Enos and Miller, Beyond Postprocess and Postmodernism

Enos, Theresa and Keith D. Miller; with Jill McCracken (Eds.). Beyond postprocess and postmodernism: Essays on the spaciousness of rhetoric. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (2004).

This collection centers on a discussion of Corderian Rhetoric (Jim Corder), a rhetoric that plays between narrative, creative nonfiction, expressivism, classical rhetoric, and academic discourse, asking in various essays how this rhetoric can impact the field’s scholarship and teaching. It looks to see how the field might begin to value nonacademic, nonprofessional writing and rhetoric, including expressive writing, seeing it as something to be practiced and theorized as a legitimate way of knowing.

Corder advocates dialogic rhetoric with the goal of discussion and dialogue instead of “winning” an argument.

Quotes and Notes

A collection inspired by and dedicated to Jim Corder (“Argument as Emergence; Rhetoric as Love”); Corderian rhetoric, pushing boundaries of academic/nonacademic rhetoric, style – a combination of classical rhetoric and expressivism

“Certainly, rhetoric and composition studies is now – and perhaps has always been – a complex field characterized by agreements and tensions, as bodies of thought crash, merge, and shift like the tectonic plates of the earth’s surface” (vii)

“gentle persuasion” (ix)

Corder wrote Uses of Rhetoric, was a friend of Winterowd, Berlin, Corbett, Kinneavy, D’Angelo, Burke.

Explored ancient, modern, postmodern rhetoric, weaving them together in his own thinking.

 

Enos and Miller, Beyond Postprocess and Postmodernism

Enos, Theresa and Keith D. Miller; with Jill McCracken (Eds.). Beyond postprocess and postmodernism: Essays on the spaciousness of rhetoric. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (2004).

This collection centers on a discussion of Corderian Rhetoric (Jim Corder), a rhetoric that plays between narrative, creative nonfiction, expressivism, classical rhetoric, and academic discourse, asking in various essays how this rhetoric can impact the field’s scholarship and teaching. It looks to see how the field might begin to value nonacademic, nonprofessional writing and rhetoric, including expressive writing, seeing it as something to be practiced and theorized as a legitimate way of knowing.

Corder advocates dialogic rhetoric with the goal of discussion and dialogue instead of “winning” an argument.

Quotes and Notes

A collection inspired by and dedicated to Jim Corder (“Argument as Emergence; Rhetoric as Love”); Corderian rhetoric, pushing boundaries of academic/nonacademic rhetoric, style – a combination of classical rhetoric and expressivism

“Certainly, rhetoric and composition studies is now – and perhaps has always been – a complex field characterized by agreements and tensions, as bodies of thought crash, merge, and shift like the tectonic plates of the earth’s surface” (vii)

“gentle persuasion” (ix)

Corder wrote Uses of Rhetoric, was a friend of Winterowd, Berlin, Corbett, Kinneavy, D’Angelo, Burke.

Explored ancient, modern, postmodern rhetoric, weaving them together in his own thinking.

Fleming, Becoming Rhetorical

Fleming, David.   “Becoming rhetorical: An education in the topics.”   In Bahri, Deepika; Joseph Petraglia (Eds.), The realms of rhetoric: Inquiries into the prospects for rhetoric education. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003.

Fleming shows, through an investigation of the topics (topoi), how there is true rhetorical knowledge and how that knowledge can push students to develop in discursive ability. He calls for scholars and teachers of rhetoric to turn back to the heart of rhetoric, which depends upon a multiyear curriculum where students have the opportunity to develop, naturally and deeply, as rhetoricians influenced by ethics and virtue towards civic, responsible ends. He warns against rudimentary definitions of rhetoric  – “checklists” of terms and ideas divorced from a larger ethical base – and also all-encompassing theories of rhetoric that, in their largeness, make rhetoric also meaningless. The goal of rhetoric, Fleming argues, is not so much to transmit a certain kind of knowledge but to develop a certain kind of person, an ethical, productive, civically-minded, knowledgable leader. That development depends on practice, imitation, exercises, and repetition.

