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Hunting Jim W. CorderRosanne Carlo a , Theresa Jarnagin Enos a , Keith D.Miller b , Jennifer Jacovitch c , Geoffrey Sirc d , JeffRice e & James S. Baumlin fa The University of Arizonab Arizona State Universityc James Madison Universityd University of Minnesotae University of Kentuckyf Missouri State UniversityVersion of record first published: 13 Dec 2012.

To cite this article: Rosanne Carlo , Theresa Jarnagin Enos , Keith D. Miller , JenniferJacovitch , Geoffrey Sirc , Jeff Rice & James S. Baumlin (2013): Hunting Jim W.Corder, Rhetoric Review, 32:1, 1-26

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2013.739483

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Rhetoric Review, Vol. 32, No. 1, 1–26, 2013Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0735-0198 print / 1532-7981 onlineDOI: 10.1080/07350198.2013.739483

SYMPOSIUM: HUNTING JIM W. CORDERRR

Introduction: The Hunt for Traces of Remnants

[T]here are remnants around me, or traces of remnants—misunderstood and misremembered moments and events, ghostlypresences, hazy icons. I’m such a trace myself.

—Corder, Rhetorics, Remnants, and Regrets

The basement is cordoned off by a small, white picket gate. Roberta, JimCorder’s widow, leads us down the stairs. The entry arch is low and we haveto duck our heads. The washer and dryer are visible and so is the water heater.It’s just like anyone else’s basement—moldy, musty, little light. Cobwebs arestrung along the lines of the pipes. And then, to the left, we see the large fire door.I remember Theresa telling me, months earlier, about this research opportunity formy dissertation. “Roberta says you and Jenny can look through his papers and seeif there’s anything useful to you.” She pauses thoughtfully, like she always does.Theresa has a way of speaking that forces time to stand still. She breathes in, “Ofcourse, she says it’s all in her bomb shelter.” I thought Theresa was mistaken. No.She wasn’t.

The bomb shelter made us feel as if we were stepping back in time—theAmerican 1950s and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Inside there are bunks, aradio, flashlights. The bunks are suspended by rusted metal chains, but instead ofmattresses, we see boxes and boxes stacked high. The boxes are damp. We look upto see that the roof is molded and stained—there must have been a flood. Jennyand I, dubbed “The Corderites” by Roberta, don’t exactly know what is in theboxes. We don’t know if any of his papers have survived. We’re not sure what todo with this inheritance.

“He had to get it all out of him. He was just compelled to write,” says Roberta.The attraction behind Jim Corder’s writing voice, for me, is how he com-

municates a sense of longing for a time or place he could never reach, a time orplace that maybe never was. He writes a lot about the emotion of nostalgia, buthe views this word not in the traditional sense of yearning for an idyllic past, but

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a concept that relates to the future—a longing for the feeling of being “at home.”He aches for a self-identity that he struggles to define. In his rhetorical theory,he tries to advocate a rhetoric of love and grace—a striving for mutual recogni-tion between the self and others. His life works, to me, are a project of gettinghimself down right in the written medium, of saying the self into existence forreaders. He was a neo-Aristotelian, and as such, he believed that textual ethoswas possible and perhaps the most important appeal in developing a relationshipbetween reader and writer. Corder wrote about how the author leaves tracks andtraces in his texts, often through his stylistic choices, for future readers to find.There are moments of direct appeal to readers of his writing. He asks: “Can I geta witness? Will anyone notice that I am here, that this is the way I talk, that thisis what my mind passes for thinking? I’m trying to get real” (“Hunting for Ethos”205). Sometimes, I sense that Corder is writing for his life. I wonder, have I nowbecome such a witness?

We spent three hours clearing the materials from the bomb shelter, Jenny inthe moldy underground and I climbing and descending the stairs with the boxes.I made neat piles in Roberta’s living room. Later we stood there looking at thecovered floor, overwhelmed—unsure where to look, how to make sense, how toarchive. This was the motherload, the find of finds, Jim Corder’s primary researchand drafts and letters and journals and unpublished manuscripts and pedagogicalmaterials and poetry and all other sort of ephemera. We were closing in on him, Icould feel it. I’ve been hunting Jim Corder for a few years now.

Jim Corder saw himself as someone on the hunt, too. A serious researcherand explorer and recoverer of things past, he is sensitive of his responsibilitiesto his subjects and places that he tries to hunt and to catch and to remember inhis writing. In his monograph, Chronicle of a Small Town, Corder analyzes thelocal newspaper of his hometown Jayton, Texas, for stories and names to corrob-orate his childhood memories and experiences. He describes his archival researchproject as one that is doomed for failure as his research methodology is based onpersonal interest and not always systematic calculations, and he sees the limita-tions of archival research as many of the issues of the newspaper are missing (22,17), and even more importantly, he sees how the nature of recovery of a time andplace and the people that live in it is always problematic: “But even now, when Ihunt and look and sometimes see, I can’t catch it all. Artifacts tell a lot, but noteverything. Try as I will, try as you will, we can’t catch and map the place whereothers invent their worlds” (50). Corder appeals to the reader through the use of“you” here; he warns us that people and their inventive worlds are complex, morecomplex than the piles of papers strewn on the living room floor or whatever otherartifacts that happen to be left behind can say about lived experience. But that doesnot mean that an archival project, or a symposium on the author for that matter,

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is not worth trying to undertake—Corder certainly found the writing of his bookon Jayton worthwhile. Just because we cannot capture the author, just because hehas died—both on the page and in the real world—does not mean we can’t be insearch of his absence, of the space he used to occupy, of the function he used toserve and still serves (Foucault 82).

“Hunting Jim W. Corder” is to be haunted by his ghostly presence, we—the authors in this symposium—are left to sort through the traces that he has leftbehind for us. I’m reminded of Derrida’s association between “the figure of haunt-ing with that of hunting. This is the very experience of conjuration” (Specters ofMarx 176). These short writings, in a way, conjure the specters of Jim Corder;Baumlin, through his introduction to Corder’s unpublished manuscript, even sum-mons the ghost to speak. By the variety of responses to his oeuvre, we can see thateach author in the symposium chases the traces in Corder’s writing that interesthim or her. They reckon with the ghost(s). Each scholar was given the challengeof an inheritance of writing that dares, “[R]ead me, will you ever be able to doso?” as the scholar must “choose and decide among what [he or she] inherit[s],”for to speak or write of Jim Corder is to look at his voice that keeps “dividingitself, tearing itself apart, differing/deferring itself, by speaking at the same timeseveral times—and in several voices” (Specters 18). The voices of Corder the-orize and model a neo-epideictic rhetoric, as Enos defines, the intertwining ofinvention, ethos, and style. Miller hears Corder’s voices that insist on the devel-opment of a rhetorical curriculum for the university. Jacovitch details her ownsearch for Corder sifting through primary materials this summer. Sirc tries to fol-low the lyrical tones of Corder’s writing as a way of being present to each other.Rice desires to uncover his affinity for Corder’s voice through a shifting theoryof topoi that construct a type of regional heritage. And, finally, Baumlin seeks toexplain Corder’s strong “I” presence, particularly in his later, unpublished writing.

