Almost directly after I posted my last post on Downs, he posted this to the WPA-L. Interestingly, too, I read Bazerman's 1980 piece against expressivism, and in it he discussed the distinction between the conversation and the apprentice model. Is Downs's version of rhetoric not conversational? I get a sense that what's going on here is similar to the disagreement between Spinuzzi and Carolyn Miller, the latter who thinks that activity theory isn't rhetorical.
I also might add that Carillo and Downs seem to depart on a reading of activity theory.
One way I've been thinking about Keith's question -- "why have we landed on a kind of reduced Aristotelian rhetoric ... as a commonplace of our courses (and, in spades, our textbooks)?" -- is by critiquing this reduction of rhetoric to "rhet-lite," substituting a few shards of vocabulary for genuine mindfulness and concrete meaningfulness. As happened with "process," our field has sufficiently emphasized the importance of rhetoric that secondary ed and factory-comp now both routinize it ("logos-ethos-pathos!"), squeezed of most meaning and invoked largely as shibboleth. Keith's critique of the resulting generalities seems fair.
So I certainly don't want to (re)teach rhet-lite. But I do see a need for, and advantage in, teaching a rich contemporary rhetoric despite Keith's hints that if it's teachable it's probably drained of meaningful specificity to begin with, and that writers get by pretty well without explicit knowledge of rhetoric. To an extent I agree with both goads, but I think that in a couple ways, good rhetorical instruction can make however competent a writer more competent.
1. Part of why Aristotelian rhetoric gets "lite" so quickly is because we (western cultures since its recovery in the 19th/20th cents) place WAY more weight on it than it can (or ever could) carry. Classical rhetoricians in the Aristotelian line tried to deduce the entirety of rhetorical principles from a tiny set of rhetorical situations involving an even tinier set of (privileged and thus non-representative) audiences. That was never going to work. But contemporary rhetorical theory / research has been widely expanding that ground. Sometimes by recovering understanding that did inhere in classical, particularly sophistic, rhetorics but got ignored by the platonic tradition; I'm thinking, for example, of incredibly rich work done on ethos by current rhetoric scholars. Sometimes by responding to the wildly richer array of scenes of rhetoric available to us now as compared to Greek times, expanding our ways of thinking about rhetoric in directions that, quite frankly, simply matter more than much of what Aristotelian rhetoric has come down to us as; here I'm thinking, for example, of rhetorical ecology as elucidated the past three decades. Sometimes through investigation of indigenous rhetorics and rhetorics of dis/ability -- so much amazing work being done on ways rhetoric works outside white, male, ableist cultural expectations. (Apologies if I leave your favorite line of contemporary rhetorical inquiry out of this quick set of examples.)
Because rhet-lite (a not-very-rich version of Platonist/Aristotelian rhetoric) is more or less ubiquitous background knowledge for many entering college students now, what we need to be teaching of rhetoric in college writing courses is this richness that typically undermines the more simplistic rhetorical understandings. What do we get by adding rhetorical ecology to rhetorical situation, for example, or shifting the focus of ethos from "credibility" to "place and way of being"? Contemporary rhetorics counter various misconceptions of writing that are usually reified or at least not challenged by Aristotelian rhetoric: the lone inspired writer / dictator; the sender-receiver communication model; linear process; the deprecation of emotion / pathetic appeal; the generalization of "audience" into gross types (y'know, young men, middle-aged men, old men); the notion that rhetors are speakers but not listeners; on and on.
So for me, teaching a rich, contemporary set of rhetorical principles, not Aristotelian rhet-lite, is a crucial path to addressing cultural misconceptions of writing and writing process, and helping students with limited writing experiences beyond school and interpersonal/social-media uses prepare for writing in other scenes (professional, civic, etc.).
2. I also feel bound to teach various contemporary principles of rhetoric because I think awareness, mindful deliberateness, helps. What I'm reaching for here is the space created by the truths that a) if I try to learn to ride a bicycle, or try to ride a bicycle, by analyzing the physics/biology/chemistry of the activity, I'm pretty likely not to ride the bicycle well, or at all -- but yet b) the world's best bicycle riders know a whole damn lot about the physics of bicycles and the biochemistry of riding them, and that knowledge improves their riding. I don't want to mistake rhetorical theory for writing, and I don't want to say that you have to know rhetorical theory to write, and I don't want to say that rhetorical theory is the best way to teach writing. (I'm pretty sure that the best way to teach writing is to assign a lot of it and then talk and write a lot about what gets written and then write it some more.) But for myself as a writer, for some other writers I've observed, and from what I hear from a fair number of students, there is something really helpful to a writer about being about to understand the why's and how's of the ways writers craft writing for users, and the things writers have to think about to do this, from contemporary rhetorical perspectives. From "here's why the people telling you not to use pathos appeals are so often using pathos appeals themselves and why you should too" to "this is a really complex writing situation and you can think deliberately about all the rhetors in this ecology who are making it so," a rich rhetorical awareness and mindfulness expands a writer's available options and understanding and in many ways can bring some peace of mind, or at least clarity, to otherwise muddled and hazy situations. (Short form: rhetorical awareness strongly assists, or may even be damn near identical with, metacognition.)
So I want to use rich contemporary rhetorical theory (and there is no way to boil it all down to single a routinized account that can be taught in a single class) to, basically, help writers grow more powerful than when they enter my class.
As to the underlying question -- why do rich systems of thought get wrung out, oversimplified, ossified, and packaged into unrecognizability when we create teaching systems, aids, resources, and curricula -- well, that would require a broader critique of western civilization at least back to Ramus. On that basis always questioning my continuing participation in higher ed --
Doug
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