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Where does the drama get its materials? From the "unending conversation" that is going on at the point in history when we are born. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him [or her]; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself [or herself] against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. It is from this "unending conversation" . . . that the materials of your drama arise.
(Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form 110-11)
Some forty-two years after Kenneth Burke described history, from a dramatistic perspective, as an unending conversation, Sonja Foss offered "conversation" as a metaphor for rhetorical criticism's process of knowledge development ("Criteria" 288). In rhetorical scholarship, "knowledge and progress cannot be measured in terms of linear accumulation, which assumes that a single vocabulary or metaphor is used by all critics so that pieces of knowledge are built on previous ones. . . . Given that data cannot be verified objectively, our aim becomes to continue the conversation about the data rather than to discover the truth about them" (Foss, "Criteria" 288). The topic of what constitutes good rhetorical scholarship is one for which an unending conversation is, indeed, in progress, a conversation into which Editor Mike Alien has asked this volume's contributors to dip their oars.
Therein lies the challenge. As I enter this ongoing conversation I face the twin risks that I will say too much, repeating what others have already said, and that I will say too little, failing to remember...