Feminism and Composition

Feminism and Composition

Sullivan, Gearhart, Annas, Lunsford and Ede, Lamb, S. Miller, Selfe, Hawisher and Sullivan

Pamala Annas

Annas argues that women should be allowed to ground their writing in the self (personal experience) and women’s lives. She asks, is it fair to ask marginalized students to ignore these aspects of themselves? In order to achieve the required academic distance. No, it isn’t. For some, it’s impossible. Instead, students should use writing to validate their own lives. As instructors, we can help them to find a way to do so.

[Plays well with Elbow and Mitchell, who argue on a similar topic.]

Sally Miller Gearhart

Gearhart recognizes that students have a variety of backgrounds and languages (literacies?), but that not all of them are recognized by the academy. She asks, is this an act of violence? An extension of Imperialist ideals (asking them to give up their “home” ways of expression for traditional academic ways)? Yes, it certainly can be. Gearhart argues that feminism rejects this notion in favor of creating a classroom space that invites (rather than forces) students to change.

[Both Annas and Gearhart focus on politicized approaches that combine feminism and comp in order to create a classroom space where all aspects of the self come together to stimulate and create change.]

Patricia Sullivan

Sullivan argues that composition studies is too slow in examining how gender informs writing. She analyzes several aspects of the writing classroom and finds that androcentrism remains pervasive in comp studies. Thus, we must ask how gender shapes the meaning of a writing situation.

[This works well with Annas and Gearhart because all three recognize that different backgrounds lead to different approaches to composition; thus, being female can lead to a different approach to composition than being male would.]

Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede

Lunsford and Ede found two primary modes of communication in comp studies classrooms. The first is hierarchical and was determined to be masculine: writing is delegated by a superior and implies bureaucratic writing; the superior values efficiency; multiple voices and shifting authority are problems. The second is dialogic and was determined to be feminine: writing values fluidity in meaning, openness, and creative tension; writing is producing (not discovering) knowledge; it has the potential to challenge phallogocentric, subject-centered discourse.

[Lunsford’s and Ede’s study has implications for Sullivan’s notion that gender shapes the meaning of a writing situation. They have shown that it shapes how a writer will respond to and write within a particular situation.]

Catherine Lamb

Lamb argues for a “maternal” view of argument that does not promote conflict. Power is not a quality to exercise on others, but is instead a force that energizes and enables competence and reduces hierarchy. Lamb explains that adapting negotiation and mediation (cooperative approaches to resolve conflicts) to writing will help avoid the divisiveness of monologic argument (which emphasizes its own interests and only acknowledges opposition to refute it). In other words, monologic argument is only interested in winning, whereas Lamb’s maternal argument is interested in finding a resolution that is fair to all sides: the goals are to see knowledge as collaborative, cooperative, and constructed. Lamb argues that written argument should be a give-and-take and power should be mutually enabling.

[Lamb’s argument plays well with Sullivan, Lunsford, and Ede because she suggests a kind of argument that is “maternal” (not paternal), and therefore feminine in nature. Thus, she suggests that this negotiative, collaborative, knowledge-making, and hierarchy-dissolving kind of argument is feminine as well.]

Susan Miller

Miller points out that the notion that composition is feminized must be challenged; she shows that the negative connotations with feminist approaches to composition reinforce the notion that composition is marginalized. Instead, we need to use political action to change the negative connotation of the “feminization” of composition, and for intellectual/political movements toward gender balance in composition studies. We must explore the status of females as lower on the hierarchy of the academy. Miller argues here and in Textual Carnivals that composition studies is a culturally designated space for political action. She adds that composition is the discourse of the majority, so it’s an effective place for counterhegemonic intellectual politics.

Gail E. Hawisher and Patricia Sullivan

Hawisher and Sullivan study women’s self-representation in digital environments. They point out that feminists have focused almost exclusively on the textual environments of computer-mediated composition, but since the Web has more possibilities for self-representation, they argue that a simple transfer of arguments about women’s verbal online lives is inadequate as a strategy for exploring visual representations. In other words, new methods for examination must be created or adapted in order to study women’s visual self-representation.

It was once promised that online spaces would be egalitarian, but, since women and other underrepresented people are often unduly harassed, that has not happened. Often, women are shut out entirely of mixed-group electronic discussions; they make fewer and shorter contributions than men, and both men and women respond more frequently to men’s postings than to women’s. Neither have these spaces proven to be devoid of communicative power for women, as was also predicted.

Hawisher and Sullivan argue that in order to extend and complicate electronic discourse theories, we need to examine online visual depictions in a variety of discursive settings. In other words, the digital realm is full of images that people view and interpret daily, and which exert influence over them; thus, we need to examine how these visuals impact their viewers. When women become visual objects online and have no say in the ways in which they are represented, the outcome is predictable. Old identities like the “pin-up girl” or academic talking head are reproduced, and traditional narratives are re-created with new technologies.

Cynthia Selfe

Selfe reinforces what Hawisher and Sullivan argue. She explains that the representations used to sell computers often reinforce the same traditional gender narratives of our culture. These conventional stories told in the context of new technologies remind us of our ethical responsibilities to work as college English teachers toward productive change. It’s our job to both analyze, critique, and deconstruct these hierarchicalizing narratives and replace them with egalitarian notions, and to teach our students to do so. Some cultural stories we are telling ourselves about computers are that 1) the electronic landscape is open to everybody (it isn’t), 2) gender will no longer be a predictor of success (it still is). Just because we now have technology does not mean social progress will automatically follow. Instead, we must educate students on how to culturally critique electronic artifacts so that they may recognize the inequalities that challenge humanity (ethnocentrism, racism, classism, sexism).

If I had to answer a question on this theme

Since a lot of these texts play well together, there are a few different approaches I can take. Annas and Gearhart argue that women (and other underrepresented) writers should write in their own voices, even if that means using personal experience or disrupting traditional hegemonic-academic notions of writing. Ede and Lunsford tie into their arguments well by showing that men and women write differently, thus calling for an acceptance of feminine/dialogic writing as well as traditional masculine/hierarchical writing. Then, Lamb goes into greater depth about what such feminine/dialogic/maternal argumentation could look like.

Susan Miller kind of stands on her own, but her notions could easily fit into a discussion of Comp’s power/powerlessness in the university, or of the politics of composition.

Finally, Hawisher and Sullivan and Selfe discuss issues of women’s identity in electronic spaces. All three scholars show that visual representations of women reinscribes traditional gender narratives into new digital spaces. They call for new approaches to studying women’s self-representations, and well as cultural productions of women in these spaces.

History of Composition Studies

History of Composition Studies

Berlin, North, S. Miller, Connors, Crowley, Smit

James Berlin

Berlin makes an argument in Rhetoric and Reality that we should consider “rhetorics” (plural) instead of “rhetoric (singular) because rhetoric is epistemological and therefore each rhetorical system is based on the natures of each knower’s reality. There are three epistemological categories of rhetoric: objective (reality is within the external, material world of experience), subjective (reality is within the subject and discovered internally), and transactional (reality is the interaction of subject and object, mediated by audience and language). For objective rhetoric, the writer’s job is to record experience exactly as it has been experienced; CTR is objective because it requires finding truth through observation and then finding the language to describe it. Subjective rhetoric is demonstrated by Plato, who believes that truth transcends the material world; it can be known, but not communicated or taught. Weaver sees rhetoric similarly, but its possibility is expanded by the suggestion that metaphor can suggest the supersensory. The writer’s role is to offer positive knowledge or correct error in order to help lead the audience to truth via a private discovery. Transactional rhetoric types are classical (truth is located in a social construct); cognitive (correspondence between structures of mind and nature); and epistemic (reality involves all elements of the rhetorical situation). In this view, rhetoric is implicated in all human behavior, and language mediates reality and truth. In another article, “Contemporary Composition,” Berlin argues for the superiority of epistemic rhetoric because it is the most practical.

In the 19^th century, the university was opened to anyone from the middle class who could meet the requirements, and at Harvard in 1874 Eliot introduced the writing test as an entrance requirement. This led to the rise of what has been called CTR, a pedagogy that focuses heavily on surface perfection, like an error-free composition but pays little attention to thought processes; the influence of CTR is still felt in classrooms that focus mainly on grammar and mechanics.

In the early 20^th century, there were three main approaches: CTR; an approach that inspired only those who possessed “genius” (usually elitist and aristocratic); and an approach that emphasized writing as training for participation in the democratic process. There was also an “ideas approach” that connected learning to social political life. The Efficiency Movement study of the NCTE determined that composition classrooms should have no more than 50 pupils per teacher and that the course should only be taught by the best teachers.

Between 1920 and 1940, college enrollments grew. CTR still held dominance, but began to be challenged by a subjective rhetoric that favored the individual. FYC programs were developed and headed by directors to provide an administrative structure for students and faculty. Objective writing tests were used to place and evaluate students who were grouped into classes by ability in order to respond to their individual differences. Expressionist rhetoric began to form as an indirect result of the liberal culture’s philosophic idealism and emphasis on self-cultivation.

Between 1940 and 1960, the most significant curricular development was the general education movement, which resulted in the rise of COMS (writing, speaking, and listening). CCCC was developed in 1949 after a 1948 NCTE conference presentation spawned a long discussion about composition that needed to be continued; the founding of 4Cs led to a burgeoning sense of professional identity. Many comp teachers taught writing through literature; great literature was needed to provide knowledge and stimulation to keep the teacher’s career active and vital. In the 1950s, there was a renewed interest in rhetoric as a discipline of historical importance and contemporary value.

