Week of 2/25

Corbett: “Introduction”

Summary
Corbett begins with a broad definition of “rhetoric,” and, quoting George Campbell, says that there are three possible ends for rhetoric: “ ‘to enlighten the understanding, to please the imagination, or to influence the will’ ” (2). He then moves to a rhetorical analysis of an advertisement, demonstrating how rhetoric encompasses images as well as text and speech. His analysis includes an accounting of which leg of the communication triangle is most “prominent” in advertising, placing his analysis in the context of recent changes in advertising practice, and claiming in the end that “[p]ersuasion is what rhetoric is all about” (5).

Next, Corbett reproduces a prose version of a section of the ninth book of the Iliad and then rhetorically analyzes it according to the principles of ancient rhetoric. Using the (now-standard?) Latin terminology, he uses the passage from the Iliad to outline the three types of discourse and their parts, concerns, times, and special topics. For Corbett, what is common to all rhetorical discourse is that it involves or “implies” “the use or manipulation of words” (15).

The five canons of ancient rhetoric provide Corbett his next topic, and he explains each in its turn, beginning with inventio. In this section, Corbett moves easily between the Greek approach as exemplified by Aristotle, and the later Roman rhetoric codified by Cicero, weaving the two together while pointing out the ways in which they differ. He introduces and explains much of the terminology of ancient rhetoric, deferring the more complex explanations until later sections of the book. Corbett maintains and explains the ancient distinction between the three types of orations while also providing explanations of the sub-species of each in the next section of his essay.

In the final section, Corbett establishes the “relevance and importance of rhetoric for our times” (24), listing a number of occupations for which persuasive and communications skills are crucial. He also notes several “dangerous form[s] of rhetoric” (25), arguing that awareness and understanding of these kinds of rhetoric can help citizens guard themselves against the influence of these “vicious forms of persuasion” (25). Corbett holds that the study of ancient rhetorical principles and techniques can help teach synthetic skills, help produce effective writers, and help us to convey ideas and emotions effectively.

Musings
Pretty useful article in terms of coming to grips with the terminology of classical rhetoric. I did, however, find it surprising that he omits “teachers” from the list of those whose occupations demand that they engage aspects of rhetoric as they go about practicing their profession!

Berlin: “Current-Traditional Rhetoric”

Summary:
Berlin begins by placing the development of current-traditional rhetoric into a post-Civil War context of decreasing educational elitism and increasing educational secularism, and social valuing of free inquiry. He reiterates the importance of the German model on American post-secondary education, and the influence of the introduction of an elective-based system of education. According to Berlin, the changes in post-secondary education in the US served an individualistic ideology in the service of “upward social mobility,” especially for the middle class. Pedagogy, Berlin holds, was influenced by the needs of industry and the interests of the middle class. He shows how constructing educational institutions on the business model, with a focus on increasing profits by decreasing costs (especially labor costs), led to the absurd result “in which four teachers and two graduate assistants were responsible for [teaching] 1,198 students” composition (60). Attempts to fix this problem led to a focus on grammar and mechanics in writing instruction.

Berlin notes that the foundational texts of current-traditional rhetoric didn’t go so far as some programs in “restricting composing to correctness” (62), but he points out that their ideas about teaching composition were based in the mechanistic “faulty psychology” of the eighteenth century. He demonstrates that the resultant “scheme severely restricts the composing process” in its insistence on an illusory “objective” POV (63), its focus on isolating and addressing the proper “faculties,” and its exclusion of the reader/auditor from the meaning-making process.

The text next moves to an examination of the “scientific” rhetoric and the ways it “redefined” the composing process. Tracing the change of focus to expository writing, Berlin begins by noting that the way a text affects the audience is the central concern of the “scientistic” approach to composition espoused by Genung, Hill, Bain, Wendell et al. Berlin shows how the current-traditional approach establishes expository writing at the top of the writing hierarchy, and relegates all other types of writing—description, argument, and persuasion, for example—to its service. Addressing invention, arrangement, and style in turn, he shows how even those who, like Genung, consider “persuasion . . . the apotheosis of rhetoric” omit it from their composition textbooks (67).