I hope my introduction has not fallen short as I can’t precisely name the exactmotivation for a symposium on an author, on Jim Corder specifically. But I wantto try to express the motive as best I can. Though the writing to discover andfind him (or traces of him) has proved to be a daunting and—what some mightbelieve to be in this age of the “death of the author”—a foolish task, the laborhopes to encourage contemporary scholars to remember those who came beforethat shaped rhetoric and composition into the discipline we now have. Jim Corderwas one of those formative voices. He was concerned with ethos, theorizing theconcept and modeling it in his works. If anything, this symposium may encouragereaders to return to Corder’s writing. His papers that cover the floor of the livingroom that day made me see that there is so much left behind from a life—so manytraces to follow, so much ephemera. As contemporaries of a legacy of past schol-ars, we have to learn to reckon with our ghosts and to find a way of “being-with

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specters,” for this type of scholarship reminds us of the “politics of memory, ofinheritance, and of generations” (Specters xviii). It is important to keep up thehunt, even if it haunts, even if we meander, even if we face dead ends. As Corderexplains, the hunt is essential for human communication: “People are mostlypretty complex. Much about them rests hidden from all others. We are easily lostto each other and sometimes forlorn. We keep on hunting” (Chronicle 51).

ROSANNE CARLO

The University of Arizona

From Invention, Voice, andEthos to Neo-Epideictic Time and Space

[We] are always re-positioning ourselves amid change, gain, and loss.

—Corder, “Turnings” (117)

[W]e make the fiction that are our lives . . . inventing the narrativesthat are our lives. . . . This means that invention always occurs.

—Corder, “Argument as Emergence,Rhetoric as Love” (17)

All histories of rhetoric and composition are histories of turnings, that isto say all histories of rhetoric and composition are new rhetorics. In the 1960sthrough the mid-80s, we were in the midst of several new rhetorics that followedthe great paradigm shift, the turn from seeing writing as product to seeing writ-ing as process. With the process movement came the revival of rhetoric with itsemphasis on invention. And with the shifting of rhetoric’s aim from the clas-sical emphasis on persuasion to the modern emphasis on identification cameattention to voice and ethos, subsumed under style. The next turning was social-constructionalism in the 1980s—the political, the cultural, the postmodern. Withthis turning much of what we’d been focusing on for so many years seemederased, or perhaps absorbed and backgrounded into invisibility. I don’t think any-one who was caught in this maelstrom of turning our rhetorical bodies from thenew rhetorics to postmodernism has recorded the angst of this change more thanJim Corder.

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From the 1970s to the mid-80s, Jim immersed himself in building a theoryof rhetoric grounded in invention, style, and ethos. With the discipline turningin the mid-80s, Jim began to question the solid foundation he and others hadbuilt, a foundation in which fault lines began to appear, and certainties we tookfor granted like invention, identification, voice, and ethos were being questioned,even discarded in the turning toward the social, the political, and the cultural. Jimwrestled with this change, in later years struggling with a profound sense of loss,of regret, seeing only remnants of the study of rhetoric that had once sustainedhim.

Yet his underlying purpose in all of his writing is to help lead us toward aban-doning hierarchies in our scholarly work, our way of arguing—to “be togetherinstead of apart”; to demand anything from the audience is “arrogance, ignorance,or dogma,” a tricolon he used in many essays (see “Lamentations for—and Hopesagainst—Authority in Education” 26). Corder always was alert to the extremepragmatism that disfigured by tribal dogmatism. His essays also show not onlythe way he foregrounded the canon of invention (“ground and source for all”) butalso how he modeled invention in those essays (“From Rhetoric to Grace” 26).Foregrounding invention allowed Jim to explore memory and time, trying if notto stop time, to move toward a more commodious discourse. In his essays he asksfor time and space, and he gives it; he examines the redemptive power of artic-ulated memory and establishes ethos—all of this by acknowledging invention asongoing as he also models his theory of invention. This process is going on, I’dargue, in all of his essays. Blending neo-Aristotelianism and the new rhetorics,Jim Corder’s discourse I call “neo-epideictic.”

I define “neo-epideictic” as discourse that projects the power of the particu-lar, that holds us in the present while going back to the past, that shows invention,voice, and ethos as intertwining and continually opening out again after each clo-sure, that shows argument emerging out of this process and constructing ourselvesamong others, and that looks for possibilities and rejects binaries. How, then, doesCorder enact all this in his written work?

(1) He usually says in differing ways that he will draw on the essay, thathe wants to write academic prose in a personal sort of way, and theexploratory nature of the essay gives him a model of the unfoldingof both inventive processes and research in process. “The essayistcarries the truth around, embodies the truth, such as it may be. Theacademic writer writes standing out of the way and at a distance onlyafter finding a proposition about that out there, so that what is writ-ten is a record after the search. . . . What one writes is reported;what the other writes is achieved” (“Academic Jargon” 317–18).This is Corder’s reason for his seemingly rambling introductions,

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his characteristic use of hedges like sometimes, perhaps, maybe sothat he won’t appear to write with certainty. He actually describeshis own writing process when he narrates the beautiful story of hisgrandmother, who made quilts, starting with no pattern but alongthe way realizing the design: “Without design, she made designs”(“Notes on a Rhetoric of Regret” 103).

(2) By characteristically using enumeration, he shows how one sectionopens a thought, then closes it, then opens up another exploration orstatement in the next section. In “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoricas Love,” each of his enumerations (1 through 10) opens withsome observation, some context, of what he means when he sayswe narrate our lives. He models this, presenting one of his ownselves through narration, making a closure as he does so, then atthe end showing us how that narrative opens up another thought orreflection. Thus he shows how invention is never closing, and heaccentuates the showing by bringing up the word invention through-out. He also shows us that the importance of narrative is its abilityto link past, present, and future.

(3) Enumeration has the effect of giving us space and time for reflec-tion. Time always is a concern for Corder, and he laments that theage of the Internet has led to a decline in attention spans and madeus terrified of slowing down enough for self-reflection. This patternof enumeration—quirky at times—allows Corder to move toward astraightforward voice, not the tentative, rambling voice of, usually,the first two-thirds of his essays.