Between 1960 and 1975, there were growing numbers of graduate programs in rhetoric; it began to be seen as a respectable specialty, especially with the growing numbers of students demanding more teachers and leading to a need for professionalization. The process movement began to take off during this time as well. There were many theories grouped under the category “new rhetoric,” but none of them became dominant. Instead, there was a multiplicity of rhetorics in which each was unique in describing elements of rhetoric. The major pedagogical approaches of this time were CTR, Expressionistic, Classical/Transactional, Rhetoric of Cognitive Psychology, and Epistemic Rhetoric. The biggest transition from the 19^th century to 1975 was the shift from writing courses for cultivation of taste, to writing for preparing students for a profession, to writing for preparing students for citizenship in a democracy and enabling self-discovery.

Stephen North

North describes and accounts for the emergence of a methodological community in composition. First, he describes the Practitioners: scholars and researchers make knowledge, but practitioners apply it. They contribute to the “lore” of how writing is done, learned, and taught; lore is a body of knowledge housed in either ritual (passed along by example), writing (textbooks), and/or talk (conversations with other practitioners).

There are three kinds of Scholars: Historians, Philosophers, and Critics. The Historians write the pedagogical history of composition through a complex web of cause and effect relationships. The making of history is a neverending cycle of interpretation and reinterpretation. The Philosophers account for, frame, critique, and analyze the field’s fundamental assumptions and beliefs. Thus, they can help us choose teaching methods. The Critics establish a canon, interpret it, and generate theories about both how they created it and how they interpreted it.

There are four kinds of Researchers: Experimentalists, Clinicians, Formalists, and Ethnographers. The Experimentalists discover generalizable “laws” that can account for the ways people do, teach, and learn writing; they try to measure the impact of a manageable feature of a pedagogy on students. The Clinicians focus on individual “cases” and how they do, teach, and learn writing; they are concerned with what is unique or particular to some unit within a population, but bring the larger population to bear on their observations. The Formalists build modes and simulations to examine formal properties under study; they focus almost exclusively on modeling writing in order to highlight what we do not understand. The Ethnographers make stories or fictions for people as members of communities. North is not very optimistic for ethnography’s potential, but it has become one of the most valid approaches for cultural inquiry.

With all of these different approaches available and competing, North explains that there has been a “methodological land rush” as various inquiries scramble to claim what constitutes knowledge in composition. There are two themes that result from this inter-communal struggle: 1) there is the notion that there is a knowledge and method crisis that justifies radical action in teaching writing, and 2) Practitioners have been targeted as lacking knowledge and methods to do anything on their own. Therefore, some have pointed out that since the ability to generate or control knowledge rests with non-Practitioners, they must import their knowledge in order to repair the practices of the Practitioners. There are two assumptions operating here: 1) that Practitioners are 2^nd class knowledge users (not makers), and 2) they should become the recipients of a random flow of information.

Since Practitioners have become a communal target, there hasn’t been much inter-disciplinary conflict. In fact, many inquirers use knowledge from various groups. However, as each community puts out new research, the field’s self-image of multi-methodological “progress” is harder to keep up. The stakes for methodological dominance are power, prestige, professional recognition, and advancement. However, North does not envision comp studies as a discipline because such a term implies unity and preparation for doing something. He offers three conditions that must be met in order for composition to be an independent discipline: heightened methodological awareness, methodological egalitarianism, and re-establishing the validity of practice-as-inquiry. North fears that each community will be absorbed by other fields and literary studies will continue to dominate. In order for composition to survive, he argues that we must break away from literature by either taking a larger share of knowledge making or by moving out of English departments, and/or we must establish inter-methodological peace to keep its vital core. North ends by predicting that composition as we know it will disappear and we can only survive by breaking institutional ties with English; however, he also clarifies that he prefers for composition more strongly with English.

Susan Miller

Miller argues that writing in higher education is simultaneously marginal and central. Part of this is because composition is confused about its own goals; thus, it is undermined in universities, and especially by literary studies in English departments. Literary studies are devoted to displacing the ordinary composition circumstances around texts it calls extraordinary; in other words, literary studies must be dissociated from the textual product so that the history of literature is told by “authorship,” whose origins, successes and privileges are considered unbound to the material circumstances of readers and writers.

One justification for why composition became part of English departments is that literary studies needed something practical to add to burgeoning English departments. Both replaced the classics, both were utilitarian means to an educated populace. Each could instill refinements of taste and correct grammar (both necessary in order to be “cultured”). Composition became the location where the unwashed were cleaned; where the masses were convinced of their dirtiness while being saved from it.

The subjectivity of a composition student is often infantilized: comp is seen as a transition-to-college course and often relies on pedagogies used at earlier levels. The student has no choice how the course is run; instead, they are unified with the university’s ideologies, often unaware that such a thing is happening. Miller argues for a politically aware composition course that prepares students to generically “be” writers in the classroom and other settings. Such a move could allow the students and teachers to acknowledge and analyze these hegemonic demands and their implications for the composition students.

Process theory has become one way in composition as legitimated itself as a field (though Lisa Ede would disagree with this notion). However, Miller argues that the paradigm shift for which it called has not yet happened. In fact, she still sees elements of CTR everywhere, and CTR and Process share some elements: priority of speech over writing, student-centered but independent individual, a “goal text” that can accurately represent intentions, and seeing words as having settled meanings. Still, Process Theory stabilized the field because it is “scientific” and gives composition an object of study and allow it to discover self-contained “meanings” in the act of writing. Miller also brings up the issue of the feminization of composition. Not only is it a marginalized field, but it is also taught by more women than men, thus further marginalizing and stigmatizing it. Composition is not considered to be a respectable field to teach. But Process works to reinforce the profession’s claim on a “normal” identity among colleagues. Miller ends by arguing that Composition could make a new identity by acknowledging that it is a culturally designated place for political action; it can work counterhegemonically while showing that making new knowledge is a shared process. We must reconceive the student subjectivity as responsibly, participatory, and potentially influential in writing.

Robert Connors

There is no such thing as CTR: Fogarty (1959) coined it, Young (1978) refined it, but no one has ever claimed to be part of a CTR movement (Eded points to a similar occurrence for Process Theory).

In the 19^th century there was a shift from oral/argumentative rhetoric to written/multimodal rhetoric, which required that the 2500-year-old rhetorical tradition adopt new theory, pedagogies, and cultural status. Women entered the university for the first time, which shifted the possibilities available to genders; the rhetoric in the classroom shifted from agonistic/male to irenic/males and females. Writing tended to be perceive as something both men and women could do, not only men. Through most of the 19^th century, information on composition disseminated through textbooks, not journals or other publications; in 1949, CCCC was founded and journals began to be established. From the 1940s-1990s, journals and textbooks struggled for epistemological primacy.

Connors also points out that the composition teacher used to be revered and well-paid, but is now overworked, ill-paid, and often marginalized.

Sharon Crowley

One of the reasons comp is marginalized is because it tends to focus on processes of learning rather than on acquisition of knowledge. Composition pedagogy focuses on change and development, encourages collaboration, and recognized the work of women long before other fields. In general, composition has little status in the university simply because most other fields tend to forget that it exists and can be a fruitful location for materialist, feminist, ethnicist, and postmodern theories. Teachers of comp are overworked and underpaid (as Miller pointed out) and often employed on a contingent basis. The majority of teachers are part-timers and graduate students, ostensibly because nobody wants to teach it. FYC is associated with teaching, not scholarship; research lead to promotion, but teaching is seen as drudgery.

Like Miller, Crowley also picks up on the tension between comp and lit in English departments. Using literature texts in composition classes only affirms the universal importance of literary study and reinforces the dominance of literature over composition. Also like Miller, Crowley determines that one of the reasons there is such tension between lit and comp is because literary studies suppresses the role of composition in producing literature; they have redefined completed literature as an embodiment of “full, central, and immediate human experience” without accounting for the process it took to get there.

Crowley finds impractical the notion that Comp must prepare students for their fields; every field has such specific requirements that they cannot all be contained in one course.

To Crowley, the pedagogy of tastes (19^th century) is a policing mechanism that works to naturalize that which is culturally instituted and harden class distinctions.

Crowley argues against a universal FYC requirement. She says it exploits teachers and students while having negative effects on curriculum, classroom climates, disciplinary and institutional aspects, and professional issues. She wants us to instill writing vertically and horizontally, across fields. Crowley thinks enrollment will remain high, especially with high caliber instruction. The FYC requirement has nothing to do with student needs, but everything to do with the academy’s image of itself as a place with special language needs.

David Smit

Despite ongoing efforts to unify and professionalize composition studies, Smit argues that we still haven’t come up with a unitary definition of what it is. Smit offers four tenets that can help work toward interdisciplinary consensus about language and how it works: 1) Writing is always constrained by students’ interest and motivation (background and experience), 2) Formal instruction will never be able to supply novice writers with adequate training because language development happens via acquisition, 3) All writing is subject to a range of interpretations, whether intentional or not, 4) All writing is constrained by social context and by the circumstances/concerns of the reader via introspection. He makes two assumptions about comp studies: 1) Writing is a global activity, 2) It is foundational to advanced learning.

Smit believes that Comp should not belong in English departments; instead, individual disiplines should teach their own version of writing.

How I would answer a question on this theme

I probably won’t need to. This document is really just to organize the main theories about the history and state of comp studies.

