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[From the Editors: The following interview, completed in the summer and fall of 1995, is the first of a series of interviews to appear in The Writing Instructor. By publishing directed conversations with established composition and rhetoric scholars, TWI seeks to provide a forum for assessing the state of the profession.]
BANNISTER: Ross, how has the field of rhetoric and composition studies evolved in the twenty years since you created the Rhetoric, Linguistics, and Literature Program at the University of Southern California (USC)?
WINTEROWD: For our purposes, the early sixties was the starting point. Rhetoric then began to gain definition, and the new rhetorics, such as the one edited by Martin Steinman at Minnesota, came out. We began to see intensified discussion at meetings. Three important works at that time were Marie Hochmuth Nichols' "Kenneth Burke and the New Rhetoric," I. A. Richards' Philosophy of Rhetoric, and then Daniel John Fogarty's Roots for a New Rhetoric. So, for whatever reason, rhetoric was re-emerging as rhetoric, not as editing skills. You can't imagine how important Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction was. Now rhetoric was a part of literary studies, gaining importance and legitimacy. Now there were journals actually emerging--Rhetoric Review, Freshman English News, and Journal of Advanced Composition--as well as organizations such as the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA). Richard Larson took over the RSA newsletter, and there was quite a transformation. Well the newsletter wasn't really serious inquiry--this is not to diminish what Dick did--but when George E. Yoos, a philosopher from St. Cloud State University, took over the newsletter, it became then the Rhetoric Society Quarterly (RSQ). RSQ--the backbone of the Rhetoric Society of America--was growing, becoming stronger. We had an RSA meeting at my house years ago when CCCC (disastrously!) met at Disneyland. So, the starting point coincides with rhetoric becoming visible, with serious people doing its work.
But there is the paradox that rhetoric was housed institutionally in the English Department, so that meant that there was always a tension between what the three of us would consider to be rhetoric and what the English Department would consider to be rhetoric--namely, at the top end, the study of tropes, at the lower end, punctuation and spelling. And so, there was never...