Western Journal of Communication

ISSN: 1057-0314 (Print) 1745-1027 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwjc20

Public Address Scholarship and the Effects of

Rhetoric

Denise M. Bostdorff

To cite this article: Denise M. Bostdorff (2019): Public Address Scholarship and the Effects of
Rhetoric, Western Journal of Communication, DOI: 10.1080/10570314.2019.1702713

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2019.1702713

Published online: 15 Dec 2019.

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Western Journal of Communication
Vol. 00, No. 00, 2019, pp. 1–16

Public Address Scholarship and the

Effects of Rhetoric
Denise M. Bostdorff

In this essay, I argue that public address scholars should reengage with the effects of
rhetoric through attention to reception and circulation/re-circulation. Doing so will
deepen our understanding of context and agency, and strengthen our scholarship by
lending support for the very premise on which our field is based: that rhetoric has
consequences. This essay discusses why public address scholars have retreated from effects,
the impact of this choice on our understanding of context and agency, and how attention
to reception and circulation/re-circulation could amend this state of affairs both in more
traditional studies and in field research. I close with some thoughts on what a shift toward
examining rhetoric’s consequences more closely could mean for public address scholarship.

Keywords: Agency; Circulation; Context; Public Address; Reception; Re-Circulation;

Rhetorical Criticism and Effects

In my junior year at Bowling Green State University, I joined the speech team to get
forensics experience for what I anticipated would be a career as a high school speech and
English teacher. I found myself enjoying this new activity more than I had anticipated and
soon began withdrawing from theater and media extracurriculars in favor of more time
with forensics. Typically, I competed in public address events, along with extemporaneous
speaking on political issues. I enjoyed the camaraderie of teammates and the coaching
staff, the challenge of the events, and the intellect and talent of other competitors whom
I encountered, whether regularly like Roseann Mandziuk of Wayne State or occasionally
like John Murphy of Bradley. In a short while, coaches convinced me to try an event called

Denise M. Bostdorff is Professor of Communication Studies and Chair of the Department of Communication
at The College of Wooster. I appreciate the opportunity to participate in this issue, as well as the insightful
scholarship and thoughtful conversations that public address colleagues, too numerous to name, have shared
over the years in many different contexts. Your words have had nothing but the best of effects on me. Salute.
Correspondence to: Denise M. Bostdorff, Department of Communication, 103 Wishart Hall, 303 E. University
St., Wooster, OH 44691, USA. E-mail: dbostdorff@wooster.edu

ISSN 1057-0314 (print)/ISSN 1745-1027 (online) © 2019 Western States Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/10570314.2019.1702713
2 D. M. Bostdorff
rhetorical criticism. I did, and in my first effort—an analysis of Margaret Sanger’s 1916
Hotel Brevoort address—immersed myself in both rhetorical and historical scholarship,
fell in love with this type of analysis, and discovered I was pretty decent at it. Bill Benoit,
the new director of forensics, urged graduate school and, as an initial step, enrollment in
his rhetorical criticism course. I decided to give it a go.
On the second day of class, Bill assigned Herbert Wichelns’ “The Literary Criticism of
Oratory” and Marie Hochmuth Nichols’ “Lincoln’s First Inaugural.” I was just starting
to read when Bill Keith, a friend and master’s student in philosophy at BGSU, asked me
for a favor. His wife, Kari, was running a high fever and he needed to go to work, but he
was concerned enough that he wanted someone with Kari “just in case.” I agreed and
came to their apartment, my copy of Bernard Brock and Robert Scott’s Methods of
Rhetorical Criticism in hand. The apartment was extremely warm, probably an adjust-
ment of the thermostat to counteract the chills of fever, and, while Kari slept, I found
myself struggling to stay awake as I tried to absorb the key ideas from what I perceived as
Wichelns’ less than engaging prose. Conversely, Nichols’ vivid descriptions of the
context of Lincoln’s inaugural and her analysis of his rhetorical adeptness kept me
interested, but then perplexed: Lincoln’s inaugural had clearly failed, but Nichols still
judged its attributes most favorably (113). How did that evaluation correspond with
Wichelns’ focus on the speaker’s success in influencing a specific audience (67)?
When Robin Rowland offered his gracious invitation to contribute to this issue,
I could not help but think back to my initial entrée into rhetorical criticism. Many of the
people I encountered at that time have since become professional colleagues. More
pertinent to my purposes here, Wichelns and Nichols may be long gone, but the issue of
effects with which they grappled continues to persist. In this essay, I will argue that
public address scholars need to reengage with the effects of rhetoric through the study of
reception and circulation/re-circulation. Doing so will deepen our understanding of
context and agency, and strengthen our scholarship by lending support for the very
premise on which our field is based: that rhetoric has consequences.
I use public address here to refer to “texts”—messages and performances—addressed
to public(s), as well as to denote the study of specific such messages in context. Texts
here should be construed as wide ranging: speeches, photographs, museum exhibits,
letters, social media posts, rallies, films, pamphlets, commercials, city council meetings,
body rhetoric, and more. And context? Well, I will get to that momentarily.
In the following, I first discuss why public address scholars have retreated from
effects, then the impact of this choice on our understanding of context and agency,
and finally how attention to reception and circulation/re-circulation could amend
this state of affairs. I close with some thoughts on what a shift toward examining
rhetoric’s consequences would mean for public address scholarship.