Influences on My Research

Influences on My Research

This is a question I am likely to get: I will need to show how the readings on my list will impact my research. I take this to mean I will need to identify which sources could best support my future research, show how, and explain why. Since my research will be focused on identity (especially gender) and social media, two sources that I will definitely use are Cheryl Glenn’s Rhetoric Retold, Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech, and Kenneth Burke’s Rhetoric of Motives; I will also undoubtedly use some of the many digital rhetoric resources on my Composition Studies reading list.

Cheryl Glenn argues for a broader definition of rhetoric that includes women and other minorities in the rhetorical canon. Such a redefinition calls for a rhetoric of silence to be included. For example, Anne Askew’s refusal to answer her Inquisitor’s questions upon her arrest signify that she was aware of her rhetorical situation enough to realize that speaking would not change her audience’s minds. Instead, she chose not to speak, and in such a refusal denied the Inquisitor power over her. Surely this is not the only occasion when a marginalized figure exercised silence in a rhetorical manner (a typically arhetorical maneuver) . It might be difficult to measure rhetorical silence in social media, since to participate in social media is to interact in some way with the platform or artifacts on it (for example, posting a photo or liking a status, or even simply increase the page visit counter by one more page view), but perhaps there are other typically arhetorical maneuvers used in rhetorical ways.

Judith Butler also has some interesting notions pertaining to identity and language. Specifically, she discusses the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy as it pertains to stating homosexual desire and intention. The presumption behind the policy is that a statement of homosexual desire is also a statement of intention to act on that desire, but Butler cautions us not to conflate desire with intention. Such a conflation oversimplifies language. She also points out that the distinction between desire and intention is observed when someone makes a racist threat; it is generally taken for granted that that particular person may not intend to act on the stated (violent?) desire, thus keeping desire and intent separated. This distinction has implications for digital rhetoric, especially considering some of the rhetorical sites I may study in the future (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube comments sections, Instagram, Reddit, 4chan) are some areas where cyber bullying and threats are most prevalent. The distinction also has implications for issues of power and marginalization: if racist threats are written off as desire with no intent, but issues of homosexuality and gender are not, what does that say about who is allowed to express their identity and who is not? Why does the racist threat get to slip by, while the homosexual declaration is penalized? These are issues of identity that will likely appear in my research, and Judith Butler will be able to give me a framework from which to examine them.

Kenneth Burke’s notion of identification is also an interesting concept to apply to studies of social media. Many people (especially my generation and younger) have spent a lot of their lives on social media and use it as a main route for communication with family, friends, and sometimes complete strangers. Users create an online identity for themselves that may or may not match who they are in real life: they choose which photos, tweets, statuses to post; what photos, tweets, and statuses to like, comment on, and retweet; and what pages or accounts to follow or subscribe to. In effect, they choose how they are represented to a select circle of people, usually with the hope of being accepted or liked by them. Thus, users engage in identification in order to choose which artifacts to post to their social media.

Another resources I can use is Bakhtin’s concept of double-voicedness (saying something simultaneously literally and figuratively) as it plays out in social media, especially as it could pertain to Burkean identification: how people say something that can be taken multiple ways in order to both make fun of and refrain from alienating some people.

I could also use Miller’s concept of genre as a social action for some fruitful discussions about digital rhetoric. I co-authored an article that examined how women feel less comfortable writing in certain genres than others because of the kind of knowledge each genre precludes, which is tied to the kind of social action it is meant to perform.

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

The Process Movement in Composition Studies

The Process Movement in Composition Studies

Murray, Crowley, Elbow, Flower and Hayes, Sommers, Perl, Emig, Kent, Foster, Miller, Ede

The process movement is traditionally thought to be the salvation of Compositions studies that was developed as a response to current-traditional rhetoric while both professionalizing the teaching of comp and reconceptualizing students as writers (Crowley). Hairston has said that it gave composition teachers something to study, something vaguely scientific, upon which to base a field. The main genre is considered the expressive/expository essay. One of the biggest debates in Comp Studies is whether or not a paradigm shift called the “process movement” really occurred, or if it just reinforced old notions in a new way.

Advocating Process

Donald Murray outlined the three stages of the process in his “Teach Writing As Process Not Product”: prewriting, writing, revising. He argues that such a process gives students the chance to won their writing, subject, truth, and language – they are in control of what they produce because the process is individualized to what each student needs. Students produce multiple drafts with a focus on mechanics coming as the last step. Peter Elbow advocates a similar process and has promoted freewriting as a means of invention that can serve as part of the prewriting stage. While prewriting, students generate raw material and figure out what to say. Elbow asserts that freewriting makes revision easier for students later because they have not yet crafted their writing in any way; thus, they are less attached to it and will be less likely to resist moving, deleting, and/or adding new material. Janet Emig also adds onto this original notion of process by advocating intervention: a teacher should intervene into a process sin order to improve the process itself or the product it produces. There are two modes of intervention: proffering freedoms or establishing constraints.

Other proponents of a kind of process are Linda Flower and John Hayes. Flower and Hayes developed the cognitive process theory to describe how writers approach a writing task. They argue that thinking exists in the mind apart from language, and they are concerned with how language is developed from the mental process of the mind. They posit a model of cognition that focuses on how the writer sets goals and makes decisions during the composition process.

One contemporary defender of process is David Foster. He uses the process movement to argue against cultural criticism in the composition classroom, which he argues is too politically charged and is likely to, through exposing and exploiting difference, offend and hurt some students. Instead, he argues that we should stick to process because it not only legitimated our field, but that a turn to the culture may even threaten to undo all the progress we made through using the process movement to establish ourselves.

Neutral?

Perl and Sommers examined revision processes of both unskilled novices and adults; their findings contradict the notion of a linear process. Perl examined unskilled writers moving through the three stages, and found that composition is recursive: the writers continuously moved back and forth among the three stages. Likewise, Sommers’ study of student writers and experienced adult writers found that each demographic revises in drastically different manners: the students focused on local revision only, but did not focus on conceptual, global matters, while the adults saw composing as constantly writing and rewriting. These findings suggest that there is no “Process,” but perhaps a series of “processes” that are individualized to each writer, and perhaps even assignment.

Post-Process

Thomas Kent developed the term “post process” to refer to a collection of sometimes conflicting theories that are a reaction to process theory. These theories maintain three assumptions: Writing is public, it is interpretative, and it is situated. In other words, it works against the notion that writing (via process) implies regular, sequential procedures and that it is an isolated writer making personal meaning along. We have come to understand writing as a messy and discursive process and that meaning is created socially (Bruffee, Cooper, McComiskey). I tend to agree with Richard Fulkerson and Lynn Bloom that there is no such thing as post-process theory. Fulkerson and Bloom argue that the term is an oxymoron and there is no agreed-upon meaning for it; indeed, it seems as if Kent’s definition of post-process is broad enough to encompass any pedagogy that is not considered current-traditional or process, such as critical cultural approaches and social epistemic/constructionist approaches.

No Such Thing As Process Movement

Susan Miller and Lisa Ede go one step further and propose that there never was anything such thing as a “Process Movement.” First, Miller points out that, though process stabilized the field, there was no major paradigm shift: Process Theory shares a lot with Current-Traditional: Both describe a student-centered by independent pedagogy, both assume a “goal text” or final version that could accurately represent intentions, both see words as having settled meanings.

Ede agrees, going so far as to assert that there was never anything as unified and coherent as a “process movement.” As she points out, the very scholars often attributed to the process movement (Emig, Perl, Sommers, Flower and Hayes) do not themselves use the term “process movement.” Further, there is no such thing as “post-process” because, not only was there never a process movement, but also elements of process are everywhere in our pedagogies: drafting, revising, etc). Finally, process was the not the primary engine of comp’s professionalization; there were multiple movements underway at the same time, such as seminars, institutes, conferences, workshops, and the rise of basic writing. Ede argues that the term “process movement” functions in much the same way “current traditional” does in that it is a “floating signifier”: everyone recognizes it in its context, but a concrete definition is difficult to pin down. However, it enables scholars to pit new theories against a generalized and devalued past that poses a threat to current efforts.

How would I answer a question on this theme?

I would do it in much the same way I do here. I set up the process proponents, then the neutral side, then post-process, then those who think the process movement never existed. I’d side with Ede’s argument. As I was reading all of these texts on process, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I was uncomfortable with it conception. It wasn’t until I got to Ede’s text that I realized Process had been CTRed: vilified and denigrated despite it never once articulating itself as a coherent theory or pedagogy.

“Politics” in Composition Studies

The “Politics” of Composition Studies

Should FYC exist? Should it be required? Where should it be housed?

Crowley, Smit, Bartholomae, Hairston, S. Miller

In Textual Carnivals, Susan Miller argues for Comp to make a new identity by acknowledging that it is a culturally designated place for political action; in other words, Comp teachers must account for the political event their work constitutes. She discusses how Lit Studies devalues Comp, but at the same time Comp is attached to Lit. But, as Miller points out, maintaining Comp as a field divorced from Lit affirms that there is a language other than literary activity; in other words, it shows that writing is not just a masterpiece product: there is a process behind writing to which students have access. Although, even this mention of process is problematic because the paradigm shift promised by process theory has not quite happened. In fact, process shares a lot in common with current traditional rhetoric. One of the most interesting discussions Miller has about Comp involves its “feminization”: more women than men teach it, and the image of the comp teacher is powerless yet authoritarian, occupying the transgressive, low status site form which language may be arbitrated. Miller argues that by creating a new political identity for Comp, two things will happen: 1) It will becomes a place for counter-hegemony, 2) Making new knowledge will becomes a shared (not isolated) process. Another product of this redefinition of student writing and subjectivity will change the view that Comp is a punitive and infantilizing course; instead, we can focus on student empowerment by reconceiving the student as responsible, participatory, and potentially influential in writing.

