Rhetoric Review
1387 articlesMay 2001
-
Making Use of the Nineteenth Century: The Writings of Robert Connors and Recent Histories of Rhetoric and Composition ↗
Abstract
(2001). Making Use of the Nineteenth Century: The Writings of Robert Connors and Recent Histories of Rhetoric and Composition. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 20, No. 1-2, pp. 147-157.
January 2001
September 2000
-
Abstract
In the spring of 1998, Richard Leo Enos, as chair of the Lorraine Sherley lecture series, invited James Kinneavy and Linda Ferreira-Buckley to speak to the faculty and students at Texas Christian University. As a graduate student working on a dissertation involving kairos and American literature, I saw in Professor Kinneavy's arrival a significant opportunity to clarify some of the ideas I had been considering. In particular, I had read Kinneavy's article on kairos as a Neglected Concept and saw in his ideas a great potential for the integration of literary and rhetorical studies. Nonetheless, I felt Professor Kinneavy had failed to address fully the transcendental aspect of kairos (best articulated by Paul Tillich) that, I felt, was central to the type of interdisciplinary work I was interested in pursuing. When I approached Kinneavy at TCU, then, I was, truth be told, on a naive mission to right a wrong I felt he had committed. Needless to say, I was quickly disabused of my perception. Professor Kinneavy and I began a conversation on the complexities of kairos, and he carefully illustrated the significance of the term to both rhetoric and literature. Most importantly Kinneavy asserted that kairos was transcendent in that it worked across culture lines and that it offered a subtle way of addressing the situations in which rhetoric is born. Indeed, kairos, he argued, actually explained how rhetoric was born. He felt the term expressed how certain cultural movements and conditions united with special moments to create ripe times for the rhetorical act. In this way kairos was a cornerstone for rhetoric. When Professor Kinneavy left TCU, he and I began a dialogue through email and phone that culminated in the interview printed here for the first time. The interview was conducted at his home in Austin, Texas, in August 1998 and was initially meant simply as background research for my dissertation and an article I was writing. My hope for the interview was that Professor Kinneavy would expand upon his idea of kairos and that he would clarify his position in relation to those of other theorists.
-
Abstract
Rita Copeland, a medievalist, reminds us that rhetoric is a the real world, circumstance, shifting and fragmented experience; in other words, a the itself (Framing Medieval Bodies 155). It is this discourse the body that concerns me here, translating temporality, circumstance, shifting interests into the following: time, space, weight. These three are the terms I will pursue, focusing on the work Milan Kundera and the late Andre Dubus as examples. They bring the bodies their characters into existence using space, weight, and time; that is, they write the body-inscribe it, mold it, shape it, give it material presence-just as dancers do. I want to suggest a rhetorical theory of the body in terms space, weight, and time and then to demonstrate how that theory might fruitfully inform our interpretation texts-not only literary texts like those Kundera or Dubus but also non-literary texts, such as journals, diaries, letters.1 The terms I am using come from Rudolf Laban, who developed a complex system movement analysis, a part which is called Effort/Shape. He worked first with ballet in Central Europe and later studied motion among British factory workers during World War II (efficiency studies). Many moder dancers have adopted his insights about movement and talk about space, weight, and time as characteristics choreography and their own bodies. They judge a good dance by its use space, weight, and time (these aren't the only criteria, course); they train their bodies first to understand its idiosyncratic preferences for using space, weight, and time and second to understand their bodies in relation to these three.
