Rhetoric's primary business has always been articulation of public knowledge and public values.1 Because making of knowledge in public realm incorporates intersecting discourses of many specialized communities, it frequently necessitates translation of expert discourse into a vernacular accessible to nonexpert decision makers. Indeed, Aristotle makes it clear in both Rhetoric and Topics that one of important uses of rhetorical art is forwarding of arguments in popular terms (34). This process of transforming into language that guides human affairs has been described by Charles Bazerman and James Paradis a conversion of the hieratic discourse of expertise into the demotic discourse of everyday practice (8). A prototype of this transformation becomes available for scrutiny in presentation of expert testimony to a jury, a process that involves accommodating knowledge claims and discourse practices of a specialized community to both formal procedures of a courtroom and lay understanding of jurors. Juries are empaneled to enact values of a larger public by deciding whether and to what degree a set of evidence matches legal definitions of criminal behavior or civil liability. By deciding guilt or innocence and determining appropriate penalties, they fulfill public function of rhetoric that Bitzer describes: to establish correct judgments in practical and humane affairs by examining contested versions of truth (68). To play this role, Gail Stygall has observed, jurors become socialized as temporary members of

The latest rehabilitation of the sophists, begun by Hegel and carried out with increasing dedication during this century (see Crowley, Enos, Guthrie, Hunt, Jarratt, Kerferd, Poulakos, De Romilly, Schiappa, Untersteiner), has improved our understanding of rhetorical theory and history. Despite, and in some ways because of, the nebulous quality of what they have left us, the sophists have become important primarily because they predate Plato and Aristotle and thus would seem to offer at least a fragmentary glimpse of rhetoric prior to its hypostatization in the classical period. The traditional thinking is that Platonic and Aristotelian rhetorical theory disciplined the sophists' extravagant practices, substantiated their unsubstantiated claims, and transformed their dithyrambic, mythic, magical, poetic discourse into a logical, rational theory of argumentation. In other words, Plato and Aristotle transformed mythos into logos; thus they were the fathers of rhetoric insofar as rhetoric was a respectable techno for the production of reasonable discourse. The philosophers rejected sophistic rhetoric on the grounds that it had no philosophical foundations from which its principles could be logically derived and safely taught. Thus they set about constructing a sound, philosophically based rhetoric by linking it carefully to, while dividing it just as carefully from, absolute knowledge (episteme). In both the Platonic and the Aristotelian rhetorical schemes, episteme provides the limits of rhetoric. In the Platonic case, absolute knowledge is a prerequisite for the application of rhetorical lore-one must employ dialectic in the service of absolute truth before one may use rhetoric to disseminate the truth (Phaedrus 265-66). In the Aristotelian case, rhetorical lore must be based on the first principles of persuasion, but must be employed when knowable matters are discussed-the closer one gets to fundamental principles, the further one gets from enthymemes, and thus the further one gets from rhetoric in the direction of scientific knowledge (Freese 1359b). If knowledge provides the limits for rhetorical theory and practice, then, in Platonic and Aristotelian terms, without both knowledge and a theory of knowledge, systematic rhetoric is impossible. This is why they dismissed sophistic rhetoric on the grounds that it ha(d) no rational account to give of the nature of the various things which it offer(ed) (Gorgias 465) and that it presented not an but the results of an art (Forster 183b). Because

teach composition using an enthymematic approach. Or I might say, teach composition from the or the enthymeme. Unfortunately, the word enthymeme is more likely to alienate composition teachers than to attract their interest and attention, despite growing body of scholarship that positions the enthymeme at the very heart of the composing process. According to the viewpoint that emerges from this scholarship, enthymematic reasoning is fundamental to cognition and discourse, and hence to writing. If so, then talking about the enthymeme ought to be an essential and powerful way of talking about the composing process, and of it (Grimaldi, Gage, Green, Walker, Porter, Hood, Emmel, among others). Part of the difficulty of explaining what is meant by teaching enthymematically resides in the word enthymeme itself, which, unlike more familiar composition terminology (thesis, evidence, conclusion), lacks common and shared meaning, even recognition, for both students and teachers alike. As one of my students complained, couldn't even find it in the dictionary! Other students have been perturbed when their other teachers do not recognize the word. As means of understanding and discussing composition, the term enthymeme is still in the process of gaining definition and application-that is, of becoming grounded in composition theory, apart from the realms of formal logic and classical rhetorical theory. The age-old tendency to reduce the enthymeme to a truncated syllogism, or to mere figure of speech with little rhetorical potential beyond the moment of utterance, robs it of the fullness from which its pedagogical potential derives (see, for example, Conley's and Poster's surveys of ancient and modem interpretations of the enthymeme). Yet the enthymeme is not just logical paradigm (statement 1 is true because statement 2 is true) but also conceptualization of rich set of relationships with the potential of being expressed in multitude of ways, of which the enthymematic and syllogistic paradigms are only the most schematic and thesis-like. A successful essay is no less enthymematic for not being