In Composition in the University, Sharon Crowley argues against a universal requirement for FYC. One of the main themes Crowley picks up on is the tension between Comp and Literary Studies; Comp is often seen as the lesser of the two and therefore is taken less seriously than Lit. This relegates FYC to nothing more than a service course. Crowley also points to the irony that FYC is valued enough to be required, but not enough to adequately provide for its teaching; the majority of FYC teachers are part-time or grad students. She explains that FYC is associated with teaching, not scholarship, but research is what leads to promotion. Thus, FYC teachers are held in lower esteem and attached to a negative stigma. Crowley argues that since FYC was developed as a punitive course for students who did not write up to the expectations of university admissions personnel, it should no longer be universally required for all students; such requirement exploits teachers and students, and it has negative curricular, classroom, disciplinary, institutional, and professional effects. Without a first-year requirement, we could install writing vertically and horizontally, across fields. She defends her stance against some potential opponents: to those who would argue that FYC teachers would lose jobs, she asserts a belief that enrollment will remain high, especially with high caliber instruction; to those who argue that students who take it won’t need it, she asserts that we can either trust students to decide if they need it, or, she hesitatingly adds, universities can maintain testing to ensure students who need the course take the course. Crowley finishes by claiming that the abolition of a universal requirement can provide the opportunity for writing to be installed at various other locations and departments on campus, rather than only in the first year. This vertical writing curriculum would have a goal to help students understand what composing is and to articulate its roles in their intellectual lives.

David Smit’s The End of Composition Studies is a play on words: he means not only the “end” as in the goal, but also the “end” as in the termination. He argues not for Comp to be abolished, for it to be taught by specific disciplines. He thinks that the best way to create broad-based ability is to encourage novice writers to learn the genres of the discourse communities students intend to join. Beyond the sentence level, Smit sees very little in common among various types of writing; each kind requires different knowledge, conventions, organization, rhetorical strategy, and processes. It is a misguided notion, he argues, that good writers have mastered some general syntax in an introductory course. Instead, he points out that the expected length and/or complexity of sentences varies from genre to genre, and different discourses require different knowledge and skills. We should think of teaching as training and shaping practice over time until it fits into some range of a discourse community. Such an approach assumes students will want to participate because they want to join that community. Finally, Smit proposes and three-pronged approach to teaching writing instruction:

1. Teach sentence fluency and editing, analysis and critique – Introduction to Writing as Social Practice (one semester, responsibility of individual departments)
2. Advanced practice in domains, disciplines, professions, discourse communities – Writing in [Field]
3. Initiate writers into writing beyond the classroom – Writing “on the Job”

Smit wants universities to offer and require as much writing as possible because it’s their ethical responsibility to make this important knowledge available to students. Smith reinforces his notions by insisting that English departments need to integrate into other fields, become more interdisciplinary, and reduce their role in writing; most of the teaching in Comp is done by graduate students who have no interest in it.

In “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing,” Maxine Hairston calls for Comp to split off from English departments. She spends most of the article enumerating all the reasons why a critical culture approach to composition instruction has no business in the curriculum, but she raises an interesting point when she blames this political fad on Comp’s placement as part of English programs. She argues that scholars of literary criticism, as the top of the totem pole in English studies, sets trends that other below tend to follow. As deconstruction, post-structuralism, and Marxism have dwindle in literary studies (this is in the early 90s), Comp Studies has picked them up and applied them to its theory and pedagogy. She dislikes this turn of events and blames it entirely on Comp’s location in English departments. She implies here (and outright states during her CCCC Chair’s Address in the 80s) that Comp Studies should break off from English departments.

In Writing on the Margins, a collection of seminal works, David Bartholomae states that Comp Studies should remain within English departments. He sees Composition as a commitment to do work with a commitment to the values of and problems of English. His stance is both personal and political. It is personal because, as he points out, literary training for Comp teachers enables them to learn key skills like close reading, and it prepares one to assign values to acts of writing, and to think about writing in relation to history and culture; it’s political because he argues that the routes for professionalization in Comp have already been paved in English departments. Because we are part of an established department, we have access to funding and opportunities that would not be available otherwise. He thinks Comp professors would also lose access to tenure-track employment. Interestingly, Bartholomae makes this argument while also acknowledging the Comp’s denigration comes not from outside disciplines, but from those within English who attack Comp Studies, such as literary studies.

If I had to answer a question on this theme

I’d outline the major stances and support for them: Miller thinks Comp needs to redefine itself politically; Crowley thinks Comp should not be required; Smit thinks individual disciplines should teach Comp; Hairston thinks Comp should not be housed in English; and Bartholomae thinks Comp should remain housed within in English, ostensibly with no paradigm changes. I’m not quite sure what to make of this debate. Part of me thinks Comp should abandon English for the sake of distancing itself from a discipline that has been trying to hold it back, but doing so would cause Comp personnel to lose access to the opportunities afforded by being part of an established field. Another part of me is as optimistic as Crowley that even if Comp isn’t required, students will still want to enroll in it, but another part of me has a hard time believing that to be true. Even if I were to wholeheartedly support the notion that Comp should leave English, I would not support it for the reasons Hairston gave, but for the ones that Smit did. Instead of any of these options, it seems to me that Comp should stay in English, but actively work to make Literary Studies respect it. However, I suspect that this is the approach that has been undertaken for decades, and that Miller, Crowley, Smith, Hairston, and Bartholomae wrote because it has not been working.

In other words, I don’t really have a stance on this issue, so I’ll need to develop one within the next two weeks.

Genre in Composition Studies

Mapping Genre in Comp Studies (similar-ish to Genre in Rhetoric)

Carolyn R. Miller: “Genre As Social Action”

Miller, quite simply, argues that genre is a social action – a rhetorically sound definition of genre is centered on the action it is used to accomplish because genre is typified rhetorical action. Miller’s definition is a pragmatic (not syntactic or semantic) discourse classification based in rhetorical practice; it is open rather than closed, and organized around situated actions. When constructing discourse, we deal with purpose (which is similar to Bitzer’s exigence) at several levels (we learn to adopt social motives as way of satisfying private intentions through rhetorical action) this is how recurring situations invite a particular type of discourse. This definition of genre helps us learn to understand our rhetorical situations better, and helps us understand how to participate in the actions of a community.

This is important for Comp Studies because it plays into the Social Epistemic belief that knowledge is constructed socially. It makes sense that if knowledge is constructed by social forces, that the purpose, action, and genre of writing would be social as well.

Charles Bazerman: Speech Acts, Genres, and Activity Systems: How Texts Organize Activity and People” (in, What Writing Does and How it Does it)

Bazerman makes an argument that genres are not only embedded within structured social activities, but that they also depend on previous texts the influence social activity and organization. Thus, genres are not only social action, but social actions influence which genres are selected. These genres are also antecedent – the previous genres are taken into account whenever a new text is created. Bazerman also defines genre sets (the collection of types of texts someone in a particular role is likely to produce, IE: all of the documents a teacher produces for a course) and genre systems (comprised of the several genre sets of people working together in an organized way, plus the patterned relationships in the production, flow, and use of these documents, IE: The teacher’s documents and the students’ documents working together in the classroom setting) He suggests that examining genre sets allows you to see the full range and variety of the writing work that can be required within a role (IE: all of the different documents a teacher could be expected to create), as well as identifying the genre knowledge and skills you need to accomplish that work (IE: how a teacher could craft all of those documents)

The implication for Comp Studies is that, if social actions influence which genres are chose, we must be flexible in teaching various genres to students. Teaching them a variety of genres will lead to them developing a wide array of antecedent genres from which they can draw in any given situation (Devitt argues this same point in Writing Genres).

Charles Bazerman: Shaping Written Knowledge

Bazerman is looking at how many textual elements shape written knowledge, but regarding genre he examines how genres help shape that knowledge. His work with genre is clearly inspired by Miller’s “Genre as Social action” (he even thanks her in the acknowledgements for her help). Specifically, he argues that “genre is a sociopsychological category which we use to recognize and construct typified actions within typified solutions – it is a way of creating order in the ever-fluid symbolic world.” Text and genre do not just respond to the rhetorical world – they help create it. When discussing the scientific academic community, Bazerman suggest that regularizing the writing genres and situations within specific communities can increase the likelihood of successful communication and thus knowledge creation. Only with a communally shared, reliable set of formulations will we be able to develop intelligent curricula to meet the local rhetorical needs of students entering into specific knowledge-generating communities, to frame efficient analytical procedures to allow writers to analyze their rhetorical situations and rhetorical options, and to present to other disciplines a knowledge and technology that will be of obvious use and power.

When speaking of students, he points out that each new text in a genre reinforces or remolds some aspect of the genre, so each reading of a text reshapes the social understanding of that text. However, genres should not be followed so meticulously that we must teach students cookie cutter approaches for their anticipated careers; instead, the students must understand and rethink rhetorical choices embedded in each generic habit in order to master the genre. Genre can stabilize the rhetorical situation and simplify rhetorical choices to be made, but the writer loses control of the writing when they do not understand the genre. As teachers, if we provide our students with only the formal trappings of the genres they need to work in, we offer them nothing more than unreflecting slavery to current practice and no means to ride the change that inevitably will come in the forty to fifty years they will practice their professions; we need to show students that genre is a flexible and ever-changing social phenomenon.

