The transcript of a continuing conversation: David Zarefsky and public address.

• Author: Ray, Angela G.
• Position: Report

The thesis of this essay is that David Zarefsky is a consummate conversationalist. This term is not one that is routinely ascribed to my distinguished colleague. In fact, if by conversationalist we mean a raconteur, someone who holds audiences spellbound by regaling them with strings of loosely connected anecdotes, then the term is unsuitable, for although Zarefsky can recall a wealth of captivating anecdotes about histories that he has studied and histories that he has experienced, he tends to share such stories sparingly, when they are pertinent to immediate concerns. And if by conversationalist we mean someone who talks a great deal, then again the term seems inapt, for although Zarefsky would never be described as shy, he is better known for careful speech, thoughtful listening, and reserve in interaction than for gregariousness. So have I begun the daunting task of characterizing Zarefsky's contributions to public address by offering an insupportable thesis? And to the readers of Argumentation and Advocacy, no less?

I hope not. Instead, I accept as a premise of this essay that "to choose a definition is to plead a cause" (Zarefsky, 1986b, p. 8), and I trust that an alternate definition of conversationalist, one closely allied to the traditions of rhetorical theory, will prove a useful vehicle for generating my case and my cause. The twentieth-century scholarship of Kenneth Burke provides the impetus for the definition I propose. Among the many influential concepts and images in Burke's scholarship is the depiction of a continuing conversation, famously articulated in 1941 in The Philosophy of Literary Form (1973, pp. 110-111). As many before me have noted, Burke describes an "unending conversation" (p. 111) that existed before specific participants arrived and continues after they depart, a conversation that is altered owing to their involvement but that is never entirely controlled by any of them, a conversation whose trajectory is marked by time-bound concerns but persists across time, a conversation whose meanings are unstable and unknowable but are susceptible to momentary characterization. Drawing on the image of the Burkean conversation, I invite a focus on the individual participant, the conversationalist, one who affects and is affected by the unfolding symbolic drama.

For my part, I learned of Burke's image of the conversation when I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. Early in the fall of 1996, Robert L. Scott, then director of graduate studies, briefly mentioned it during our orientation week. The significance of the image was quickly reinforced when I encountered it again within days, this time in a scholarly essay assigned by Kirt Wilson in his course on early U.S. public address. The essay that Wilson assigned was Zarefsky's "Four Senses of Rhetorical History." It would not appear in print until 1998, but we read it in manuscript, as a keynote address delivered at the Greenspun Conference on Rhetorical History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in March 1995. Our class gained early access because Wilson had been a research assistant for Zarefsky at Northwestern. The "Four Senses" essay remained a touchstone for me throughout graduate school, and I cited it in my dissertation (Ray, 2001, pp. 27-28). Now I periodically assign the essay to my own graduate students. Its precise framing of four approaches to rhetorical history and its frank advice about audience-based rationales for scholarly writing prompt lively class discussions. Students routinely refer to the essay in their class papers or their dissertations (e.g., Richards, 2008, p. 230), and some occasionally produce playful parodies of the "four senses of ..." theme. Perhaps a few are introduced to Burke's conversational metaphor via this essay.

I offer this personal commentary as narrative evidence of key points. When we change our focus from the conversation to the conversationalist, it quickly becomes apparent that each conversationalist is engaged in multiple conversations at once, and he or she may participate in any given conversation directly or indirectly. Indeed, the conversationalist is personally unaware of some of the conversations to which his or her voice contributes, since the voice may come to a conversation carried on the breath of others or via written words generated years before. Further, when we emphasize an engaged conversationalist participating in conversations within an academic discipline, conventional categories of practice begin to blur. Scholarship proves itself functional as an instrument of teaching, whether the learner is enrolled in a class or is a private reader. Teaching uses, inspires, and promotes scholarship, produced by those who have been students or teachers, roles that, as Zarefsky reminds his students, are "always reciprocal." (1) And lectures presented outside classrooms can transform into scholarship to be reinvented in teaching. Generations speak to one another, sometimes directly and personally in classrooms and offices and restaurants and coffee shops and the lobbies of conference hotels, and sometimes indirectly across time and space.