Berlin also shows how the focus on arrangement and its principles of “unity, coherence, and emphasis” led to the rise of the understanding of the paragraph as a miniature essay. Hill, in fact, argued that the structure of the sentence should be the model for the structure of the paragraph, and Wendell extended this idea about form to the essay.

Berlin notes that current-traditional rhetoric’s reliance on a mechanistic epistemology and faulty psychology led to the focus on correctness as the most “significant measure of accomplished prose” (73). Texts that gave priority to practice encouraged the organization of composition classes “around actual writing” (74), especially models of well-written essays, and on what students would find useful in the business and professional worlds after college. Berlin says that although it might seem paradoxical to fault a system for encouraging student writing, the problem with current-traditional rhetoric is that it encourages mechanistic writing for an “abstract” audience (74). Because current-traditional rhetoric limits students’ compositional vocabularies to the empirically verifiable (75). It also limits writers’ conceptually to that which can “be contained within acceptable structures” such as the rational categories (75).

Musings
I love Berlin. I’ve like every single one of the few things I’ve read that he wrote, and I find especially useful the way he contextualizes his history. I might be a bit of an idealist, but for me, education is not just about getting a job, and education shouldn’t necessarily be in the service of the professions. Note that I said “necessarily.” ‘Cause I do recognize that many students whom I will teach do not share my beliefs, and their goals are quite different from mine. And, embracing a liberation pedagogy involves allowing students to decide what ends education will serve for them, even if I believe other goals are better.

That said, I think Berlin sums up some of the difficulties with the other approaches we read this week, even if only implicitly. He demonstrates that even the supposedly scientific approaches to teaching composition and rhetoric are not objective and serve the interests of particular classes. He raises the question of how one is to divest oneself of the “trappings of culture that distort . . . perceptions” (63). For if language is one of the trappings of culture, how are we to stand outside language to use language? A pretty paradox. He shows that what happens in classrooms in inextricably intertwined with what happens in the larger cultural context and that classroom practices embody values. Pretty important stuff from my perspective.

Connors: “The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse”

Summary
Connors’ article begins by noting that although most histories trace the origins of the modes back to the late nineteenth century, they were in “general use” as early as the 1820s, and their prototypes are found in Newman’s 1827 text (444). However, Connors notes, Newman’s terms did not become common currency until Bain’s 1866 text. Because Bain used modal terminology to inform significant portions of his text, and because American post-secondary education became significantly more secular between 1830 and 1900, Bain’s text strongly influenced the development of the modes of discourse as both classificatory and pedagogical tools. The rise of the modes was accompanied by a decline in the popularity of belletristic composition education. According to Connors, Genung’s text marked the paradigm shift between belletristic and modal approaches to teaching composition.

Bain’s paragraph model remained popular alongside the modes, and Scott and Denney codified the Bainian trinitarian model for paragraph development in their 1891 text. The modal model of composition ruled until the mid-1930s. Until then, there were few innovations in the teaching of composition, partially, perhaps, because of a split between the study of literature and the study of rhetoric in English departments, with rhetoric disappearing completely from many English departments and literary study rising to the top of the English department hierarchy.

Two trends “fragmented” the discipline of English by the 1930s: the rise of single-mode texts, most of which focused on expository writing, and the rise of the thesis text. This fragmentation led to the decline of the modes, and Fulton’s text provided the prototypical methods for expository writing. However, although these trends contributed to the decline of modes, thesis-driven theories and exposition both derive their “controlling assumptions” from the modes (450).

In 1931, Foerster and Steadman’s text presented the notion that thinking and writing are “organically related” (451). By the late 1940s, the general education movement based on Dewey’s work and the general semantics movement, with its focus on the uses and abuses of language also contributed to the decline of the modes as the controlling idea in composition education. By the 1960s, the modes had been largely abandoned as not terribly useful.
Connors holds that the modes lasted as long as they did because they “fit into the abstract, mechanical nature of writing instruction at the time, and they diminished in importance as other, more vital, ideas about writing appeared” (453). Today, the modal approach to composition has largely been supplanted by process-oriented approaches that shift the focus of the process back to the writer’s purpose, and classifying discourse is no longer viewed as very important. Connors closes with a warning that “we need always be on guard against systems that seem convenient to teachers but that ignore the way writing is actually done” (455).

