ABSTRACT
In “Tribes and Displaced Persons” (1993), one of his late essays, Jim W.Corder announced an informal retreat from the genres of “academic writing.” Paradoxically, Corder’s rationale strikes at the heart of his early rhetorical theory, which emphasizes self-revelation and the individual’s ethical relation to his or her writing and audience:
I haven’t yet learned how to be myself…. I don’t want to learn how to be someone else. I can’t be Maynard Mack, whose work I admired so much when I was in graduate school, and I probably won’t turn out to be Jacques Derrida. I want to try to think my thoughts, which aren’t altogether mine. I don’t want to write in the languages of the academic communities I have almost belonged to for years. I hope this is the last piece that looks even a little like academic writing…. I want to do a scholarly sort of work but to write in a personal sort of way…. I want to write in my way, which isn’t mine, and perhaps even stretch out the possibilities of prose. (281)
Pursuing “a scholarly sort of work…in a personal sort of way,” Corder’s mature writing did, in fact, “stretch out the possibilities of prose,” and had he managed to complete, polish, and publish the remaining manuscripts that he rushed to complete before his passing, his fame as an essayist would endure beyond doubt. Yet Corder did not give up entirely on “academic writing.” Among his unpublished works is a manuscript, “Rhetorics, Remnants, and Regrets,” which seeks to synthesize and expand upon his previous discussions of rhetorical theory.1 While passages are typically Corderian-that is, brilliant and movingand worthy of study, the work remains imperfect, again reflecting the author’s haste in finishing an important part of his life’s work. But, based on this manuscript, we can say that Corder was still working toward a systematic theory of rhetoric, one that had been developing over several decades and that had at least reached near-completion.
