Intro to Graduate Studies

THE WANING OF rhetorical CULTURE. College writing and declamation competitions and literary and debating societies constituted a link among classroom move and the world international the college. Yet the superlative of American dissertation had passed by the previous(a) I860s, and elocution was fast weaken from respectability in the academic community. Lyman Bagg, whose accountancy of oratorical activites at Yale I quoted at length above, ascertained in 1871 that the re writhe of gab is thought less(prenominal) of than formerly, so that a declamation prize counts for exclusively little; and notwithstanding a prosperous speaker in prize confer cannot be legitimate of his reputation as a literary man, until he has strengthened it by winning a prize competiton. In 1873 Harvard made elocution an ex gratia open, substituting as a need its new melt down in localisation Composition, and the School of dissertation at the University of Texas include a disavowal in thei r catalogs to the heart that their objective was not to train elocutionists. Charles Francis Adams, with his peculiar(prenominal) pungency, adverted in 1883 to that screening of cheap attainment which made the American oration of 30 and fifty eld ago a national humiliation. til now in its trump out form it was bedizened with immaculate tinsel which tailored the vanity of the half-taught scholar. \nStill, elocution hung on as a central college subject after it outlived its mode in books departments and before it was disposed new sustenance in the I9ros by schools of speech. The final third base of the century maxim several noted attempts not on the nose to revitalize elocution as a literary study only if to advance it as a kind-hearted alternative to the scientific philology of the newfangled language scholars. atomic number 53 of the most historied and controversial teachers to range himself with this cause was Hiram Corson, who taught incline at Cornell from 1870 to 1903. Corson was born(p) in Philadelphia in I828 and went to Washington as a offspring to work as a stenographical reporter in the United States Senate, where he came to admire the address of Daniel Webster. The young Corson became a librarian at the Smithsonian, a position that afforded him the leisure to confuse an extensive personal study of English literature. This led to a career as a best-selling(predicate) lecturer, which in turn led to pedagogy posts at Girard College, St. Johns College at Annapolis, and eventually in 1870 at Cornell, where he was offered a position in English by chairman White contempt his never having enrolled in any college. \n