Whither Effects?
What drew so many of us to the study of rhetoric is the idea that it has effects. Those of
us who entered the field via speech or debate quickly learned that carefully constructing
 Western Journal of Communication 3

and delivering a presentation, along with answering questions well, could persuade
a judge to evaluate our performance positively. More significantly, I would venture, what
enticed most public address scholars to this type of study was the conviction that
rhetoric had significant consequences for the world. We reached this conclusion
through the study of history and current events and through our own embodied
experiences with matters ranging from the Vietnam War to the Iraq War, from the
Birmingham sit-ins to the Charleston shootings, from Stonewall to Obergefell v. Hodges,
from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to the students at Tiananmen Square (also see
Blair, “‘We Are All’” 42). Furthermore, many of us experienced the empowering impact
of our own rhetorical practices in political contexts and/or the impact of others’ rhetoric
on us. Why, then, have we become so reluctant and, sometimes, disinterested in
exploring the actual effects of rhetoric?
Amos Kiewe and Davis Houck provide an explanation in their 2015 edited
volume, The Effects of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Effects. Sadly and somewhat
ironically, however, the book seems—at least thus far—to have had little effect.
A quick search of Communication & Mass Media Complete and Academic Search
Complete indicates that only two communication journals, Rhetoric & Public Affairs
and The Forensic, reviewed the volume, while by the start of 2019, just a small
handful of scholarly journal articles in our field had cited it. And that is a pity. The
Effects of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Effects offers an insightful analysis of how our
field has talked about effects and a rousing call to refocus our attentions on how
audiences actually respond, along with providing case studies to illustrate.
I do not intend here to repeat the detailed retrospective that Kiewe and Houck’s
book advances, some of which will already be familiar to readers, but suffice it to say
that the field traveled from Wichelns’ conception of rhetorical criticism as the
analysis of messages aimed at particular audiences with particular effects in mind
to Edwin Black’s rejection of neo-Aristotelianism in favor of esthetic recreation, to
the dominance of symbolicity fostered by the new rhetoric and poststructuralism,
and to the adoption, on the part of many rhetorical critics, of a perspective influ-
enced by social science that holds contributions to theory as the primary function of
criticism (Kiewe and Houck, “Introduction” 11–14; Blair, “‘We Are All’” 32–36,
40–41; Rowland 60; Houck, “Conclusion” 290–291). In her essay in the volume,
Carole Blair offers a brilliant genealogy of these changes and their significance. She
also warns, “An exclusive focus on symbolicity diverts us from rhetoric’s capacity to
do things, rather than simply mean something,” with the result that rhetorical critics
have tended to overemphasize the interpretation of texts in isolation from their
actual consequences within social contexts (“‘We Are All’” 41, 44, 45–46).
According to Houck, public address scholars became even more reluctant to
examine effects after political scientist George Edwards attacked their work at the
1995 presidential rhetoric conference at Texas A&M and, subsequently, in his book,
On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit (Houck, “Conclusion” 282; Edwards,
“Presidential Rhetoric” and On Deaf Ears). In response, David Zarefsky and Martin
Medhurst countered that Edwards’ view of rhetorical effect was quite narrow—he
4 D. M. Bostdorff
expected a single message to result in significant changes of opinion, as measured by
social scientific means—and that Edwards’ conception of rhetorical criticism as only
concerned with assessing message effects was equally limited (Zarefsky, “Presidential
Rhetoric” 608; Medhurst, “Afterword” 224–225).1 Zarefsky also rightly charged, how-
ever, that rhetorical critics were often sloppy in the precision of the claims that they
made about effects (“Knowledge Claims” 637). Houck maintains, though, that Zar-
efsky went too far when he claimed that Wichelns, the founder of the field, had not
been interested in ascertaining effects but in explicating and evaluating how a message
was constructed to realize particular effects or how a speech accomplished its “known
and uncontroversial” effects (Zarefsky, “Public Address” 67 and “Reflections” 384;
Houck, “Conclusion” 283–286). To be fair, Wichelns incorporated “the effect of the
discourse on its immediate hearers” as just one point in his “15-point scheme for what
‘a rhetorical study includes’” (Medhurst, “The History” 34). Nonetheless, as Houck
avers, Wichelns’ famous essay emphatically stated that rhetorical criticism is “not
concerned with permanence, nor yet with beauty. It is concerned with effect.”
Furthermore, Wichelns directed that, in rhetorical analysis, “the effect of the discourse
on its immediate hearers is not to be ignored, either in the testimony of witnesses, nor
in the record of events” (qtd. in Houck, “Conclusion” 283–286). Houck argues that
Zarefsky’s reaction was not limited to him alone; rather, rhetorical critics focused even
more intently upon rhetors and messages, but largely skimmed over audiences and
satisfied themselves, at best, with observing the “probable effect” of a message (Houck,
“Conclusion” 286). If neo-Aristotelian critics once veered too extensively in the
direction of effect, to the detriment of message analysis, then rhetorical critics—after
the rise of symbolicity and poststructuralism, the adoption of social science’s mantra of
theory, and the vociferousness of Edwards’ critique (which also emanated from a social
science perspective)—have gone too far in the other direction.
Let me be clear here, though: I am not attacking symbolicity (given my Burkean roots,
how could I?) nor poststructural theories. In addition, I do not abjure theory building
and, as stinging as Edwards’ assessments were, I appreciate that he has prompted us to
reexamine our work as rhetorical critics. What I do want is to join Kiewe and Houck
et al. in urging our field to take the effects of rhetoric more seriously.

