Invention: The Rebirth of Rhetoric

This week’s readings, following the title Modern Rhetorical Theory, chronicles the period in collegiate history in which rhetorical invention died to streamline and standardize the composition process. Current-Traditional Rhetoric, as outline by Berlin, dominated this era—the eighteenth century and on into the major part of the nineteenth. Supplemented with Corbett’s introduction to classical rhetoric, we can see Berlin’s retelling of the age of Current-Traditional Rhetoric as a period of great loss for composition studies. It was a time when the most rigid, mundane, and superficial theories on composition were idolized for their ability to speak to all the new citizens of society post-Civil War who were now vying for the chance to become welcomed into the social and intellectual upper-class. Lauer outlines this time as one in which rhetorical invention ceased to exist in the composition curriculum, a time when Berlin agrees composition studies became the study of a fragmented argumentation, the logical and scientific yang to persuasion’s emotional and oral ying. Connors continues this historic retelling of modern rhetoric; however, gives a brief and valuable suggestion that by the late 1950s, composition studies were beginning to focus more on methods of exposition and thesis-driven texts than on the modes of discourse. This prefaces Kinneavy’s “Basic Aims of Discourse,” which further dissects the components and players of communication into modern roles each piece plays in understanding and classifying discourse.

What struck me first when reading this week was the unquestioned dominance Current-Traditional Rhetoric held for so long. Perhaps a mixture of lack of interest in composition studies and the heightened need to teach so many students at the same time, Current-Traditional Rhetoric single-handedly stunted the growth of compositional studies for over a hundred years. But I must say from personal experience this is not all that unbelievable. Teaching students is difficult and there are many factors which stand in the way of teaching effectively, everything from monetary to class-size, not to mention the fact that teaching composition is still seen as a trial-run for professors who wish to prove their worth before entering the more status-boosting realm of literary studies.

But even from a managerial perspective, one which Current-Traditional Rhetoric is all too familiar with, it is impossible to teach students all they need to learn about writing in a single year, when they are part of a class of over one hundred students. I felt this tension first-hand, just as a writing tutor, when given a half-hour or mere hour of time with a student who wished to revise (or prewrite and compose) a full-on term paper. Let alone the fact that it takes nearly half of the time given in a single session to read these papers, it was often tempting to simply add a few commas, fix a few splices, and superficially correct the paper and hand it back without giving two words of advice on how to actually write better. But the purpose of a tutor is to work in baby steps, and it was often more effective to pick out one or two areas within a paper to develop rather than to dot the student’s “I”s and cross their “T”s.

A similar point comes out of reading Lauer’s outline of the reinvigoration of the rhetorical cannon of rhetoric throughout the later half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. Once scholars began to reimagine what could be done with writing and how it can influence study in many other areas, the possibilities for students became endless. Thankfully, it is no longer only thought that good writing is writing that is grammatically polished. Rather, good writing comes from most anywhere and anything; it is the critic’s job to find its social, psychological, hermeneutic, or epistemic place and the teacher’s job to cultivate such within his/her students.

With such a renewed sense of invention in writing, then, it seems odd that not much seems to have changed in the composition course since the reign of the Current-Traditionalists as evidenced in last week’s reading. Is it because the university is ahead of its time, and it is just a matter of time before the preparatory schools catch up? Or is it still a matter of money and class-size? Certainly, it is not a teacher’s fault that they are employed to instruct hundreds of students with no support or financial backing. But … then … whose fault is it?