Object and method in rhetorical criticism: From Wichelns to Leff and McGee

Abstract

T ESSAYS by Michael Leff (coauthored with Andrew Sachs) and Michael McGee offered in this volume, ostensibly as illustrations of two competing approaches to rhetorical criticism, display greater anxiety about the critical object than about the critical method. This is somewhat perplexing, because the names of Leff and McGee are associated with two different ways of conducting practical criticism: textual and ideological. In this special issue devoted to the interplay of those two methods, we find their chief proponents less concerned with rearticulating their methodological commitments and strategies than with totalizing the critical object as iconic or as fragmentary. Our perplexity is also heightened by the fact that since the publication of Edwin Black's Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (1965) there has been greater excitement and anxiety, partly intensified by the innovations of Leff and McGee, over the preferred method than over the privileged object.