Week of 2/4 cont'd

Excuse me. I had to go yell at Tim Russert, Pat Buchanan, George Will, Mary Matalin, and Ben Wattenberg. It’s part of my Sunday morning ritual. Often it involves Cokie Roberts, too, but George Stephanopoulos had the good sense to leave her out of things this morning. Thank heaven. I’ve quit smoking, and I’d probably have become apoplectic if I’d had to listen to that woman on top of the others.

Brereton: “Introduction”

The thing about Brereton that struck me deeply is what hit Jessica pretty hard, too. Why does he (and so many other theorists) conflate woman-centered content with feminist? Well, at least women aren’t completely invisible in this article. But the fact is that feminist rhetoric may be produced by males or females, so conflating it with women’s voices is just wrong. Brereton seems also to conflate and equivocate between “feminine” and “feminist.” Really irksome in something published in 1995, dontcha think? Feminist rhetoric is not the same as gendered (feminine) rhetoric. In fact, some of the most recent research published in the Journal of Pragmatics indicates that the search for a gender-specific dialect (genderlect) has been fruitless; the data indicate that different conversational and writing styles have more to do with one’s power position relative to the audience than to one’s sex, gender, or race.

Speaking of sex and gender, a really rare event occurred as I read page 25. I’d heard of most of the women on the list of those who “taught and published in rhetoric while young and migrated to literature when older,” but I’d heard of none of the men. How often does that happen?

Brereton’s distinction between male-targeted rhetoric and female-targeted rhetoric, makes some sense, but I’d sure like to hear more about how he determined which audience was targeted by which rhetoric. What characteristics signify male-targeted rhetoric and what characteristics count as “signs of a specifically female-targeted public rhetoric”? I suspect that it’s something as simple as use of apostrophe and vocative, but I’d like to have read more about this. He continues to say that it’s hard to find “a trace of a black writer or orator in composition’s professional literature” (21). What would such a “trace” look like? Is it about content? Style? Voice? Would all black writers or orators embody the same defining “trace”? My goodness. So much left unsaid. So much revealed about the writer in what’s left unsaid. But that’s getting ahead of myself and into Nystrand, et al, isn’t it?

Brereton’s historical overview seems to me vastly inferior to Nystrand et al’s (hereafter Nystrand for brevity’s sake), even though he tries to contextualize the mid-nineteenth century transformation of the university. He complicates the discussion in ways that Hill does not. Still, I am suspicious of the “great men” approach to historicizing and the Enlightenment epistemology that underlies Brereton’s history. Brereton doesn’t address why the student population in American colleges nearly quadrupled between 1890 & 1920, and that strikes me as an important question that ought to be answered. Nor does he address the social and economic factors that led Congress to establish land-grant colleges, surely another significant consideration. What was really striking to me was how little the college/university curriculum has changed since Eliot’s time. And the hierarchy within the English department’s pretty much the same, too. A quick anecdote: During a Writing Across the Curriculum committee meeting at CSN, one first-year professor asked why she had to teach comp. I mean, she’s at a community college! She seemed to find it insulting that she wasn’t allowed to get to what she called “the good stuff”—lit. Nothing’s really changed. And, after reading this article, one might think that we just keep going over the same ground in our attempts to make our classrooms more productive and conducive to writing.

I’m annoyed with the false dichotomy set up by those who claim that “[w]orking with first-year students is a job for a teacher, not a scholar” (18). In my experience, it’s not working with first-year students that prevents their instructors from doing scholarly work—it’s the hellacious course loads required of professors and instructors at all post-secondary institutions except research universities and elite colleges. Again, an example from CSN: English faculty there are required to teach 5 classes per semester. Many teach between 5 and 7. The classes are capped at 25 (or sometimes 30). That’s a lot of essays to read in addition to college service (committee work, advising student organizations, etc.). Then there are departmental and divisional meetings, budget constraints on sabbatical time—you get the point. This leads me to another point: If the business of colleges and universities is education, why is pedagogy less prestigious than research? I’m not sure it’s enough to say that it’s because “English departments organized themselves on the German model” (22). Nor am I certain that the three options Brereton articulates as available to those who are dissatisfied with the research model exhaust the possibilities. More thinking necessary.


Reynolds, Bizzell, and Herzberg: “A Brief History of Rhetoric and Composition”

Okay. So I promise this’ll be shorter. I really can run on, can’t I? I suppose that by the end of the semester, when I have a ton of things to do and I’m also trying to prep for comps, I’ll be a lot less long-winded.