Topics depend on understanding the commonplaces of a particular culture – what that culture values, what opinions are generally accepted, the “endoxa”  of a community, what allows people to meet together on the same ground.

Rhetorical education, Fleming argues, can’t hope that students will absorb a rhetorical sensibility through mere exposure to many different disciplines and ways of knowing, the foundation of liberal arts education. Rather, rhetorical education needs to help students develop a rhetorical self-consciousness, flexible but still concrete in vocabulary and purpose, “an art that, once learned, confers on students a genuine practical and ethical ability” (105).

Fleming, with this goal in mind, proposes a richer, teachable theory of the topics that includes five broad categories of rhetorical knowledge: 1. circumstantial knowledge; 2. verbal formulae, 3. common sense; 4. models of textual development; and 5. logical norms.

Notes and Quotes

“The topics we organize this way shuold be infinitely malleable, capable of being adapted and used in multiple ways in different situations. What I am after, in other words, is a theory that can accomodate diverse kinds of resources, one that is focused on situated practice in particular communities, and one that sees the words and things of those communities as practically plastic in the hands of its speakers, hearers, writers, and readers” (104).

rhetoric can’t be taught in one course – it needs to be infused into an entire curriculum

“Where classical rhetoric took a remarkably precise language and dedicated it to an ambitious political-ethical project, the new rhetoric takes a highly elastic vocabulary and puts it to rather trivial ends” (93).

topics: “an ancient set of pedagogical resources designed to help speakers and writers invent arguments for public debate” (94): “My appraoch will be to see the topics as a species of political knowledge that, through theory and practice, can be made part of the student’s very character” (94)

“Rhetoric is at once overburdened and underburdeded with content” (94) – the challenge is to find a place between particularilty and generality (95)

the topics are commonplaces – places to go to discover arguments, a set of heuristics to help invention

connection between Toulmin’s warrants and Aristotle’s topics.

modern rhetorical theory has taken out the content and context of the original topics in order to create a more universal form of rhetoric.

Problem: “A theory of argument situated at the intersection of politics [specificity] and logic [generality] will always elude us; the best we can do is choose one path or the other and stick to it, hoping that our students, at least, will learn to merge the two in their practical lives” (103)

need something more substantial than the rhetorical triangle

Fleming’s theory of topics:

• circumstantial knowledge – context, history, people, places, familiarity
• verbal formulae – discursive resources and languages of the community, through wide reading and listening
• common sense – values, truths, preferences that exist in that community
• modes of textual development – the structures of everyday arguments in the community, patterns, modes, things that direct and shape thought in that community
• logical norms – the norms that authorize arguments, warrants, inference

The problem of the paper cycle in typical freshman composition classes: (110)

1. they are too long for close work but too short to do real work: “they are neither the kind of discursive chunk that constitutes an utterance, a move in written or spoken discourse, nor the kind of project that results from weeks, months, or even years of active engagement with real intellectual or practical problems.
2. they aren’t sequenced developmentally, to build off each other
3. students work on them too slowly, tediously drafting over and over again

Draws on the ideas of the New London Group: inquiry into a specific text or situation, recursive thinking and writing. Gives example of Brown vs Board of Education  sourcebook

Ronald and Ritchie, Asking ‘So What?’

Ronald, Kate and  Joy S. Ritchie  “Introduction: Asking ‘so what?’ Expansive Pedagogies of Experience and Action.” Teaching rhetorica: Theory, pedagogy, practice. Ronald, Kate; Joy S. Ritchie (Eds.),   Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2006. 1-12.

Ronald and Ritchie are co-editors of the collection Teaching Rhetorica, which was designed to question how our practices are affected by women’s rhetorical practices and to recover women’s rhetorical practices in order to expand our definition of rhetoric. With the resurrgence in scholarship about women’s rhetorical practice and rhetorical theory (both contemporary and historical), Ronald and Ritchie ask scholars the all-important ‘So What?’ question – how does the expansion of rhetoric through the inclusion of women change how we practice as teachers, scholars, administrators, and community members? They claim that features of much women’s rhetoric include using experience to discover truth, a move towards action, and attention to context.

