Ethnography Unbound: From Theory Shock to Critical Praxis, edited by Stephen Gilbert Brown and Sidney I

Issue 33.2 Fall 2005, Pages 128-30
Book Reviews

Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks, edited by Carol S. Lipson and Roberta A. Binkley. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 267 pages.

Reviewed by Teresa Grettano, Illinois State University

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This collection extends the canon of classical rhetoric by including investigations of Middle Eastern, Egyptian, and Chinese rhetorics and complicates notions of what rhetoric is, how it functions, what its techniques and strategies are, and how it is interconnected with culture.

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In November 2004, Susan Miller delivered the inaugural English Studies Lecture Series address at Illinois State University. In “What’s Love Got to Do With It: An Emotional History of Rhetoric, A Rhetorical History of Emotion,” Miller discussed the “false and boring” rhetorical tradition many in the field present as our foundation and argued that rhetoric, despite how it has been represented in textbooks, did not start with Corax and Tisias arguing land disputes in Sicily; that in fact, communication and the study of how it can be done effectively had been taking place long before that. Much like the recent revisionist efforts of Cheryl Glenn, Andrea Lunsford, John Poulakos, Edward Schiappa, and others, Miller discussed the need to extend our understanding of classical rhetoric by studying and applying voices of those outside the ancient Athenian Greek canon—including those of women, people in socio-economic classes other than the elite, and other cultures. Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks is such an attempt to open the canon in what the editors’ characterize as an effort to better understand “other ways of being, seeing, and making knowledge” (4).

The collection analyzes rhetorical practices from three of the six regions that are recognized as established civilizations during the period 5000-1200 BCE (the Middle East, Egypt, and China) and is divided into sections according to areas: Mesopotamian Rhetoric, Egyptian Rhetoric, Chinese Rhetoric, Biblical Rhetoric, Alternative Greek Rhetoric, and Cross-Cultural Rhetorical Studies. The editors recognize access to historical texts from this period is problematic due to the limited number of texts recovered and translated. They acknowledge that translation itself is problematic, lending to the skewing of ideas and contents, and are quick to point out that while their collection works within this problematic framework, the authors of the articles in the Chinese section are either fluent or conversant in the language, limiting the difficulties associated with translation.

Methodology in general is always a factor, and the editors understand that much work that has been done in relation to ancient cultures favors Western interpretations—skewing further the research in the area. They acknowledge the contributions made by George Kennedy’s Comparative Rhetoric and Robert Oliver’s Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China, as well as others, but claim the texts use Greek culture as the primary lens of comparison. While some articles in the collection follow this comparative methodology, others attempt the hermeneutical, anthropological approach suggested by Xing Lu which allows the texts to “speak for themselves” and recognizes the differences among and within cultures.

In addition to opening the canon of rhetoric, the editors hope to problematize or complicate our notions of the term itself. While “rhetoric” is largely understood as persuasion through argument in the field of rhetoric and composition, the collection illustrates that it did not mean this for all cultures at the time and did not mean it in the same way as it did in Athenian Greece (see articles in the collection by George Q. Xu, Yameng Liu, and Richard Leo Enos). The editors look to contemporary theories that approach rhetoric as the study of power relations and issues and offer alternative ways to understand rhetoric in these ancient contexts as discourse systems, communication norms, or principles of language use. Arabella Lyon, however, in her article “Confucian Silence and Remonstration: A Basis for Deliberation?”, suggests that applying the term “rhetoric” to cultures whose values differ from ancient Greece (and particularly from Aristotle and Plato) violates the term. James W. Watts’s “Story-List-Sanction” on the rhetoric of the ancient Near-East challenges the idea that rhetoric is situated discourse by showing the use of similar conventions and patterns through combinations of genres among different cultures.

One of the first notions of rhetoric the collection challenges is the story of origin that Miller criticized. This is evident in William H. Hallo’s opening article “The Birth of Rhetoric.” In this revised version of his book chapter, Hallo posits that rhetoric began not with the Greeks but in Mesopotamia and that the canons of classical rhetoric can be applied to cuneiform literature. Roberta A. Binkley disputes the origins story in her discussion of Enheduanna—the poet, priestess, and princess recognized as the first named historical author—in “The Rhetoric of Origins and the Other.” Binkley’s article also is instrumental in the way the collection calls into question the gendered history of rhetoric the field purports. She says studying Enheduanna’s work challenges images and ideas of the veiled Eastern women and Platonic ideas of identity, materiality, and gender; Enheduanna’s composing process articulated in her writing illustrates a subjectivity with agency and the interconnectedness of the mind/body/spirit.

In “Law, Rhetoric, and Gender in Ramesside Egypt,” archeologist Deborah Sweeney analyzes legal texts from Ramesside era (1300-1070 BCE), during which time there were no professional lawyers and individuals represented themselves. She focuses on what the texts (which are summaries of dialogues during the cases) tell us about women’s rhetoric and finds that women and men spoke and were treated similarly in court, implying that rhetorical technique was more genre specific than gendered. C. Jan Swearingen in “Song to Speech: The Origins of Early Epitaphia in Ancient Near Eastern Women’s Lamentations” reinforces this notion, saying the roles for women as leaders/speakers were similar across cultures, and that these roles diminished only with the development of Athenian rhetoric. Carol S. Lipson’s “Ancient Egyptian Rhetoric: It All Comes Down to Maat” argues that Egyptian rhetoric relied heavily on Maat (the goddess who invented writing), both as a notion and as a Bakhtinian superaddressee. The collection also extends some of the work done in the field (for example, Cheryl Glenn’s Unspoken) by de-gendering the rhetoric of silence—addressing it still as a culturally conditioned response but taking it out of the realm of “woman” (see the articles on Confucian rhetoric).

The conflation of rhetoric and argument is challenged by this collection, as well. In “‘Nothing Can Be Accomplished If the Speech Does Not Sound Agreeable’: Rhetoric and the Invention of Classical Chinese Discourse,” Yameng Liu “points out that a restrictive equation of rhetoric with ‘argumentation’ or ‘naming’ limits our understanding. Instead, looking at rhetoric as a ‘productive architectonic art,’ and applying postmodern perspectives on the production of discourse, he demonstrates that the invention of classical Chinese discourse was dependent on the common assumptions of a highly developed rhetoric” (17). Richard Leo Enos also discusses the use of rhetoric to promote cross-cultural, cross-boundary discourse necessary for commerce in the port island of Rhodes in “The Art of Rhetoric at Rhodes: An Eastern Rival to the Athenian Representation of Classical Rhetoric.”

The collection will be important for scholars, teachers, and students of classical rhetoric, and it opens wide spaces for much needed future work in this area. The individual Works Cited pages of each article allows interested readers to access further readings easily. The greatest value of this collection, though, is its closing section, “Suggestions for Teaching Ancient Rhetorics.” Each author in the collection contributes to the section, putting the area of focus in context to the wider discussions in classical rhetoric, offering sources for background and future reading, suggesting goals and objectives for teaching units and questions of inquiry, and outlining unit designs. The section can be used both by faculty as a guide for how to expand students’ understanding of classical rhetoric by incorporating other rhetorics into graduate and undergraduate curriculum, and for graduate faculty to talk about pedagogy and course design while training graduate students to teach classical rhetoric.

Normal, IL