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Barbara P. Warnick, Ph.D. (1946-2020) – Scholar Presentation
By Al Blanchard
Background – Barbara P. Warnick (not to be confused with Barbara H. Warnick) was born in the small rural town of Ashland, KY, a place she never planned to leave. As a child, she was a “voracious reader” but considered herself a “spoiled brat” who always sought the “center of attention.” Even as an adult, she admitted she was still “too critical of others, too judgmental, and a poor listener” – traits she worked to correct; however, these same traits would probably be labeled “quick thinking” and “decisive” if she were male. She pursued speech, debate, and theater first in high school and then in college. After earning her bachelors, she returned to Ashland to teach drama, French, and speech at her old high school while completing a masters at nearby Marshall University. Her marriage fell apart after 6 years as did her Ashland dream. She went to live with her mother in Ann Arbor, MI and started a Ph.D. program in speech at the University of Michigan where Richard Enos was her advisor. The trajectory of her life changed dramatically at UM. She taught at Tulane University starting in 1977 but left to take a position at the University of Washington so she could “work with graduate students at a larger university.” There she held various positions to include chair of the Department of Communication and editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech. In 2006, she moved to the University of Pittsburgh where she was the chair of the Department of Communication. She died from complications due to dementia on June 26, 2020.
“Traditional” Scholarship – Up until about 1997 (which just happens to coincide with Octalog II), Warnick’s scholarship was focused mostly on traditional pale-male subject matter such as John F. Kennedy’s address to the Houston ministerial association (using argument scheme analysis) and inventions in 18th century British Rhetorical Theory (valuing clarity over style and “adjusting to audience interests and comprehension”). Her greatest work of historical rhetoric was most likely her book, The Sixth Canon: Belletristic Rhetorical Theory and Its French Antecedents. Warnick directly challenges rhetorical orthodoxy by asking whether the five canons of rhetoric are sufficient and responding, “No.” To prove this, she analyzes primary sources and even translates original French texts herself to propose a sixth canon based on “principles of propriety, dimensions of the Sublime, the nature of taste as a human faculty, and principles of criticism.” Alan Brinton, representing the hegemony, published a review stating that the book’s “main idea is a bad one” and saw her work primarily as discussion fodder. Warnick responded in print defending the sixth canon as “a set of principles governing both composition and criticism, and concerned with the match between associationist and faculty psychology and the features of discourse itself.” Her ideas were bold, and she didn’t back down.
New Media Scholarship – After 1997, as full professor and chair at UW, Warnick shifted her research focus (often with collaborators) to a hybrid of new media, recent history, and the future. In her 1998 article “Appearance of Reality? Political Parody on the Web in Campaign ‘96,” she questioned the utility of parody websites (using secondary sources) in the ‘96 presidential election which created “the illusion of political participation” for its audiences that “did little to decrease public cynicism about politics or the political process.” She chastised website authors for “misrepresenting events and misinforming the public” thus defining “fake news” two decades before it became a rhetorical plague. Essentially, Warnick dedicated the second half of her scholarly life to analyzing online rhetoric and translating rhetorical theory for this new medium.
Selected Warnick Publications
“Traditional” Scholarship
1985 – “Charles Rollin’s Traite and the Rhetorical Theories of Smith, Campbell, and Blair”
1990 – “The Bolevian Sublime in Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorical Theory”
1992 – “The New Rhetoric’s argument schemes: a rhetorical view of practical reasoning”
1993 – The Sixth Canon: Belletristic Rhetorical Theory and Its French Antecedents
1996 – “Argument Schemes and the Construction of Social Reality: John F. Kennedy’s Address to the Houston Ministerial Association”
Octalog II (1997)
New Media Scholarship
1998 – “Appearance or Reality? Political Parody on the Web in Campaign ’96”
1998 – “Rhetorical Criticism of Public Discourse on the Internet: Theoretical Implications”
2001 – Critical Literacy in a Digital Age: Technology, Rhetoric, and the Public Interest
2001 – “Rhetorical Criticism in New Media Environments”
2002 – “Analogues to Argument: New Media and Literacy in a Posthuman Era”
2003 – “Deconstructing Cyberspace: The Peril and Promise of Computer-Mediated Communication”
2004 – “Rehabilitating AI: Argument Loci and the Case for Artificial Intelligence
2004 – “Text-based Interactivity in Candidate Campaign Web Sites: A Case Study from the 2002 Elections”
2005 – “Looking to the Future: Electronic Texts and the Deepening Interface”
2006 – “Web-Based Memorializing After September 11: Toward a Conceptual Framework”
2007 – Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web (first edition)
2012 – Rhetoric Online: The Politics of New Media (second edition)
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