(4) In many of his essays, especially the early ones on using rhetoric asthe “needed authority” for curriculum-changing, he strings togetherblocks of quotations. These quotations can be distracting untilthe reader realizes that Corder is using them rhythmically in hisopening and closing invention strategies to move toward an emer-gent argument and to draw the reader in. Another strategy Cordermuch relies on as a rhythmic motif that marks inventive openingsand closings is repetition, not only stylistic patterns like anaphora,expizeuxis, and epistrophe but also phrases, sentences, even wholepassages.

(5) Another strategy Corder skillfully uses is to let us think we knowwhat the essay is about, but he has no intention of letting us knowbefore he is ready to “turn” to the real subject of his essay. Thushe models the rambling, exploratory nature of the essay, seemingly

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misdirecting us when he takes us on a geographical route, muses ona rock that at first he thinks is an ancient weapon but finds out it’sjust a funny-shaped rock. Of course, there’s a point to this, as thereader discovers later: An “alternative view enables the viewer tosee things differently, denies instrumentality, and deconstructs myrock” (“Hunting for Ethos” 299). Here he’s exploring how recentdeconstructionist theory undermines the long history of ethos, thepresence of one’s self in the text.

(6) A familiar theme of Corder is how our memories fail us, how wecome to believe in our own philosophies of life (“Lessons Learned,Lessons Lost”). Wrong lessons can stay with us; wrong lessons wemight keep. He keeps struggling with postmodernism’s axiom ofthe reader as the one who “makes” the text. We have, according topostmodernism, to wait for the reader’s construction for a text tobecome a text (“Hoping for Essays” 302). If the alternative viewtells him ethos can’t be found, then he has no hope for survival. Butthen he pins postmodernism to the ground, finally, by recognizingthat unlike theorists, who see themselves primarily as theorists, notwriters, he (“sometimes”) thinks of himself as a writer, thus wants tobe seen as somehow real in the text. Someone has to find the words,to create them out of the rocks and tools that others have left lyingaround. “If they tell me that I cannot find the speaker or author in apoem or essay, then they tell me that I cannot hear Mozart’s music,only mine as I interpret, and I know that is not so. . . . Surely some-one might learn a little about me from what I write. . . . Style andidentity are symptoms of each other, I’m in here. Shall I provide doc-umentation? Are telephone numbers needed? Letters of reference?. . . Ethos is in there somewhere. Please send word if you find it”(“Hunting for Ethos” 314–15).

Jim Corder’s oeuvre is an important expression of the new rhetorics, and in it heshapes neo-epideictic discourse that reflects what contemporary rhetoric shouldbe.

THERESA JARNAGIN ENOS

The University of Arizona

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Our Next Decade is Hiding in 1971: Jim Corder’sVisionary Proposal for Radical Curricular Reform

To read Jim Corder is to leap back to the future. In 1985 Corder glimpseddecades ahead: “To make a new rhetoric, we will have to face the implications ofminiaturization and electronic communication and to decide whether new tech-nologies may indeed bring a new kind of literacy and with it a new kind ofrhetoric” (“On the Way” 195). He added, “. . . the overwhelming load of knowl-edge that waits, stored on disks and tapes, may call for a new sense and newcritical capacities” (195). Clearly, specialists in the Internet and new media nowobserve “a new kind of literacy” that fosters “new critical capacities.”

In 1975 George Tade, Gary Tate, and Corder coauthored a proposal for anundergraduate major in rhetoric that, they stated, their own administration at TexasChristian University had already rejected. At that time, few, if any, such majorsexisted in American colleges and universities; after several decades the idea even-tually gained popularity. In 2004 the Executive Committee of CCCC launchedits first Committee on the Writing Major. The committee soon located forty-five colleges and universities that offered an undergraduate major in Rhetoricand Composition; by 2008 the number of institutions had grown to sixty-eight(Balzhiser and McLeod 416). One hopes and imagines that the number willcontinue to increase.

Although Corder’s prediction of—and advocacy for—the ascendency ofelectronic communication and the development of an undergraduate major inRhetoric and Composition proved strikingly prescient, he provided, in 1971, avisionary proposal that remains tantalizing futuristic. He salted this proposal intohis Uses of Rhetoric, which W. Ross Winterowd describes as an “exceptionallyfine book” that, paradoxically, “was seldom, if ever, cited in the professional lit-erature” (79). I suspect that this work failed to impact the profession because itmoves in two directions. Corder uses many of its pages to join his contempo-rary Edward P. J. Corbett in issuing a conservative warning against the excessesof young radicals during the 1960s. Amid such cautions, Corder interlards boldnotions for adapting classical Greek and Roman rhetoric. He explains that thisintellectual tradition, when refashioned, provides fruitful ways of understand-ing current television shows and magazine ads. And he advances exceedinglyadventurous, radical ideas for reconfiguring university curricula.

I cannot imagine how radical readers would like the conservative portionsof Uses of Rhetoric or how conservative readers would like its radical portions.Liberals, I suspect, might dislike the entire book. By writing a volume that

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almost no single reader would value in its entirety, Corder virtually guaranteedits unpopularity.

Fast forward to the present. In 2012 anyone visiting the Bedford/St. Martin’sbooth at CCCC could receive a free copy of Writing Together: Collaboration inTheory and Practice, a collection of groundbreaking essays by Andrea Lunsfordand Lisa Ede on such important topics as collaborative writing and feministrhetorics. In one of these essays, they assert, “Most university calendars, dividedneatly into semesters or quarters, reflect a positivistic approach to learning: knowl-edge is ‘packaged’ into discrete segments and dispensed to passive recipients,fast-food-style, through four years” (161). They suggest that “we rethink our useof time in the college curriculum. At the very least, we must become aware ofhow such things as the use of time reflect assumptions and traditions that nolonger fit with our educational goals” (161). Since this essay first appeared in1992, universities have certainly rearranged their calendars to attract and accom-modate online students. But unfortunately, most faculty and students who meetface-to-face in brick-and-mortar classrooms still follow traditional calendars,which replicate themselves through institutional inertia, or what Kenneth Burkewould call “bureaucratization of the imagination” (225–99). For that reason,Lunsford and Ede’s critique of “our use of time in the college curriculum” is stillsalient.

Zoom back to the future. Writing twenty-one years before Lunsford andEde, Corder challenged this form of bureaucratized imagination while provid-ing a strong rationale for reconfiguring the university calendar. Offering a fresh,radical proposal, he claimed that the art of rhetoric should serve as the architec-tonic frame not only for first-year composition but also for the entire universitycurriculum.

