Comments on 1/28/10 Readings

I found this week’s readings to be a fast-and-furious historical and annotated bibliographic introduction to why modern or contemporary rhetorical theory is the way it is today in the college/university environment.

I enjoyed Corbett’s “Introduction” from Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student because of the way it linked contemporary rhetoric – in the form of advertising – with classical rhetoric – in the form of the speeches given to Achilles in order to get him to go back to fighting so that the Greeks do not lose in the war against the Trojans. Having spent the Fall semester in Dr. Staggers’s Visual Rhetoric course, reading an ad such as the one for the HP Color Printer from both a visual and a rhetorical perspective made perfect sense to me. I was also particularly fond of Corbett’s statement that those who write ads “are some of the most skillful rhetoricians in our society” (2). Before returning to academia about ten years ago, I worked for a number of years at a mail order/catalog company. During my tenure there, I had the opportunity at one point to serve as our in-house copywriter. Our catalogs had a set format, but as a copywriter you had to be able to create text that would marry with pictures in such a way that products would sell. In this regard, I found the discussion about audience – particularly as it involved the use of pronouns – to be relevant. As a copywriter, and part of a larger marketing/merchandising enterprise, I always knew our audience was a certain group of women, in the 35+ age range, who would likely spend anywhere from $50-$100 on any given order. So I was always writing to that group or the collective you, as well as the single or the individual you. And, I suppose I can say this now since I have not been with that particular company for well over a decade now, that all of our products were pretty much cheap junk that it was my job as copywriter to make look as attractive as possible so people would buy it anyway. What was, perhaps, most interesting in terms of a connection that Corbett’s article allowed me to see, is that classical or contemporary, the aim – or one of the aims – of rhetoric remains the same after 2,500 years: to “persuade or motivate an audience, whether that audience is made up of one person or a group of persons” (1).

Having read some of Campbell, Blair, and Whatley’s work in Dr. Nagelhout’s History of Rhetoric course last year, I was somewhat familiar with their ideas. The understanding the article “The Triumph of Eighteenth-Century Rhetoric” allowed me to come to was just how influential these authors’ works were on the development of rhetorical education in the US. Indeed, Berlin informs us that the works of this trio dominated rhetorical education for most of the 19th century in the US. Where Campbell is concerned, I found Berlin’s description of Campbell’s position interesting: Campbell thought that “Oratory simply engages more faculties in the speaker and the listener: the understanding, the imagination, the passions, the judgment, and the will. Thus persuasive oratory transcends even poetry—the realm of imagination and passion—in its inclusiveness, becoming the apotheosis of human language acts” (22). Considering Campbell was an 18th century figure—from the Age of Enlightenment, Reason, and Rationality—I found this description of Campbell’s ideas on rhetoric to be rather Romantic. Of course, Berlin reminds us that all three—Campbell, Blair, and Whatley—of these educators were concerned with celebrating, if not exalting, the traditional and maintaining the status quo of the time. The study of literature “was to support the existing social and economic arrangement, as well as to provide a stay for religion and morality. In keeping with the dominant national mood, poetry, drama, and fiction were expected to be optimistic about the future” (33). This point reminded me of the articles we read in our fist class meeting where one or two of the individuals cited called for the study of literature in the contemporary period to eschew deconstructive trends in favor of supporting the tradition of “the Great Books.” I also liked finding out, through Berlin’s discussion of Blair, that Blair was an important figure behind the idea of “using literature to teach writing” (27), something we have moved away from doing, at least at UNLV.

Connors’ article, as its title suggest, describes the rise and fall of the modes of discourse, which include, Narration, Description, Exposition, and Argument. The modes took over or dominated writing/rhetorical instruction in the late 19th century (with roots going back to the early 19th century) in America, and continued to dominate it until the 1940s when they fell out of favor because they really did not teach students how to write. What was most interesting to me was reading this article in relation to how we teach Composition here at UNLV. In ENG 101, we teach students how to write narrative essays, then move on to extended definition and process or procedure essays, and conclude with problem/solution essays. All of which seem, to me, like modes of discourse similar, if not exactly the same, to those used for the 60 or 70 years between the late 1800s and the mid 1900s. The modes, as Connors makes clear, were replaced by exposition and, most importantly, thesis driven approaches to writing. Now, even though we use what I would call a modal approach to teaching writing here at UNLV, we also focus on students’ ability to create a thesis within whatever mode of writing we are assigning them to do.

Kinneavy’s discussion of the aims of discourse allows us to see writing—as a discursive practice—in a manner similar to that of the ancient rhetoricians (he cites Aristotle most often in his artice). Indeed, in the 1960s when this piece was written originally, writing involved a writer, a reader, and the means or medium of communication (writing, in this case) that was used as the interface between them. All with the aim of the writer’s informing or persuading the reader of some point of view. What I thought was most intriguing about Kinneavy’s article was his rejection of the New Critical “intentional” and “affective” fallacies in favor of including both reader and authorial intentions in the meaning-making or discursive processes. Both are a part of, a necessary part of, the transaction of persuasion.

Finally, I found Lauer’s extensive article on rhetorical invention to be informative about the evolution of ideas associated with invention but also, ultimately, tedious to wade through. This article makes it seem like every possible approach to invention has been covered, dissected, and expostulated upon ad infinitum. I did, however, appreciate the commentary/reflections on the postmodern debates about writing as something that is innate to us or, rather, a product of the society and cultural conditions in which we live, which came up toward the end of the article and in particular as regards feminist studies of writing. I would have liked Lauer to take these ideas further and opened them up to things like studies of race, disability, ecocriticism, queer studies, and such.