viz.

By Rachel Schneider

One of the five major canons, delivery has often occupied an instable place in rhetoric.  Aristotle dismissed delivery as being relatively unimportant to rhetoric, and with the exception of the eighteenth-century elocutionary movement, delivery has been readily ignored or imagined to be a subject for communications professors.  Within the contemporary rhetoric classroom, where most of the work examined is written communication, delivery remains outside of the purview of most discussions.  However, as visual rhetoric often involves video as frequently as it does static images, delivery may become a more important factor in rhetorical pedagogy—not as we teach students to deliver speeches, but as we teach them to analyze texts that are audiovisual.

What makes this more complicated is that these audiovisual texts are often not speeches—they are performed texts.  A class on the rhetoric of luxury might as easily focus on an episode of Gossip Girl as it might an ad for Aston Martin cars; thus, a vocabulary of delivery needs to learn to take into account performance not just in Burke’s or Austin’s terms, but to think about how an actor’s performance attempts to convey arguments through establishing sympathetic characters.  This requires more than a language of pronunciation, volume, and gesture, but rethinking how we analyze performances as rhetorical texts.  Teaching students to read these texts, and giving them a vocabulary for articulating what they find there, will help them learn to think critically about all forms of popular media that they might encounter.

However, trying to teach students to think about analyzing delivery in performed material involves a wide range of material.  Just as Margaret Syverson encourages teachers to think of composition as consisting of an ecology or “a set of interrelated and interdependent complex systems” (3), so performance itself evolves as part of a set of systems—actors working together, performing on a stage as they are watched by an audience who participate in the performance through applause or boos, all of which takes place within a larger theater.  Just as the writer’s labor does not take place in isolation, performance is dependent upon location, time, the director’s guidance, and a host of larger contexts that have to be considered.  While we might look backward to the elocutionists for a terminology, modern communications studies and performance studies also offer help in thinking of ways to revive delivery for the modern rhetoric classroom.

In his book on performance theory, Richard Schechner stresses the need to study each performance on a case by case basis:  “[A]s embodied practices each and every performance is specific and different from every other.  The differences enact the conventions and traditions of a genre, the personal choices made by the performers, various cultural patterns, historical circumstances, and the particularities of reception” (29).  In my own class, The Rhetoric of the Musical, we’ve spent the semester considering how the musical (a highly stylized genre) creates and frequently violates its own conventions, how it balances the demands of believability and naturalness that is the greater concern of twentieth-century acting with its own unnatural convention of people breaking out into song at emotional moments.  However, Schechner’s observation is perfectly suited to rhetorical terms:  each rhetorical performance is already examined within its own particular context, and the rooted concerns of speaker, audience, and text.  Just so any analysis of a performative text requires a sensitivity to the intent of gestures and vocal performance, and how each are calculated to construct characters that attempt to engage the audience’s sympathies to persuade them not only to watch the musical, but also to engage on their side in the controversies of the plot.  Bruce Kirle’s article on “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of Oklahoma! in American Consciousness” excellently studies Joseph Buloff’s performance in the original 1943 Broadway production, and how he signals a Jewishness that is acceptable to audiences, and thus reconciles them to World War II interventionist military policies.  His work shows the potential benefits for thinking about delivery.

While elsewhere on this site I provide my own lesson plans as a guide, I want here to include a list of materials that I’ve consulted in creating a language of delivery for my students, as well as modern rhetorical books that think about the place of delivery in the rhetorical canon.  I hope this material might be helpful for thinking about potential applications and ways to adapt delivery into the modern rhetorical classroom as a method for analysis.

 

Works Cited and Related Sources

Buchanan, Lindal.  Regendering Delivery:  The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors.  Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

Golden, James L., Goodwin F. Berquist, William E. Coleman, and J. Michael Sproule.  The Rhetoric of Western Thought:  From the Mediterranean World to the Global Setting.  Eighth edition.  Dubuque, IA:  Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 2003.

Kirle, Bruce.  “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of Oklahoma! in American Consciousness.”  Theatre Journal 55 (2003):  251-274.

McCutcheon, Randall, James Schaffer, and Joseph R. Wycoff.  Communication Applications.  Lincolnwood, IL:  National Textbook Company, 2001.

Schechner, Richard.  Performance Theory.  Second edition.  New York:  Routledge, 2003.

Stucky, Nathan and Cynthia Wimmer, eds.  Teaching Performance Studies.  Carbondale, IL:  Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.

Syverson, Margaret A.  The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition.  Carbondale, IL:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.

Wolf, Laurie and Counsell, Colin.  Performance Analysis: An Introductory Coursebook.  Hoboken:  Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2001.

Wolf, Stacy.  “In Defense of Pleasure: Musical Theatre History in the Liberal Arts [A Manifesto].”  Theatre Topics 17.1 (2007):  51-60.

Wolf, Stacy.  Handouts from TD357T “American Musical Theatre History” Spring 2008 at the University of Texas at Austin.