Corder presents his reconceptualization as a result of his continued reflec-tion on the first three canons of ancient Greek rhetoric—Invention, Structure, andStyle. For Corder a proper understanding of these canons carries absolutely gigan-tic implications—for writing, speaking, and learning. Like Aristotle he greatlyvalues Invention, treating it as the source for decisions about Structure andStyle; he also observes that conventional college curricula seriously shortchangeInvention. Imagine students struggling to read and digest much new materialfor ten weeks or so and then studying for final exams while trying to generateand finish papers before the conclusion of the semester. How much Inventionis possible for such students? Very little, Corder argues, because they enjoyall-too-brief opportunities to wrestle with course content before they must cre-ate what professors demand: well-organized, stylistically polished products. (Andthen, of course, professors complain that students write wooden papers.) Instead,Corder maintains, a single course should last two semesters. In order to prevent

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students from robotically sliding less-than-developed ideas into a small num-ber of structures and styles prescribed by professors or ready-to-hand, he wantsstudents during the first semester to wrestle only with course content while search-ing, brainstorming, and imagining different means of inventing their projects.During the second semester, he wants them to investigate many possible struc-tures and styles for their inventions—explorations that can, of course, provokemore invention.

I suspect that few, if any, American colleges or universities have attemptedto implement—or even seriously considered—anything like Corder’s curricularproposal. But, as Lunsford and Ede wisely note, university calendars continueto hurt students by dividing time unwisely—a problem that endures decade afterdecade. Hiding in 1971 is the solution.

KEITH D. MILLER

Arizona State University

Hunting Jim Corder and the Searchfor Ethos Where He Left it to Be Found

My search for Jim Corder began about ten years ago when I first startedteaching first-year composition. My faculty mentor at the time enthusiasticallyrecommended his essay, “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love,” as some-thing I should read with my students. I discovered immediately that I was quitetaken by Corder. I was drawn to Corder’s style, his use of repetition, and therhythm of his phrasing. I was surprised by his choice to include personal expe-rience and to blend his own narratives into the writing. I gradually realized thatCorder was not just writing about his subjects, he was illustrating them throughhis use of language, in how he constructed his arguments.

My interest in Corder continued to grow in graduate school, and I started toread and write more seriously on his theories of rhetoric and writing pedagogy,which eventually culminated in my dissertation work, a project devoted entirelyto Corder. When I consider those early encounters with Corder, I still recognizethe same essential features of Corder’s writing that originally attracted me tohis work. His voice is present in the text, without arrogance or authority; histhinking is revealed in the text, without feigned objectivity; his life experience

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is shared in the text, without embellishment. Corder enacts a vision of discoursethat provides a way for scholars to imagine future directions in research, writing,and teaching; and his legacy of published works offers a rich resource for futurescholars, especially because Corder’s writings represent models of his theoreticalperspective.

Now, over a decade later, my hunt for Jim Corder is still fully underway. I amalways seeking clues, looking for publications that I might have missed in priorsearches, following the tracks he left, and putting together any fragments I find.I never met Corder, and I never talked to Corder, although I am acquainted witha number of people who knew him well. They can tell me stories about him, butI am always left feeling a bit unfulfilled—often with a tinge of jealousy—becauseI will never hear his voice (although I am told he spoke softly, in a soothing, deepTexan drawl). I want to ask him questions such as, how did a west-Texan boy whogrew up in the depression come to study rhetoric? I speculate that Corder had aprofessor or two in college who might have guided him to the study of rhetoric,but so far, I have yet to discover mention of any such person in Corder’s publishedwritings.

I am reminded of Corder’s research in Hunting Lieutenant Chadbourne.As he slowly gathers evidence of the life and career of Chadbourne, trying tolocate a real, authentic person in the clues he discovers, Corder explores the con-cept of ethos, primarily the ways in which authors reveal themselves to theiraudiences, and his research points to the central question informing the entirework: Can anyone really come to know another through a text? Is it possible tofind Chadbourne beneath all the bits and artifacts he finds (for example, mili-tary uniform sash, belt and sword, personal letters, government documents andcorrespondence)? Likewise, can any author really come to be known through atext? Does the author really exist somewhere beneath the text? Will I ever knowCorder? I will keep searching.

Fortunately, I am pleased to report, the hunting grounds have grown in recentmonths. My research on Corder has taken me into previously unexplored territory,and I wish to share some of the insight I gathered on the latest expedition—a tripto Fort Worth, Texas, and the home of Corder’s widow, Roberta.

Earlier this year I learned that in her home, Roberta Corder stored an archiveof Jim Corder’s papers, left virtually untouched for nearly fourteen years. I con-tacted her immediately and arranged a visit to her home in late May with mycolleague Rosanne Carlo. Beyond the number of boxes—approximately ten, shesaid—I had no other information about the papers contained in them. Will I findCorder there? What tracks did he leave there? What evidence of him exists there?Will I be surprised or disappointed by what I find there? I must go to Texas. I willkeep looking.

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On May 20, 2012, we embarked on a five-day trip to Fort Worth, and what wediscovered upon arriving there exceeded even our most optimistic expectations.“He never threw away anything,” Roberta told us as she led the way downstairs tothe basement where all of the boxes were kept—in a bomb shelter that had beenadded to the existing space in 1961, thirty years after the house was built. “Healso made multiple copies of everything,” she added as we resurrected the boxes,lugging each one up the staircase.

I knew that whatever we found would be useful, but I was particularly keento find two things. First, I hoped to see evidence of Corder’s writing process, tounderstand more about Corder’s drafting and revision strategies, to gain a behind-the-scenes perspective on his research process, and perhaps to learn more abouthis connections to other scholars and his reasons for drawing on particular the-ories or texts. Second, I sought to know more about Corder’s work on HuntingLieutenant Chadbourne for use in an article I am writing on scholarly research andwriting practices. I was astonished when both of my wishes were granted—duringthe first half-hour, actually.

The sheer volume of materials contained in those boxes was overwhelming—literally thousands of pages of writings—including dozens of binders, folders,and notebooks filled with seemingly countless published and unpublished works(articles, essays, book manuscripts, and poetry); extensive revision notes, editingmarks, and comments; various lists, tables of contents, outlines, and bibliogra-phies; reports on curriculum development; and professional correspondence withscholars, publishers, and readers.

Moreover, I was surprised by the variety of written forms contained in thematerials—typed pages, word-processed pages, handwritten notes in fountainpen, pencil, and ballpoint, in cursive script and printed letters. Some drafts werecomprised of an amalgamation of all of the above, often with excerpts from otherwritings (typed and handwritten) cut out and pasted or taped onto the page, inaddition to a variety of sketches, diagrams, and images.