-
Abstract
All his life, Mikhail Bakhtin wanted to be known as a moral philosopher. But the strange history of his life in print-both in Soviet Russia and abroaddictated that the would appear last.1 Bakhtin began writing philosophy during the World War; his book (on Dostoevsky) was published in 1929, within months of his arrest. For him as for many exiled Russian intellectuals, the thirty years of Stalinism were one huge silence. Then Bakhtin was rediscovered; everything came out in a rush at the end of his life, starting in the 1960s, jumbled in time and dodging a lazy decrepit censorship. His fame in the West dates from 1968, for his astonishing theses about carnival (a product of his middle age). Scholars then began to attend to his earlier ideas about dialogue; and only in the past ten years has serious attention been devoted to the sober, post-neoKantian philosophy of his youth, the last writings to be translated. Bakhtin confessed that he had turned to literature because, in the Soviet climate, literary study was safer than philosophy-but without a consistent set of first principles, he said, literary criticism remained a parasitic profession upon which nothing serious could be based or built.2 In 1997 I attempted to summarize this stressful professional trajectory and its recuperation in a book on Bakhtin's First Hundred Years; here I would like to speculate on possible futures for Bakhtin Studies during the second hundred years, especially as they relate to the teaching classroom. Two areas especially are worth watching, which will be the burden of my comments today. First: since 1990 there has been a slow but steady infiltration of Bakhtin's early ethical writings into American theory and practice-a very welcome development, I think, which has already gone far to tame the embarrassing excesses of carnival and dialogism. For excess and inflation have accompanied Bakhtin's remarkable posthumous career every step of the way. The timing of that purple paperback, The Dialogic Imagination, was perfect. The year was 1980, the deep freeze of structuralism was still in effect, literary professionalism and precision was still equated with systematicity, symmetrical constructs and complex nomenclature. Then suddenly this palpably warm, erudite, chatty set of texts appeared, essays on literature that provided lots of labels-in fact, a whole taxonomy of new terms-while remaining wholly human-centered and engagingly imprecise. It could only have dazzled the stupefied American
-
Abstract
Edward Schiappa. The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999. x + 230 pages. Maureen Daly Goggin. Authoring A Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post‐World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition. Manwan, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000. vii‐xxviii + 262 pages. $59.95 cloth. Ann E. Berthoff. The Mysterious Barricades, Language and Its Limits. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 191 pages. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter. The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth‐Century American Delsartism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. 152 pages + 17 photographs and illustrations. $55.00 hardcover. Brenda Jo Brueggemann. Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1999. 336 pages. $49.95 cloth. Laura Gray‐Rosendale. Rethinking Basic Writing: Exploring Identity, Politics, and Community in Interaction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000. vii‐xiv + 191 pages. $39.95 cloth. $19.95 paper.
-
Abstract
Mina Shaughnessy has long been revered as leader, even founder, of basic-writing movement, which emerged from open-admissions educational policies of egalitarian 1960s. Throughout 1970s, 80s, and 90s, most professionals in have accepted role of basic writing as defined by Shaughnessy in Errors and Expectations and as enacted in classrooms of City University of New York, where action of book took place. Indeed, Jeanne Gunner calls Shaughnessy's work the starting point of reference for these professionals (28); seldom does a discussion of basic writing not referand defer-to Shaughnessy.' In spite of almost universal acclaim for Shaughnessy, some articles about work have appeared with contradictory, even negative, visions: Paul Hunter describes Shaughnessy as radical for caring so much about and believing in students, most of whom were minorities; Min-Zhan Lu describes as conservative-and a gatekeeper and accommodationist-for wanting to acculturate them. And while no doubt both Hunter and Lu have captured truths about Shaughnessy, CCNY's Patricia Laurence argues that historical dimension is missing from many such analyses, that they set Shaughnessy adrift on educational raft-unmoored from [her] times, [her] institution, [her] field (880). In essay describing these intra-community conflict[s] (26), Gunner argues that literature about Shaughnessy can be categorized into two forms of discourse: iconic and critical. In iconic discourse Shaughnessy is invoked as a figure and symbol with meaning beyond identity as historic person (26). Time editor Stephen Koepp, in issue on heroes and icons, defines icon as an embodiment of ideal that affects way we live act, for better worse. Only possibility of or worse, in fact, really differentiates Koepp's icon from his hero-one who changes society for better by shatter[ing] a limitation convention (6). Certainly, iconic literature of basic writing invokes Shaughnessy as positive icon-as a hero. The imagery in eulogies describing Shaughnessy shortly after death set tone for this type of literature: Irving Howe spoke of the brightness of her (102); E. D. Hirsch, Jr., described how human influence radiated out (96); Adrienne Rich stressed way work illuminates (102).
-
Abstract
Although there has been much discussion in composition studies for the past several years about the importance of contact zones, dissensus, and conflict to the process of learning (Bizzell; Harris; Jarratt; Lu; Olson; Trimbur; West), there has been less talk of the relationship between safe houses and conflict, as well as the role anger plays in social and political engagement. Some composition scholars have argued that in order to help prepare students for participation in civic culture, it is necessary to articulate radical pedagogies, ones that encourage modes of argumentation and that see the tensions of social difference as points of political friction to be interrogated. In arguing for the necessity of agonistic pedagogical models, however, it is easy to overlook not only the affective relations of social and political engagement but also the fact that conflict and dissensus-precisely because of emotional ties and affective investments--o not always follow the proscriptions of reasoned or civil discourse, that engagement cannot always be understood in terms of prevailing rationalities and intelligibilities. In arguing for the importance of conflict (that ideological positions are forged and tested through argumentation rooted in social difference), it is also easy to ignore that sometimes we need to deal with some of the more damaging and long-lasting results of engagement: the effects of pain, violence, cruelty-psychic and emotional injury as well as physical
March 2000
-
Abstract
(2000). At the century's end: The job market in rhetoric and composition. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 375-389.