Context, Agency, and Effects

When we give the actual consequences of rhetoric short shrift, we undermine our work as
public address scholars by assigning too much agency to the rhetor at the risk of ignoring
other important contextual factors at play. This, too, is a legacy from Wichelns, and
I suspect it has influenced my own scholarship at times. The assignment of agency also
implicates a topic on which I deferred discussion at the start of this essay: context. Public
address scholars have traditionally defined their work as the examination of texts in
context (e.g., Zarefsky, “State of the Art” 23–24; Parry-Giles and Hogan 3–4), but ques-
tions have increasingly arisen over what the 2016 Public Address Conference dubbed the
“conceit” of context. Public address studies, the guiding principle goes, examine texts
 Western Journal of Communication 5

within the “appropriate” context or setting, previously deemed a historical context, but as
Carole Blair asked at Syracuse, “What exactly is the ‘appropriate setting,’ what is its
character, and what does it include or exclude? And what does it mean for a focal object
in that ‘appropriate setting’ to be ‘properly considered’?” (“Conceits of Context” 3).
Context is not a one-dimensional entity. Rather, context may include publics, counter-
publics, power relations, other texts, culture, race, gender, sexuality, ideology, setting,
generic expectations, and, yes, history, too, along with other possibilities. Drawing on the
work of Doreen Massey, Blair argues persuasively for a richer conception of context that is
both temporal and spatial. In particular, she counsels a more dynamic understanding and
greater development of the “many types of relationships that constitute both spatial and
temporal dimensions of context, including the most basic type—that between the context
and the focal object” (“Conceits of Context” 20–21).
In Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation, Lisa
Corrigan provides an apt illustration through her insights into the relationships
between H. Rap Brown’s Black Power rhetoric and a complex context: the external
struggles and internal politics of the civil rights movement, Stokely Carmichael’s
declaration of “black power,” the formation of the Black Panther Party, the political
and rhetorical environment of urban riots in 1967, the “black badman” of black history
and folklore, the signifyin(g) game of the dozens, and Brown’s own experience with
“the fragility of black boyhood” and the cultural performance of black masculinity
(21–82). This dynamic multi-dimensional context influenced Brown’s rhetoric and,
while he contributed to the creation of a space for black resistance, his fiery critiques
and advocacy of black self-defense also reinvigorated opposition to his political goals
in the form of sensationalized white media coverage, FBI surveillance, and passage of
the Anti-Riot Act—also known as the “Rap Brown Law”—that prohibited interstate
travel or the use of interstate facilities with the intent to incite a riot, thereby narrowing
the spatial realm in which Brown and other Black Power leaders could rhetorically
operate and increasing the potential illegality of their rhetorical efforts (Corrigan
56–59 82). In short, other agencies were at work, as well. Agency or “the capacity to
act,” as Karlyn Kohrs Campbell put it, is “communal, social, cooperative, and parti-
cipatory” and also “constrained by the material and symbolic elements of context and
culture” (Campbell 3). We still sometimes forget this in our criticism.
As a corrective, Jeffrey Mehltretter Drury has identified five different kinds of agency
that rhetorical critics should be cognizant of: material agency or “the capacity to act in
the world”; discursive agency or the capability to “communicate public discourse”;
inventional agency or the ability to create rhetorical texts; audience agency or the
“capacity to respond to and co-create discourse”; and textual agency or “a text’s capacity
to resonate beyond its context of utterance” (“Beyond ‘Rhetorical Agency’” 41, 42–43,