In 1976 Mina Shaughnessy invoked the phrase converting the natives (235) describe an undesirable attitude for a teacher of composition. In her article Diving In: An Introduction Basic Writing, she outlines four stages of development for composition teachers, of which converting the natives is the second. The tendency of teachers at this stage is see themselves as missionaries who initiate the unenlightened into the true path of correct writing. At this stage the teacher's goal is to carry the technology of advanced literacy the inhabitants of an underdeveloped country (235). Joseph Harris also mentions the term conversion in his 1989 critique of the use of discourse communities in the composition classroom (16). We have, Harris suggests, pictured various discourse communities as fundamentally different, in fact, so fundamentally different that we are at a loss explain how students make the break with former communities in order enter new communities. Harris describes the way we have tended think of students

Ethos is generally associated with individual rhetors.1 Certainly that's association Aristotle had in mind when he recorded most influential usage of term (Rhetoric 1356a). But there is ample warrant for moving to a broader level-the level adopted in this paper, a case study of outrageous of a group of generative linguists on cusp of sixties and seventies. There is ample warrant for identifying not simply with specific individuals in specific orations but also with identifiable communities. In ordinary language, for instance, has always been far more communal than individual: Ethos.... [ 1.] The characteristic spirit, prevalent tone of sentiment, of a people or community; 'genius' of an institution or system (OED, 1933 reissue) . And it has a similar sense among our academic neighbors-in literary criticism, where books have titles like The Ethos of Restoration Comedy (Schneider); in sociology, where books have titles like The Ethos of Hong Kong Chinese (Siu-Kai), or, more famously, in Merton's discussion of general ethos of science (268). Coming closer to home, consider Augustine's notion of a Christian ethos, which presupposes that rhetor stands for group values (De Doctrina 4.27-29). Consider similarly presupposing admonition of George Campbell about influence of party-spirit (97). Consider Black's above-epigramitized talk of patterned commitments and stylistic proclivities, which, as Halloran tells us, is essentially projection of to communal level (Black 85; Halloran, Molecular Biology 71). Elsewhere, Halloran tells us more: the word has both an individual and a collective meaning. It makes sense to speak of of this or that person, but it makes equally good sense to speak of of a particular

Being bodies that learn language / thereby becoming wordlings-thus begins Kenneth Burke's revised definition of human beings.' Here I will suggest teachers of writing and literacy can use Burke to revise our discussion of words and thereby better empower the wordlings we teach. Traditionally, what have we taught our students about words? Probably the first place to look for the answer to this question is the site where our assertions about diction have most power: in the margins of their papers. What my students report about their revision processes matches what composition researchers report. Their primary concern (re: diction) is changing words to avoid such comments as WW, Abst, Amb, especially WW. That is the most potent lesson they have learned from their previous teachers about diction. I. A. Richards was right when he asserted that the best and most effective way to teach writing is to help students understand how words work in (8). The New Rhetoric reframes what we know about words work. It directs attention to the crucial importance of word-ing in both the psychological process of invention and the social process of discourse community.2 It can help us teach writing humanely, critically, and effectively both in the humanities and across the curriculum/'in the disciplines. Most composition textbooks use Burke, if at all, only by mentioning his Pentad. But this presentation of the Pentad is a red herring, an obeisance that allows us to deflect the rest of Burke, to put him under erasure.3 More important than any particular like the Pentad is what Burke can help us understand about language in general, rhetorical processes in particular. We should take into our classrooms Burke's insights into words work, into abstractions move minds, into contexts (especially of that rhetorically most important context called, perhaps misleadingly, audience [cf. Park]), into contradiction and into process-in short, into writing as a psycholinguistic, sociocultural process. In writing classes our discussion of words is all too often based in reductively narrow, dichotomized conceptions of style and diction. We will do well to let Burke remind us words are more important than that, to remind us wording can constitute knowledge and power. We should demonstrate to our students-while