Much of the material seemed already organized, which Roberta attributed toCorder’s work style. He not only saved everything but also maintained a strictfiling system, and the coherency of the materials as a whole surprised us. I thinkit shows undeniable evidence of Corder’s perennial concern—that he might beforgotten, that he does not exist in his writings—and his desire to prevent such anoccurrence.

Jim Corder is far from forgotten. His published writings already stand asa sizeable contribution to the field, but there is still opportunity for Corder toparticipate in current scholarship. The papers he left are an invaluable piece of dis-ciplinary knowledge, and the process of organizing such an extensive collection,especially to make it available for others, is slow, but worth the effort.

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Corder is waiting for us to find him. So let the work begin!

JENNIFER JACOVITCH

James Madison University

Parade Notes

Ninth law of composition: Everything comes from somewhere andgoes some place. You touch other people, and they enter your world,coming from another . . . into your thoughts, giving texture to theuniverse you live in, becoming finally the words you speak.

—Corder, “What I Learned at School” (57)

I’ve been thinking lately about the lyric as compelling form: short, poignant,poetically compressed—it seems a perfect genre for contemporary life, especiallyin the way the ones we like seem to drift in out of the mega-mix of our mediatedlives and take root. Corder would surely approve, because the lyric is a non-academic genre, and Corder realized how the occasion of classroom writing isflawed: It “contains no immediacy; it offers no genuine need” (“What” 54). Thebest lyrics throb with genuine need.

Let me, then, in order to reflect on the truth of Corder’s Ninth Law, offera lyric that has entered my world, one from Elliott Smith, a lo-fi lyricist—a fit-ting choice for Corder, in the way a rough, basement-taped track is the textualequivalent of Corder’s highly prized, though ineptly done, “jackleg carpentry”(“Aching” 271). A lyric, like so many of Smith’s, that seems profoundly personal,a window into a sad singer’s world. Song, then, as not artificially elicited, but sim-ply, as Wallace Stevens would say, “the cry of its occasion”; mere Corderian trace;the jackleg poem of a jackleg poet (404).

The lo-fi compositional basement, then: an underground workshop where theimagination wanders, sifting through an amassed collection of cool jottings takenduring surveillance trips above ground, trying to fit those notes together to makeinteresting art. We can see, in Smith’s lyric, precisely how it works: We’ve beenasked to come and watch the Rose Parade, “to march down the street like theDuracell bunny,” and we know it’ll be a drag, of course (“throwing out candy thatlooks like money to people passing by that all seem to be going the other way”).

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But then it happens: As we stand there (feeling, as Corder might say, a soul in herewho’s trying to become a self out there), watching the parade go by, chroniclingthese “daily domestic particulars of our lives,” which “give us texture, identity”(“Aching” 268)—like, say, tripping over a dog in a choke-chain collar; or, how,when we trade someone a smoke for a food stamp dollar, this ridiculous march-ing band starts playing, and maybe noticing that the guy playing trumpet hasobviously been drinking ‘cos he’s fucking up even the simplest lines—it gets us,amazingly, singing along with some half-hearted victory song (“Rose Parade”).

“We keep coming back and coming back/To the real,” Stevens wrote.

We seekThe poem of pure reality, untouchedBy trope or deviation, straight to the word.Straight to the transfixing object, to the objectAt the exactest point at which it is itselfTransfixing by being purely what it is. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .We seekNothing beyond reality. (402)

What Corder seems to most touchingly advocate is a composition of localobjects, in which text is simply the form for a life, a reliquary to “hold our owncyclings and dartings, dear though inept,” like those souvenirs from our day atthe Rose Parade (“Aching” 271). This was Stevens’s use of lyric form, to recordwhat gives our lives texture: “to keep them from perishing,/The few things, theobjects of insight, the integrations/Of feeling, the things that come of their ownaccord,/Because we desire without quite knowing what . . . the moments of theclassic, the beautiful” (474). Our ongoing Great Hits collection, that “anthologyof solitary shouts, remarks, grunts, and whispers” also known as a life (“Aching”270).

In interviews Elliott Smith spoke of how his songs recorded his life, trans-figuring it through imagination; “a dream diary” is how he once characterizedthem (Haynes)—lyricist as sketch-artist of contemporary manners, reassemblingtableaux from scraps recorded and collected. Smith, friends claim, would alwaysbe scrawling on napkins, constantly replenishing his homemade literary stock-pile. Corder called such writing “incomplete class notes from the world, a wayof catching reminders,” “a trace, always fleeting, always only what a singlesoul beheld,” “rendered by errant perception, failed memory, and faltering hand,always only what somebody was able to see and to rearrange, calling from outthere for us to see and to rearrange” (“Aching” 264).

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What else can we do but work in the dark, in the basement, perfecting ourcraft, taking notes on the passing parade, then fiddling with them later, poeticizingour vernacular, composing our little still-lifes? “Scraps are what there is,” Corderwrites: “Remnants. . . . the peculiarities, anecdotes, and evidence of [our] lives”(“Aching” 265). Notes from the cavalcade, rearranged in tranquility. A pedagogyof nervous, hesitant, but almost desperate self-disclosure. A corollary, perhaps,to Corder’s Ninth Law is this basic existential economy: “If you come toward meshowing me the things of your life that gave you residence, perhaps I will see you.If you can see me in my local habitations, perhaps I existed there” (“Aching” 268).

GEOFFREY SIRC

University of Minnesota

Regional Heritages

I was born in Oklahoma. This statement should establish a connection withJim Corder, born in nearby Texas. We should share a regional heritage. Yet we donot. I was born on the Fort Sill army base in Lawton; Corder was born in Jayton,not on a base. When I declare that I was born in Oklahoma, I make an assumptionthat similar regional heritage—based on the physicality of space—equates othersimilarities. “Each of us is the center of some small geography” (“Hunting forEthos” 305). My geographical assumption reflects Corder’s “tribal virtues,” thatis, shared identity based on commonality, such as space. “Each tribe speaks, attimes as if virtue were invested solely in the tribe. Tribal membership disablesus” (“Hunting for Ethos” 307). I might declare a tribal connection with Corderbased on birthplace proximity. Or I might declare a tribal connection based onprofessional affiliation. Both declarations frame a regional heritage: One is spa-tial, one is disciplinary. Neither explains affinity for Corder. Claiming tribalism,I am disabled. I offer little other than an assumption regarding shared heritage.