Since Bazerman directly addresses students, the implications here should be obvious. Since text and genre help to create the rhetorical world, genres should be regularized in order to increase the chances for successfully using the genre as well as communicating within it. But we should not drill generic formalities into students’ heads; instead, we should teach them how genre stabilizes situations and simplifies their rhetorical choices (again, Devitt would agree).

Candace Mitchell: Writing and Power

For Mitchell, genres can be the source of power. She talks about how journals can be a non-threatening, non-male-dominated form of writing that allows the free flow of feelings, thoughts, and impressions without any constraints caused by academic writing. However, it should not be the only genre of writing taught at the college level – students also need to learn how to write an essay or research paper. Mitchell argues that it is not oppressive to teach students how to reference work, seek information, and formulate critical questions in order to learn something and present this information to an audience (indeed, this is the foundation of education). Since some genres clearly “count” more than others, she argues specifically that “nonmainstream” students (read: ESL or basic writers) especially need to be taught all of the different genres of the academy. They need to understand that speaking outside of the accepted genres of one’s discipline may hold serious consequences. Denying students access to this knowledge potentially denies them possibilities for future academic and professional success (Peter Elbow argues something similar, but not in terms of genre).

Mitchell appears to be operating under an old-fashioned definition of genre as form (journals, essays, research papers, etc), not social action. Yet, she hints that genres are the result of or may even lead to action. She mentions that journals are meant for reflection and research papers are meant to create and disseminate knowledge. Though she does not say it explicitly, Mitchell would appear to implicitly support the notion of genre as action. She makes it clear that she is a linguist whose background led her to take an interest in this topic, so perhaps she does not realize that there is a distinction.

Amy J. Devitt: Writing Genres

Devitt builds upon and extends Miller’s definition of genre as a typified social action. She associates genre with recurrent situation; in other words, she expands from “rhetorical situation” to an interaction of different contexts at different levels that encompass the impact of preexisting genres as well as situation and cultural context. Most definitions of genre refer only to a genre’s situational context, but Devitt adds two more levels: culture and other genres. Culture (a shared set of material contexts and learned behaviors, values, beliefs, and templates) influences how situation is constructed and how it is seen as recurring in genres. It defines what situations and genres are possible or likely (and it is a dynamic element in constructing both; adding culture is important because it captures the way existing ideological contexts partially construct what genres are and are in turn constructed by performing genre actions. “Other genres” refers to the face that one never speaks/writes in a void; we always have access to existing genres we have encountered through experience or suggestion. The “context of genres” includes all the existing genres in that society, the individual genres and sets of genres, the relatively stagnant and the changing genres, the genres commonly used and those not used. The existence of prior genres shapes the development of new or newly learned genres. The context of situation, context of culture, and context of genres all influence the actions of writers/speakers, speakers/listeners – and they do it partly through genre.

Devitt also argues for teachers to teach contextual genres, situated within their contexts of culture, situation, and other genres. She explains that generic forms must be embedded within their social and rhetorical purposes so that rhetorical understanding can counter their urge toward following a formula. Genres must also be embedded within their social and cultural ideology so that critical awareness can counter potential ideological effects. Genres must also be taught as both constraint and choice so that individual awareness can lead to individual creativity. Devitt is arguing for teaching genre awareness, a critical consciousness of both rhetorical purpose and ideological effects of generic forms. This method of teaching will enable writers to learn newly encountered genres when they are immersed in a context for which they need those genres; students may also acquire new genres that can serve as antecedent genres for their future writing. The goals of teaching genre awareness are for students to understand the intricate connectedness between contexts and forms, to perceive potential ideological effects of genres, and to discern both constraints and choices that genres make possible. Devitt believes that to deny this knowledge of genre to students is to hide the fact the language, genre, and writing interact; she also believe that this would deny them access to a better understanding of why and what they write (similar to Mitchell).

If I had to answer a question on this theme

I would begin with Miller, since her definition of genre is key to all of the discussions of it that follow. I might connect her notion of genre as social action to the social constructionism/epistemic camp of Comp Studies, but only if I have enough time to do so. Just establishing her as the base will be enough; connecting her directly to Comp will be icing on the cake.

Next, I would bring in Bazerman and Devitt since they have similar things to say about genre. First, is Bazerman. He suggests regularizing genres so that scholars are able to work and communicate within genres more easily. He discusses the sciences in particular, but this has implications for our students as well: rather than having to learn all of the intricate quirks of several genres, regularized genres would forego some of those more specific idiosyncrasies in order to enhance the ability to utilize genres without accidentally breaking from their form (because, though genres are social they also have formal qualities, and these formal qualities can trip people up). Another point Bazerman makes, and that Devitt echoes, is the need to teach students a base of antecedent genres from which they can draw in any new rhetorical situation. But they should not just learn the formal qualities of each genre; instead, they should learn how genres both stabilize the situation and simplify the choices that students can make. In other words, genres provide both constraint and choice in order to enhance creativity. Devitt calls this critical consciousness of genre use “genre awareness” and advocates that we teach students, not just the formal qualities of genres, but that genres are socially constructed and construct our social world; thus, students will be more capable of mastering a wide array of genres, which is important since an understanding of genre is key to successfully addressing a rhetorical situation.

Finally, I would end with Mitchell, who has some interesting thoughts on genre that relate to what she calls “nonmainstream” students. She argues that journal writing can be useful sometimes (it is a non-threatening, low stakes, reflective genre with some obvious benefits for students), but that it should not be the only genre ESL students and basic writers should learn. She argues that teachers do those students a disservice by not teaching them the basic academic genres they will be expected to know later. Denying them this knowledge denies them future academic and professional success. Some of the skills she suggests students need to learn for the academic essay are referencing sources, formatting essays around an inquiry of some sort, and performing research, all of which suggest formal generic qualities. However, she also implies broader social implications involving genre. Like Bazerman, Mitchell seems to be implying that genres create the rhetorical world; without access to academic genres, “nonmainstream” students will have a much narrower view of what is rhetorically possible. But by teaching them a range of academic genres, perhaps in a way similar to Devitt’s genre awareness, students will be more likely to succeed academically and professionally because they will be able to draw on antecedent genres to meet each new rhetorical situation.

My argument? I would agree with all three. I think it’s pretty rare for writing courses to center around only journaling, as Mitchell suggests, but I do think students need access to as many genres as possible to be able to succeed both in college and in their careers beyond. For example, teaching something like a resume and cover letter in ENGL 103 constructs an antecedent genre from which students can draw when creating a LinkedIn page or perhaps a profile on eLance or some other professionally-oriented site. I’m not sure what to make of Bazerman’s call to regularize genres; I don’t entirely understand what that would look like or how it would affect Comp Studies (so I may just not bring that part of the answer up).

Rhetorical Situation in Rhetoric

Rhetorical Situation in Rhetoric

Lloyd Bitzer: “The Rhetorical Situation”

• The rhetorical situation calls discourse into existence and obtains its rhetorical character from the situation which generates it
  • A work can only be rhetorical if it responds to a situation
• Simply defined, a rhetorical situation is a context of persons, events, objects, relations, and an exigence that strongly invites utterance
  • It is the ground of rhetorical activity
  • By mediating thought and action, rhetoric creates a discourse that alters reality
• 3 constituents of a rhetorical situation: exigence, audience, and constraints
  • 1) Exigence: imperfection marked by urgency – the thing that needs to be done/changed – problem to be solved
    • Capable of modification that can be assisted by discourse
  • 2) Audience: persons capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change
    • Must be able to serve as mediator of change that the discourse functions to produce
  • 3) Constraints: persons, events, objects, and relations that have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify the exigence
    • Two kinds: 1) those originated in or managed by rhetor and method, 2) Those which are operative
  • Added constituents: rhetor and speech when they enter the situation
  • Rhetorical situation must be real, not fictive – unless the fiction is responding to a real exigence outside of fictive context

 

Devitt responds to Bitzer

• Bitzer limits rhetorical situation to only those situations with rhetorical exigencies that require discourse action, so his definition of rhetorical situation is too narrow for the wide range of discourse for which genre theorists need to account
• Activity systems have the benefit over rhetorical situations of encompassing much more than narrowly defined rhetorical exigencies, including even the nonlinguistic, and much more than the immediate situation, including cultural values and other, interacting activity systems
  • Readers and writers construct situation – people’s actions around discourse delineate what is relevant and not, what constitutes the situation
  • The activity system, context of situation, or rhetorical situation is created by people through their use of discourse

 

Vatz takes on Bitzer: “The Myth of the Rhetoric Situation”

• Exigences, audiences, and constraints are created by rhetors who choose to activate them by inscribing them into their texts
  • In other words, a situation is only rhetorical when a speaker/writer evokes an audience within a text, embodies an exigence within the text that the evoked audience is led to respond to, and handles the constraints in such a way that the audience is convinced that they are true or valid
  • Argues that “no situation can have a nature independent of the perception of its interpreter or of the rhetoric with which he chooses to characterize it”

Kennedy builds on Bizter, examines the first rhetorical situations in early humans

• On rhetorical situation: it should be the starting point for an approach to the early stages of human language as rhetoric
  • Bitzer: “Rhetorical situation may be defined as a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be so completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence”
  • Kennedy notes: situation occurs to which an agent feels an emotional reaction and which impels utterance
    • He has suggested that the instinct for self-preservation is the fundamental factor, extended in social situations to include the perceived best interest not only of the agent, but of the family, the social group, and their progeny – in biological terms, the survival of their genes
    • The “situation” is the context of a reaction on the part of an individual and of the creation of mental energy that is then transmitted by a rhetorical code
  • Bitzer discusses audience and constraints – he limits it to the situation of public address
  • Kennedy extends that limitation to include a small group, one person, the agent addressing the self (or some aspect of the self)
    • He even includes physical objects (rocks, trees, rive, storms) because some societies believe these objects are alive and can be appeased/persuaded
  • He addresses the “constraints” encountered by early humans in rhetorical situations
    • Limited control of vocal apparatus, thus the variety, pitch, and volume of sound
    • Limited vocabulary, though it was aided by gesture
    • Limited range of rhetorical techniques to accomplish persuasion
    • Conservatism and resistance toward anything innovative or nontraditional