-
Abstract
(2000). Planning graduate programs in rhetoric in departments of English. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 390-402.
-
The arrival of rhetoric in the twenty‐first century: The 1999 survey of doctoral programs in rhetoric<sup>1</sup> ↗
Abstract
(2000). The arrival of rhetoric in the twenty‐first century: The 1999 survey of doctoral programs in rhetoric. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 233-242.
September 1999
-
Increase and diffusion of knowledge: Ethos of science and education in the Smithsonian's inception ↗
Abstract
In 1835 the United States inherited the large estate of James Smithson, the natural son of a British nobleman. Smithson had written in his will, I bequeath the whole of my property . . . to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian institution, an establishment for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men (Rhees i). The single, enigmatic statement in Smithson's will was the only instruction that Congress had; as a result, competing Congressmen were able to interpret Smithson's words according to their own political and civil agendas. The eight-year debate that ensued over the use of the money was a groundbreaking ideological struggle in the nation's pursuit of knowledge. During these early years of the nineteenth century, universities were only beginning to develop in the United States, and the German thrust for research had not yet made its mark on these new institutions. The rhetoric in the Smithsonian debate represents a uniquely American version of the longstanding struggle between ethos as a value system passed on through education and ethos as a value system embodied in the new science of discovery.1 The debate forced Congressmen and citizens to address directly the question of where intellectual authority should reside in the developing nation. Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran argue that early nineteenth-century America was an oratorical culture: one in which a tradition of citizenship and public argument relied on tacit agreement about the commonality of knowledge. This oratorical culture, according to Clark and Halloran, underwent an individualistic transformation in the middle of the nineteenth century, exemplified by Andrew Jackson's defeat of John Quincy Adams in the presidential election of 1828. While the debate over the formation of the Smithsonian does not entirely support the theory of a rhetorical paradigm shift or transformation, it does dramatize a creative struggle between multiple ideological approaches. While the ethos of public education competed with the ethos of scientific discovery, a larger cultural context of traditional consensus vied with the new ideology of liberal individualism. Individual speakers often
-
Supporting deliberative democracy: Pedagogical arts of the contact zone of the electronic public sphere ↗
Abstract
I participate in a teaching and learning collaborative called Intercollegiate Electronic Democracy Project (IEDP). The project's goal is to enable students' participation in democratic culture through rhetoric and public writing. Using Internet and Web technology, we inhabit an electronic public sphere where both teaching and learning are collaborative, connecting teachers and students from many institutions across country, and where pedagogy, public issues, and politics intersect. From perspective of rhetoric and composition, IEDP embraces three topics important to our field: computers and writing; public discourse, especially deliberative rhetoric; and multiculturalism, specifically contact-zone theory and pedagogy. This essay elaborates some implications of this nexus. While much of pedagogy I discuss reflects strategies successfully used in IEDP, its implications extend to similar projects that engage students in electronic public sphere. Ever since Mary Louise Pratt challenged teachers to develop pedagogical arts of contact zone (40), many teachers have become more sensitive to multicultural dynamics of their classrooms, and they have begun to chart what Richard E. Miller calls the uncharted realms of teaching and studying in contact zone (407). There have been theoretical projects such as using contact zones as a basis for rethinking and reorganizing English studies (Bizzell); efforts such as those that address challenges posed by asymmetrical power relations in classroom (Miller) and differences in cultural perspectives and values (van Slyck); and investigations of specific contact-zone phenomena such as students' strategies for coping with dominant discourses (Canagarajah) and the politics of style (Lu). These developments signify our ability to respond to multicultural classroom conditions by accommodating educational needs and desires of all students. Nowadays, however, classroom per se is no longer sole site for teaching, learning, writing, and speaking. With growing interest in public discourse and civic participation among students-and with rapidly increasing
-
Abstract
