Classical Canons in Rhetoric

Classical Canons in Rhetoric

Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Augustine, Blair, Ridolfo and DeVoss

The five classical canons are invention (thinking of what to say), arrangement (saying it in the order you want to), style (saying it in the way you want to), memory (memorizing it), and delivery (conveying it to the audience).

Plato

Plato makes his views on memory clear in the Phaedrus. Memory is the most important facility to exercise. Delivering a speech from memory to an audience show more skill than writing one and reading it to them. Such delivery is boring, whereas the delivery of a memorized speech can be more exciting and dynamic because the orator is able to improvise more freely. Plato is against writing because he says it cripples memory.

 

Aristotle

In the Rhetoric, Aristotle only focuses on three canons: invention, arrangement, and style. For invention, he offers the general and special lines of argument (such as questions of conduct), five matters on which everyone debates (such as ways and means), the common topics (example, enthymeme, and maxim), and the 28 lines of proof (such as defining your terms) as resources from which an orator may draw in order to determine what to say. Aristotle also determines four parts for arrangement: introduction, thesis, proof, and conclusion; since the audience is the primary target of the oratory, they should be the deciding factor in how best to arrange those four parts to mirror their thought process. Finally, Aristotle argues that good style should be clear and appropriate; thus, its foundation is correctness.

Cicero

For Cicero, style is amplification: saying the same thing in 2-3 different ways by adding to, elaborating, or qualifying clauses. Delivery is also important. Cicero talks about how the orator must sound and move naturally while speaking, and not exaggerate his tone and/or body movements. They must train like the best actors in order to master using their body while speaking in a way that does not seem rehearsed or robotic.

Augustine

For Augustine, invention is not important because God will tell the preacher what to say. Style should be clear so that the congregation will be able to understand him. Memory and delivery are also important: the preacher should not read a pre-written sermon, but should instead trust that God will give him the right words to say at the right moment.

Blair

Blair also largely ignores invention, claiming that genius is far more important: in other words, writers and orators do not invent new ideas, but learn to manage them; therefore, they need the intelligence to be able to do so, not the ability to come up with new topics on which to write or speak. Blair argues that good style has perspicuity and ornament: it requires purity, propriety, and precision, which means words that belong to our language, selecting pure words, and distinctiveness and accuracy.

Ridolfo and DeVoss

With the prominence of writing over oratory, the canons of memory and delivery fell by the wayside because fewer people were orally presenting their rhetorical artifacts. However, with the rise of digital technologies (part of what Ong refers to as a period of secondary orality), the need for attention to delivery becomes apparent again (some refer to memory as the ability for our computers to store our compositions, but that seems to me like a pretty lame way to re-include memory). Ridolfo and DeVoss argue in “Composition for Recomposition” that because digital artifacts are often used as part(s) of new compositions, it is important for composers to consider their audience and how they may receive the composition; then they must consider how best to compose their artifact in order to have the intended impact (in in order to be potentially useful to those audience members who decide to take elements of composition and use them in their own artifacts in a process that Alexander Reid refers to as “Rip. Mix. Burn.”). Thus, delivery carries many of the same implications it always has, but in the digital realm it necessarily includes some new aspects, such as deciding where or if to place a video, image, sound clip, or other artifact that can be used in composition.

How I would answer a question on this theme

[This could also be an answer to an Aristotle’s Time Machine question]

I would spend the majority of the time tracing delivery through history, perhaps briefly touching on the other canons. Delivery has undergone the most interesting change from being a main part of the oral rhetorical tradition, to disappearing when writing came to the fore (because delivery mostly meant 12pt, Times New Roman font, on 8 ½ x 11 paper), to completely changing with the introduction of digital rhetoric. I briefly mentioned Reid above, but I could draw on him and Yancey as well as Ridolfo and DeVoss for a fruitful discussion of delivery in new media.

Composition in Rhetorical Theory

Composition in Rhetorical Theory

Since I’m also sitting for a special field exam in Composition Studies, I probably won’t get a question on this, but it’s best to be prepared. In all reality, unless I am asked to address any of these specific authors, I will likely draw from the Comp Studies reading list for an answer on composition.

