Professor Edward Schiappa will present the 2008 Brigance Forum lecture on Wednesday

April 2 at 8:00 p.m. in Hays Hall 104.  The lecture is free and open to the public.

The Brigance Forum, an annual event hosted by the Wabash College Rhetoric Department, honors the legacy of W. Norwood Brigance.  Professor Brigance educated generations of Wabash men during his tenure at the College (1922-1960).  During that time he made an indelible mark in the classroom (“Room Filling Energy”!), was a forceful public speaker, an exemplar of the public intellectual, and a scholar of great renown.  Among his many scholarly accomplishments was his work as editor of the pioneering two-volume set History and Criticism of American Public Address, editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech, author of numerous textbooks on public speaking, and President of the Speech Association of America (forerunner to today’s National Communication Association).  For these accomplishments, in 2007 Brigance was recognized as a Distinguished Scholar in Communication by the National Communication Association, a fitting and overdue honor.  In honor of his memory, family, friends and former students have made generous contributions to make the annual Brigance Forum lecture possible. 

We have been honored through the years to host a number of distinguished rhetorical scholars, drawn to Wabash based on Brigance’s legacy and the continued dedication of the College to rhetorical studies.  This year we are honored to have Professor Edward Schiappa, Chair of the Department of Communication Studies and the Paul W. Frenzel Professor of Liberal Arts Chair at the University of Minnesota, present the lecture.  Professor Schiappa is the author of five books including Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric, (Columbia: U. of South Carolina Press, 2003, 2^nd Edition) and The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

Professor Schiappa's lecture, "Rethinking Criticism of Stereotypes and Representation in Popular Culture" is drawn from his present scholarly project.  In it he provides a sweeping critique of how "stereotypes" and "representations" of minorities are typically analyzed by popular culture critics.  He argues that too many critics are guided by impossible norms he describes as "representational correctness," neglect audience responses, and fail to consider what he describes as the larger "representational ecology" of mass mediated popular culture.