George A. Kennedy, trans. Aristotle: On Rhetoric (subtitled A Theory of Civic Discourse). Oxford University Press, 1991. 335 + xiii pages. The Importance of George A. Kennedy's Aristotle: On Rhetoric Kennedy's Aristotle: On Rhetoric as a Pedagogical Tool Kennedy's Rhetoric as a Contribution to Rhetorical Theory Kennedy's Aristotle: on Rhetoric as a Work of Translation∗ James J. Murphy, ed. A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth‐Century America. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1990. 241 + v pages. Teaching the History of Writing Instruction Thomas Miller. The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon. Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. 318 + viii pages. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb, eds. Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in the Postmodern Age. New York: Modern Language Association, 1991. iv + 242 pages. Sandra Stotsky, ed. Connecting Civic Education and Language Education: The Contemporary Challenge. New York: Teachers College Press of Columbia University, 1991. Janis Forman, ed. New Visions of Collaborative Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1992. 200 pages. $23.50.

complex of social formations. In the field of composition and rhetoric, such systems have been described as communities. The term is useful in the theory and analysis of writing because it embraces the rhetorical concern with social interchange (discourse) and with situation or context (community). But the term can lead the analyst astray by prompting an uncritical acceptance of as a natural element or transcendental category. Because community, like discourse itself, is socially constructed-by the analyst as well as by the people who claim membership-the act of identifying communities is never innocent, never free of ideological influences. As both Lester Faigley and Joseph Harris have noted, the word community is almost always used positively, and herein lies its danger to rhetorical analysis. If the community is always good, who but the perverse could question or rebel against practices that sustain the community? However, to accept this irresistible goodness as somehow prior to discourse (above question) would amount to abandoning a key premise of rhetorical criticism-the idea of the rhetorical situation (Bitzer), which demands that the analyst acknowledge the possibility of transformation among the elements and aims of discourse, including location. In addition to changing language and changing minds, the enterprise of rhetoric suggests that speakers and writers have the power to transform the site of discourse, the community itself. In this essay I argue that as a defense against an uncritical adoption of the community concept rhetorical theory needs to keep alive competing concepts of discourse communities, so that alternatives exist in the description and analysis of discourse practices. Recent definitions of discourse communities have established a rather too-narrow foundation upon a communitarian ethic. At the present time, when liberalism's stock is down, communitarianism appears to be a strong alternative for understanding the relation of people to government and culture (Lasch). In liberalism, social organization depends upon two strong formations-the individual, who may enjoy a wide range of rights and freedoms at the possible cost of

In his 1925 article Literary Criticism of Oratory, Herbert Wichelns, a scholar of rhetoric at Cornell, observed that, with respect to literary study, oratory had become either an outcast or a poor (181). Oratory's falling out of favor indicated to Wichelns that perceptions of discourse had been radically transformed. Intimating what the change might consist of, he wrote, [i]nvolved in it is some shift in the conception of oratory or of literature, or of both; nor can these conceptions have changed except in response to the of which oratory, as well as literature, is part (181). Scholars writing after Wichelns have frequently reported on the ill fate of oratory-and, more broadly, of rhetoric as the practice and study of some kinds of written as well as oral discourse-in American colleges. How had colleges by 1925 come to demote rhetoric to a position beneath literary critical study and literary works of fiction, drama, and poetry? As Wichelns suggested, rhetoric and literature shared some life, and our elaboration of their common history and context can help us account for rhetoric's condition. Some scholars have argued that the study and status of rhetoric in the college curriculum diminished as a strong interest in literature emerged (e.g., Stewart 119-21; Connors, Ede, and Lunsford 5-7; Halloran 176). Exploring the role of the belletristic tradition in rhetoric and of representative individuals such as C. S. Baldwin and the men who held the position of Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard, the work of these scholars offers insight into the interrelations among rhetoric and literature during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians neither of English nor of speech as academic disciplines, however, have traced the relation between rhetoric and literature as it was construed by scholars who were active during this time. The concomitant rise of literary study and fall of rhetoric suggest that historical perceptions of the relation between literary and rhetorical discourse figure in the story of rhetoric's demise. Part of what we might call the life of rhetoric and of literature is the relation that members of the profession perceived between them. As with contemporary discussions on the issue in such texts as Jane Tompkins' Reader in History and Steven Mailloux's Rhetorical Power, we might guess that turn-of-the-century scholars posited rela-