43–47, 47–49, 51). Even Drury, though, sometimes provides a flatter reading of context
than his terms at first suggest. He states, for instance, that audience agency concerns
“particularly how the text opens and forecloses opportunities for audiences to partici-
pate in the meaning-making process” (49). This conception puts audience agency
primarily within the text itself, rather than recognizing that historical, cultural, political,
6 D. M. Bostdorff
and material relationships between the audience and other elements might also shape
audience readings.
Of course, the number of potential contexts—with their corresponding relation-
ships and agencies—that one might include in an analysis can be overwhelming, so
critics must argue for the context they have chosen to construct for a particular
message, one that is in keeping with their purpose (Blair, “Conceits of Context”
12–13). Context is, as Kirt Wilson argues, “a product of hermeneutic and rhetorical
behavior and not a static historical situation in which the more important work of
oratory transpires” (221). Individuals and communities interpret their contexts, as
do public address scholars examining texts “in context.” And this leads us back to
effect, for depending on how we construct context in our critical work, we may
assign rhetors too much agency and audiences too little, and thereby overlook
revealing evidence for how audiences actually responded.
Context includes another element, as well: the rhetorical critic. Ten years ago in
Western’s special issue, Chuck Morris encouraged rhetorical critics to engage more
often in “critical self-portraiture” by examining how our own values and positions
shape the contexts in which we place the texts we examine and, therefore, the critical
processes that we adopt (Morris, “(Self-)Portrait” 32–34). Both Morris and Morris
and Sloop have modeled critical self-portraiture since then as a way of interrogating
their approach to a rhetorical text (Morris, “Sunder the Children”; Morris and Sloop,
“Other Lips”). According to Morris, “coming out” in this way permits critical self-
reflection on the interpretive work that critics do, which has the potential to enrich
“the depth of our work—its hermeneutical, ethical, performative, and political force”
(Morris, “Context’s Critic” 232–233). More pertinent to our purposes here, critics
who contemplate the ways in which they themselves are part of the interpretive
context may be less likely to analyze texts as though they were the only audience.
Does this mean explicit self-portraiture needs to appear in every analysis we write?
I would say no because not every self-reflection is necessarily of interest to a reader
or particularly germane to a critical purpose. At other times, that self as context may
be extremely relevant. I might have enriched my analysis of George W. Bush’s
epideictic war rhetoric, for instance, if I had developed the ways in which my
views were informed by my experiences with patriotic rituals growing up in
a conservative rural community, my spirituality centered in Unitarian Universalism,
and my work with the anti-war movement, rather than simply making a brief
observation about one event in an endnote that perhaps no one even read (Bostdorff,
“Epideictic Rhetoric”). Morris would undoubtedly add that informing my readers in
this way would also be an act of accountability (Morris, “(Self-)Portrait” 33).
Whether critics ultimately decide to incorporate explicit critical self-portraiture
into an analysis or not, it is still important that we engage in self-reflection about
the values and positions we bring to an interpretation.2 Doing so makes us aware of
the lens through which we are analyzing a text and reminds us that other audiences
will interpret differently; hence, our interpretation of what a text does should not be
 Western Journal of Communication 7

equated with only what we think it does without ample consideration of a text’s
audiences, intended and unintended, and its actual consequences.