Greenbaum, Talmudic Rhetoric

Greenbaum, Andrea  “Talmudic rhetoric: Explorations for writing, reading, and teaching.”  In Judaic perspectives in rhetoric and composition studies. Greenbaum, Andrea; Deborah Holdstein (Eds.), Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press (2009).  151-169.

Greenbaum explains some key features of Talmudic rhetoric (which has Greek influences) and points to ways Talmudic rhetoric can be used by teachers of writing as an alternative mode of rhetorical instruction in the writing classroom. Talmudic rhetoric points to deep philosophical and religious beliefs in the Judaic tradition – it is a cultural rhetoric.

Notes and Quotes

Rhetorical devices it uses: heteroglossia, metaphor, polysemy, dialogic discourse, discursive critique, imagistic narrative, juxtaposition, associative logic, nonlinearity, social consciousness

The Talmud has no page one – you begin in the middle (in media res) – which contrasts traditional linear Aristotiliean rhetoric. That has a rhetorical purpose – the discussion and studying of the Talmud has not beginning or ending, everyone who does it is part of the conversation.

Heteroglossia: Commentaries on the text are on the page, in the margins – multiple points of view on one page; multiple languages (Hebrew and Aramaic primarily, but influences with Greek, French, German) that gives the Talmud a complex cultural and linguistic identity

Highlights the contrast between faith and reason: it is rich in metaphor, stories, tales, advice, medical cures, philosophy and history. It has to be interpreted on a variety of levels.

“Judaic hermeneutics emphasizes what cannot be seen” as opposed to the highly visible ideas and rhetorics (and idea of God) in Christian or Greek rhetoric. (158)

The power of language – words do things (Let there be light), people change their names to reflect new identities, concept of “nomancy” – “the ability to create an alternative reality and identity through language” (161)

Talmudic rhetoric is not utilitarian – its purpose is to seek the truth (162) It has connections to Aristotle’s mythos

“Acts of kindness are inherently related to literacy” (167)

Mathison, Making Rhetoric Explicit

Mathison, Maureen “Making rhetoric explicit: Demystifying disciplinary discourse for transfer students .” In Galin, Jeffrey R.; Carol Peterson Johnson; J. Paul Haviland (Eds.), Teaching/writing in the late age of print; Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003. 53-62.

Transfer students often have a difficult time negotiating both the writing expectations at four-year schools and the different disciplinary and institutional discourses they confront at their new university. Mathison describes a course , “Ways of Knowing in a University Setting,” which was designed to help students explicitly learn about the reading and writing expectations they would encounter in their courses. The course used texts from rhetoric and composition that researched how students write in various disciplinary communities and rhetorical conventions.  The course assignments asked the students to reflect on their own practices as writers and how they understand the thinking, reading, writing, and researching in their other courses.

Notes and Quotes

It is important to let students know that the academic realm is not separate from our personal and private lives: “I had reminded students that all academic contributions are personal – they come from our questions, our knowledge, our creativity, and our labor.” (59) this is not to say that students don’t need to be taught to present their claims rhetorically – not all personal opinions.

Downs and Wardle, Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions

Downs, Douglas and Elizabeth Wardle. “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies.’” CCC 58.4 (June 2007): 552-584.

Downs and Wardle argue for revising first-year writing curriculum so that the course becomes an introduction to writing studies, where students explore writing studies as a content-filled discipline that questions ideas and practices of reading, writing, and literacy. Part of the reason both first-year writing and the field of rhetoric and composition have such low status in the academy is that they are both perceived to be content-less; making the first-year course about the research and theories of writing studies helps improve the status of both the first-year course and the discipline. Downs and Wardle explain the “writing about writing” first-year courses that they taught at University of Utah, Utah Valley State College (both Downs) and University of Dayton (Wardle.)

Notes and Quotes

Students in these courses learn that writing is conventional and context-driven (559). They also become more self-aware writers and understand that academic writing is a conversation.

