Editors’ Note
The five audio pieces gathered here are a kind of hybrid, something like book reviews and something like podcast episodes—something like sonic reviews. These reviews span two of enculturation’s sections. As the editors of those sections, one thing we (Book Review Editor Caddie Alford and Sonic Projects Editor Eric Detweiler) can say confidently about these sonic reviews is that they are collaborative in nature, dependent on cooperation among the graduate students who created them, the authors and scholars featured in them, and the professor—Mark Longaker—who envisioned this assignment for his Ancient Rhetoric and Politics graduate class. We’re joining that chorus by introducing these pieces and what we hear them bringing to this journal’s digital pages.
The very word “collaborative” may best capture what stands out here. The scholarly book review is by definition a dialogic genre: the reviewer is in conversation with the author(s) of the book being reviewed. In traditional reviews, however, the reviewer controls the conversation, synthesizing what she finds significant and evaluating the work based on her own criteria. Even as some reviewers weave in other sources to contextualize the text, reviews do not typically host the same kind of panoply of citational voices that we might expect from other kinds of publications.
That is most certainly not the case here. In each of these sonic reviews, listeners will hear multiple reviewers discussing their observations alongside the authors of the books themselves as well as other rhetoricians who specialize in the book’s subject area. The listener is left not just with the perspective of one reviewer, but with the perspectives of a network of readers, writers, and interlocutors. The interweaving of voices in these recordings is more than a twist on the book review genre. Rather, this interweaving makes visible—or audible—what has always been the underexplored, inventive potential of a book review: its capacity to distill not only a bite-sized way of reading a text, but a way of building with a text.
While plenty of journals of have published polyvocal interviews, roundtables, and collaboratively authored articles in print form, these recordings enact not only an inventive twist on the genre of the book review, but a noteworthy amplification of audio’s possibilities as a medium of scholarly publication. From the cacophonous classroom sounds that open the episodes to the scripted and unscripted exchanges between speakers, from shifts in tone to momentary pauses as someone gathers their thoughts, listeners can hear different forms of scholarly engagement and co-production that—while not purely distinct from the possibilities of print scholarship—emphasize the emergent tendencies of audio publications, which echo down different avenues than written words.
That collaborative, polyvocal interweaving of voices also spans across the individual reviews, allowing for themes and scholarly conversations to emerge across installments. Here the episodic structure typical of podcasts adds another track into the mix of possibilities. For instance, listeners will hear how many of the books reviewed here rethink George A. Kennedy’s “decline narrative” of the history of rhetoric. They will also hear the author of one reviewed book speak to the arguments and topics of another, a kind of disciplinary cross-talk made possible by the episodic arrangement of this project.
In the spirit of that cross-talk and collaboration, we are glad to add our voices to this project, even as we wrap up this note and turn the mic over to the reviews themselves.
Mark Garrett Longaker, The University of Texas at Austin
Published February 6, 2023
The book review is a staple academic genre because it surveys a disciplinary field, positioning a new work in an old conversation. The book review is a standard graduate assignment because it provides practice in three crucial skills: summary, critique, and contextualization. Because it has such scholarly and pedagogical utility, the book review remains, but, as a genre and as an assignment, it feels stale. So, in the fall of 2021, with the help of Casey Boyle, and in a graduate course (E 387R Ancient Rhetoric and Politics), I decided to try something new. This statement explains what I did, and why I did it.
I’ve found that graduate students readily learn two skills necessary to any book review. They easily summarize, and they happily critique. But they often stumble when contextualizing. This last task requires both acumen and knowledge, eloquence and wisdom. You need to belong to a conversation in order to explain how an utterance fits among its cacophonous voices. Yet graduate students, for the most part, have just begun to listen to our academic chatter. How can we expect them to identify the stakeholders or to situate specific contributions? To solve this problem, I enlisted other scholars, who agreed to sit for interviews. Two such scholars talked with a small group of graduate students assigned with reviewing one recent book. The students also interviewed the book’s author, similarly, asking about the argument, its intellectual contribution, and its scholarly potential. Informed by these three interviews, the students were ready to summarize and contextualize.
But I wanted to do something else because the book-review genre needs an overhaul. Other academic journals and editors in our field have similarly arrived at this conclusion. Brandon Inabinet has organized conference panels featuring reviews of several recent academic books. Both at conferences and in the pages of Advances in the History of Rhetoric, Art Walzer has organized symposia about recent and groundbreaking works. Walzer also introduced the “review of scholarship,” a book review on steroids. Finally, Christa Olson invented “micro-reviews” during her tenure as book-review editor at the Journal for the History of Rhetoric.
Inspired by these and other efforts, I decided to create sonic reviews, putting scholars in conversation with one another and with my students by featuring audio from their interviews. Before inflicting the assignment on my students, I undertook the labor myself. After interviewing Marjorie Woods (an author), and Jordan Loveridge and Martin Camargo (two scholars), I stitched together clips from these interviews. Using the sonic rhetoric review that I had produced, I pitched the idea of a podcast series to Caddie Alford and Eric Detweiler. They helped me to refine my production, giving me advice about format, narration, and sound editing. After I had revised, Caddie and Eric agreed that my production might merit publication, so I used it as a prototype, asking my graduate students to produce similar reviews. I put these students in touch with the authors of several books and with numerous scholars in the field, people who had already agreed to have their audio featured. Because I’m blessed to work in an academic community of generous people, I had no trouble recruiting participants.
The result, I think, speaks for itself: a new genre and an excellent learning opportunity. I hope that these sonic rhetoric reviews inspire other graduate instructors and future scholars to perpetuate, renew, and remediate the book-review genre and the graduate assignment.