What Is Rhetoric Enough? Forms <i>in</i> and <i>of </i>Rhetoric Scholarship

Abstract This article poses the question, What is rhetoric enough? as a provocation about the hurdles emerging scholars must traverse. The first is fear that their scholarship is not “enough” to meet the topical, theoretical, and evidentiary standards of rhetoric studies, while the second is the criticism that there is “too much” rhetoric in communication scholarship. Together, these create a wicked polarity. This article answers this question by drawing on the strategy of prepositional criticism, which posits “both/and” answers as affirmative rejoinders to “either/or” framings of rhetoric’s grounding in either tradition or transformation. To that end, it offers five provisions that elaborate distinct forms in and of rhetoric scholarship: (1) rhetoric can be understood as a contained feature in and productive effect of discourse; (2) exigencies define the context in and purpose of scholarship; (3) theory is embedded in and an enactment of rhetorical criticism; (4) community is invoked in and a creation of academic discourse; and (5) citation can be thought of as a way to document scholars’ due diligence in their writing and as an active habit or practice of constituting a conversation.