Challenges: finding appropriate material, having students learn skills that will be useful in other courses, professional development needed for part-time and full-time faculty in order to teach this course

Instead of learning how to write, students in an “Introduction to Writing Studies” course learn about writing, and what they learn changes how they think about writing and how they write.

“It seeks instead to improve students’ understanding of writing, rhetoric, language, and literacy in a course that is topically oriented to reading and writing as scholarly inquiry and en couraging more realistic understandings of writing.” (553).  

make first-year writing like other first-year introductory courses

there is a powerful misconception that first-year writing can give students transferrable general writing skills (554). Writing is far more diverse and complex than that.

In a writing about writing course, students read research about writing, conduct their own writing research, write ethnographies about writing, locate writing issues that interest them, write reviews of existing literature – they are seen as gateways to WAC and WID programs

Readings about problems in the composing process (drafting, revision, reading for purpose, critical reading) and research-based, data-driven studies. Examples of readings include Berkenkotter, Huckin, Sommers, Perl, Flower and Hayes, Elbow, Murray, Swales, Dawkins, Kantz, Lakoff and Johnson, Gee

Assign reflections on the readings, literacy narratives for students to discover what they know about their own writing

Sample student-generated research questions:

Do college freshmen and seniors use rhetorical strategies at all or in similar ways? * How useful is Microsoft Word’s grammar checker? * What makes a classic literary work a “classic”? * What makes an effective business plan?* How does music (or lighting, or other environmental factors) affect writing and revision? * How do literacy activities vary at high- and low-income day cares? * What kinds of writing will a social work major encounter in his career? * Is writing taught in medical school? Should it be, and if so, how?

Micciche, Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar

Micciche,  Laura. “Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar.” CCC 55.4 (June 2004): 716-737.

Micciche argues that teaching grammar rhetorically prepares students to be effective rhetoricians and communicators, and that explicitly teaching students how language functions and constructs realities is in lines with the goals of liberating education. Micciche breaks down the binary between formal, overt grammatical instruction and inventive thinking and composing, arguing that grammar should not be a consideration for the final draft but one that spurs thinking and writing. Rhetorical grammar leads to questioning relationships between people and ideas and the cultural and ideological foundations upon which knowledge is made.

Micciche used Kolln’s Rhetorical Grammar and Crowley’s Ancient Rhetoric for Contemporary Students as anchor texts to teach her students rhetorical grammar.

Notes and Quotes

Rhetorical grammar underscores the purposeful use of language – that people’s grammatical choices do make a difference.

A closeness to language

“The chief reason for teaching rhetorical grammar in writing classes is that doing so is central to teaching thinking. The ability to develop sentences and form paragraphs that serve a particular purpose requires a conceptual ability to envision relationships between ideas. Such relationships involve processes of identification with an imagined or real reader and reflection on the way our language invites and/or alienates readers. The grammatical choices we make, including pronoun use, active or passive verb constructions, and sentence patterns- represent relations between writers and the world they live in. Word choice and sentence structure are an expression of the way we attend to the words of others, the way we position ourselves in relation to others. In this sense, writing involves cognitive skills at the level of idea development and at the sentence level. How we put our ideas into words and comprehensible forms is a dynamic process rather than one with clear boundaries between what we say and how we say it.” (719)

“When we broaden the goals of rhetorical grammar, it’s possible to see how the intimate study of language it encourages has enormous potential for studying language as central to constructions of identity and culture.” (721)

Sentence-level choices give clues to an author’s ideas about power, identity, culture

Pedagogy, commonplace books: “My course is based on the assumption that learning how to use grammar to best effect requires lots of practice and a good deal of exposure to varied writing styles. To this end, students maintain a commonplace book throughout the semester in which they imitate and record passages of their own choosing.” (723-724) Gives students the opportunity to reflect on the relationship between how something is said and what is said and also gives them the chance to practice identifying and using grammatical terms and structures. – gives students a framework and vocabulary

Boyer, Response

Boyer, Ernest L. “Response.” In Send Our Roots Rain.

