Ambito familiar

To this point, I hope that I have made the relation of the road to rhetoric more apparent. In this section, my objective is to show how contemporary rhetorical theorists have used the metaphor and language of the road to arrange and organize rhetoric as a discipline. Most importantly, psychagogia indicates both what rhetoric is and what it does. In this way, rhetoric does something for us. Put differently, Kenneth Burke refers to it as “equipment for living.”101 For instance, in The Prospect of Rhetoric, rhetoricians situated problems in contemporary life to show how rhetoric could be applied more                                                                                                                

98 _{Quoted in Rhodes, Eros, Wisdom, and Silence, 420.}

99 _{Zdravko Planinc, Plato through Homer: Poetry and Philosophy in the} Cosmological Dialogues (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 83.

100 _{Planinc, Plato Through Homer, 83.}

effectively to address current and future needs.102 In other words, scholars held faith in the possibility that their work could affect social change. Reengaging the Prospects of

Rhetoric revisited these twentieth century issues for the twenty first century: its

“fundamentals” (Karl Wallace-Stephen H. Browne); its action for a contemporary world (Samuel L. Becker-Barbara Biesecker); its uses (Richard McKeon-David Depew); its intellectual physiology (Lawrence W. Rosenfield-Robert S. Iltis); its trends in rhetorical theory (Henry Johnstone-Steve Fuller); its scope (Wayne Booth-Paul Kameen); its emotive potential (Chaim Perelman-Celeste Michelle Condit); its needs (Hugh Duncan- Peter Simonson); its trends of study (Wayne Brockriede-John Lyne); its queries and caveats (Burnet Baskerville-Mark Porrovecchio); and its quests (Edward P. J. Corbett- Steven Mailloux).103

Aside from considering the possibilities and limitations of rhetoric, both the Prospect and Reengaging presume that rhetoric does something for us as a society. As for rhetoric, the metaphor of the road has become a prominent strategy for broadening its scope. Such examples include: The Rise of Rhetoric and Its Intersections with Contemporary Critical

Thought and At the Intersections: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies. In

interdisciplinary study, intersections are useful metaphors for depicting the convergence of disparate ideas. Put differently, the analogical nature of language, and the metaphor of the road in particular, offer productive access points for challenging the story simplex, or trained incapacities of dominant discourses. Here, I offer three examples, among many,                                                                                                                

102 _{Lloyd Bitzer and Edwin Black. The Prospect of Rhetoric (Upper Saddle River,} NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971), 1.

103 _{Mark Porrovecchio. Reengaging the Prospects of Rhetoric: Current}

Conversations and Contemporary Challenges (Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis, 2010),

from contemporary rhetorical theory to demonstrate how the discursive road functions as a rhetorical encounter with the theoretical other toward self-knowledge and the

intellectual Good.

First, there is Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin’s “A Feminist Perspective on Rhetorical Theory: Toward a Clarification of Boundaries.” In this article, Foss and Griffin, in foregrounding the importance of “boundaries,” bring forth the imagery of the road as a means to examine the borders of rhetorical practice. For Foss and Griffin, rhetoricians consider how rhetoric constructs our worlds and how theories provide particular perspectives.104 However, they recognize that theory is simply one view among others and does not always get translated into a discovery of its particular biases.105 _{I pause here,} for the sake of opportunistic emphasis, to show how Foss and Griffin substantiate my argument about the dangers of story simplex (and trained incapacities):

A few master theories may come to dominate a discipline without a clear understanding of the ways in which they limit our understanding. Only through challenging and questioning the placement of the boundaries of our theories will we be able to understand what kinds of pictures of rhetoric our theories present and to account for rhetorical activity that previously has not fit into existing rhetorical theories.106

In sum, Foss and Griffin recognize the propensity of rhetorical theory to follow the “mainstream,” which actually circumscribes the theoretical lines of rhetoric. As such, their language takes on the language of questing and remapping in order to lead others,

psychagogically, toward some semblance of the better life or intellectual Good.

Second, Cheryl Glenn’s “Remapping Rhetorical Territory” is more explicit in its                                                                                                                

104 _{Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin, “A Feminist Perspective on Rhetorical Theory:} Toward a Clarification of Boundaries,” Western Journal of Communication 56 (Fall 1992): 331.

105 _{Foss and Griffin, “Clarification of Boundaries,” 330.} 106 _{Foss and Griffin, “Clarification of Boundaries,” 330-31.}

road imagery, utilizing the metaphor of “maps” to reconsider the borders of rhetorical theory. Plainly, we are beginning to see the emergence of a sophisticated rhetorical cartography. Specifically, Glenn maps “rhetorical terrain.”107 For Glenn, remapping allows us to consider ignored borders on the rhetorical map, the “shadowy regions where roads run off the edge of the paper and drop away at sharp angles.”108 _{Perhaps her}

simplest, but most ardent, claim is that our histories do something for us (or they should). Such theories address particular needs, for particular times, in specific places, for

particular theorists—resonating with Kenneth Burke’s notion that our answers are always stylized answers addressed to particular problems in the times which we live.109

My third and final example comes from Carly Woods’s “(Im)mobile Metaphors: Toward an Intersectional Rhetorical History,” which foregrounds road imagery in both her examination of metaphors and her study of “intersectionality.” Because metaphors structure our experience, arrange reality, and prescribe how we should act, the

metaphorical language of the road can help us see the specific ways in which contemporary theorists may re-conceptualize rhetoric. Woods writes:

Feminist scholars have long grappled with the figurative language of

intersectionality in order to find the conceptual framing that best accounts for varied relationships between power, oppression, and privilege. Similarly,

rhetorical historians have an obligation to think critically about the metaphors we use. One cluster of metaphors, in particular, characterizes both intersectional and rhetorical-historical research: the spatial and geographic.110

107 _{Cheryl Glenn, “Remapping Rhetorical Territory.” Rhetoric Review 13, no. 2} (Spring, 1995): 287.

108 _{Glenn, “Remapping Rhetorical Territory,” 288.} 109 _{Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 1.}

110 _{Carly Woods, “(Im)mobile Metaphors: Toward an Intersectional Rhetorical} History,” in Standing in the Intersections: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in

Communication Studies, ed. Karma Chávez and Cindy Griffin (Albany, NY: SUNY

Put differently, the “language of intersections and maps suggests a fixed location that does not fully account for the fluidity and shifting of human relationships.”111 In sum, contemporary rhetorical history provides new spaces from which to study and extend intersectionality.112 In all, each of these examples demonstrates, at a minimum, the concrete nature of the imagery of the road as an agent for perspective, and at most, the significance of the road as a means of enacting rhetorical encounters with others.