History Bump

When the first Octalog met at CCCC in 1988 to address the “The Politics of Historiography” (Octalog, 1988), the problem of how historians conceived the historiographic project was the focus of debate. Did historians create narratives under the influence of Burkian terministic screens that guided their choice of sources and methods as well as the outcome of their analyses? Was objective truth, or at least something beyond equally un-evaluable relative truths, possible? If all histories were equally valid, or if the validity of a particular historic narrative couldn’t be evaluated, what was the point of writing history?

Brooks (1997) proposes that triangulation between the historian, the texts (sources) which the historian interprets, and the audience (reader) creates the interpretation that becomes both historiography and its politics, and that understanding this intersubjectivity gives historians both a way to understand and evaluate their work and a reason for continuing to do history in the face of complex questions about their ability to construct “true” histories. Who, then, is the audience with whom the historian interacts? For James Murphy and other participants in the first Octalog, one proposed answer was the polis, the community within which common good is enacted: in this case, the disciplinary community of rhetorician/historians doing historiography of rhetoric/composition as a field. To what extent does the polis operate on historians and on their sources, by limiting the definition of appropriate sources and methods, of valid analyses, of coherent interpretations, or epistemologically sound stances or terministic screens?

At the time of the first Octalog, the participants might well have chosen to echo the assertion that “scientific problems are usually clearly defined… scientific disciplines have communally-agreed on goals and a system of central principles. Literacy interpretation, by contrast, is relatively unconventional and unregulated; there are no agreed-upon goals (Berkenkotter and Huckin, 111). After reviewing a sizable sample of CCCC proposal abstracts from the years 1988, 1989, 1990, and 1992 using a “close textual analysis” method, Berkenkotter and Huckin concluded that a “generic blend” of hermeneutics, praxis, and empirical research appeared to be developing within Composition/Rhetoric, and concluded: “This blending of discourses seems most appropriate, in our view, for a field that is still searching for an identity. Rhetoric and composition is a highly interdisciplinary field, not yet a true discipline unto itself…” (ibid, 114). This blending echoes Hayden White’s assertion that History claims to be both science and art, and so succeeds in providing valid arguments from neither standpoint, in part because it lacks a recognized body of terminology for its endeavors (White). Whether the project under discussion is History of rhetoric or Rhetorical history, it seems the problem is the same.

The proceedings of the first Octalog and its successor, Octalog II, were published in Rhetoric Review in 1988 and 1997, respectively. These proceedings are now available to us as historic texts that can be operated on to gain insight into a variety of questions. How did panel members think their work should be undertaken? On what epistemological grounds would historiography be authorized? Should methodology adhere to disciplinary norms, and if so, what procedures would be sanctioned? Different analyses of Octalog I, for example, will provide different interpretations of the processes at work. Textual analysis may reveal key topoi, tropes, and arguments at stark variance with one another. Analysis of turn-taking and topic maintenance (discourse analysis methods), on the other hand, show that what appears to be a heated debate over the nature of “relative” and “static” truth and the historiographer’s role in constructing historical narratives might be understood instead as the communal construction of an intermediate stance between polemics. This stance requires, but simultaneously limits, a tolerance for paradox in historiographic epistemology, and has interesting implications for the adoption of specific approaches to the very political act of “doing history”.

The presentation will include findings from multiple analyses of the Octalog articles, and use them to discuss issues of epistemology, methodology, and method in the field of comp/rhet historiography, as well as discussing the issue of methodological training for comp/rhet research.

Works Cited

Berkenkotter, Carol and Thomas N. Huckin. “Gatekeeping at an Academic Concention”, in Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/Culture/Power. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995. pp 97-116.

Brooks, Kevin. Reviewing and Redescribing “Politics of Historiography” Octalog I, 1988. in Rhetoric Review Vol 16, No. 1, Autumn 1997 pp 22-44

Octalog: The Politics of Historiography. in Rhetoric Review> Vol 7, No1, Autumn 1988, 5-49

Octalog II: The (Continuing) Politics of Historiography. in Rhetoric Review Vol 16, No. 1, Autumn 1997 pp 22-44

White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978