Examining Effects: Reception and Circulation/Re-Circulation

So what, more precisely, are claims of effect? According to Kiewe and Houck, they
are “interpretive claims made by a rhetorical critic that link a rhetorical act to some
sort of reaction—behavioral, attitudinal, textual” (18). These effects may be short
term, as with an immediate response to a message, and/or the effect may be longer
term in nature (Browne 121–138). For example, President Jimmy Carter’s rhetoric
about human rights did not have the kind of easily measured, short-term effects that
Edwards would look for, but his rhetoric did have “more subtle, indirect, and long-
term effects” by making “human rights” an ideograph that subsequent presidents
had to adopt, to some degree, in their own discourse, even if they did not necessarily
follow Carter’s policy predilections (Stuckey 294, 299, 305–308).
Two general approaches to finding evidence for effect claims come to mind:
reception and circulation/recirculation. In the case of reception, an approach
adopted with regularity by our rhetoric colleagues in English departments but rarely
in communication studies, public address scholars focus on how audiences actually
responded to a text, rather than only analyzing how the text encouraged the
audiences to respond or speculating about how audiences may have responded
(see, e.g., Ceccarelli 407). Reception studies might draw on evidence from focus
groups, interviews, letters to the editor, blogs, correspondence, notes left at memor-
ials, archival documents, and social media responses, to name just a few possibilities
(see Zarefsky, “Public Address” 79; Houck, “Conclusion” 286–288). Jay Childers’s
reception study of violence as a text, for instance, examines a Georgia lynching in
1946 that might well have receded from public attention as just one more horrific
attack, but instead rose to public prominence as an issue of urgency. Through careful
analysis of five national newspapers, three Georgia newspapers, seven African
American publications, congressional debates, magazine articles, archival materials,
speeches, and the NAACP’s Crisis, Childers demonstrates how audience reactions to
the murders transformed them into “a national focusing event” that led to the
President’s Committee on Civil Rights. The interpretations that prevailed within
the post-World War II context of the United States were those that chose to “define
the murders as a mass lynching, blame the lynching on the racist campaign rhetoric
of Eugene Talmadge, and highlight the military service of one of the victims,” all of
which contributed to arguments that the crime constituted a threat to the nation,
hurt international perceptions of the United States, and required federal action
(574–575, 571–572). In Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History From the
Civil War to the Great Depression, Cara Finnegan likewise accesses how audiences
interpreted photos from historic periods long past by adeptly making use of not only
media coverage, speeches, books, and letters to the editor, but also trial testimony
and comment cards left at a photo exhibition (1). Examining reception permits
8 D. M. Bostdorff
critics to reexamine their own suppositions about a text and how and why it
resonated or failed to resonate with an audience (Houck and Nocasian 674–675).
Had Hochmuth Nichols used Southern responses to help interpret Lincoln’s inau-
gural, for example, she likely would have written a different essay. As Wilson’s
analysis of the Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy Hearings illustrates, reception studies can
be especially insightful when they account for how different audiences interpreted
the same texts, and reception work may also shed light on subsequent, related texts
and contexts (Wilson 213–222).
Indeed, another approach to assessing effects is to examine a text’s circulation/re-
circulation or how the text dispersed through mediation, even if in fragmentary form
(see Warner). The song, “I Will Be All Right Someday,” for example, began as a slave
work song and then moved into black churches as “I’ll Overcome Someday.” In the
1940s, labor strikers altered the words to “We Will Overcome.” The song eventually
became the anthem of the modern civil rights movement as “We Shall Overcome”
and has also appeared at immigration rights protests. Furthermore, human rights
activists in places as far away as North Korea and South Africa have sung “We Shall
Overcome” (Adams; Wier). The circulation/re-circulation of “I Will Be All Right
Someday” occurred through the publication of hymnals, musical performances at the
Highlander Folk Center (which provided training to civil rights activists), civil rights
organizing and protests, and public concerts, as well as recordings and the Internet.
As it circulated and re-circulated, the song addressed new publics—slaves, black
parishioners, labor unionists, civil rights and immigration activists in the United
States, and human rights advocates abroad—each of whom attached slightly different
meanings to the words and music, which also evolved. Yet, part of the core under-
lying meaning of the song remained constant: it expressed unity (even at the start,
the song was sung with others) and confidence in prevailing over the challenge of
oppression. Warner explains that the “reflexive circulation of discourse” creates
a public or a “social space” that includes both an individual addressee, as well as
strangers, who are addressed by the text (413, 417–420). When a North Korean
human rights activist sings “We Shall Overcome,” that person becomes entwined in
relationships with—for instance—not only other North Koreans who feel repressed
by their government but also anyone now or in the past who has suffered oppres-
sion. The public(s) of “We Shall Overcome” might more properly be understood as
“counterpublics” because, whether liberal or conservative in nature, the rhetoric of
counterpublics serves a response to the dominant texts of what a culture considers
“the” public and sometimes to texts of other counterpublics, too (Warner 423–424;
Gring-Pemble 627, 643–645).
The interrelationships of textual and contextual elements can also be observed in
a text’s circulation/re-circulation or “re-presentation” (Latour 418–440), for it is no
passive process. As Olson shows in his study of an 18th-century print’s re-circulation,
a text may migrate over time to different places and through different media with
subsequent circulators reshaping “both the composition itself and its resituated mean-
ings through their derived and re-circulated compositions addressed to subsequent
 Western Journal of Communication 9

