The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change

Abstract

n his Afterthoughts on Rhetoric and Public Discourse, S. Michael Halloran finds that efforts of citizens to shape the fate of their community... would surely have been of interest to American neoclassical rhetoricians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (2). Unfortunately, he sees an apparent lack of interest in such 'Public Discourse' among new rhetoricians of late twentieth-century English departments (2). One way to increase our in public discourse is to bridge the university and community through activism. Given the role rhetoricians have historically played in the politics of their communities, I believe modern rhetoric and composition scholars can be agents of social change outside the university. Some critical theorists believe that the primary means of affecting social change is to translate activism into liberatory classroom pedagogies. This paper seeks to address other ways in which we can affect social change, something more along the lines of civic participation. As Edward Schiappa suggests, pedagogy that enacts cultural critique is important but it is not enough.... We should not allow ourselves the easy out of believing that being 'political' in the classroom is a substitute for our direct civic participation (22). I agree. I hope here to suggest ways we can empower people in our communities, establish networks of reciprocity with them, and create solidarity with them. Using a self-reflexive rhetoric, I'll describe the limitations of my own role as a participant observer in a predominately Black (their term) neighborhood in a city in upstate New York. I hope to reveal a tentative model of civic in our neighborhoods

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