I suspect that many people who buy sentimental greeting card verse have the same preconceived ideas about such verse that I had before I began a serious study of it a few years ago. To my mind, greeting card verse was a trite and trivial form of poetry, filled with flowery language, poetic diction, and figures of speech, appealing to emotions in excess of the occasion-artificial, affected, and insincere. To my surprise, however, I discovered that greeting card verse, although often written in meter and rhyme, is not poetry, nor is it intended to be, but a rhetorical composition, a message transmitted from one person to another. Although its rhymes and meters are frequently trite (this may account for its wholesale condemnation), the sentiments it expresses, although commonplace, are seldom trivial. It uses few figures of speech, little or no poetic diction, and almost no flowery language. Nor are its emotions in excess of the occasion. The sentiments and emotions it expresses are no different than those that you and I might express at a wedding, a graduation, an anniversary, or a birthday, or at Christmas, New Year's, or Easter-good luck, congratulations, I love you, I'm thinking of you, have a joyous holiday, and so forth. Finally, greeting card verse is neither artificial, affected, nor insincere, but straightforward, genuine, and sincere. In fact, it exemplifies beautifully an important kind of ceremonial discourse, and I can think of no better way of introducing writers to the ancient art of epideictic discourse than through a careful analysis and understanding of the rhetorical strategies used by writers of greeting card verse. Paradoxically, greeting card verse is both universal and particular. The message of greeting card verse must be general enough to fit representative rhetorical situations (Quinn 22), yet particular enough to fit immediate occasions. Like proverbs, maxims, quotations, and anecdotes, when they are decontextualized and put into collections, greeting card verse is decontextualized when it is put on racks of cards in card shops, drug stores, and supermarkets. Under appropnate circumstances, however, the person who buys greeting card verse recontextualizes it, appropriates it to his or her own intention, and sends it to someone else as a personal message. As a result, there is a dialogic relationship set up between the writer's intention and the sender's intention, between the writer's words and the sender's words. But as Mikhail Bakhtin has pointed out, do not all of the

Richard Leo Enos, ed. Oral and Written Communication: Historical Approaches. "Written Communication Annual, An International Survey of Research and Theory,” vol. 4. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1990. 264 pages. Susan C. Jarratt. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. 181 pp., $22.50. Brandt, Deborah. Literacy as Involvement: The Acts of Writers, Readers, and Texts. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. 151 pages. Jeanette Harris. Expressive Discourse. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1990. 206 pages.

(1991). Abstracting the bodies of/in academic discourse. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 52-69.

Patricia P. Matsen, Philip Rollinson, Marion Sousa, eds. Readings from Classical Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. viii + 382 pages. Roderick P. Hart. Modern Rhetorical Criticism. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman/Little Brown, 1990. iv + 542 pages. Susan Miller. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. 267 pages. Bruce Lincoln. Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 238 pages. Gregory Clark. Dialogue, Dialectic, and Conversation: A Social Perspective on the Function of Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. xix + 93 pages. Lawrence J. Prelli. A Rhetoric of Science: Inventing Scientific Discourse. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. xi + 320 pages. Kathleen E. Welch. The Contemporary Reception of Classical Rhetoric: Appropriations of Ancient Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990. 186 pages.

neither my stories of teaching nor those of many of my feminist colleagues. These practitioners, along with many women and men writing about composition studies today, urge us to design curricula to empower women and other students marginalized in relation to the dominant discourse. In their stories we see them empowering those women, who experience life and the academy from a marginal perspective, to write. Moving away from the developmental theories of William H. Perry and Jean Piaget, these researchers cite studies by women about the different ways women know and write to justify the ways they encourage their female students' literacy.2 But these feminists do not describe the nonmarginalized students many of the rest of us meet in our classes-those men, women, and culturally different ones who already belong in the academy. How many of those of us who are feminists and composition teachers interact only with students eager to be transformed by the political agendas of feminist, or for that matter, even composition pedagogy? The affirmation in the first part of my title gives away the ending of my story,

