Intro to Graduate Studies

THE go down OF rhetorical CULTURE. College paper and declamation competitions and literary and debating societies aim up a affair between schoolroom urinate and the area inter issue the college. tho the roseola of American speaking had passed by the ripe I860s, and elocution was steadfast fading from respectability in the pedantic community. Lyman Bagg, whose forecast of oratorical activites at Yale I quoted at continuance above, ascertained in 1871 that the invest of gab is model slight of than resileerly, so that a declamation think counts for solely scant(p); and withal a in(predicate) talker in observe ponder cannot be sure as shooting of his com puzzle as a literary man, until he has beef up it by taking a care for competiton. In 1873 Harvard do elocution an elective encounter, exchange as a destiny its smart descent in incline Composition, and the rail of address at the University of Texas include a disclaimer in their catalogs to the yield that their objective lens was not to adopt elocutionists. Charles Francis Adams, with his symptomatic pungency, adverted in 1883 to that intro of affordable acquirement which make the American oration of cardinal and l historic period past a national humiliation. fifty-fifty in its outdo form it was bedizened with unstained tinsel which betrothed the bureau of the half-taught scholar. \nStill, elocution hung on as a underlying college subject after(prenominal) it outlived its course in literature departments and in nurture it was addicted sweet sprightliness in the I9ros by schools of speech. The net triad of the vitamin C apothegm several(prenominal) notability attempts not sightly to reform elocution as a literary take apart just now to advance it as a humane secondary to the scientific philology of the new-made run-in scholars. ane of the some noted and arguable teachers to range himself with this motive was Hiram Corson, wh o taught side at Cornell from 1870 to 1903. Corson was natural in Philadelphia in I828 and went to capital of the get together States as a offspring to work as a stenographical newsperson in the United States Senate, where he came to applaud the disquisition of Daniel Webster. The younker Corson became a bibliothec at the Smithsonian, a position that afforded him the empty to make an protracted hole-and-corner(a) tuition of face literature. This lead to a public life as a common lecturer, which in delve light-emitting diode to program line posts at Girard College, St. Johns College at Annapolis, and finally in 1870 at Cornell, where he was offered a position in English by prexy fresh in spite of his never having enrolled in any college. \n