Notes from Reading Packet on 19^th / 20^th Century Rhetoric

19^th Century Rhetoric of Composition:

• As the industrial revolution creates more advanced technical careers, higher education begins to open to more middle class students.  Writing instruction became important, because students needed to learn to communicate technical ideas.  The discipline of Composition has its origins in this historical circumstance, and I think we can see that some of our teaching practices are still rooted in the technical, practical, prescriptive philosophy of this era.
• Herbert Spencer: “Philosophy of Style.”  An example of this kind of technical writing approach (out of Peter Ramus)—“successful communication is that which requires the least expenditure of mental energy to achieve successful reception” (from the packet).
• The influence of George Campbell: Henry Day and Alexander Bain both relate composition to mental faculties, seeing rhetoric as a tool used to arrange content drawn from a specific discipline, in order to appeal to the faculties of an audience.
• Bain’s three most influential ideas: 1) That figures of speech—metaphor, metonymy, antithesis—“are parallel to mental operations” (packet 994).  You would think this would lead Bain to some deeper understandings of how language use constructs meaning, rather than simply reporting meaning, but it doesn’t.  2) That four modes of discourse are proper to Composition instruction—description, narration, exposition, and persuasion.  Comp courses have been organized around these ever since.  3) That paragraph unity is the key feature of successful writing.

Disciplinary divisions:

• Rhetoric splits from literature, because persuasion is taken to be an entirely different pursuit than poetry.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth are representative Romantic poets who saw poetry’s main concern as being the feelings of the poet in nature.  The reader of the poem is meant to contemplate, not to believe or act (see 994-996).
• Since Composition pedagogy went with Rhetoric in this split, Comp’s emphasis continued to fall on efficiency.

Philosophical Considerations of Language, Rhetoric, and Knowledge

• Jeremy Bentham, “utilitarianism.”  People seek pleasure and avoid pain, and “would always act selfishly” if it weren’t for the constraints of the social contract.  Bentham anticipates some 20^th Century language philosophy by seeing the ways that internal, psychological knowledge-making is persuasive.  We don’t know how our courses of action will turn out, so when we make a decision of one course over others, we’re using persuasion internally.  Our own thoughts, then, are interwoven with Rhetoric.
• Friedrich Nietzsche would agree with Bentham.  Nietzsche saw all language as symbolic or metaphoric—no word is exactly related to its object—and therefore all language is tied up with rhetoric.  People who think they’ll be able to use language to achieve truth are delusional and dangerous, according to Nietzsche.  In the 20^th Century, Nietzsche’s work would enable some of the most challenging postmodern theory—particularly the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

Twentieth Century Rhetoric

• In the 20^th Century, Rhetoric challenged a number of obstacles—for instance: empiricism in the sciences, pursuit of “truth” in Philosophy, the privileging of certain gendered or racial perspectives over others, and the privileging of literary discourse over “ordinary language” in English Departments.  By the beginning of the 21^st Century, rhetorical critics have forged a widespread, interdisciplinary commitment to the idea that all forms of knowledge are socially constructed, and all types of language are involved with persuasion.  Rhetoric, as a discipline, is positioned to illuminate the dynamics such constructions.