Cynicism is that offers the contemporary reader creative links with an ethical past as well as important legacies of rhetorical tactics.' In particular, a rereading of the Cynics provides an important but overlooked history that harbors some strategic ethical positions for rhetoric.2 In the Cynics we find the possibilities of rhetorical resistance as well as places from which speakers and writers who remain at the margins can launch critique, those minority voices that get silenced under the monolith of majority conversation. This is an important tradition of Cynic rhetoric; it operates from the margins, taking its model from their forced or chosen exile. It foregrounds the political by calling attention to the inequity in both speech and discursive situations. Cynic tactics are impolite and disruptive, for if you are a minority, you have to shout to be heard (Hodge and Mansfield 199). This disperses the centrality of logic in philosophy and by operating by a logic of its own, one that uses parody and satire to question accepted norms (Branham). Cynic uses the body and accounts for desire in constructing its ethics; it is, as Edward P. J. Corbett describes, a closed fist that is at once persuasive and potentially coercive in its ethos of action (99). What distinguishes Cynic from other, more authorized rhetorics is its physicality, its emphasis on the equation of principle, discourse and action, and its blatant disregard for community standards of decorum. The Cynic rhetoric of confrontation is a counterstatement to the of Aristotle that presuppos[es] the 'goods' of order, civility, reason, decorum, and civil... law (Scott and Smith 7). The Cynic rejects decorum by adopting incivility as a means of speaking out on issues of social and political importance to often unwilling audiences. Cynic stages kairotic moments when dissensus, rather than consensus, becomes the goal of the speaker in imploring an audience to self-scrutiny and action. The implications of this counterstatement within the rhetorical are evident in the simple fact that little is known-or left-of the Cynics,3 unless we look to the ways in which incivility and interruption are and have become an effective discursive means to an ethical or political end. Therefore, to understand the Cynics' significance, we need to suspend our support for a of reason and decorum and lend an ear to the rhetorical possibilities of noise.
-
Abstract
(1999). Economic citizenship and the rhetoric of gourmet coffee. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 112-127.
-
Bakhtin's “rough draft”:<i>Toward a philosophy of the act</i>, ethics, and composition studies<sup>1</sup> ↗
Abstract
Helen Rothschild Ewald's 1993 essay, Waiting for Answerability: Bakhtin and Composition Studies, attempts to consolidate and redirect nearly a decade's appropriation of Bakhtin's work in composition studies. Its ambition to provide an authoritative map of and a new direction to Bakhtinian composition studies has been fulfilled in both its original place of publication and in its recent republication as the culminating essay in the first collection of landmark essays on Bakhtin, rhetoric, and (Farmer). While demonstrating the widespread use of Bakhtin in the field, Ewald characterizes this work as predominantly social-constructionist and heralds a new ethical emphasis that might be drawn from his earlier work on answerability. With heavy irony she deprecates how handy (332, 337) Bakhtin's work has been to a range of social-constructionist writers but chooses not to undertake a direct refutation of their claims. Instead, she chooses to suggest some teaching practices as part of a general reorientation of composition studies that would focus on and examine our specific situational responses to ethical issues that arise when we engage in or the teaching of writing (345). Connecting with a crossdisciplinary revival of inquiry into ethical issues, Ewald's intervention could be taken to herald an important ethical turn in Bakhtinian composition studies. Ewald necessarily draws much of her account of Bakhtin's early themes of ethics and answerability, as she acknowledges, from Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Slavicists who have provided the most extensive and authoritative reading of Bakhtin to date and joined vigorously in the revival of ethical issues in literary criticism. Ewald shares not only their emphasis in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics on the superior authenticity and ethical seriousness of Bakhtin's early work but also their impatience with readers of his work who have confined their interest to his socially oriented theories of dialogue and carnival. Like Morson and Emerson, she eschews refutation of these readers but identifies herself with a more serious and worthy future line of inquiry into answerability in the ethical sense of individual accountability as
-
Abstract
(1999). Constructing essences: Ethos and the postmodern subject of feminism. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 82-91.
