Provocation: James Ahnt Aune, Master Rhetorician

Part of what made James Arnt Aune's scholarship so compelling was its style as well as content. Academic writing tends to be impersonal, only occasionally acknowledging the author, and creates its ethos through a formal, somewhat literary style. To be accepted and understood as academic writing, and to generate the ethos appropriate to such writing, the style needs to be serious and formal. And often pretty boring. However, there are a few--very few--academic writers who manage to flout these stylistic constraints, producing writing that is simultaneously formal and casual, closely argued, yet utilizing the callbacks of the standup comedian and the riffing of the rock guitarist. Jim Aune's prose did all of these things. He produced scholarship that was as rigorous and insightful as it was engaging and entertaining. In his work, the personal, pedagogical, and political came together as one, offering readers the chance to know him through his prose. One distinctive aspect of Aune's prose style was its movement between high and low cultural references. In the realm of high culture, for example, he pulled lessons on the democratic political style from musings on the period styles of classical music--baroque, romantic, and modern--nodding to Beethoven's and Schoenberg's use of dissonance along the way (Aune, 2008a). In the realm of low culture, he began a chapter in his 2001 book Selling the Free Market with an imaginary, Libertarian-themed episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation: Captain's Log: Stardate 13256.8. The Enterprise is on its way to Planet Libertas in the Hobbesian system. We have received a distress call from a Robert Nozick, who claims to be a professor at a Harvard University, and he is demanding that we rescue him. (p. 77) Of course, to appreciate the richness of this reference, one needs to have some knowledge of Star Trek, Thomas Hobbes, and Robert Nozick. Indeed, this is where Aune's cultural references truly displayed their brilliance. He adeptly blended high and low culture into often-humorous, always-revealing scholarly insights. Consider the movement of his essay "The Politics of Rhetorical Studies: A Piacular Rite" (Aune, 2006), which positioned the study of rhetoric as a form of mourning for the "failed quest to incorporate the lost desire signified by the Athenian polis" (p. 69). On the second page of the essay, Aune captured the Romantic longing for ancient Athens by quoting--first in the original German, then in English translation--Friedrich von Schiller's "The Gods of Greece." The presence of the German verses (not to mention the unusual word "piacular" in the title) mark the essay as a formal, refined, perhaps even elitist take on nostalgia. The quotation from Proust on the following page reinforces this appearance. But by the end of the essay, Aune had trodden from the snobbish to the familiar, as his insights on the status anxiety of rhetorical studies culminated with a personal reference and a set of song lyrics. "A few weeks ago, when I turned fifty," Aune recounted, "I ran across the following song from Bob Dylan's Love and Theft, entitled 'Mississippi.' In its mature acceptance of mourning and loss, Dylan's song captures something of a fitting mood for the piacular rites of the rhetorician facing the uncertainties of a new century and a radically changing university context." Aune then demonstrates how weaving works, by offering twenty lines from Dylan's song and changing the chorus slightly to make his point: "Well I got here following the southern star / I crossed that river just to be where you are / Only one thing I did wrong / Stayed in rhetorical studies a day too long" (p. 75). To Aune, academic writing was supposed to be continuous with one's life--close to the rhythms, peculiarities, sorrows, and joys that one experienced on a daily basis. Humor was one of the many stylistic tools he used to tie his scholarship to the rhythms of life, and his humor was often dry and biting, in a typically Scandinavian way. …