A Changing Tradition

The word tradition typically comes with the definition of passing on the same values and acts to one generation to another, yet Royster and Kirsch challenge this by demanding that other minorities and groups are represented in the rhetorical tradition. It seems problematic to have a tradition that is constantly changing and adaptable because it seems unstable, yet in academia as well as in a historical society tradition is constantly moving. Royster writes in "Discplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric" that, "whatever we currently know about rhetorical history as a disciplinary landscape is situated on a larger terrain of developed and undeveloped possibilities" (148). The metaphor of rhetoric being a landscape is continued on throughout both her article and her co-authored book. Although it encompasses the lack of understanding of the great mass of rhetoric, it appears to be create a strange dissonance. Thus, there needs to be a new call in language. Tradition seems to no longer fully embody everything that rhetoric can or cannot be. In literature studies they use the word "canon" to represent the Western male-dominated of texts, rhetoric needs a new word that more appropriately encompasses the mass of studies in discourse and rhetoric.

Royster goes on to state, "Because we have richly endowed traditions and highly entrenched habits in rhetorical studies that inevitably engender a certain amount of intolerance for change, another challenge is whether we can actually build a higher tolerance for dramatic change, kaleidoscopic vision, and philharmonic interactions" (166). I think the time has come as a discipline to rise to this challenge. Although feminist rhetorics has risen over the last decade, as well as the representation of other minorities the language used to describe it is still oppressive. By being outside of the tradition although still rhetoric still creates a hierarchy as well as binaries that weaken the rhetoric found in these new spaces.

Coming into this class, we had a shallow definition of what rhetoric was. This is the space to recreate that definition in order to encompass the complexity of meanings and find language that will be all-encompassing rather than situated in a tradition or outside of it.