audiences located elsewhere” (1–35, 7). Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

organizer Cordell Reagon, for example, helped organize the Freedom Singers in 1961
and, based on his experiences at Highlander, convinced black singers who had sung the
song as “I Will Overcome” to substitute “we” for “I” to be more inclusive of black and
white activists (Adams; “Freedom Singers”). Re-circulation may incorporate adaptations
like these in response to new times, locales, relationships, and media, or may take the
form of outright appropriation, by borrowing or emulating texts typically “associated
with and/or perceived as belonging to another” in order to meet their own goals
(Shugart 210). In March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson included the words “we
shall overcome” in his address to Congress on the Voting Rights Act. Some civil rights
activists saw his re-circulation of this phrase as a moving effort to show support for the
movement, while others interpreted his usage as appropriation for his own political ends
(Adams). Circulation/re-circulation, in other words, is subject to reception, as well.
Examining the circulation/recirculation of a text can shed light on the effects of
rhetorical action in at least two ways. First, it can extend our understanding of the
temporal impact of a text which may, even if unsuccessful or unremarkable in its
immediate context, have effect in the long term, albeit not necessarily the effect that
the original rhetor wanted and/or anticipated. In addition, scrutinizing the re-circula-
tions of a text may illumine how they contributed to altered conceptions of temporal and
spatial relationships, thereby deepening our understanding of rhetorical evolutions that
shape perceptions of the cultural, political, and material world. Jasinski and Mercieca,
for instance, demonstrate how the “Principles of ’98,” Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison’s unsuccessful effort to overturn the Alien and Sedition Acts through state
resolutions, re-circulated subsequently and reinvigorated several of their “constitutive
legacies” for future Americans, such as a suspicion of national office holders and
a textual fixation with the meaning of the Constitution (315–332; also see Rand).3 In
Creating Conservatism: Postwar Words That Made an American Movement, Michael Lee
similarly traces how different branches of the modern conservative movement devel-
oped through their use—or re-circulation—of “canonical” conservative books, thereby
shaping the distinctive worldviews of traditionalists and libertarians (Lee). My own
archival work has revealed ways in which the recirculation of texts, both within the
Truman administration and without, helped reshape the Truman Doctrine into the
Marshall Plan (Bostdorff, “Dean Acheson’s”). Public address scholarship examining
what is, in essence, the circulation/re-circulation of texts over time—even if these terms
are not explicitly used—appears far more often than studies of reception, but typically in
books and book chapters where space limitations are more generous.
The processes of reception and circulation/re-circulation cannot be completely
separated, of course, so another advantage of examining effect through these approaches
is that they help reveal the fluidity of interactions between text and context. In her
intriguing study of a documentary created and posted in 100 installments on a YouTube
channel, Anne Demo reveals how rhetorical effects were generated during the process of
production via circulation/re-circulation. The documentary dealt with a controversial
proposed ordinance in Prince William County, Virginia, that would require police to
