CMS/W
Edward Schiappa, the John E. Burchard Chair of Humanities at MIT, has published Neosophistic Perspectives: Selected Essays on Historiography and the Scope of Rhetoric, a collection bringing together more than two decades of his scholarship on the history of rhetoric, historiography, and rhetorical studies. Published by Parlor Press, the book revisits debates about how scholars understand the past, how disciplinary categories take shape, and what we mean when we call something “rhetoric.” CMS/W recently discussed the new book with Schiappa.
CMS/W: Why revisit debates around Greek rhetoric? In philosophical debates, it seemed we had a battle over postmodernism and then decided to take separate paths forward, not look back.
Schiappa: First, interest in Greek texts continues, both in popular culture (thank you, Christopher Nolan) and in scholarship. Several big research projects called Handbooks and A Companion to Greek Rhetoric have been published recently, so the issues engaged continue to be “live.”
Funny you should mention postmodernism: a bit part of my project is to try to navigate between an outdated form of positivism on one hand and what might be called “reckless” postmodernism on the other. That is why I try to carve out a position I call “Sophisticated Modernism” that acknowledges the contingencies of history and culture while not abandoning the ideas of “fact” and better and worse historical arguments.
When people hear of a media studies or writing program, they might think of scholars who teach poetry, analyze films, or, now, try to predict the effects of AI. In your own career, you are perhaps best known not for Greek rhetoric but for a theoretical framework that used a television show as its case study. As you jumped back into these essays, and Greek and contemporary rhetorical theory more broadly, what connections did you find beyond the usual boundaries of the field?
The research on media effects was picked up in popular media, and in fact was featured in Newsweek back in 2004 as our work was just starting to come out. But within my original home discipline of Communication Studies, I was best “known” before then precisely for my work in rhetoric, both classical and contemporary.
My work in classical rhetoric, contemporary rhetoric, and media studies all have as a common factor an interest in categories: classical work focused on the category of “rhetoric” itself and the significance of the act of naming a discipline; contemporary work includes two books on definitions and definitional categories, and finally the media work is all about how exposure to media content changes how people’s psychological schema—that is, categories—change and become more elaborate as a result of learning more about a category of people. As Gordon Allport (popularizer of the Contact Hypothesis) said: “A differentiated category is the opposite of the stereotype.” So that is the dimension that runs across all my work: the persuasive work of categories.
You joined MIT in 2013 after faculty positions in departments organized around more traditional subjects such as public speaking, organizational communication, communication ethics, and classical rhetoric. What did it mean to join a more transdisciplinary academic community in Comparative Media Studies/Writing?
Frankly, it was one of the things that attracted me to MIT, especially the new merged identity of Writing AND Comparative Media Studies, since my work traveled across both realms. I had accomplished pretty much all I could in the traditional discipline of Communication so I was eager to explore beyond that, as I often had done. I have always been proud of the fact that my work has been published in many disciplines: Classics, Communication, English and Rhetoric-Composition, Psychology, Philosophy, and Law. I think what has been noteworthy are the problems I am trying to address.
Your new book collects writing from more than two decades. As you acknowledge in the introduction, that gives you distance from which to reevaluate your own work and consider the critiques of peers and a new generation of scholars. What would you tell a young scholar about engaging meaningfully with thoughtful criticism of arguments they hold strongly?
I would say: you cannot be only a theorist. Theory is fun and challenging, but if you want scholars to treat you seriously you need to also prove yourself as a historian or as someone engaging contemporary texts. Theoretical interventions are far more credible if you can speak with a body of work that shows the results of your theoretical commitments. My first book on definitions was organized around advancing a set of theoretical claims about definitions, but each claim was illustrated by a reasonably detailed case study. And the work in this new collection has credibility (I think) because I have proved the value of my historical work, and the usefulness of my “sophisticated modernist” framework.
