Osborn retired, but not from scholarship

It can be said that a scholar never retires, because that individual never stops thinking. But, some scholars retire more than others. Michael Osborn may have retired from his teaching position at the University of Memphis, but he is as busy as ever as a scholar.

Osborn is the leading proponent of the study of metaphor in the communication discipline. To hear him tell it, however, he sort of fell into the topic. While a doctoral student at the University of Florida, he took a seminar from the semi-retired Charles Morris, the founder of semiotics. Osborn, who had been an English major in his undergraduate days, decided to write a seminar paper on metaphor for Morris, using the rhetorical theories of I. A. Richards and semiotics, while grounding the presentation in the behavioral approach to communication that was beginning to come into favor. Morris reacted in a very excited manner to Osborn’s paper and agreed to direct his dissertation.

Douglas Ehninger, who was soon to move to Iowa from Florida, was also excited about Osborn’s work and offered to co-author an article on the topic. Ehninger was editor of Speech Monographs at the time and published the piece in the August 1962 issue of that journal. In those days, the August issue of Speech Monographs was devoted to an annual bibliography of scholarship, a listing of doctoral dissertations, and a listing of master’s theses, so the article was included in an issue that was heavily read.

Osborn’s work on metaphor continued in a controversial direction when he began to focus on archetypal metaphor and how it functions as an anchor in rhetoric. Detractors argued that the meaning of metaphors changed with the situation, but Osborn still insists that archetypal metaphors are "symbols which can be used very effectively within culture, but there is a continuity of meaning which is also interesting for the study of rhetoric."

Perhaps Osborn’s work crystallized in his article, "Rhetorical Depiction," which was published in Simons and Aghazarian’s 1986 volume, Form, Genre, and the Study of Political Discourse. In that article, Osborn attempted to integrate his work into a functional framework that could be used for the analysis of public discourse; Osborn called it "a movement away from the technical." The article succeeded in placing Osborn’s work into the mainstream of the discipline, and this past year he was awarded the Charles Woolbert Award for that article. The Woolbert Award is given annually to an article that is ten to fifteen years old and has demonstrated to have been influential for scholarship that followed. In other words, it "stood the test of time."

Since retirement, the Osborns have been able to travel and accept visiting teaching positions, but research and writing is still a big part of their daily lives. Along the way, Michael and Suzanne Osborn have written one of the best-selling basic texts in the field, and they continue to update and field-test it. The Osborns are proud that reviewers of the book have written things such as, "this book takes students seriously and takes its subject matter seriously," and Michael delights in the fact that he can still generate controversy by suggesting that mythos is a fourth form of rhetorical proof, right up there with ethos, pathos, and logos.

While retirement can bring needed opportunities for rest and relaxation it can also bring scholarly isolation, especially when you live in the hills of Tennessee between Nashville and Memphis. Osborn finds that his scholarly connections can come through the mail, fax, and the Internet; he is asked to read and comment on enough scholarship that he feels he is "becoming a professor for the field." There are opportunities to visit the Memphis campus, such as on March 25, where Osborn will inaugurate a lecture series in his honor. And, he has come to appreciate that he is married not just to a wonderful woman but to a woman who is an intellectual and scholarly companion as well. "If it weren’t for Susie, all would be impossible," Osborn says. We should all be so lucky.