Re-Marking Slave Bodies: Rhetoric as Production and Reception

Abstract

There is much talk nowadays about the double nature of rhetoric: rhetoric as a practical guide for composing and rhetoric as a theoretical stance for interpreting. The two uses can be viewed as complementary, as flip sides of the same holistic approach to rhetorical studies. But they can also appear in conflict: production models of writing and speaking versus reception models of reading and listening; models for inventing rhetoric versus models for analyzing it. Indeed, though the two models can be mutually supportive, they have often developed in tension within the evolution of academic disciplines over the last 125 years. Different emphases on one or the other model have resulted in different departmentalized disciplines and varied divisions within those departments, as we are all so well aware. One might even claim that advocating one or the other model has contributed significantly to the fragmentation of rhetoric as an interdiscipline during the last century and to the distribution of its parts into various academic units. In many English departments, for example, the continuing divisions between literature and composition faculty arise from contrasting professional interests in reception models focused on interpreting literary works versus production models focused on composing student texts. A similar reception/production antagonism appears in the history of speech departments separating from English departments. In 1915, when seventeen teachers of public address broke off from the National Council of Teachers of English, the production (oratory or debate) model they favored was at odds with the reception (philological or hermeneutic) model of most literature faculty. 1