Rhetoric as a college-level discipline entered the nineteenth century as one of the most respected fields in higher education. The teacher of rhetoric at that time was an honored and respected figure, often occupying a chaired position like Edinburgh's Regius Professorship or Harvard's Boylston Chair. When, however, we look at the teacher of rhetoric a mere century later, what a sad change we find. Rhetoric has changed in a hundred years from an academic desideratum to a grim apprenticeship, to be escaped as soon as practicable. Instead of being an esteemed intellectual figure in community and campus, the rhetoric teacher of 1900 is increasingly marginalized, overworked, and ill-paid. Instead of being a senior professor, he, or she, is an instructor or a graduate student. Instead of being sought by students, rhetoric courses are despised and sneered at, and their teachers have fallen from the empyrean of named chairs to the status of permanent underclass teachers: oppressed, badly paid, ill-used, and secretly despised. In this essay I want to examine some of the issues of labor and status that have surrounded the composition underclass, which is with us today in forms that would be all too familiar to the writing teachers of 1900. The creation of the composition underclass cannot be understood without examining an essential change that took place in America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was the shift from oral to written discourse within rhetorical training, with its result an incredible rise in the amount of individual academic work that each teacher of rhetoric must do. This overwork, along with the increasing bureaucratization of the universities, allowed the formation of permanent low-status jobs in composition which were not filled by upwardly mobile scholars, who increasingly gravitated to literary work, which was easier, offered a lighter load, and was given more respect.

(1988). On the outside looking in: Students' analyses of professional discourse communities. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 130-149.

In a recent Festschrift for Edward P. J. Corbett, Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa S. Ede look dispassionately at the issues we now concern ourselves with in historical rhetoric, evaluate them, and conclude forcefully that much of Aristotle's work has been reduced to the unrecognizable.I They assert that much of the secondary work in Aristotle depends on misunderstandings that can occur when commentators ignore the fundamental connections among Aristotle's writings (41). Later in the same essay, in citing William Grimaldi's complex interconnections among Aristotle's works, Lunsford and Ede say, rational man of Aristotle's rhetoric is not a automaton, but a languageusing animal who unites reason and emotion in discourse with others. Aristotle (and indeed, Plato and Isocrates as well) studied the power of the mind to gain meaning from the world and to share that meaning with others (43). The Aristotle as logic-chopping that Lunsford and Ede have named for us represents the inadequate and sometimes even wrong interpretation that a significant number of rhetorical scholars rely on in their presentations of classical rhetoric. The explication of Aristotle as automaton also provides us with a critique of the state of some scholarly work on classical rhetoric in American rhetoric and composition during the last twenty years. This formulaic view of rhetoric, which emerges eventually as a pattern, relies on reducing the intertwining theories that make up classical rhetoric and replacing them with simple categories. This kind of reductivism, a version of classical rhetoric that writers of the Heritage School (Welch 120) often use, hinders complex interpretation, such as the work of Walter Ong and James Kinneavy, and deprives classical rhetoric of its strength and its attractiveness. The Heritage School presentation of classical rhetoric primarily as a series of rules, dicta, and

the writer's audience. Writing involves moving material from the inside the outside. We need only consult a few recent composition texts see how this inner/outer metaphor shapes the language we use talk about teaching writing. We tell students that the writer's mind is a kind of a box-a storehouse or reservoir, a pool of thoughts, filled with tremendous reserves draw upon. We speak of student writers opening the lid of the mind in order free what is stored inside. As teachers of writing, we want help students tap these sources, sift through your memory, and dredge up ideas. We want help students overcome writer's block, to unlock your mind and release information.' To make this happen, we talk about brainstorming, in which we make a frontal assault open the stronghold of the mind. And when this happens, we call the effect linguistic fluency, the flowing outward of inner speech from the reservoir of the mind. The dualism of this inner/outer metaphor, moreover, permeates much of the discourse of composition studies. Writing, many teachers, researchers, and theorists assume, begins inside, in the inner speech of private verbal thought, and is only gradually transformed into the outer written speech of public text. We habitually think of the process of composing as a movement from monologue, where writers address primarily themselves, dialogue, where writers address others. In this view composing transforms what is inside the writer's head into an external text that can stand by itself. Composing, that is, converts the associative, idiosyncratic, self-referential language that writers use talk themselves into autonomous texts that supply the interpretive contexts, logical connections, and explicit meanings readers expect of public discourse. James Britton's expressive and transactional functions, Janet Emig's reflexive and extensive modes of writing, and Linda Flower's writer-based and reader-based prose, however they may differ in conception and formulation, all assume the polarity of private and public language and an inner-to-outer directionality in composing, a movement, as Flower puts it, from thinking in code