Literary versus “ordinary” language

• 19^th Century Philosopher John Stuart Mill follows Wordsworth’s definition to create a scale that privileges expressive language: at the top of his scale his lyric poetry, followed by other literary genres, followed by other forms of language such as the essay, and the report, which are more expository, less expressive.  This forms a basis for literary studies, since it shows how much more valuable and difficult expressive writing must be.  NOTE: this value scale is not rhetorical; appealing to a reader has nothing to do with the value of a text, and neither does the appropriateness of a text to a situation.  This begins a tradition of literary study that divorces the text from its context, pushing Rhetoric away from English departments.
• Kenneth Burke: Counter-Statement (1919): literature is nothing more than another form of persuasive discourse within a culturally defined context that determines what’s valued as “good literature” and what’s not.  Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) extends this idea to other forms of discourse, showing that all communication is subject to situational motivations, and so cannot be separate from Rhetoric.
• Mikhail Bakhtin: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (written circa 1930, manuscript recovered and published in 1973): all language (and even human consciousness) takes the form of a dialogue.  Literature offers examples of this principle.  The novel, for instance, contains many voices interacting from numerous perspectives.  This kind of heteroglossia (“many tongues”) shows how deeply intertwined language is with ideology, and shows that the richness of literary discourse is a result of the dialogue of perspectives it creates (i.e., if literature simply preached a single perspective, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting). 
• Bakhtin would extend rhetorical analysis to all kinds of communication, arguing that our behaviors are always rooted in contextual expectations.  All of our communication acts, then, are rooted in genre—at the post office, we act in the post office genre, while at the ball game, we act in the ball game genre.  
• Wayne Booth: The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961): all literature is discourse addressed to a reader, and in that discourse, the author tries to persuade that reader that his fictional world (for instance, in the case of a novel) is worth believing in, enjoying, or subscribing to in some way.
• Reader-response criticism (Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, etc.): focuses on how the reader responds to a text as the guiding principle for what a text means.  Based on the idea that “discourse communities” have different conventions for what count as meaning, and that any reader’s interpretation of a text is tied to his/her purposes for reading it and the context within which the text is read.

The Influence of Nietzsche: Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault

• Jacques Derrida: Speech and Phenomena (1967): no language is a matter of purity or truth to life.  Derrida attacks the whole tradition in which language is conceived as based on logic (i.e., truth to empirical observations of the world).  To do so, Derrida searches for the key assumptions of logic within a given text, then shows how those assumptions are undermined by the very logic of the text itself.

• Michel Foucault: The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969): truth is determined by the discursive practices of a community, which, in turn, are interwoven in complicated ways with the power structures of those communities.  Foucault attempts to “excavate” (hence the “Archaeology” of knowledge) various disciplines’ techniques for creating knowledge, the certification of disciplinary “authorities,” and the dynamics of power struggles within disciplines.  Language, then, can not convey knowledge, but can function to enforce conventions and to create knowledge within communities.

Rhetorics of Gender Race, and Culture

§    As knowledge, meaning, and truth are seen as tied to the cultural forces that create them, grounds for discrimination dissolve. 

• Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own (1928): examines the roots of British patriarchy and how it has served to silence women by marginalizing their talents and concerns.  Perhaps more importantly than the content of her numerous feminist works, Woolf’s style offers an alternative to the linear, thesis-driven essay advocated by Bain and Hill; her evidence often comes from personal experience and reflection, and her structures are often circular, indirect, and associative, gradually accumulating support for central concepts.
• Hélène Cixous: “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1973): analyzes seemingly “natural” binaries such as man/woman and, from her experience as an Arabic French national, French/Algerian, to suggest that such binaries are not inevitable.  She is best known as a writer and theorist of “écriture féminine” (“women’s writing”), in which knowledge is created non-linearly, non-hierarchically, staying generously open to multiple perspectives and directions--“écriture féminine,” in other words, argues for and embodies a feminist way of creating (knowledge in) the world.
• Since Frederick Douglass, African American intellectual leaders have often used the forms and dialects of mainstream America to argue for civil liberties.  However, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been central in a movement to understand and honor Black English as a valid form of expression.

Rhetoric and Composition

• Freshman English continues to follow the path of formal argumentation and prescriptive grammar laid out in its 19^th century origins.  Education becomes steadily more available, throughout the century and, as a result, students with a wider range of writing skills are entering the academy.  For the most part, Composition scholar/teachers (practitioners) respond to this by continuing to enforce prescriptivism.  However, expressivism—the teaching of personal writing, creative writing, emphasizing voice and the student’s own knowledge—offered some alternatives.  In the Vietnam era, expressivism became an even more powerful force in pedagogy, as students and teachers alike saw more reasons to resist standard forms of discourse.
• Scholars and writing teachers turned attention to the process of composing.  The writing process (usually: pre-writing, writing, revising, or some variation of that formula) springs from the rhetorical tradition, as pre-writing exercises are closely related to the canons of “invention” and “arrangement.”  The scholarly discipline of Composition develops with the writing process movement, as university scholars study the writing process in order to better understand what teaching methods are actually valid.