By affinity, I mean more than “interest” or “emotional appeal.” Those topoiconnect commonality in language or thought. My interest has some basis in thesetopoi, yet I feel another affinity based on regionalism. Place is more than a locatedand physical region; place might indicate a profession, a discipline, a page, a dig-ital space, a moment, or an event. Places change as we do (we take on new jobs,start families, change disciplinary direction). Corder writes that change leads to

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search anxiety, a search for ourselves or others that causes us “to hunt for tracesof ourselves in genealogical searches; in coffee-table books that might show uspictures of ourselves, our gear, our places; in antique malls and flea markets thatmight show us the artifacts of our identity” (Yonder 21). These are not obviousplaces to search for affinity; flea markets are not databases, and antique malls arenot search engines. Additional places not listed by Corder but which allow foraffinity searches might be: online, in a moment, in a coincidence, in a materialobject. Topoi are meant to move. All of these spaces are capable of remainingstatic; a search can, however, cause their movement as pieces of affinity are dis-covered. Whatever regional heritage I share with Corder, it need not be tied toa state or profession. It might be found in the equivalent of a flea market experi-ence that shifts as I move through experiences. A regional heritage might, in otherwords, be found in nonobvious places as opposed to expected regional locations(Oklahoma/Texas).

Take, for instance, the topos of shit as a less obvious place. In Lost in WestTexas, Corder recounts his childhood outhouse and frames a memory around thisouthouse as one of shitting: “When I was young and all the family gathered ona holiday—Christmas, say—at my grandparents’ farm, the outhouse there wasthe centerpiece for a regular entertainment (“Outhouses” 22). As a child, Corderthrew rocks at the family outhouse. A form of entertainment, but also a markerof identity formation, the moment allows for affinity as shitting. My childhoodmemories are more limited. While I have no shit stories, one circulated familystory involves a return to Fort Sill when I was five. As we exited a store, I yelledat a passerby, “Hey, old man. Ever ride in a jeep before? I have.” My memory isframed by military identity. Indeed, I not only rode in a jeep by the time I was fivebut did so later as an adult serving in the military, stationed not on a fort but on abase far from where I was born.

Two actors intersect in this region I briefly map: shit and the army. During hisKorean war service, Corder writes that he “lived for two years in the army with-out peril, first at Fort Hood, Texas, then at Coleman Barracks outside Mannheim,Germany, though diverse officers expected me to be alert, as if in peril” (HuntingLieutenant Chadbourne 22). I, too, served in the army, and, as an infantrymanoccupying another country or patrolling borders, I found myself in peril. One baseI recall living on was called Tinkerbell. Shit constitutes a major feature of militaryservice, whether in battle or not. Soldiers shit everywhere: on patrol, in the mid-dle of an empty desert, behind buildings, and sometimes even in latrines. Duringa two-week stint in which our “barracks” constituted a taken-over elementaryschool, we shat in Turkish toilets whose plumbing backed up. Driving throughoccupied territory, rocks—thrown by children—rained down on our jeeps, scaringthe shit out of us. The sense of bullshit (the feeling of participating in a useless

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moment) or shit (the anxiety of conflict leading to uneasy bowels) felt chasingrock throwers through narrow alleys echoes the bullshit Corder’s relatives felt asouthouse visits were accompanied by an impending children attack. Children arescary. In Yonder Corder writes that a rock kept on his desk to hold papers has alsobeen used by his three children for violent means: “Each in turn carried the thinglashed with a leather thong to a stout stick, which fit neatly into the indentation.It made a formidable club” (52). Corder, at times, feared children. I do, too, whenmy youngest child throws a toy at my head (my older child pays more attentionto fairies, such as Tinkerbell, than clobbering me with a truck). I feared childrenduring military service as well. Rocks thrown through a jeep’s window terrify.

For Corder such fear carries over into the search for Second LieutenantTheodore Lincoln Chadbourne, who died at twenty-three years of age (practi-cally a child!) in 1846 during the Mexican War. “I first came upon him at thehistorical marker and learned that he had died young and far from home at atime when I thought I might, in serving myself, lose my own children or be lostto them” (Hunting Lieutenant Chadbourne 97). Corder discovers professionalfrustration (and bullshit) writing about Lieutenant Chadbourne, a search influ-enced by perceived affinity and less obvious means of search retrieval. Caughtin the metaphoric coffee table/flea market search for affinity, Corder discoversthe materialism of search: letters, markers, headstones (which are, in essence, bigrocks). In Yonder Corder, frustrated that “others seem to know; seem to knowtheir own identity” (218), likewise performs a search through the less obvious; hewanders through Jayton’s cemetery and discovers a relative named Callie JanetRice, 1904–1917 (219). In this coincidental moment, I, too, find affinity in myown naming, even though I am not from Texas, nor is any part of my fam-ily from Texas. Our affinity is, thus, regional, but that regionalism is not placebound.

Affinity is not a question of what is there, but also a question of what isnot. Affinity does not depend on causality or logical connection. Two items mayshare a regional affinity based on fragile or suspicious connections. I searcha particular regional affinity with Jim Corder; Corder searched for one withLieutenant Chadbourne. The search outcomes, unlike a contemporary onlinesearch or database quest, is not for what exists or what logically connects, but forwhat is missing. “I found myself wondering, again and again, what I would havelearned, what would have startled me, what I could have seen in a new way thatI had misremembered, if only I could read the missing papers. There are alwaysmissing papers (Chronicle 17).” Regional heritages are searches for metaphor-ical missing papers that locate affinity. What is missing is not a rememberedmoment, but what I associate as related. Rocks. Military service. Children. Theseitems appear as networks generating affinity. Search, a contemporary digital

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problem explored through search engines or database logic, also involves theloosely affiliated networks of less obvious places or topoi as much as it involvesalgorithmic or causal connection. To think in such terms is to rethink the overallproblem of search and how we identify with what we find, much as Corder doeswhen approved or institutionalized search is questioned: “It occurred to me thata scholar’s reputation, supposing he had one, could be ruined if the world foundout that he had discovered his sources at Aunt Mary’s house” (Chronicle 5).

Institutionalized search demands the library, the engine, and the database assanctioned regions to locate affinity. Regional heritage offers an alternative. I can-not search for an affinity only within an institutionalized space. I might say thatI discovered my affinity with Corder in the missing moment of backed-up toiletsin an occupied school house. Or I might say I discovered affinity in our Kentuckybathroom where my oldest child bundles rock-size piles of toilet paper and tossesthem into the toilet. Or I might have discovered affinity in the rocks that spedtoward our heads as we drove through alleys and streets believing we were keep-ing the peace. Or I might have discovered my affinity in any number of markers,words and things, people and moments, places and spaces that shape a given affin-ity. I do, in fact, share a regional heritage with Jim Corder. I locate that heritagenot in Oklahoma or Texas, however, but in the brief network of places I outlinehere, in this small remembrance of his work and affinity.

JEFF RICE

University of Kentucky

Corderian Remnants

From what you would know and measure, you must take leave . . .

—Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (165)

In this symposium why not invite Jim back to the table? Two chapter excerptsfollow from his unpublished Rhetorics, Remnants, and Regrets: An Essay onShifting and Competing Rhetorics (1997). As for my own contribution, I shallgive a brief discussion of this typescript and an introduction to these excerpts.

Some years ago, when my friend Keith D. Miller and I retrieved manuscriptsfrom Jim’s widow, Roberta, we promised to publish nothing that fell short of his

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scholarly/creative legacy. We coedited two collections: Selected Essays of Jim W.Corder (2004) and The Heroes Have Gone (2008). To these, I coedited (with aformer student) a book-length memoir, Jim W. Corder on Living and Dying inWest Texas (2009). I trust that these proved faithful to our promise. Unfortunately,Rhetoric, Remnants, and Regrets “fell short,” and I should explain why.

Jim’s last several books—all creative nonfiction (CNF)—give mere glimpsesof Corder-the-theorist. While interweaving thoughts on rhetoric with personalnarrative, Corder-the-belletrist predominates in these works, which entails someloss to his scholarly legacy: It’s hard to imagine such titles as Lost in West Texas(1988), Yonder (1992), and Hunting Lieutenant Chadbourne (1993) on grad-levelreading lists in comp/rhet, though they remain powerful experiments in contem-porary CNF. In his final years, Jim did seek to synthesize his life’s scholarship:Rhetoric, Remnants, and Regrets (RRR) marks this attempt. But Jim’s commit-ments to the “scholarship of the personal” makes RRR read occasionally morelike an “I-Search” (remember Ken Macrorie?) than a summation of research; fur-ther, Jim had become so devoted to the loose, bricolage structure of his CNFwritings that this last typescript meanders, overarguing some aspects of its com-plex thesis while leaving others underdeveloped. He hints at this in his Preface:“I have from the start thought of this as a long, sometimes halting, personalessay. To me, that entails trying to remain exploratory, provisional, tentative,and—obviously—personal” (ii).

Had Jim taken a more traditional, “academic” approach, RRR might wellstand as a summa of his thoughts “on the psychology of rhetoric,” an abid-ing theme of his mature theorizing. Instead, RRR becomes a meditation onthe rhetoric of his own psychology—which he terms leucocholy, followingthe eighteenth-century English poet, Thomas Gray. In a letter of 1742, Graywrites:

Mine, you are to know, is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholyfor the most part; which though it seldom laughs or dances, nor everamounts to what one calls Joy or Pleasure, yet is a good easy sortof a state. . . . The only fault of it is . . . now and then to give asort of Ennui, which makes one form certain little wishes that signifynothing. (153)

Friends will remember Jim’s little obsessions—those “wishes that signify noth-ing,” as Gray puts it—and general ennui (though Jim did turn a jig when occasionallowed). In RRR’s introduction Jim describes his shifting moods as so many shift-ing rhetorics: “diverse rhetorics whirl and spin, come and go, and I do not live in

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a single rhetoric” (1). Meditating on this multeity, Jim writes that “I came even-tually to think that I live at a turn from one rhetoric toward another,” of which the“one, which I will call a rhetoric of remnants, gradually gives way to the other,which I will call a rhetoric of regret. The names may suggest that I have beena little lonesome before and that I am a little sad now. I expect both reports areaccurate” (1–2).

Beyond Jim’s self-analysis of the leucocholic personality and its habits ofrhetoric (that is, its ways of inventing and organizing its world and of clothingits worldview in words), there isn’t enough “news” to declare RRR original; atthe same time, its incorporation of Jim’s previous theorizing is only partiallysuccessful. Readers are better off dwelling in the depths of his original essaysthan surfing Corderian rhetoric as presented in RRR.

I’ve come to conclude that Jim, himself, was incapable of the sort of synthesisthat could turn a career’s worth of discrete essays into a coherent system; for suchwould demand that Jim write about himself rather than be himself writing. Jimsuggests as much:

From the start, I wanted to . . . get into my own understanding ofrhetoric. . . . I can’t talk or write about rhetoric without already beinginside a rhetoric. Whatever I say or write about rhetoric, taken as outthere, takes its character, at least in part, from the rhetoric that alreadyexists in here. (1)

It is the “in here” that dominates RRR.As for my Nietzschean epigraph: It remains a truism of existentialist philos-

ophy that a man—Jim W. Corder, in this case—cannot be known and his life’swork appraised until his passing. For death alone completes us, closing the bookon our thoughts; while we live, we remain “in process,” provisional and tentative,liable to change our minds. Jim confesses as much when he “issu[es] a warning. . . at the outset: I have included here some sections and passages that I nowthink are mistaken. . . . What they say is sufficient, perhaps even right enough,in a rhetoric that was inhabitable for me as early as this morning” (2). By thatafternoon the mind had changed.

But death puts the period on one’s last sentence. Necessarily, then, the taskof gathering Corder’s essays into a coherent, systematic Corderian theory fallsto his students. Part of this task has been outlined in Enos and Miller’s BeyondPostprocess and Postmodernism (2003), though the work of synthesis remains“in process.” Note that the “condition of postmodernism” joins intrapersonal psy-chology and the multeity of rhetorics as the triple subject of RRR. Every greatthinker, Martin Heidegger noted, “thinks one thought only” (50). If so, then the

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Shifting and Competing Rhetorics announced in RRR’s subtitle must be deemedJim’s great “one thought,” from which all other Corderian concepts proceed; thefact that we’re unsure how they might converge and fit together points to the worklying ahead.

I’ve suggested that Jim proved unable to step “out there” (as he puts it) towrite from the impersonality and stylistic zero-sum of pure theory. (SpinningNietzsche, we might say that Jim couldn’t “take leave” of himself, though it wasthe self-in-process that he wanted most to “know and measure.”) The Corderian“I” remains too strong, for which reason Jim could never yield to postmodernistdeclarations of the “death of the author.” And that, in an existentialist nutshell, ismy introduction to the chapter-excerpts below: only in death not theorized (á laRoland Barthes) but met in brute fact can the Corderian “I” speak in the fullnessand fixity of its meaning. Poignantly, it is only after Corder’s passing that we cancomplete the construction and appraisal of his great “one thought.”

Two passages follow from RRR. The first (212–17) critiques the poststruc-turalist deconstruction of the “autonomous individual.” The second—from thetypescript’s last page (342)—looks beyond poststructuralism to reassert the pos-sibility of an heroic epos grounded in individualism. These last paragraphs readwith the eloquence, and the finality, of a life’s peroration. (In transcribing,I’ve added some punctuation and corrected typos; cuts are marked by ellipses.Everything else is Jim’s.)