Berlin, Blair, Pratt, Winterowd

Blair

Blair’s ideas were rooted in the belletristic tradition, which argued that rhetoric and “polite arts” should be categorized as “rhetoric and belles lettres.” He was interested in notions of taste, style, criticism, and sublimity. He largely discounted the canon of invention and instead believed that genius is the key motivator and enabler to coming up with a topic; this genius cannot be affected by the rules of rhetoric and so cannot be taught. Blair is also concerned with taste, which he defines as “the power of receiving pleasure from the beauties of nature and of art.” There are two facets of good taste: delicacy (feeling well and accurately) and correctness (a standard of good sense). He points out that everyone has taste to some degree, but some are more refined than others due to finer organs and internal powers. However, it is possible to develop taste through exposure to art and literature that those with a more refined taste have deemed “good.” Because of his notions about genius and taste, Blair argues that good writers are developed through acquainting themselves with the best authors. At first, these aspiring-to-be-good writers must recreate the writing of the best authors from memory; however, he does not want them to imitate it, but to adapt their own style to the subject and its hearers/readers. Such pedagogy shows that learning writers do not yet have the genius to devise their own topics and so much take them from others, and it seeks to develop the learner’s taste through exposure to the best works.

It should be noted that though many (most?) composition theorists and practitioners find the belletristic notion Blair propagates to be outdated and not terribly useful for our students, many composition teachers still continue to use this pedagogy in their classrooms. These teachers teach FYC using literary texts and ask students to write papers on them, which limits the number of genres they learn and thus rhetorical situations to which they are prepared to respond. Some scholars (Hairston, for example) think that such practices are the result of FYC being house in English departments where literature scholars hold most of the sway; thus, many of the grad students who teach FYC are aspiring lit scholars who do not want to teach writing and so teach lit instead. But that is a discussion for another question.

Winterowd

Winterowd questions the sanity of requiring FYC, arguing that the justification that details its inherent usefulness is not a good enough reason. He argues that Comp’s real effectiveness comes when we shift from context and content to addresser orientation, what he calls “self-expressive writing”; in other words, he calls for the writer to take the center of their compositions in order to express themselves through writing. He argues against Current-Traditional Rhetoric when he states that there is no such thing as good or bad language, except in relation to a purpose; in other words, there are no “right” or “wrong” words as long as they accomplish their rhetorical goal. Such expressive writing will give students a chance to write toward these goals while also feeling motivated to master the aspects of written English because their writing is centered on them. The role of the instructor in this scenario is to lead students to analyze various texts and to provide feedback. The instructor should also focus on process and much as product. Interestingly, Winterowd’s book is divided into three parts: invention, form, and style, and organizational plan that belies what he believes are the three most important aspects of writing.

Pratt

Pratt exhorts us to use our classrooms as contact zones (social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other) when teaching students. Such pedagogy would resists the hegemonic relationships of power in the academy in order to allow students of various cultures and backgrounds the opportunities to learn about each other and question dominant power structures. Pratt’s argument comes a few years ahead of its time: by the end of the decade in which she wrote, many composition scholars were calling for (and some were arguing against) a critical cultural approach that would perform many of the pedagogical moves Pratt describes. For instance, feminist scholars argued for a more negotiative and irenic rhetoric to be taught (instead of the traditional male, agonistic rhetoric), and digital scholars call into question issues of technological access and how it affects the teaching of underprivileged students.

Berlin

In Rhetoric and Reality, Berlin lists several kinds of rhetoric that have influenced compositin pedagogy. First is objective rhetoric, which led to CTR and behaviorist pedagogies that assumed that teachers do not know how good writers write and whose goal was to make the student self-sufficient and responsible for their work rather than relying on teacher approval; some of its proponents were Lynn and Martin Bloom and Zoellner. Second is subjective rhetoric, which is an expressionist approach that relies on solitary activities and considers group activity to be dangerous. Some proponents of this approach were Macrorie, Murray, and Elbow. Third is transactional rhetoric, which led to Aristotelian pedagogy that studied all elements of the rhetorical situation as involved in the rhetorical act and thus considered rhetorical. Two of its proponents are McDowell and Corbett, who argue respectively that comp courses should include persuasive/expository writing and take social problem as subject matter and that they should include moral and aesthetic issues such as arrangement, style, and the awareness of audience in shaping a discourse. Fourth is the rhetoric of cognitive psychology, which seeks to determine how social and psychological structures influence writing process. For example, in 1971 Janet Emig suggested a longitudinal study of students to learn the developmental dimensions of their writing processes. And finally, epistemic rhetoric argues that writing involves the transmission and generation of knowledge; knowledge is dialectical and thus rhetorical construct. Proponents of this kind of pedagogy are Bruffee and Berthoff.