It is in all these senses that I propose that David Zarefsky is a consummate conversationalist. By conversationalist I signal his role as an active, engaged participant in the ongoing conversations of his time, one who both listens and talks. With the adjectival qualifier consummate, I invoke common denotative definitions of being accomplished and skilled to the highest degree, and in consequence, I dissociate types of conversationalists along lines of quality. Although I have just suggested that conversations are inextricably intertwined--especially when traced through the activity of an individual--for convenience I will disentangle three conversational threads, in order to illuminate different facets of Zarefsky's skilled conversational practice: as a researcher, as a teacher, and as a practitioner of public address.

This essay, which is simultaneously observation, interpretation, reflection, argument, and tribute, aims not only to examine the ways in which Zarefsky's conversational abilities are manifested but also to ascertain what it is that he says. What are his contributions to public address? They are manifold, but resounding through varying modalities I hear three consistent themes. First, Zarefsky argues that the discursive record of the past is useful and susceptible to continual reinvigoration and reassessment. As he noted in a public lecture in November 1995, "The record of American public discourse is not just a record of old dead orators. It is the transcript of a continuing conversation" (1996, p. 10). Second, and in keeping with an understanding of public discourse as conversational exchange, maneuver, and engagement, he enacts and promotes argumentation as a "point of view" (Zarefsky, 1980b). This perspective functions as a means of understanding how the discourse of individuals and institutions changes across time, altering subsequent rhetorical practice, changing rhetors' own views, and affecting public sentiment. Third, and crucially, Zarefsky emphasizes the utility of examining the past and gaining an argumentative perspective to promote productive rhetorical deliberation in the present, to "cultivate persons who responsibly practice our old and useful art in both their personal and their public lives" (2008b, p. 15). Thus the study of public address is not an antiquarian activity appealing only to the anointed, but a crucial foundation for creating and sustaining a democratic culture.

In his "Four Senses" essay, Zarefsky writes of the role of conversationalists within the Burkean conversation: "To be judged relevant, what we say must fit into the context of that conversation. To be judged important, it must somehow influence the conversation so that its subsequent path is different from what it might have been otherwise" (1998b, p. 24). This essay adduces evidence to demonstrate that Zarefsky's work--as a researcher of public address, as a teacher of public address, and as a practitioner who addresses publics--can easily be judged relevant and important, as it responds to conversational contexts and alters conversational trajectories.

RESEARCHING PUBLIC ADDRESS

During David Zarefsky's career, ongoing scholarly conversations collectively have expanded the object domain of public address studies (Zarefsky, 2009), have increasingly emphasized critical practice as a perspective rather than a set of methods (Zarefsky, 2006, p. 385), and have argued for the significance of studying the historical record of public discourse generally, and the record of U.S. political discourse specifically, as a means of contextualizing the present, challenging a myopic sense of historical inevitability, and enriching one's empathy for and understanding of human experience different from one's own (Zarefsky, 1998b, p. 31). His own scholarship, much like the rhetorical practices that he has chosen to study, is situated within recognizable traditions and at the same time alters the foci of those traditions as a response to situational exigence.

Many rhetorical scholars have reiterated with approval Wayne Brockriede's assertion that "useful rhetorical criticism ... must function as argument" (1974, p. 165), and Zarefsky is no exception (see, e.g., Zarefsky, 1987; 1988, pp. 11-12; 1989, p. 24; 2006, p. 384). A key contribution of Zarefsky to rhetorical scholarship, however, has been to extend this claim, effectively collapsing a meaningful distinction between the rhetorical criticism of public address and argumentation studies. His publications that emphasize public discourse regularly employ argumentation as an analytic perspective, and his work that emphasizes argumentation theory regularly relies on evidence and examples drawn from public discourse.

This intersection is dramatically apparent in his 2007 essay on Colin...