SOURCE: "Rhetoric and Autobiography: The Case of Malcolm X," in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 60, No. 1, February, 1974, pp. 1-13.

In the following essay, Benson offers an analysis of Malcolm X's Autobiography based on the principles of rhetoric, and contends that The Autobiography of Malcolm X "achieves a unique synthesis of selfhood and rhetorical instrumentality."

Rhetoric is a way of knowing, a way of being, and a way of doing. Rhetoric is a way of knowing the world, of gaining access to the uniquely rhetorical probabilities that govern public policy and personal choice for oneself and others; it is a way of constituting the self in a symbolic act generated in a scene composed of exigencies, constraints, others, and the self; it is a way of exercising control over self, others, and by extension the scene. Taken by itself, any one of the rhetorical modes of action is incomplete...