ly to students, but create an impression for some that the techniques are purely activities for fun, trivial interludes that don't contribute substantially to a finished paper. In addition, some teachers fear the freedom these techniques allow students and believe more controlled instruction is needed. On the other hand, structured heuristics such as Burke's Pentad and Young, Becker, and Pike's Tagmemic Grid provide systems to guide inquiry, but often are so abstract, acontextual and complex that they are difficult for students to apply and sometimes seem to intrude on rather than to aid the composing process. I Aware of problems with both approaches and having little time to present them fully, a majority of us, I would guess, take the middle road and briefly introduce students to invention techniques before quickly moving on to other concerns.2 Problems in reconciling free and structured heuristics have appeared in several articles.3 In the end, a number of theorists say that structure and freedom, reason and intuition, consciousness and unconsciousness aren't mutually exclusive: Each school of heuristics contains elements of the other. For example, free writing theorists Ken Macrorie and Peter Elbow advocate that after students use automatic or stream-of-consciousness writing, they should consciously seek patterns in their free writing-or in Elbow's words, an emerging center of gravity (20), which can then be used to generate and organize more discourse. And structuralist Richard Young points out the guiding, not dictating nature of heuristics. Young emphasizes that systematic heuristics do not always work consciously: Although more or less systematic, a heuristic search is not wholly conscious or mechanical; intuition, relevant knowledge, and skill are also necessary. A heuristic is an explicit strategy for effective guessing ( 135). Since the two approaches contain aspects of each other, there should be pedagogies that integrate both heuristics. But how? I believe a way of addressing the problem of how teachers can integrate free and structured inquiry effectively can be found in the classical progymnasmata, exercises designed to train the classical student in the art of inventio. While the classical tradition may suggest a rhetoric that is unduly prescriptive to some

(1986). Intertextuality and the discourse community. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 34-47.

Composition studies began to take its contemporary form only in the early 1960s. There is no unbroken theoretical tradition from classical rhetoric to the present, although scholars in composition studies have attempted to reinvent the work of earlier theorists as foundations for their own work.' Perhaps because of this discontinuity in the tradition and because composition studies has been constituted as a field so recently, there is also no dominant theory governing composition studies today. Some theorists seek the universal laws of composition, or at least a universally applicable method for investigating such laws, while others seek to understand discourse in its historical context. Not coincidentally, the period in which composition studies has developed has also been a period of theoretical upheaval in English studies, the parent discipline. Composition theorists have drawn on the contending literary theories of this period as much as on the rhetorical tradition in shaping their own debates. One reason for this influence of literary theory on composition theory is that almost every active scholar in composition studies today holds a degree in English literature, not in composition and rhetoric. This situation is changing as degree programs in composition proliferate, but the majority of faculty who design and teach in these degree programs were themselves trained as literary critics. Much important work in composition studies shows the influence of the scholars' literary training. For example, Mina Shaughnessy has subjected the essays of unsuccessful student writers to a sort of new-critical close-reading. She is thus able to show that the students' tortured sentence structures are actually attempts to make meaning, albeit meaning in an unfamiliar world, the academic. Elaine Maimon has analyzed as literary genres the various kinds of academic discourse, thus uncovering their knowledge-generating conventions. Ann Berthoff has generalized a theory of the poetic imagination, derived primarily from the work of I. A. Richards, to explain all attempts at making meaning in language. Composition specialists have not only used literary training in their own work but also urged on their students a kind of literary close-reading ability as a means to develop the students' own writing. Pedagogy such as that of Peter Elbow and Ken Macrorie assumes that the same critical eye that allows the