 

Covino and Joliffe

• In some rhetorical situations, writers cannot know with any certainty who their readers are
  • Writers work to construct an audience, playing on the assumptions and operating within the rhetorical constraints to which they presume the constructed audience would adhere

 

Berlin on Epistemic Rhetoric

• Truth in a text never exists a priori outside the rhetorical situation the generates the discourse, nor dwells immanently within speaker/writer
  • It is forged via negotiation, as a transaction among rhetor, audience, and constraints of rhetorical situation
• In “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” Berlin argues that rather than seeing writers as “objective” reporters of reality, comp instructors are now urged to help their students understand themselves as ideologically situated writers in real rhetorical situations

 

Ernest Bormann

• Focused on the social construction of rhetorical situations
  • Examines how groups of individuals participate in elaborate, dramatic fantasy-events made up of smaller units of the “fantasy-theme,” which he defines as a “recollection of something that happened to the group in the past or a dream of what the group might do in the future”
  • As participants act out these fantasies, they make increasing use of a collective, group imagination, a shared sense of myth, hero, villain, story, and subplot

 

Charles Bazerman: Shaping Written Knowledge

• Even though genre can stabilize the rhetorical situation and simplify the rhetorical choices to be made, the writer loses control of the writing when he/she does not understand the genre
• The regularization of writing genres and situations within specific communities can increase the likelihood of successful, forceful communication
• If the communal wisdom of a discipline has stabilized the rhetorical situation, rhetorical goals, and rhetorical solutions for accomplishing those goals in those situations, the individual writer and reader no longer need make so many fundamental choices and perform virtuosities of communication
• Regularities occur because individuals perceive situations as similar and make similar choices
  • Institutionalization and codification occurred because repeated choices appear to the collective wisdom (or wisdom of a few powerful actors) to be generally and explicitly advisable
• The success of the genre in carrying out the business of the scientific community has also turned the genre into another kind of social fact, as an authoritative model to be emulated by other disciplines, interpreted through their own perceptions and problems
• In recognizing and using genre, we are mobilizing multidimensional clusters of our understanding of the situation, our goals, and our activity
• Understanding the genre one is working in is understanding decorum in the most fundamental sense – what stance and attitude is appropriate given the world one is engaged in at that moment
• Steps to better writing:
  • 2) Consider the structure of the literature and the community, and your place in both
    • As you step in to add your utterance, it necessarily must address the rhetorical situation established by that literature, for certainly it will be received and measured against that communal construction
    • The rhetorical moment one speaks to is shaped not only by history of paper, but by living persons whom you wish to move in some manner by your written comments
      • These individuals share communal assumptions and projects as well as familiarity with the disciplinary literature
      • They are also driven by their own active projects and view communal legacy through their own interests and schema
    • 3) Consider your immediate rhetorical situation and task
      • All choices have rhetorical import, for they help shape the next statement to be made
    • Only with a communally shared, reliable set of formulations will we be able to develop intelligent curricula to meet the local rhetorical needs of students entering into specific knowledge-generating communities, to frame efficient analytical procedures to allow writers to analyze their rhetorical situations and rhetorical options, and to present to other disciplines a knowledge and technology that will be of obvious use and power

 

Carolyn R. Miller: “Genre As Social Action”

• Definitions of rhetorical genres are grounded in: strategies/forms in discourse; similarities in audience; similarities in rhetorical situations
• Classification is important to human action – must classify situation before forming action
• Rhetorical situation: is social construct / semiotic structure, then exigence (social motive) must be located in the social world
• Genre is a category of discourse based in large-scale typification of action – acquires meaning from situation and social context
• One way a genre can fail: inadequate consideration of all the elements in recurrent rhetorical situations
• Her definition of genre helps us learn to understand our rhetorical situations better
  • Helps us understand how to participate in the actions of a community

 

Amy J. Devitt: Writing Genres

• Genre entails purposes, participants, and themes, so understanding it entails understanding a rhetorical situation and its social context
• The genre a writer needs for a particular situation often already exists and hence already guides responses to that situation
  • Genre depends heavily on the intertextuality of discourse
  • Situations construct genres, genres construct situations
• A writer who mixes or shifts genre in the middle of the text causes confusion to the reader because the reader cannot be sure of the writer’s purpose or the reader’s role (the situation)
• Grocery list example:
  • Using it means they have defined the need for food as a weekly action – a recurring situation with the same participants, purpose, and process
  • Keeping the list assumes that a similarity in experience from week to week, even if the experiences are not similar
  • It creates the sense of recurring situation
  • It makes the situation recur
• Rhetorical situations never actually recur – each situation is unique
• Genre and situation are reciprocal, mutually constructed, and integrally interrelated
• Culture: a shared set of material contexts and learned behaviors, values, beliefs, and templates
  • It influences how situation is constructed and how it is seen as recurring in genres
  • It defines what situations and genres are possible or likely – therefore it is a dynamic element in constructing both
• Adding culture is important because it captures the ways that existing ideological contexts (contexts beyond the more immediate context of situation of a particular genre) partially construct what genres are and are in turn constructed (reproduced) by performing genre actions
• The rhetorical situation to which a genre is related arises from the functional needs of a particular group
  • Those who encounter that situation are those who need and use that genre
  • Rhetorical situations are likely to be perceived as recurring by the same group of people, whose experiences are similar enough and repeated in similar enough ways to be perceived as recurring situations

 

Notes on practice question

Bitzer on RS: context of persons, events, objects, relations, exigence

• A rhetorical situation calls discourse into existence; the situation determines its rhetorical nature
• The exigence is something that must be changed – it is the reason for the situation; the action that needs to happen
• When the rhetoric enters the situation and speaks, he or she initiates discourse that will alter reality

 

Vatz takes on Bitzer by pointing out that his definition is too narrow:

• He fails to mention that a situation is only rhetorical when the rhetor invokes an audience on top of the context of persons, events, objects, relations, and exigence
• Rhetor embodies exigence in order to evoke an audience and lead them to respond to the text – convinces audience that her text is true/valid
• One particular lens useful for analyzing rhetorical situation is genre

Miller: Genre teaches us how to respond to particular rhetorical situations and to participate in the action of our community

• Focuses (obviously) on the socialness of rhetoric and especially genre.
• Rhetorical situation is also social – it is constructed by social forces, which means Bitzer’s exigence must also be social in nature – it redefined as a social motive whose exigence (for lack of a better word) is grounded in society, and whose outcome will effect society
• Like Bazerman, Miller realizes that an understanding of genre is essential to the success of the rhetorical situation – inadequately considering all elements will lead to a failure of the genre
  • For example, if a someone fails to realize that she must format a résumé in a specific way and instead writes a paragraph, she will have failed to utilize the correct genre to meet the rhetorical situation of applying for a job.

 

Bazerman: in order for a writer to take advantage of a rhetorical situation, he/she must first understand the genre in which he/she will speak/write – he argues for a regularization of writing genres in specific communitie

• This will lead to more effective communication
• It takes away the writer’s choice to make generic and situational choices (ie: format of writing or tone of writing – that is all determined by the regularization
  • Examples: genres of the scientific community – perceived recurring situations led to standardization of writing genre, led to being emulated by other disciplines as the “empirical standard” to which they should strive
• We need reliable formulations for students entering knowledge-generating communities – helps them enter the discourse of their discipline with more ease

 

Devitt: Responds directly to Bitzer: his definition limits rhetorical situation to only those situations with rhetorical exigencies that require discourse action – in other words, he limits them to situations with motives that can be addressed via language

• She offers activity systems as an alternative – they include environment, history of the person, culture, role of the artifact on top of the people, events, objects, relations, and exigencies of Bitzer
  • This is a much wider definition of what was should mean when we say “rhetorical situation” because it includes the social context beyond the immediate situation
• She expands on Bazerman’s notion that genres are important to the rhetorical situation
  • She discusses that situations never recur, they only seem to because they are similar, but we have nonetheless established genres in order to make confronting/entering these situations easier; because we often use the same genres for similar situations, those situations appear to recur, but they do not (ex: grocery list)
• Like Bazerman and Miller, she claims that genres will fail if misunderstood; understanding a rhetorical situation and social context leads to understanding a genre.

Is the term useful?

Not so much. The term is hotly contested, and every time a rhetoric scholar accidentally says the word situation in conversation, s/he appears to always need to clarify which version s/he operates under. It seems to be more crippling than useful. Amy Devitt suggests using activity systems, which seems like a move in the right direction. It has the benefit of being interdisciplinary and well-known in the social sciences (and so its use could bring our departments some prestige), and seems to work well for a wider definition of what we want to mean when we say “rhetorical situation.” It goes beyond Bitzer’s contexts of people, objects, events, relations, and exigencies, beyond Vatz’s addition of audience evocation. In addition to both, the term encompasses Miller’s notion of the sociality of genres (because it acknowledges such social factors as culture and personal history), and even Bazerman’s, Miller’s, and Devitt’s notions that an understanding of rhetorical situation leads to successful use of genre; a rhetorical situation, or activity system, that includes such useful information as environment and culture will help lead to a stronger understanding of genre because the rhetor will have more information to factor into the utterance for which the situation calls.