JAMES S. BAUMLIN

Missouri State University

“Turning Away”

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E———, my young colleague next door, has posted a notice beside his doorannouncing the seminar he will offer next fall. . . . This notice announces a sem-inar in Poststructural Rhetoric, with these sub-headings: The State of Knowledgein a Postmodern Era, Deconstruction, Semiotics and Narratology, Feminism,Cultural Poetics, and Post-Colonial Rhetoric. Readings include works byLyotard, Foucault, Derrida, Eco, Riffaterre, Hayden White, Bakhtin, Sontag, andothers.

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I pass his office to reach mine, and sometimes I stop to look again at thetopics and readings.

One day I stopped and looked, and quite without planning to do so, askedhim whether or not there would be an additional section at the end. I expect I wasspeaking out of my own perplexity, but I was trying to imagine an occasion forexploring the consequences of the readings and studies for teachers of composi-tion and literature. “If you begin to know these things,” I asked him, “what doesthat do to you when you go into your own classroom?”

. . . Later, trying to explain myself to myself, I thought or hoped that Ihad made the suggestion because I had seen graduate students and colleagues—and myself—initially confused, disturbed, even angry when they confrontedpostmodern writings. Those who come to these works early, say as first-yearuniversity students, often seem to move on in comprehension readily enough.The rest of us, who come to the same works later, . . . seem to experience someconfusion and dismay at first. At least I hope I am not alone.

The Old Party, then, sometimes resists or repudiates the New Party, some-times without learning its texts.

But the New Party has on occasion turned equal scorn upon the Old Party bynot acknowledging that it exists in any significant way or that it has any texts . . . .

I know that it is easy to mistake a change in fashion for the turn of an age.Each is worth observing, and we can sometimes distinguish between them, butevery moment is a turning point. I believe that more is at stake now than a fashionchange. We are re-conceiving and re-positioning ourselves. New rhetorics may beforming, or will form, that I may not comprehend, and might not choose if I couldcomprehend . . . .

What is the nature of this turn we are taking?We are turning toward the end of the great rhetorical (therefore epistemolog-

ical, ontological, linguistic) epic of our time, still in progress for a moment or twolonger, but not yet written, or written but not yet discovered, the epic of exile,migration, and transformation of the imagined self from the vale of imaginedautonomy and univocality to the city of imagined selves evolving toward mul-tiplicity, collaboration, and multivocality. Encrusted upon and embedded withinthis epic, when it is told, will be the stories of our changes, gains, and losses inthe ways we see ourselves, in the ways we learn, in the ways we can use thelanguage, the stories of how change assaults identity, undoes time, devastates thelandscape . . . .

Some would say that our time is only the period of rapid change since 1945.. . . I’ll suggest that our time is the last five or six centuries, when we put at thecenter of creation the seeing, thinking, autonomous individual we had imagined.

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When I mention the Old Party, then, I expect that I am sometimes tryingto catch that imagined autonomous individual of the last five or six centuries,sometimes only trying to catch modern rhetoricians of the time since about 1950.When I mention the New Party, I expect that I am sometimes referring to thosewho will come after us, sometimes referring to poststructural rhetoricians.

Each party lives in its own set of rhetorics. A set of rhetorics will block theview of another set of rhetorics.

The Old Party, I think, fears loss and can’t see gain in the new. The new Party,I think, cherishes gain and can’t see loss with the old.

What we have often called “modern rhetoric” has itself been revolutionary.By its restoration of invention, it welcomed and helped validate the work of socialconstructionists and intertextualists and the work of those who were advocatingcollaborative learning, writing, and editing—that is to say, modern rhetoric (fit-tingly enough) abetted the de-centering project of poststructural rhetoric. By itsrestoration of audience to the study and practice of rhetoric, modern rhetoric alsowelcomed and helped validate the work of reader-response theorists, thereby abet-ting the dislocation of both the author and the created speaker from the written textto the perceiving audience.

Most modern rhetoricians, I judge, did not guess how far the de-centeringproject would push—far enough for some to propose that all writing should becollaborative, for others to find even the personal essay poisoned by the claims ofindividualism . . . .

Most modern rhetoricians, I judge, still assume an autonomous individual atthe center of writing. That notion is not dead, but mourning has begun.

The New Party re-positions the self. . . . That old self needed to be re-positioned or re-tooled or abandoned. We were prideful. We were oblivious toothers. We suppressed others. We killed others. The New Party must be new, forin its view the old is contaminated by the claims of individualism, by what Whorfcalled “standard average European”—and he might have added, male—mentality.

. . . Those in the rhetorics of the Old Party did not always know that theywere already inside a rhetoric when they described a rhetoric, but they did helpto teach the world that there are many rhetorics, not a unitary, stable, universalRhetoric, and they did help to make us cautious about the potential tyranny ofunivocality . . . .

4

But whatever else it does, the New Party can’t carry the past. It can’t enterthe future.

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Change seldom takes us from the wholly worthless to the purely good. On anyside of us at turning points, we may find gains, whether actual or expected, andlosses, whether real or imagined.

I think we don’t much like that. We mostly still want to believe in progress,and it’s not entirely comfortable to look out at a world we’ve imagined and con-structed and see what we have lost in order to gain whatever we have gained. It’snot especially comforting, either, to see the world we live in as an imagined con-struction. I’d guess that we mostly want the world and ourselves in it to be real, notghostly constructions. But even if we are ghostly constructions, imagined selvesand others wafting in the air, others only our perceptions of them, ourselves onlytheir perceptions, we are also real, and each of us has a voice, and each voiceshould be heard. Devotion to multivocality is our best guard against arroganceand ignorance and dogma . . . .

“A Rhetoric of Regret”

The de-centering project of our time that will find us re-located after a curi-ous, glorious, disastrous five-hundred-year journey at the center of things mightlead to a new collective in which we are lost, but it needn’t. We’re here. We makewhat’s left. Then we go. While we’re here, we give witness to others, to ourselves.

The epic of our time, the drama, the story, the song, will not, I hope, tell ofwar and of the hero’s triumph with spear or gun; and surely it’s unlikely that itwill begin with fallen angels. The angels have flown away, and no hero waits.We are what we have. We sing or tell or show or chant in the languages of theechoing past, shaped and transformed now to our uses in the forms that we canmake or learn to make. Each moment we save holds our epic, not of war or thefortunate fall, but of ourselves. It will tell who we were in the midst of sometimesslow, sometimes sudden, but always startling ontological, epistemological, andrhetorical change. It will tell how each of us is always the last of some tribe.It will tell how our world came to an end. And it will tell how, at last and after all,we came to vanish. We will vanish, but for now, we are here. While we’re here, wecan give witness. Our testimony is the only testimony there is for our testimony.

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