How I’d answer a question on this theme

I’d probably draw from my Comp Studies list for any question on Comp. Many of these resources (except for Pratt) are outdated and largely out of fashion in Comp Studies. Berlin’s book is still important, but he’s also written other more recent(ish) things since then that are more pertinent. Frankly, most of the Comp stuff on the Rhetoric list is just boring and I don’t want to talk about it in an answer unless I have to (and I have a hunch I won’t have to).

Composition Pedagogies

Major Approaches to Composition Pedagogies

Belletristic (19^th C): using literature to teach writing

Blair: the key to learning to write well is reading the best authors in order to develop taste

• Imitate their style (Connors)

The problem with the belletristic tradition is that it focuses too much on the product of writing

• Students always compare themselves to literary greats – look like failures by comparison

Another problem is that the kind of critical thinking you use when analyzing lit, while important, is not the only kind of critical thinking

• They must develop the ability to think/write in/about other genres

Current-Traditional (19^th C – now): Fogarty (1959) coined it; Young (1978) refined it

• Knoblauch pointed out that it doesn’t mean anything – no one is a member of the “CTR paradigm” (Connors)
• Emphasis on final product – loves the 5-paragraph essay
• Major focus on error-free prose as part of the final product
• Static abstractions: Unity, Mass, Coherence, Denotation, Metaphor, etc (Connors)
• Four genres: exposition, description, narration, and argument (EDNA) (Crowley)
• Truth exists prior to language (Berlin)
  • Language is a distorting mechanism that either alters the original perception or captures the original experience so it can be reproduced exactly (Berlin)
• There is no invention – ideas for texts are given, or other texts are imitated
• 19^th C’s pedagogical concern with clean texts are a reflection of a greater cultural attempt to convince the masses of their dirtiness while saving them from it
• Conservative – resistant to rule changes – reinforces traditions and lines of authority
  • Conservative: respect for human proclivity to go wrong; point of education is to acquaint new generations with old traditions (Crowley)

Blair, Campbell, Whately, Bain: Good style requires purity and propriety

• Invention does not exist – genius supplies the topic

Berlin and Inkster show how the CTR method restricts writer engagement with audience

• It also diminishes the importance of the author
• It focuses too much on the product

Process Theory (1972): developed as a response to CTR

• Professionalized the teaching of comp (Crowley)
• Reconceptualized students as writers (Crowley)
• Gave comp teachers something to study – a substance on which to base a field (Hairston)
• Main genre is expressive/expository essay (Crowley)
• Liberal – encourages novice writers to write freely as individuals
  • Liberal: humans are inherently good; point of education is to help individuals get better at what they do (Crowley)

Donald Murray: Three stages: prewriting, writing, rewriting

• Gives students the chance to own their writing, subject/truth, language
• Multiple drafts with focus on mechanics coming last
• The process is individualized

Janet Emig: teaching in intervention into a process to improve the process or the product of that process – the process is internalized and deliberate (not arbitrary)

• Two modes of intervention: 1) proffering freedoms; 2) establishing constraints

Peter Elbow: Freewriting as a means of invention

• Generating raw material and figuring out what to say

Susan Miller points out that PT did not create some major paradigm shift – shares a lot with CTR

• Both describe a student-centered but independent individual
• Both assume a “goal text,” or final version,” that could accurately represent intentions
• Both see words as having settled meanings
• Still, she acknowledges that it stabilized the field and gave scholars a subject to study

Lisa Ede argues that the Process Movement is not responsible for legitimizing the field

• Many other things were happening at the same time that worked to professionalize Comp
• She also argues that we use the term “Process Movement” in much the same way that we use “CTR”: no one in the “movement” referred to it as a movement, and it was named after the fact as a derogatory term against which define the new theories and make them look better