 

If I had to answer a question related to rhetorical situation

I’d start with Bitzer, since he kicked the whole thing off: rhetorical situation is a context of persons, events, objects, relations, and an exigence that strongly invites utterance. Then I’d move into Vatz, who added the “audience” component to the definition. I’d finish this section off with Consigny, who says that a combination of both is the way to go.

Next, I’d move into a discussion of Miller and Bazerman, since both discuss the importance of genre to an understanding of rhetorical situation: in order to properly respond to the situation, the rhetor must not only understand their exigence/purpose/motive, but must also be able to choose and understand the genre that will help them respond most properly. To this end, Bazerman argues for a regularization of genres. Miller is the only one of the two who directly addresses rhetorical situation when she explains that it is socially constructed; social forces create it.

I’d finish with Devitt, who invokes Bitzer’s original definition. Like Vatz (and many others), she finds Bitzer’s definition too restricted. She argues that Bitzer’s definition calls only for the contexts of the rhetorical situation itself, but many other factors outside of that situation (such as the rhetor’s education, upbringing, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, culture, etc) influence how that person will respond in that situation. She also discusses genre as the key to succeeding in a rhetorical situation, arguing that we should teach genre awareness to students so that they will be able to analyze the rhetorical situation and be more likely to succeed within it. Since rhetorical situation is too narrow, she proposes a change to a term like “activity systems” that will account for all of the contexts outside of the immediate situation. This would allow a broader understanding of how speakers approach the situation.

Genre in Rhetoric

Mapping Genre in Comp Studies

 

Aristotle: Rhetoric

• He argued that every audience is either a judge or not a judge
  • If the audience is a judge of what has happened in the past, the species is judicial (forensic)
  • If it judges what action to take in the future the species is deliberative
  • If it is not a judge but hearers/readers who are not asked to take any specific action, the species is epdeictic
• There are only three kinds of genres: deliberative, judicial, epideictic
  • They are both formal and social
  • In one sense, the genre will determine all formal elements of the oratory: the arrangement, style, subject matter, delivery, etc
  • In another sense, the decision to use a particular genre is socially constructed: the aim of each is to persuade, but needing to use forensic, for example, comes from the need to convict someone of wrongdoing or to defend them against such accusations
    • It would be socially inappropriate to use epideictic or deliberative in this situation
    • Although, it may be necessary to use elements of each – the three genres do not need to be mutually exclusive
      • To convict/defend someone, you will undoubtedly use epideictic’s “praise and blame” approach, though the focus will fall more heavily on judicial

 

Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy

• Ong explains the link between Aristotle’s oral genres and written genres
  • Written cultures are more objected, analytical, and hierarchical than oral cultures simply because writing things down allows people to remember and refer back to them more easily
  • This also allows room for more genres than Aristotle’s original three

 

Carolyn R. Miller: “Genre As Social Action”

Miller, quite simply, argues that genre is a social action – a rhetorically sound definition of genre is centered on the action it is used to accomplish because genre is typified rhetorical action. Miller’s definition is a pragmatic (not syntactic or semantic) discourse classification based in rhetorical practice; it is open rather than closed, and organized around situated actions. When constructing discourse, we deal with purpose (which is similar to Bitzer’s exigence) at several levels (we learn to adopt social motives as way of satisfying private intentions through rhetorical action); this is how recurring situations invite a particular type of discourse. This definition of genre helps us learn to understand our rhetorical situations better, and helps us understand how to participate in the actions of a community.

• Definitions of rhetorical genres are grounded in: strategies/forms in discourse; similarities in audience; similarities in rhetorical situations
• Useful principle of classification for discourse: should have some basis in conventions of rhetorical practice, including ways actual rhetors/audiences comprehend discourses they use
• Aristotle: 3 genres: forensic, epideictic, deliberative
  • Each has a characteristic substance and each has appropriate forms
  • Explicate the knowledge that practice creates
• Classification is important to human action – must classify situation before forming action
• Rhetorical situation: is social construct / semiotic structure, then exigence (social motive) must be located in the social world
  • Exigence provides a sense of rhetorical purpose, but not rhetor’s intention
• Form, substance, and context are relative (not absolute) and occur at many levels on a hierarchy of meaning
• Genres change (evolve and decay) – the number of genres current in any society depends on complexity and diversity of the society
• 5 understandings of genre:
  • 1) It is a category of discourse based in large-scale typification of action – acquires meaning from situation and social context
  • 2) It is interpretable by rules that occur at a high level on a hierarchy of rules for symbolic interaction
  • 3) It is distinct from form – it is a fusion of lower-level form and characteristic substance
  • 4) It is the substance of forms at higher levels – as recurrent patterns of language use, genres help constitute the substance of our cultural life
  • 5) It is a means for mediating private intentions and social exigence; it motivates by connecting that private with the public, and the singular with the recurrent
• 3 ways a collection of discourse may fail to constitute a genre:
  • 1) Failure of significant substantive/formal similarities at the lower levels of the hierarchy
  • 2) Inadequate consideration of all the elements in recurrent rhetorical situations
  • 3) No pragmatic component – no way to understand genre as a social action
• To say it’s not a genre is to say that its interpretive rules do not form a normative whole that we can consider a cultural artifact – a representation of reasoning and purposes characteristic of that culture

 

 

Charles Bazerman: Speech Acts, Genres, and Activity Systems: How Texts Organize Activity and People” (in, What Writing Does and How it Does it)

Bazerman makes an argument that genres are not only embedded within structured social activities, but that they also depend on previous texts the influence social activity and organization. Thus, genres are not only social action, but social actions influence which genres are selected. These genres are also antecedent – the previous genres are taken into account whenever a new text is created. Bazerman also defines genre sets (the collection of types of texts someone in a particular role is likely to produce, IE: all of the documents a teacher produces for a course) and genre systems (comprised of the several genre sets of people working together in an organized way, plus the patterned relationships in the production, flow, and use of these documents, IE: The teacher’s documents and the students’ documents working together in the classroom setting) He suggests that examining genre sets allows you to see the full range and variety of the writing work that can be required within a role (IE: all of the different documents a teacher could be expected to create), as well as identifying the genre knowledge and skills you need to accomplish that work (IE: how a teacher could craft all of those documents)

• Each successful text creates a social fact for its reader
  • These social facts consist of meaningful social actions being accomplished through language, or speech acts
  • These speech acts are carried out in patterned, typical, and therefore intelligible textual forms or genres, which are related to other texts and genres that occur in related circumstances
  • Together the text types fit together as genre sets within genre systems, which are part of the systems of human activity
• The definition of genres only as a set of textual features ignores the role of individuals in using and making meaning
  • It ignores the differences of perception and understanding, the creative use of communications to meet perceived novel needs in novel circumstances, and the changing of genre understanding over time
  • Genres arise in social processes of people trying to understand each other well enough to coordinate activities and share meanings for their practical purposes
• The system of genres is also part of the system of activity of the class
  • In defining a system of genres people engage in, you also identify a framework which organizes their work, attention, and accomplishment
• Examining the genre system allows you to understand the practical, functional, and sequential interactions of documents, which allows you to see how individuals writing any new text are intertextually situated within a system and how their writing is directed by genre expectations and supported by systematic resources
  • Considering the activity system enables you to understand the total work accomplished by the system and how each piece of writing contributes to the total work

 

Charles Bazerman: Shaping Written Knowledge

            Bazerman is looking at how many textual elements shape written knowledge, but regarding genre he examines how genres help shape that knowledge. His work with genre is clearly inspired by Miller’s “Genre as Social action” (he even thanks her in the acknowledgements for her help). Specifically, he argues that “genre is a sociopsychological category which we use to recognize and construct typified actions within typified solutions – it is a way of creating order in the ever-fluid symbolic world.” Text and genre do not just respond to the rhetorical world – they help create it. When discussing the scientific academic community, Bazerman suggest that regularizing the writing genres and situations within specific communities can increase the likelihood of successful communication and thus knowledge creation. Only with a communally shared, reliable set of formulations will we be able to develop intelligent curricula to meet the local rhetorical needs of students entering into specific knowledge-generating communities, to frame efficient analytical procedures to allow writers to analyze their rhetorical situations and rhetorical options, and to present to other disciplines a knowledge and technology that will be of obvious use and power.

When speaking of students, he points out that each new text in a genre reinforces or remolds some aspect of the genre, so each reading of a text reshapes the social understanding of that text. However, genres should not be followed so meticulously that we must teach students cookie cutter approaches for their anticipated careers; instead, the students must understand and rethink rhetorical choices embedded in each generic habit in order to master the genre. Genre can stabilize the rhetorical situation and simplify rhetorical choices to be made, but the writer loses control of the writing when they do not understand the genre. As teachers, if we provide our students with only the formal trappings of the genres they need to work in, we offer them nothing more than unreflecting slavery to current practice and no means to ride the change that inevitably will come in the forty to fifty years they will practice their professions; we need to show students that genre is a flexible and ever-changing social phenomenon.