-
Abstract
In Rescuing Discourse of Community, Gregory Clark hinted that pedagogy based on theory of discourse was in a state of crisis. In this article Clark put forward a theory of ethical participation that he believed would rescue attempts characterize writing classrooms as discourse communities. But even as he did so, he acknowledged that pedagogical practices based on rhetoric of discourse can put into motion processes that tend minimize or exclude participation of some people as they establish dominance of others (61). Others shared same concern. Joseph Harris had argued, goals as teachers need not be initiate our students into values and practices of some new community, but offer them chance reflect critically on those discourses (19). Marilyn Cooper warned that discourse may develop static standards, which are then used to determine who is and who is not a member of (204). Mary Louise Pratt characterized them as imaginary utopian communities that do not accurately represent fractured reality (50-51). Carolyn Miller said the domination of communal is a political and rhetorical problem because it seems restrict and control what can be said, what can ever be found persuasive (Rhetoric and Community 86). And Jim W. Corder, who likened discourse tribes, said that being part of such tribes represses individual's own capacities for observation, thus violating private virtues (306). These critics did not actually deny that discourse exist. Most accepted that discourse communities, like Dell Hymes' communities, exist and that they are that share rules for conduct and interpretation of speech (Hymes 54). But assumption that writing classroom constitutes such a community soon became untenable. Meanwhile, study of discourse flourished on another front as researchers investigated disciplinary and professional discourse. As Charlotte Thralls and Nancy Roundy Blyler say, the concept of a discourse community has given researchers a way talk about workplace writing in both industrial and academic settings (8). Among those doing such work, Greg Myers analyzed
-
Abstract
Traditionally, has played a central role in how classical rhetoric defines, conducts, and structures both its subject matter and its methods.' The subjects of [rhetorical] deliberation, writes Aristotle, such as seem to present us with alternative possibilities (1357a). These alterative possibilities, structured as opposites, precede-as well as proceed from-the study of rhetoric. For example, stasis theory assumes that people find themselves opposed, actually or potentially, to other people in their interests, desires, and motives and that they require the means, or method, to clarify this opposition even as they seek to move beyond it toward consensus. To provide these means, stasis theory posits a heuristic set of categories-of Being, Quantity, Quality, Place, for example-designed to help disputants identify and evaluate the issues in any given case, chiefly by establishing the relative merit of the oppositions underpinning the contested issues: Only those cases whose points of conflict are sufficiently clear-i.e., are well formulated and resting on sufficiently common grounds-should go forward for debate and adjudication. Equally, opposition plays a key role in structuring the canons of rhetoric and, consequently, in structuring rhetoric as both a theoretical and a practical art. Within the canon of inventio, for example, we find appeals to the advantageous paired with the disadvantageous, possibility with impossibility, guilt with innocence, praise with blame; within dispositio, we find confirmatio paired with refutatio; within elocutio, we find a whole range of figures-from epanalepsis to antimetabole to isocolon-capable of pairing terms into stylistic antitheses; and, finally, within memoria and actiopronuntiatio, we find a spectrum of normative terms marked, at either extreme, by pairs such as natural and artificial, open and closed, high and low, and the like. Clearly, opposition is one of the key terms, if not a governing principle, of classical rhetorical theory and practice. But what of its role in contemporary rhetorical theory? In the critical analysis of visual, rather than verbal or written, texts? In images that seek identification rather than overt persuasion?
-
Abstract
Richard Marback. Plato's Dream of Sophistry. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. xii + 163 pages. Gregory Crane. Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity: The Limits of Political Realism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xii + 348 pages. Josiah Ober. Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. xiv + 417 pages. Harvey Yunis. Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. xv + 316 pages. Christine Farris and Chris M. Anson, eds. Under Construction: Working at the Intersections of Composition Theory, Research, and Practice. Logan: Utah State UP, 1998. 332 pages. Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe. Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1994. Pages viii + 452. $29.95 paper. Tharon Howard. A Rhetoric of Electronic Communities. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1997. Pages xii + 203. $24.95 paper. James Porter. Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1998. Pages xiv + 203. $24.95 paper. Russel K. Durst. Collision Course: Conflict, Negotiation, and Learning in College Composition. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 1999. 189 pages. $22.95 paper. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory. New York: Guilford Press, 1999. Pages, xl + 627. Richard E. Miller. As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998. 249 pages. Lynn Z. Bloom. Composition Studies as a Creative Art: Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration. Logan: Utah UP, 1998. 288 pages. $19.95 paper. Duane H. Roen, Stuart C. Brown, and Theresa Enos, eds. Living Rhetoric and Composition: Stories of the Discipline. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999. 233 pages. $22.50 paper. Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, ed. Women/Writing/Teaching. Albany: SUNY P, 1998. 294 pages. $19.95 paper. Peter Dimock. A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. 118 pages. $12.95 paper.