Cross-Conversations on Writing, Interviewing, and Editing

You work in both rhetoric and literature. Do you consider yourself a hybrid scholar, or do you work more in one area than the other?

Wade Mahon: I probably work more in rhetoric, the history of rhetoric—primarily literature and rhetorical theory. I do teach literature courses, like the British survey, and I’ll be teaching a course on Swift and DeFoe next year. But most of the scholarship I’ve been working on is in the history of rhetoric. I think really when talking about 18th century literature, there’s a lot of overlap between literature and rhetoric.

I did my dissertation on Thomas Sheridan and the elocution movement. I’m still working on that from different angles, doing some research into different elocutions and ways in which elocution theory impacted other theories of rhetoric during the 18th century. Actually, one area that’s really interesting to me (that I think kind of defined a lot of things for me) was the relationship between reading, literacy, and rhetoric.

Eric Schroeder: I was originally doing a dissertation on Shakespeare’s theatre, and I had this massive falling out with my dissertation director. I realized that if I couldn’t work with this particular person, there was no one else really suitable for what I wanted to do, so I changed fields to contemporary American literature.

I was very fortunate. I ended up having a director who was at that time only one of four people in the entire University of California system who was a Vietnam veteran. He kind of pushed me towards not just new journalism but specifically looking at Vietnam. The doctoral dissertation I ended up writing was on literary representations of the war from the American point of view.