Boyer argues that Kolvenbach’s address at the bicentennial convocation points out the key problems and challenges facing all institutions of higher education, not just Jesuit ones. He explains four themes that he believes are central to preparing students to enter and serve in the modern world: an awareness of the sacredness of language and an ability to be ethical, precise rhetoricians; a need to see the interconnectness of knowledge throughout the curriculum; an understanding that knowledge should be used to serve others and for greater human good; and an acknowledgement that the educated should protect those who are less fortunate.  Boyer argues that Jesuit institutions can give students the larger vision of what it means to be human: to serve others.

Notes and Quotes

“I am convinced that to achieve excellence, the nation’s colleges and schools must reaffirm the centrality of language. The Jesuits’ historic emphasis on rhetoric can lead the way. But in the Jesuit tradition, good communication means not just clarity of expression; it means integrity as well. In the Ignatian tradition language is a sacred act. So excellence in education means preparing students who are not just good writers and good speakers but good people too.” (11)

 

Four themes: the sacredness of language, shaping a curriculum with perspective, directing knowledge to human ends, confronting injustice

Connors, Overwork/Underpay

Connors, Robert J. “Overwork/Underpay: Labor and Status of Composition Teachers since 1880.” Rhetoric Review 9.1 (Fall 1990): 108-125.

Connors looks at the change in the institutional position of composition teachers from 1880 to the present (1980), tying composition’s current low status to broader changes in society and American higher. Connors explains how the structure of the composition course in the late 1800s – which most often contained the entire freshman class, not split into sections, and which was based on frequent essay-writing and individual attention to students – butted up against the rise in American university student population. Professors of rhetoric were overworked, often moved on to another less laborous field, and rhetoric was not considered a desirable field for a scholar to enter. The growing graduate student population provided a large pool of cheap labor, which extended after the graduate students graduated and became poorly-paid instructors (disproportionalty more women than men compared to other fields) in order to have a foot in the door for a more well-paying assistant professor position. Connors uses historical documents and reports to construct his history, including reflections written by and about the Boylston Chair at Harvard, the Hopkins Report of 1913 (which published the results of a nationwide survey of over 600 composition teachers about their working conditions and expectations), and the NCTE “English and the PhD” report from 1925 (which argued that literature PhDs were not trained to teach composition)

Notes and Quotes

“Rhetoric has changed in a hundred years from an academic desideratum to a grim apprenticeship, to be escaped as soon as practical” (108).

Connors explained the first American college literacy crisis, which originated at Harvard in 1874 and resulted in the institution of hte required basic freshman writing course.

late 1800s: coeducation (men felt more comfortable writing arguments to women than debating them); rise of business and industry that demanded consistent written communication; larger debates of linguistic correctness; university student population growing rapidly and the emerging notion of writing instruction that should be individualistic (and hence labor-intensive.)

Hopkins Report estimated that, given how fast a teacher could read (2200 words an hour, 10 hours a week), a composition teacher could only effectively teach 61 writing students.

“While teachers in other fields were dealing successfully with the larger numbers in their classes by evolving techniques of discussion and lecture, composition teachers were tied to the reading of thousands of themes” (115).

mismatch between the work required to get a PhD (investigation, research) and what the TAs were then expected to do (teach, often sections of freshman composition.) TAs were assigned multiple sections of labor-intensive composition while trying to complete their dissertations, and they hated rhetoric andcomposition as a result.

Why did people agree to be part of the composition underclass? 1. “Surplus” PhDs who wanted to stay doing something academic in the hopes of getting a better job 2. Women who did not have a fair shake in competing with fellow male PhDs for academic jobs 3. Women who had the added burden of raising children and couldn’t compete in scholarly production 4. Women who needed part-time jobs to raise children. 5. People who wanted part-time flexibility

“Unless and until teaching and studying writing can be made work the entire English faculty wants to share in, irresistable social forces will maintain the underclass and all of the unhappiness and poisonous inequality that have always followed in its train.” (one solution – give extra credit to faculty who agree to teach writing)

uses late-19th and early-20th century reports, articles in English Journal, monographs, surveys on the teaching of English and composition