• There are many ways of grouping texts, depending on the analyst’s purposes, but when considering genres within their contexts, the generic classification that matters most must be the classification recognized by the users of those genres
• Writing is choice making, the evaluation of options – genres determine our choices
  • In whatever way these writing choices are realized and become institutionalized, they shape the kind of thing we consider contributions to knowledge
• It is remarkable that statements emerge over time that represent an overwhelming consensus as the best of currently available formulations, and that these formulations are sufficiently reliable to be near infallible
  • Ex: operating microwave ovens
• Theme of book: variety of discourse systems and their relation to evolving communities
• The differences between texts are not just on the page, but in how the page places itself with respect to social, psychological, textual, and natural worlds
• If the communal wisdom of a discipline has stabilized the rhetorical situation, rhetorical goals, and rhetorical solutions for accomplishing those goals in those situations, the individual writer and reader no longer need make so many fundamental choices and perform virtuosities of communication
• Genre is not just a linguistic category defined by a structured arrangement of textual features
• The textual features associated with any particular genre do not necessarily have a fixed definition – even attempts by social processes of institutionalization to hold features firm only lead to temporary stability
• In recognizing and using genre, we are mobilizing multidimensional clusters of our understanding of the situation, our goals, and our activity
  • Understanding the genre one is working in is understanding decorum in the most fundamental sense – what stance and attitude is appropriate given the world one is engaged in at that moment
• Because genre is such a multidimensional, fluid category that only gains meaning through its use as an interpretive, constructive tool, the reduction of any genre to a few formal items that must be followed for the sake of propriety misses the life that is embodied in the generically shaped moment
  • A list of formal requirements of any particular genre gives us only weak command over what we are doing and gives us no choice in mastering or transforming the moment
  • We do better to grant ourselves and our students means to understand the forms of life embodied in current symbolic practice, to evaluate the consequences of the received rhetoric, and to attempt to transform our rhetorical world when such transformation appears advisable

 

Amy J. Devitt: Writing Genres

Devitt builds upon and extend Miller’s definition of genre as a typified social action. She associates genre with recurrent situation; in other words, she expands from “rhetorical situation” to an interaction of different contexts at different levels that encompass the impact of preexisting genres as well as situation and cultural context. Most definitions of genre refer only to a genre’s situational context, but Devitt adds two more levels: culture and other genres. Culture (a shared set of material contexts and learned behaviors, values, beliefs, and templates) influences how situation is constructed and how it is seen as recurring in genres. It defines what situations and genres are possible or likely (and it is a dynamic element in constructing both; adding culture is important because it captures the way existing ideological contexts partially construct what genres are and are in turn constructed by performing genre actions. “Other genres” refers to the fact that one never speaks/writes in a void; we always have access to existing genres we have encountered through experience or suggestion. The “context of genres” includes all the existing genres in that society, the individual genres and sets of genres, the relatively stagnant and the changing genres, the genres commonly used and those not used. The existence of prior genres shapes the development of new or newly learned genres. The context of situation, context of culture, and context of genres all influence the actions of writers/speakers, speakers/listeners – and they do it partly through genre

Devitt also argues for teachers to teach contextual genres, situated within their contexts of culture, situation, and other genres. She explains that generic forms must be embedded within their social and rhetorical purposes so that rhetorical understanding can counter their urge toward following a formula. Genres must also be embedded within their social and cultural ideology so that critical awareness can counter potential ideological effects. Genres must also be taught as both constraint and choice so that individual awareness can lead to individual creativity. Devitt is arguing for teaching genre awareness, a critical consciousness of both rhetorical purpose and ideological effects of generic forms. This method of teaching will enable writers to learn newly encountered genres when they are immersed in a context for which they need those genres; students may also acquire new genres that can serve as antecedent genres for their future writing. The goals of teaching genre awareness are for students to understand the intricate connectedness between contexts and forms, to perceive potential ideological effects of genres, and to discern both constraints and choices that genres make possible. Devitt believes that to deny this knowledge of genre to students is to hide the fact the language, genre, and writing interact; she also believe that this would deny them access to a better understanding of why and what they write (similar to Mitchell)

• Genres as types of rhetorical actions that people perform in their everyday interactions with their worlds
• She breaks with older, traditional notions of genre and moves toward more contemporary views in order to explain why genre cannot be equated with classification (though they do classify), and why genre cannot be equated with forms (though they are often associated with formal features)
• She argues that genre both encourages standardization and enables variation and that, similarly, genre both constrains and enables individual creativity

• Genre entails purposes, participants, and themes, so understanding it entails understanding a rhetorical situation and its social context
• Genres help people do things in the world
  • They are both social and rhetorical actions – they operate as people interact with others in purposeful ways
  • Genres are strategies that have commonly been used to answer situations
• The genre a writer needs for a particular situation often already exists and hence already guides responses to that situation
  • Genre depends heavily on the intertextuality of discourse
• Knowing the genre means knowing such rhetorical aspects as appropriate subject matter, level of detail, tone, and approach as well as the expected layout and organization
  • Knowing a genre means not only knowing how to conform to generic conventions, but also knowing one way of responding appropriately to a given situation
• If genre is based on recurrence at all, it must be a recurrence perceived by the individuals who use genres
• A writer/reader recognizes recurrence because they recognized an existing genre
  • But for existing genres to exist at all, people must have perceived similarities among disparate situations
  • Paradoxically, people recognize recurring situations because they know genres, yet genres exist only because people have acted as though situations have recurred
• This paradox works because people construct genre through situation and situation through genre – their relationship is reciprocal and dynamic
• Rhetorical situations never actually recur – each situation is unique
  • Genre and situation are reciprocal, mutually constructed, and integrally interrelated
• Because a genre develops from the actions of the people in the group in the context of a perceived situation, the genre will show how most people in the group act or are expected to act and what most of its members believe, behave as if they believe, or think they should believe
• The encouragement of conformity among its participants is a fact of genre, for genres provide an expected way of acting
• The loss of a genre reflects the loss of its function, the result of changing needs and ideologies as society and individuals change
• The existence of a genre in an established rhetorical and social context does not dictate any writing – it is a choice to be made with powerful incentives and punishments attached
• Genre necessarily simultaneously both constrains and enables writers and such a combination of constraint and choice is essential to creativity
  • Creativity theory suggests that creativity derives from constraint as much as from freedom, giving genres a significant role in making choices possible
• Genres conventionalize formal expectations, and make visible opportunities for variations
• Having learned how to perceive the purpose behind form, the learner can discover the purposes behind the particular forms they notice
  • Having learned how to discern potential ideological effects, the learner can be alert to the ideologies underlying the genres they are acquiring
• Teaching language and genre explicitly risks enforced conformity to formula, but it also has the potential reward of helping students integrate their understanding of rhetoric with linguistic and generic forms that they produce

 

How I would answer a question related to genre:

(This would be a good Aristotle’s Time Machine approach)

I would move chronologically through all five authors. I would treat Aristotle’s conception of the three oral genres first. I would mention what they are and define them, then move into Ong’s notion that the move from orality to literacy influenced the way people think; thus, literacy enabled the existence of more genres than orality did. Ong’s notion is the bridge between Aristotle and Miller, Bazerman, and Devitt.

Next, I’d treat Miller’s argument that genre is social action: a rhetorically sound definition of genre is centered on the action is it meant to perform. When constructing a discourse, we adopt social motivations to make our private intentions a reality. This kind of a definition helps us understand rhetorical situations better, as well as adapt to a discourse community. I would compare Miller to Aristotle, pointing out that her idea is not as revolutionary as it may seem; indeed, it is a response to contemporary notions of genre that construe it as a form, not to Aristotle. Aristotle’s three genres are both formal and social: they suggest formal elements, but their use is social in nature. An orator would not use epideictic in the place of forensic, though a forensic speech may call for elements of the epideictic in order to perform its intended action.

Then, I’d move on to Bazerman. He expands on Miller: genres are not only social action, but social forces also effect which genre will be chosen. Text and genre do not just respond to the rhetorical world; they help create the knowledge within it (writing is a set of choices, and its power lies in the writer’s self-consciousness of those choices). However, a writer must fully understand a genre before using it; failure to understand it can result in its misuse and thus a failure of the text to effect its social action. This is another notion of genre that it seems Aristotle would agree with. Though he only advocates three genres, it seems he would argue that the orator must fully understand their formal conventions as well as typical situations in which they occur. For example, if an orator is making a speech in a situation that calls for him to prove someone innocent of wrongdoing (forensic/judicial), but focuses heavily on asking the judges to deliberate, it is likely that they do not understand the genre and will fail to convince his audience in his favor.

Finally, I’d bring up Devitt’s expanded definition of genre. Where Miller and Bazerman seem to bring up elements of genre with which Aristotle would agree (since they are built into his own genres), Devitt blows up the typical definition a makes it much more broad than it seems Aristotle would have conceived of. She add two more levels to the standard definition of genre: it is not only situational context, but also cultural context and other genres. Cultural context limits and promotes certain genres in certain contexts, while other genres set a precedent for what has been done in the past (as well as implications of what can be done in the future). Such antecedence is grounded in literacy, as Ong’s argument suggests. Devitt also argues for teaching genre awareness. Like Bazerman (who argues for regulating genres so that students may learn more easily how to operate within them), she does not mean drilling students on the formal qualities of particular genres. Instead, she wants so make students aware of the opportunities and constraints genres entail and how they can help students realize their own ability to work within and without of particular genres (by either adhering to or manipulating them). Students would then develop knowledge of a large supply of antecedent genres from which they may draw. Aristotle appears to be silent on this issue of the impact a broadened social awareness would have on genre, as well was the effect of genre awareness on an orator’s ability to speak. Obviously, an orator must have some awareness of his genre (enough that, as Bazerman suggest, he will not fail in his rhetorical situation), but since he only needs to be conversant in three genres, he need not establish a pool of antecedent genres form which he may draw.