conception as a department. (And very, very Berkeley). I have no opinion on these students, their work, or their program, none of which is any of my business. The rhetoric stuff they do there has very little at all to do with what people do in my broader field. And I’ll leave it at that.
I will also say, once again, that though I am in a rhet/comp program, I do not do research in rhetoric myself, generally. Much in the way that a student in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences might only study hearing, for example. There’s lots of cool work being done on that side of the field, but it is not my work. I do largely quantitative work in writing assessment and pedagogy.
At some point one of them says something along the lines of ‘the styles and structures of various discourses’ which seems close enough.
I think it’s somewhat understandable, when your in the business of how discourses shape and our shaped, to be extremely mindful of the implications of defining the meta.
I have no judgement of those students, their work, or their program. It’s none of my business. I’m just reflecting on the fact that what they do is not what we do.
What exactly are people saying about the interview? At least one of the students articulates, very early on, a traditional understanding of rhetoric: “the applied study of language and written argumentation, persuasive speech and so forth.” And he is aware that Berkeley’s program is different, and clear about why he chose it: “The appeal of Rhetoric for me lies in its training in a tradition of continental philosophy and critical theory and the flexibility to do whatever research you want to do. But I also chose Rhetoric because it’s at UC Berkeley, and I knew that they had really strong departments like English, Ethnic Studies, and Southeast Asian Studies. So, I was confident the campus could in fact make possible the kind of interdisciplinary work I wanted to pursue.” He even explains the challenges posed by having chosen this non-traditional rhetoric program: “I have to think about how I can present myself as being equipped to teach and do research within a discipline but also to present my interdisciplinary training in rhetoric as doing something new or non-traditional.”
My point is, this person is neither confused nor evasive. He clearly understands what “rhetoric” means traditionally, and he also seems to have chosen this particular, non-traditional rhetoric department for well thought-out reasons that he articulates early on in the interview. What’s people’s problem?
I don’t disagree with your take.
People’s problem is that we live in a culture that is reflexively dismissive of academics generally and those in the humanities specifically, where people are very eager to believe the most damning and dismissive takes on the supposed obscurity and uselessness of humanities research. So I think they’re taking the lack of particularly clear, consistent definitions here as indicating some type of willful impenetrability in a way people in theory typically are.