10 D. M. Bostdorff
“verify the residency status of anyone in custody suspected of being in the country
illegally” (Demo 224). As they uploaded each installment, the film producers invited and
moderated online commentary. This, in turn, promoted productive dialogue, engage-
ment through video responses and linked videos, and offline organizing, while also
shaping the documentary’s ensuing installments (Demo 221–232). The study of recep-
tion, in tandem with circulation/re-circulation, foregrounds the ways in which texts and
contexts are constituted in countless, intertwining relational loops composed of multiple
agencies intermittently supporting, shaping, and constraining one another. When
engaged in such interpretive work, public address scholars must also remain attentive
to how different publics and counterpublics interpret texts and how power may influ-
ence text circulation/re-circulation (Black) or even conspire to ensure that a text is not
circulated at all (O’Rourke).
Thus far, I have focused on how more traditional studies of texts might examine
rhetoric’s effects, but a relatively new form of pubic address scholarship, field research,
may also be invaluable in such endeavors. Sara McKinnon et al. define field as “the nexus
where rhetoric is produced, where it is enacted, where it circulates, and, consequently,
where it is audienced” (4). As such, field research gives pubic address scholars the
opportunity to see, close-up, how audiences interpreted texts and how texts circulated
and re-circulated. Some field critics analyze observed texts—both messages and perfor-
mances—as well as interviews and other documents they have gathered in a particular
locale. Over a two-year period, Rob Asen examined more than 200 school-board meetings
as a means of studying democratic deliberation on the local level, including how particular
practices led to particular decisional outcomes. His analysis incorporated transcripts of
school board meetings, interviews, and observations (Asen). In other cases, rhetorical
critics participate in the field they write about and reflect on their own actions and
reactions, too. The 2010 special issue of Western featured a model for such criticism
with Peter Simonson’s thoughtful analysis based on his participation in the 2008 Obama
campaign. As Simonson remarked, he “played the roles of participant, observer, and
critic” in his research (120). Alina Haliliuc similarly drew on critical ethnography when
she returned to her former home of Romania to attend a performance of Romanian actor
and theater director, Dan Puric. By doing so, Haliliuc offered insights into Puric’s ethno-
nationalist rhetoric, the context of his performance, and audience reception, including her
own (Haliliuc 133–147). Over the past decade, field research has become increasingly
common in public address scholarship (e.g., Chávez; McKinnon et al.; Middleton et al.),
particularly as a way to connect research with social justice work, as Stephen Hartnett
advocated in the last special issue of Western (Hartnett 68–93).
Especially relevant to my topic here, field research provides the chance to study
rhetoric, context, and effects—in all their messy complexity—as they unfold. I learned
this firsthand in my own very limited fieldwork experience when a student and I were
participant-observers for a farmland preservation campaign. The rhetorical intricacies of
dealing with different publics—county commissioners, the Chamber of Commerce, the
Amish population, farmers, town dwellers, local media, campaign organizers, volunteers,
and a national lobby group working with the campaign, to name a few—became far more
 Western Journal of Communication 11