Post-Process Theory/ies argue against Process (see below), but David Foster defends it

• It legitimized the field of Comp and kept admins from over-enrolling classes in the 80s
  • Relationships between teacher and students are individualized, yet regularized
• He cautions that PPT’s turn toward the social endangers this progress and threatens to invalidate writing programs

Post-Process Theory: Actually a collection of (sometime conflicting theories) that are a reaction to process theory

• Three assumptions: 1) Writing is public, 2) Writing is interpretive, 3) Writing is situated (Kent)

Nancy Blyler: Flaws of PT: 1) The belief that composing is a systematic, codifiable entity that we can isolate and examine, 2) Assuming that understanding and mastering the codifiable entity are necessary prerequisites to learning how to write

• PPT scholars believe mediation of process is unnecessary – knowledge of the world/writing results directly from interpretation
• PPT entails hermeneutic guessing as paralogic: writing can never be codified or reduced to a comp process – writers guess until they find a fit between their strategy and another’s in order to create understanding

Helen Rothschild Ewald: PPT acknowledges that teachers are tools of the dominant culture – to hide that is to hide traces of power, tradition, and authority present at the scene of writing

• PPT exposes that power
• PPT situates communicative interaction in writers’ existing cultural, local, personal forces
  • Students make their own knowledge through writing

David Russell: Activity Theory – analyzing writing processes in terms of different networks of human activity can help us understand how writing works and people work with writing, individually and collectively

– An activity system is a unit of analysis of social and individual behavior

Fulkerson and Bloom both say that there is no such thing as a Post-Process Theory

• It is an oxymoron – there is no agreed-upon meaning for it – it is just a way of seeming au currant
• There are three meanings:
  • 1) Field no longer researches processes
  • 2) (Kent) “Process” implies regular, sequential procedures, but writing is discursive and messy
  • 3) Process is an isolated writer making personal meaning alone, and we are beyond that

Cognitive Process Theory (1981): developed by Flower and Hayes to describe how writers approach a writing task

• Thinking exists in the mind apart from language
• Concerned with how language is developed from the mental processes of the mind
• Concerned with goals of the writer, and decisions made during composing

Sondra Perl: examined unskilled writers moving through three stages of prewriting, writing, editing

• Found that composition is not linear
• Focusing on fixing surface errors intrudes in the process
• Teachers need to find aspects of each student’s process facilitate/inhabit writing

Flower and Hayes – four points:

• Writing is a set of distinctive thinking processes orchestrated by writers while composing
  • The process is recursive and nonlinear
• These processes have a hierarchical, highly embedded organization in which any given process can be embedded within any other
• Composing is the goal: directed thinking process, guided by writer’s own growing network of goals
• Writers create goals in two ways:
  • 1) Generating high level and sublevel goals that embody the writer’s developing sense of purpose
  • 2) Changing major goals or establishing new ones based on what has been learned in the act of writing
• Theory emphasized writers’ powers of invention
  • It puts the credibility (exploring idea; developing, acting on, testing, and generating goals) in the writer’s hands

Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holzman dismantle Cognitive Process Theory

• The belief on which it is based (that writing is thinking and therefore an essentially cognitive process) obscures many aspects of writing we have come to see as not peripheral
• Language and texts are social activities that depend on social structures and processes
• Flower and Hayes’s model is too underspecified to be testable
  • Testing their central hypothesis (that writing is a goal-directed process) requires a definition of goals and a discussion of the distinctions and relationships between at least goals and plans if not also between goals and scripts
• Flower and Hayes claim that protocols give direct access to writers’ cognitive processes
  • But this claim cannot be granted on both theoretical and methodological grounds
  • Any research methodology that ignores the context in which writing takes place cannot produce valid data
• But Cooper and Holzman emphasize the importance of F and H’s work – they have identified the proper goal of research, but they have not given an ecologically valid, replicable research methodology
  • Cognitive psychology could still help us understand the recursive and complex writing process

Expressionism: Truth can be learned, not taught, through the act of writing

• Goal is to find your one true voice and to learn to use that voice in all areas
• Personal narratives are the best way to find this voice, along with journals, freewriting, and imitation practices (Elbow)
• Concentrate on process, not product

