Melissa Deem
(Rhetoric), Director

May 5-6, 2000

Contemporary interest in civility might be termed a mini-boom. The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, sexual harassment, the decline of community life, school shootings, and the perceived loss of civic virtue within democratic public life have produced lively debate on the proper conduct of the citizen, conviviality, bodily and linguistic deportment, and civic conduct in general.

These public discussions of public life intersect with important work done in the area of rhetoric under the sign of decorum. Rhetorical scholarship provides the resources to investigate and advance the questions raised by this debate regarding the modes of governance concerning bodily deportment and speech. While the symposium will focus on rhetorical scholarship, it will also explore the importance of civility across disciplines, which at varying levels of abstraction and specificity concern themselves with the regulation and production of norms involved in democratic practice.

To focus debate, Melissa Deem and the Obermann Center will convene a three day research symposium bringing together major scholars from the University of Iowa and from other institutions. The symposium also will sponsor major evening addresses, free and open to all, featuring Laura Kipnis and Toby Miller.

Much of the contemporary public discourse on civility points to the late 1960's and early 70's as the genesis of today's "crisis" in civility. These discourses exhibit a nostalgia for a time when modes of decorum were more clearly identifiable and more clearly enforced. Still others, skeptical of the new interest in civility raise the question of whether civility is simply a tool for "ruling elites" to maintain control. This contemporary public debate resonates with the questions and challenges raised during an earlier period in academic discourses. In fact, rhetorical scholars in the late 1960's an early 70's took up the very problematic of civility and democratic governance as the force of new radical political practices brought them to question assumptions in the field of Rhetoric dating to at least Cicero (Scott, Smith, Campbell, Windt). More recently scholars have taken up theoretical/critical investigations into the role of decorum and civility in democratic life and in forces for social change (Leff, Hariman). Both strands of scholarship offer important insights and interventions into the contemporary public discourses on civility.