vivid when we were the ones actually doing it. Additionally, our experiences on the ground
meant we could offer informed analysis about the rhetorical effectiveness of messages (or
lack thereof), as well as other factors that led the campaign ultimately to fail (Bostdorff and
Woods). One criticism of field research is that participant observers may be “too” close to
their subject matter. Certainly, though, field researchers are not the only kind of scholar
who must guard against potential myopia. Field research also offers the advantage of
extending public address scholarship’s understanding of marginalized and/or little studied
publics and their rhetorical practices; the cultural, political, and material constraints they
face; and these publics’ reception and re-circulation of texts (see, e.g., Pezzullo and de Onís
111–114; Asen 13).

Final Thoughts
Whether scholars take a more traditional approach to public address or engage in field
research, the examination of reception and circulation/re-circulation permits a more
intensive focus on effects. Still, obstacles remain. Organizing focus groups, participating
in field research, or traveling to archives can be costly in money and time and, as Houck
points out, refraining from doing so is easier (“Conclusion” 289). In some cases, the critic
may not be able to support definitive claims of effect. For her study of the Clionian Debate
Society of antebellum Charleston, for instance, Angela Ray clearly could not watch the
group’s debates or interview members, but her careful analysis of the society’s minutes and
other documents provided evidence of how the organization “emphasized the value of
individual learning and communal service, and … demonstrated a commitment to read-
ing, writing, study, and the generation of argument within clear procedural frameworks”
(35). As such, “the Clionians’ records imply that they [members] practiced speech and
debate as a collective, experiential affirmation of their humanity as intellectual beings: for
themselves, for each other, and for Charleston’s black community” (35, my emphasis).
Ray’s study demonstrates both savviness in marshaling evidence and care in expressing
claims. In other cases, critics can make more definitive assertions of effect (or lack thereof)
by seeking out substantiation that exists but is often overlooked.
I do not mean to suggest here that all public address scholarship should take the form
of reception and circulation/re-circulation studies. Rather, my point is that our field
would benefit from more reception and circulation/re-circulation studies and that even
our textual analyses focused primarily on particular rhetorical messages and/or perfor-
mances should pay more attention to audience and effects. As Rowland observes, many
common forms of critical activity—critiquing the ethics or ideology of a text, identifying
a symbolic form that appears across texts, or arguing that a text’s characteristics
resonated or failed to resonate—implicate an audience, but may be of little worth if
we have no evidence whatsoever that an audience might actually have interpreted the
rhetoric, at least broadly speaking, in ways comparable to the critic (64–66).4 A typical
textual analysis may not be able to provide voluminous reception evidence within the
confines of a journal article, but surely we can do better than we frequently do, as when
a few quotations from major newspapers are, at best, the only evidence provided. While
12 D. M. Bostdorff
critics sometimes use survey data or point to the outcome of a campaign to assess effect,
the strongest studies also rely on reception evidence to provide insight into how
audiences interpreted texts since multiple agencies may have shaped survey responses
or campaign success (see, e.g., Kiewe; Kimble).
This proposed move to a greater emphasis upon audience and effect also plays to
our strengths by having critics engage in what we do best: analyzing rhetorical
messages and performances. Instead of only focusing on the texts of a particular
rhetor or group of rhetors, though, we would also examine the texts of publics and
counterpublics, thereby offering greater insight into the dynamism of contexts, the
impacts of rhetoric, and the focal texts themselves. All of this, in turn, will both
improve the quality of our scholarship and make public address research more
meaningful to those outside our field. When we wish to claim resonance—and we
need to be careful in the precision of our claims—we will then have evidence to
answer the questions, “How do you know that the audience(s) responded in this
way?” and/or “How do you know this text had the consequences you say it did?”
Through this approach, public address scholars can offer useful, compelling herme-
neutic work about rhetoric’s impact that social science simply cannot provide.
Further attention to reception and circulation/re-circulation will also permit us to
make more significant contributions beyond the case study at hand, particularly
through books, book chapters, and programmatic research. As Wilson argues,
“human beings discursively constitute contexts that shape the past to make sense
of the decisions, actions, and values of the present” (221). By tracing through
attentiveness to reception and circulation/re-circulation how texts of various kinds
create, shape, and constrain contexts—in tandem with sensitivity as to how we as
critics construct context and make claims about effects—public address scholars can
fulfill the potential that Wilson sees for contributing insightful “‘argued-for knowl-
edge’” that transcends any particular instance (222).
If space allowed, I would elaborate on how a shift in our scholarship might impact our
field’s pedagogy and civic outreach, as well. More students would learn not only how to
read texts critically but also how to use rhetoric to enact positive change. Through our
deeper understandings of rhetoric’s effects, we could provide a more informed basis for
our own civic contributions and those of the partners with whom we collaborate, and our
field could expand its contributions toward social justice. In short, adopting the study of
reception and circulation/re-circulation more frequently into our critical practices will also
renew our attention to the crucial assessments that attracted so many of us to this field in
the beginning: rhetoric has consequences … rhetoric does things.

Notes
1. Rowland also points out Edwards describes presidential messages as reflecting and intensi-
fying the views of their constituents which, from rhetorical critics’ perspectives, would be an
effect (“Purpose, Evidence, and Pedagogy” 62–63).
2. In addition to arguing for the incorporation of critical self-portraiture into rhetorical
criticism, Morris endorses opportunities for critics to reflect on how their values and
 Western Journal of Communication 13

positions influence their critical work in general, such as Rhetoric & Public Affairs’ special
issue where critics examined their religious faith’s impact on their work (Morris, “(Self-)
Portrait” 33, 37; Medhurst, “Special Issue”).
3. Jasinski and Mercieca further distinguish between circulation and articulation by treating
the latter as the means by which the former occurs (320).
4. Rowland also discusses other functions that rhetorical criticism may serve and the role of
theory in criticism (64–73).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. This essay was received
on February 7, 2019.

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