They’re getting warmer. Very useful extended timeline. Some stuff I think will be useful for my dissertation. Again, however, I’m appalled by the elitism. Is it that there is no evidnce or record of what was happening at schools other than the elite colleges and universities? Is it that we have no idea of what has happened in English department courses in women’s colleges during the course of American history? I, too, have recently read Woolf, and maybe I’m just being overly sensitive, but as best as I can recall, the only real mention of a woman’s college is a note that some prof taught the same way at Radcliff as at Harvard. Oh, well.

The social agenda of progressive educators—to produce moral and productive citizens—seems to me to differ little from Quintilian’s ideas about classical rhetoric. But this account of the development of the modern comp program still seems to me to depend on a kind of top-down theory of historical development, and while it might give an adequate and informative chronology, it’s overly simplified, I think, especially when compared to Nystrand’s earlier accounting. But perhaps my dissatisfaction stems from my prejudice in favor of New Historical approaches.

The most interesting point that these folks make is, to my mind, the claim that “New
Criticism . . . made it possible to see the relation between thought and language as fundamental rather than superficial” (Sorry, don’t have the page number. To cut down on paper, I copied and pasted this into a Word document and didn’t retain the pagination). This implies, of course, that New Criticism paved the way for post-Enlightenment epistemology, even though the New Critics seemed to completely embrace the empiricist bent of the Enlightenment. Cool. And, I’m wondering if anyone else is seeing Kant in these pages. That is, I think that it might be kind of misleading to claim that language use creates knowledge. But it kept occurring to me as I read this article (and Nystrand’s) that it might be accurate to say that language functions as the Kantian categories of understanding do. This has the advantage of eliminating the divine imposition of the categories on the mind and allowing for the human construction of knowledge mediated through and by language . . .

Two questions: What’s the “particle-wave-field heuristic” these folks talk about? What was the Wyoming Resolution? Does anyone know?


Nystrand, Greene, and Wielmet: “Where Did Composition Studies Come From?”

Okay. Operating on the prescriptivist model outlined by Hill and Reynolds et al, I have to ask if the title shouldn’t be “From Where Did Composition Studies Come?” But that’s just me. I. Whatever.

At last! An attempt to historicize the development of comp programs in a way to which I can relate (I’ll stop it, I promise). I found the way this article links trends across and within disciplines extremely useful and evocative. Most interesting to me is the way Nystrand et al link the evolution of the field of comp studies to the “problem of meaning in discourse” (272). I must say that although this isn’t the first place I’ve come across many of the critiques of different theoretical perspectives, the critiques are articulated clearly, concisely and without the oversimplification that can obfuscate the points. Yay!

Again, I’m reminded of Kant in the authors’ description of Chomsky’s epistemology. The description of the cognitive view of language leaves me with a question or two: If meanings are “generated and then stored as mental representations,” what, precisely, is doing the generating? Is it the mind? The brain? Are the mind and the brain the same thing on this view? ‘Cause they sure aren’t on mine.

Ahhh. Bakhtin. In one of my undergraduate theory classes, I had to write an essay articulating my definition of reading. I had not yet read Bakhtin, but I’ve always thought of reading as a conversation between ideologies articulated by a text. If you have a grasp of the language and grammar of an ideology, you can “get” the book. I thought this was a great metaphor. I thought this was an original metaphor. Then I read Bakhtin. Damn. It seems as though every idea I get that I think is worth pursuing has already been articulated by someone who has thought more deeply about the issue than I have . . . or than I can. I have been busy trying to understand American domestic humor through a Bakhtinian lens. It’s really one of the most useful ways I’ve found for entering the discussion. But this article has taken me places with Bakhtin I’ve never been before.

A few things I’m still thinking about: “[T]he context of writing is not somehow exterior to the writer but rather is created and justified while writing” (299). I’m not always sure about the precision of this way of talking. On one level, the context exists prior to the writing. It may be, it seems to me, more accurate to say that the context is re-created or altered while writing. In other words, writers do make a context (the rhetorical situation or whatever you want to call it) while they’re writing, but there are many contexts, all interacting and mutually constituting each other. I want to consider how these contexts vibrate into and alter each other. Just something to think about.

“[C]ognition itself is a thoroughly public, that is, publicly ‘accountable’ sense-making practice” (300). I really need to think about this and to revisit my initial reaction to it.

And you thought you might be writing too much, Jess . . . Sorry if I’ve bored you all, but I do tend to work things out by talking. Well, I’m still working.