Abstract Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse, ed. Robert J. Connors, Lisa S. Ede, and Andrea A. Lunsford (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1984). 291 pages. Student Writers at Work: The Bedford Prizes, edited by Nancy Sommers and Donald McQuade (Boston: Bedford Books, 1984). James M. McCrimmon, Writing With a Purpose, 8th edition by Joseph F. Trimmer and Nancy I. Sommers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984). 752 pp. Joyce S. Steward and Marjorie Smelstor, Writing in the Social Sciences. Scott, Foresman and Company, 1984. 340 pages.

In its classical formulation, invention is the canon that provides a rhetorician with more or less systematic procedures for finding argu- ments appropriate to the rhetorical occasion that faces her. In most of the composition textbooks written by influential nineteenth-century teachers of writing, however, invention is either greatly transformed from its classical guise or is slighted altogether. By the end of the nineteenth century most popular composition textbooks written in the vein now described as current-traditional treat invention as a means of systematically delimiting an area of thought in order that the writer may handle its exposition in discourse with maximum clarity. 1 In what follows I trace the evolution-or better, devolution-of the inventional procedure recommended by influential composition texts written during the last half of the nineteenth century, and follow its course into our own century. The term evolution is of course metaphorical; however the continuity and development of the inventional tradition I am tracing is remarkably homogeneous. The first-generation authors in the tradition-Alexander Jamieson, Samuel Newman, H. N. Day, and Alex- ander Bain are among the best known-cite and use the work of British rhetoricians George Campbell or Hugh Blair, while members of the second generation-John Franklin Genung, Adams Sherman Hill, Bar- rett Wendell, Fred Newton Scott, and Joseph V. Denney-generally acknowledge at least Bain, Genung, and Day. And after 1900 until about 1940, Wendell and Scott and Denney are the authoritative names in the tradition; they are as routinely cited in early twentieth-century textbooks as were Blair and Campbell in nineteenth-century works. Early nineteenth-century American school rhetoric is an amalgam of classical and eighteenth-century discourse theory. No American rhetoric text had yet succeeded in creating a satisfactory blend of the epistemological rhetoric formulated by George Campbell in his influen- tial Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) and the Ciceronian rhetoric imparted by such popular works as John Ward's System of Oratory (1759).2 Alexander Jamieson's popular Grammar of Rhetoric and Polite Litera- ture (1818) nicely represents the confusion of traditions which obtained in the early part of the century.3 Jamieson opens his treatise with a discussion of language which is an imitation of Hugh Blair's treatment of 146

(1984). The birth of molecular biology: An essay in the rhetorical criticism of scientific discourse. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 70-83.

Articles by Richard Fulkerson, Karen Pelz, and Michael Hogan in the first issue of the Journal of Advanced Composition (Spring 1980) all pointed to a serious lack of consistency in the profession's conception of what should be covered in advanced composition courses in college. Professor Pelz, while arguing against what she perceives as another teacher's advocacy of media-centered rather than writing-centered advanced composition courses, advocates the development of a personal style in advanced writing courses, seemingly calling for an emphasis on expressive discourse and self-discovery (A Reply to Medicott: Evaluating Writing, 7-9). Professor Fulkerson (Some Theoretical Speculations on the Advanced Composition Curriculum, 9-12) uses Abrams' and Kinneavy's theories of literary criticism and the aims of discourse to construct two different curricular models for advanced composition programs--one suggesting courses based on the skills required of students as they produce discourse with different aims, the other suggesting synthesizing all four discourse aims in a single advanced composition course. Finally, Professor Hogan (Advanced Composition: A Survey, 21-29) sent questionnaires to 374 advanced composition teachers at 311 schools and found an enormously diverse range of course objectives and plans among the responses that he received. Hogan also found that many advanced composition courses used the same books as freshman writing courses in the same schools. Although rhetoric, Hogan found, dominated the courses of instruction, there did not seem to be any clear or consistent pattern of rhetorical approach in the schools or teachers who reported. Very few respondents, in fact, reflected much attention to types or aims of discourse, as Fulkerson had suggested, in their assignments or plans. Articles such as these reflect the composition profession's general lack