The rhetoric of the familiar essay: E. B. White and personal discourse

Abstract

When written discourse in the twentieth century adopted "scientific" tendencies (disassociation of facts from values, subject-dominated treatises, thesis-proof argument), it employed a restrictive and outmoded variety of classical rhetorical theory. The success of classical rhetoric relied heavily on two bases, neither of which survive in modern society: a coherent set of values held within a rhetorical community, and a belief that a speaker could embody and speak forth that community's wisdom in a persuasive fashion. Furthermore, the classical rhetor was an orator who could stand before an audience and move them emotionally as well as rationally, by the dramatic force of his person. Instead of attempting to compensate for the distance and impersonality which the artifice of writing places between speaker and audience, the classic model for written discourse has, perversely, emphasized evidential argument (or logos) to an ever greater degree. Modern rhetorical theorists such as Kenneth Burke and Wayne Booth have suggested that discourse might more effectively follow a model whereby a speaker would acknowledge both the diversity of his audience and the incomplete nature of his own wisdom. Such discourse would take as its purpose the investigation of thought, rather than the dispersal of culturally-approved truths. Modern rhetoric would aim at establishing what Burke calls "identification" between speakers and audiences, so that admittedly limited men might share and improve their ideas, composing themselves into a condition of greater completeness. The familiar essay form is particularly well-suited to these modern rhetorical purposes. Though it has long been considered a tangential and irresponsible subgenre of writing, the familiar essay offers a means by which a modern speaker might reach an otherwise suspicious or uninterested audience through personal discourse, which reunites the appeals of ethos (the force and charm of the writer's character) and pathos (the emotional engagement of the reader) with the intellectual appeal of logos. A study of the operation of personal discourse in eight essays by E. B. White reveals how the modern familiar essay can evince compelling arguments by the use of modern, generative, and lyrical ethos.