Bruce Mccomiskey

12 articles
  1. Symposium: On the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing
    Abstract

    This symposium centers on the recently released Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project. In addition to the document itself, the symposium features an introduction to it by some of its drafters, as well as responses to it by veteran composition specialists.

    doi:10.58680/ce201220310
  2. Laws, Works, and the End of Days: Rhetorics of Identification, Distinction, and Persuasion in<i>Miqşat Ma'aśeh ha-Torah</i>(Dead Sea Scroll 4QMMT)
    Abstract

    4QMMT is one of only a few epistles among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It represents the Qumran community's effort to correct impure priestly practice in the Jerusalem Temple, so that when God descends in final judgment at the end of days, his Temple will not be defiled and Israelites will rejoice in their atonement rather than suffer for their wickedness. The authors of 4QMMT create identification by citing scriptural laws that would be commonly agreed upon. Yet they also create distinction by criticizing the Temple priests' incorrect interpretations of more ambiguous laws.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2010.485960
  3. Literacy Matters: Writing and Reading the Social Self
    doi:10.2307/1512125
  4. Hard Lessons Learned since the First Generation of Critical Pedagogy
    Abstract

    Review of the following books: (1) Collision Course: Conflict, Negotiation, and Learning in College Composition by Russel K. Durst, (2) Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom by David Wallace and Helen Rothschild Ewald, and (3) Teaching Composition as a Social Process by Bruce McComiskey.

    doi:10.2307/3250749
  5. Teaching Composition as a Social Process
    doi:10.2307/358705
  6. Postmodern Cultural Studies and the Politics of Writing Instruction
    Abstract

    Presents brief guidelines for developing writing assignments based on the author’s description (a politicized representation) of postmodern cultural studies. Discusses a composition assignment in which students critique the formal and the hidden curriculum of a class they have taken in the recent past, and in which they also become writing members of the institutions and communities they critique.

    doi:10.58680/tetyc19981814
  7. Gorgias and the art of rhetoric: Toward a holistic reading of the extant Gorgianic fragments
    Abstract

    T hroughout this essay, I argue that the three primary extant fragments of Gorgias of Leontini-On Non-Existence (or On Nature), the Encomium of Helen, and the Defense of Palamedes-are not disparate or contradictory statements, as is often assumed, but intricately interrelated and internally consistent contributions to a complex theory and art (techne') of rhetoric. Of course, we cannot argue that Gorgias composed these texts with a holistic rhetorical task in mind; however, reconstructing and interpreting On Non-Existence, the Helen, and the Palamedes holistically does shed significant new light on our current understanding of Gorgias' emerging theory and techne' of rhetoric. In brief, On Non-Existence describes the effects that externally given realities (ta onta) have on the human psyche (psuche), the Helen explores the unethical workings of the persuasive arts on the human psuche, and the Palamedes demonstrates rhetorical topoi for the invention of arguments designed to move the human psuche' of a forensic audience to ethical action. Reconstructed thus as a holistic statement, Gorgias' primary extant fragments theorize the social nature of linguistic symbols and explore their artistic uses for both unethical and ethical purposes; and as a holistic interpretation of the extant fragments demonstrates, Gorgias favors the topical invention of ethical arguments over the magical invention of false arguments, unsupported opinions, and deliberate deceptions. Criticism of Gorgianic rhetoric as inartistic is almost as ancient as the very texts themselves. Plato, who probably wrote some of his earliest dialogues while Gorgias was still living and teaching in Athens, argues that Gorgianic rhetoric is not a techne. In the Gorgias, for example, Plato (through the mouthpiece of Socrates) tells the character Gorgias that his conception and practice of rhetoric whose scope is logos is not a true art but merely a false art, a form of flattery because its goal is to elicit pleasure and not to discover the Good. Moreover, in the Phaedrus Plato explains that sophistic rhetoric is irrational and thus atechnical because it is not founded on truth discovered through the principles of philosophical dialectic. No activity, according to Plato, is artistic unless it begins with a foundation of pure universal knowledge discovered through dialectical inquiry, and it is precisely because those who claim to teach and practice the art of rhetoric are ignorant of dialectic that they incapable of properly defining rhetoric, and that in turn leads them to imagine that by possessing themselves of the requisite antecedent learning they have discovered the art itself' (269b). But if we accept Plato's philosophy/rhetoric demarcation along with the claim that all

    doi:10.1080/02773949709391103
  8. Composing postmodern subjectivities in the aporia between identity and difference
    Abstract

    Recent discussions of teaching composition in the context of cultural studies have begun consider the condition of the writing subject in society, yet these discussions construct student-writer Subjects according modernist identity/difference binary oppositions that are politically problematic.1 The modernist Subject is defined in terms of its objective relationship reality and its opposition Other subjects, and the construction of the modernist Subject (autonomous and sovereign) is an effect of ethno-centric formulations (frames, constructions) of identity/difference oppositions.2 In Orientalism, for example, Edward Said describes how modernist European societies construct cultural differences not only as but also as opposite (the of the West is constructed in opposition the of the East). According Said, When one uses categories like Oriental and Western as both the starting and the end points of analysis, research, public policy, . . . the result is usually polarize the distinction-the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western-and limit the human encounter between different cultures, traditions, and societies. The tendency, then, is to channel thought into a West or an East compartment (46), eliminating the possibility for common ground, agreement, understanding, or in more extreme cases, destroying the human capacity for tolerance of We cannot maintain oppositional notions of identity/difference without inevitably falling into a situation in which gains (or attempts gain) hegemonic control over difference. A few recent cultural theorists, on the other hand, do not view and as oppositional terms; instead, they construct identity and difference as a complementary pair, as an alliance rather than an opposition. And the subjectivities that result from this alliance refuse the structural closure of the modernist Subject and articulate themselves (engage in cultural and rhetorical practices) in the aporia between and Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida in particular deconstruct the unified structure of the sovereign and autonomous modernist Subject, positing in its place a space in the aporia between and where subjectivities construct themselves and each other. Throughout much of his work, Foucault is concerned with issues of and in the textual construction of subjectivities. Discursive

    doi:10.1080/07350199709359223
  9. Sophistic rhetoric and philosophy: A selective bibliography of scholarship in English since 1900
    doi:10.1080/02773949409391016
  10. Neo‐sophistic rhetorical theory: Sophistic precedents for contemporary epistemic rhetoric
    Abstract

    (1994). Neo‐sophistic rhetorical theory: Sophistic precedents for contemporary epistemic rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 24, No. 3-4, pp. 16-24.

    doi:10.1080/02773949409391015
  11. Disassembling Plato's critique of rhetoric in the<i>Gorgias</i>(447a‐466a)
    Abstract

    (1992). Disassembling Plato's critique of rhetoric in the Gorgias (447a‐466a) Rhetoric Review: Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 205-216.

    doi:10.1080/07350199209388988
  12. Disassembling Plato's critique of rhetoric in the <i>Gorgias</i> (447a‐466a)
    doi:10.1080/07350199209388965