Musings:
It seems to me that the main difference between Genung’s and Newman’s systems is that Newman focuses on authorial intent, while Genung categorizes by content. A few things I’d have liked to have more about: First, Connors notes that little “progressive theoretical work was done in the field” between 1870-1930 (453). Well, I’m left wondering why that is. A little more context would be useful here. He also claims that the modes don’t really help students learn to write, and while that confirms my experience in the Writing Center, I’m left wondering about what he bases his claim on. Do data exist?

The modes are rather more than “an unofficial descriptive myth” (454). In fact, one of the more popular texts used by adjuncts at CSN until last year was Patterns for College Writing. It’s a terrible book, one whose method led students to say things to me like “I can’t describe the room. This is an argumentative essay, not a descriptive essay.” But students really did love that way of learning. They knew exactly what they were expected to do and what “should” be contained in each paragraph for the essay to be “correct.” This pedagogical method reduced the fear of writing for many students. Isn’t there something to be said for that?

Now, I don’t want you all to think that I like a modal method. I think it’s limiting, rigid, and mechanistic, and it usually produces really boring texts. But students’ reaction to it may mean that we need to take seriously the idea that values are embodied in pedagogy, that ways of teaching are never objective, for if our students are so afraid of “imperfection” that they want a mechanical model for writing “success,” they will be reluctant to work things out for themselves, to figure out what they want to say, and to find their own voices.

Kinneavy: “The Aims of Discourse”

Summary:
Kinneavy begins by defining “discourse” and what he means by the “aims of discourse” (129). By the former he means a complete oral or written text; by the latter he means the effect the author/speaker intends to achieve relative to a particular audience. Kinneavy cautions against allowing classification of discourse’s aims to prevent flexibility and “overlap” (130).
A distinction between external and internal aims of discourse is discussed, and Kinneavy uses Wimsatt and Beadsley’s enunciation of the intentional and affective fallacies to illustrate his claim that authorial intention and audience reaction are “markers” but not determinants of the aims of discourse (131).

Kinneavy outlines the similarities and differences between different conceptions of the aims of discourse, beginning with Aristotle’s “codification” of the Platonic approach (131). The chart on page 132 aims to illustrate similarities and differences among historically diverse methods of classifying the aims of discourse. Some of the divisions are based on logical positivism; others are based on psychological considerations. Kinneavy’s own classificatory system “distinguishes aims by the focus on the component of the communication process which is stressed in a given discourse” (134). Kinneavy concludes that although the classificatory systems seem to widely diverge, they are in fact “fairly symmetrical” (137). The lesson he says we need to learn from this symmetry is that composition programs cannot afford to ignore any of the basic aims of discourse.

Musings:
I think some of the shortcomings I see in Kinneavy’s schema have to do with his goal of establishing a scientific analysis of the aims of discourse. I’m never really comfortable with thoeires that claim to answer all of the questions in an objective way. And Kinneavy’s scheme leaves important kinds of discourse out, it seems to me. He only examines the overt aims of discourse; he completely neglects others. For example, what about interpellating discourses whose aims are to delimit identity construction, like those Althusser talks about? Self-referential discourse? Extra-legal regulatory discourse? I have trouble seeing where these would fit in Kinneavy’s classificatory system.

A couple of things Kinneavy says annoy me. For instance, he says that “during the Deweyite progressive period, the reduction of all language to self-expression destroyed alike any objective scientific or literary norms” (137). I would argue that such objective norms never existed in the first place and that we are well rid of the notion that they do. I agree that we have “norms”; I just think it’s important to understand the ways in which they’re culturally constructed as such (I also think it can be important to challenge them, but that is, perhaps, another issue). However, given that Kinneavy first published this essay in 1969, perhaps it is not too surprising that he maintains the objectivity of norms.

Second, as many of you know, my area of interest is American humor, and I’m not too sure that his understanding of the social functions of humor is adequate. Here’s the thing: While one of the aims of humor is to make us laugh, humor can do a lot of other stuff, too, and its authors often aim at those things. For instance, George Carlin aims at cultural critique via pointing out incongruities; much American humor aims at constructing community either by including or excluding people (or both). Not all humor involves joking. Yet that’s the only form of humor in his system.