Donald Murray: writing is a process of discovery and experimentation

• It is a search for truth in a specious world
• Writing is an exploration of what we know and feel about what we know through language using language to learn about our world, evaluate that knowledge, and communicate it

Maxine Hairston: calls for a non-prescriptive atmosphere in teaching, including less focus on grammar and syntax

–     Instead, focus on the process of growth experienced by the writer

Peter Elbow: Emphasizes freewriting as a way to translate the messy chaos of though to the page

• Helps writers explore what they want to say
• Supports private writing and low stakes assignments in general
  • This allows writers to write for a variety of audiences and find their voices
• Wants to provide a classroom space that makes “mother tongues” feel safe, but also trains students to survive in the real writing world by teaching them SWE

James Berlin: Critiques Expressionism in “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Classroom” (1988) – says that the fragmentary nature of expressionism and its emphasis on the individual and her resistance to dominant “economic, political, and social arrangements” deprived expressionsists of real political power.

• Expressivists ran a depoliticized classroom that ignored social, economic, and political circumstances of its students/institutions
• Berlin is dismayed at the notion that all humans have the same common core (a collective or shared experience)

Social Constructionist/ Epistemic Rhetoric/ New Rhetoric: language and the mind are inseparable – and individual needs language to think

• Writing is inherently political in nature and writers are part of a discourse community with an assumed set of principles and a distinct language of its own

Patricia Bizzell: attacks cognitivists’ belief that writing can be understood as distinct sets of mental processes

• These theories focus too much on the individual writer’s language and learning processes and overlooking the importance of society and discourse communities in composition

• Instead, Bizzell believes writing takes place within a community
  • In order to improve composition, teacher’s need to explain what the community’s conventions are

James Berlin: Rhetoric is epistemic – it is a means of arriving at truth

• Truth itself is dynamic and dialectical
  • It arises out of the interaction of writer, language, reality, and audience
• Rhetoric determines what is considered reality/knowledge
  • The writer is the creator of meaning, not the passive receptor
• Truth is not discoverable via sense impression – it must be interpreted to have meaning
  • It is impossible without language since language generates it
• It’s the most practical approach to teaching and studying rhetoric
  • It emphasizes invention via heuristics to discover truth
  • Attention to arrangement and style is more fastidious than in CTR
    • Structure/language as the center of discovering truth, not just dressing up thought
  • Closer to classical rhetoric in written language than CTR, Neo-Platonic, or Neo-Aristotelian

Kenneth Bruffee: Reflective thought and social conversation are related functionally

• Thought is internalized conversation, so they act the same way
• Thought is an artifact created by social interaction
  • To understand how we think requires us to understand the nature of conversation
    • Which requires us to understand the nature of community life that generates and maintains conversation
  • To think well individually, we need to learn to think well collectively (to converse)
  • Therefore, writing is internalized conversation re-externalized
• The ways students talk with each other determines the way they will write
• Knowledge is established/maintained by communities of knowledgeable peers – it is what we agree it is, for the time being
• Collaborative learning challenges authority of knowledge by revealing that authority is a social artifact

Social (Process/Action) Theory:

Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holzman argue for composition as a social action

• Writers bring entire communities with them when they write
  • To ignore these communities is to ignore the complexities of social structure and dynamic that characterizes writing
• Social means real interaction among social groups and individuals – Writing is a way of interacting with others
• The purpose of FYC is to convince students of the value of using writing to criticize and change their social world
  • Students need to see the immediate value of what we are asking them to do
• C and H do not like the use of the word “discourse community”
  • A discourse community is useful for characterizing a group of people who have certain assumptions, knowledge values, and interests that its members hold in common and who use certain language conventions
  • But it is also a way of labeling individuals as insiders or outsiders
    • It can regulate who has access to power, resources, even discourse itself, and creates gatekeepers to make sure that the right people get in and all others are excluded

Bruce McComiskey: Social theory offers a wealth of critical methodologies for interrogating social institutions and cultural artifacts

• He proposes a cyclical model of the writing process that accounts for the composing strategies of individual and collaborative writers as well as the socio-discursive lives of texts
  • 1) Cultural production; 2) Contextual distribution; 3) Critical consumption of cultural values
  • Careful rhetorical interventions into this cycle make reforms possible
    • The process of intervention turns useful knowledge into shared knowledge and enhances the potential for social change that is less likely to occur if students end their composing processes with critical essays
    • Critique alone leaves students feeling helpless – there is no way to change the world
    • Students need to learn to produce their own values/identities, not just to critique texts that promote other values and identities
    • They learn that individual texts participate in larger contexts of institutional discourses that are steeped in cultural and social values, and the success of any text relies ultimately on its interactions within these discursive environments

Critical Cultural Studies / Feminist Approach: Both deal with critiquing culture, dominant discourses, essentialism, and identity politics (especially feminism for the last one)

• Both have an activist proclivity and background
• Both articulate differences and show privilege/erasure of some categories by others
• Credentials for CCS courses: 1) cultural activity is interpretation, 2) multiple texts reflect one theme, 3) interpretive move assumes artifact/text reveals deep structural truths about power in American society, 4) Students write papers interpreting social artifacts, 5) course goal is to empower and liberate students (Fulkerson)
• Philosophy of composition questions:
  • 1) teacher cannot be oppressor
  • 2) knowledge is socially constructed through dialectic exchanges (Fulkerson)

Sally Miller Gearhart: recognizes that students have varied backgrounds and languages, not all of which are accepted by the academy

• Feminism rejects the notion that these students must give up their “home” language and instead adopt traditional academic discourse

Pamela Annas: women’s writing should be grounded in the self and women’s lives – marginalized students should not have to ignore these aspects of themselves in order to achieve academic discourse

• For many it is impossible
• They should use writing to validate their lives instead – as instructors, we can help them

Gearhart and Annas represent a politicized approach that combines feminism and composition in order to create a place where all aspects of the self come together to stimulate and create change

Patricia Sullivan: Comp studies it too slow in examining how gender informs writing

• She examines research/teaching practices, classroom/mentoring experiences, and student published writing – she finds a pervasive androcentrism in comp studies
  • She asks how gender shapes the writing situation

Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede: Found two kinds of writing

• Hierarchical (masculine): writing delegated by superior and implies bureaucratic writing – values efficiency; sees multiple voices and shifting authority as problems
• Dialogic (feminine): values fluidity of meaning, openness, and creative tension – writing as producing (not discovering) knowledge – has potential to challenge phallogocentric, subject-centered discourse

Catherine Lamb: Favors a negotiative, mediating rhetoric (cooperative approach to resolve conflicts) over the divisiveness of a monologic argument (emphasizes its own interests and only acknowledges opposition to refute it)

• Power is not a quality to exercise on others, but a force that energizes and enables competence and reduces hierarchy
• The goal is to see knowledge as collaborative, cooperative, and constructed

Nancy D. DeJoy: feminist discourse allow us to accommodate critical practices within the dominant frame

• She calls for the revision of process in order to allow for the opportunity for critical understandings
• As it is, process forces students to recognize stereotypes and recreate them (to appeal to audience) rather than break them down
• Reposition writers as participatory subjects – rearrange context and challenge its limitations

Patricia Bizzell: the instructor should be true to herself (and her social/political/economic beliefs) in front of the class without inundating her students

• Composition can make the world a better place
  • Do the proper work of teaching comp – helps students succeed beyond college
  • While doing this, raise issues of social justice and foster reflection on rhetorical methods of engaging them
  • Help them connect with professor’s personality and values

David Foster is against challenging cultural cites in these ways

• Students want to avoid conflict in classrooms, not seek it out
• He warns that PPT scholars/teachers need to think carefully about the effects of dissonance in the writing classroom
  • 1) Difference must be framed in and interactive structure and laid out for all participants
  • 2) Teachers must prepare themselves/students for personal tensions created by dissonance/conflict
  • 3) Classrooms valuing difference – articulating differences is risky, stressful, and potentially painful

Richard Fulkerson also argues against it – he thinks they seem inappropriate

• The reading, analyzing, and discussing upon which course rests are not conducive to actual writing instruction – there is no time to do it all
• And the likelihood of indoctrination is high – cannot accept opposing viewpoints or register contemporary relevance