Number 2: for the week of Thursday, January 28, 2010
My dear readers,
The general impression I get when examining together the ideas contained in this week's readings is a long-standing attempt to determine if rhetoric still has a purpose and if it does what that purpose may be. Whether we are talking about Burke’s five key terms, which make me wonder Burke was a journalist since they remind me of the things a reporter wants to know… who, what, when, where, why, and how.
Richards' idea of rhetoric as the idea of understanding language and remedying misunderstandings to me goes along with what Campbell has in mind in trying to use rhetoric and particularly persuasion to affect certain feelings in listeners. In that way the rhetoric used by a speaker or writer would build feelings within the audience based on what they had previously experienced much in the same way Lev Vygotsky’s idea of scaffolding constructs skills one on top of the other students move through Education. That idea is built on the premise that students learn from models.
Blair firmly believes in the principle that students learn effective writing through modeling examples of effective writing. I'm reminded of Dr. Samuel Johnson who said that students learn good writing by studying examples in the “correctest style”. (Thank you Dr. Leon Coburn English 206 for giving me that reference all those years ago). Mind you, Whately somewhat in contrast wanted to try to marry a classical rhetoric of Aristotle to the imperialism of his time. Although Berlin makes the case that Whately’s rhetoric didn't necessarily match up with that of Campbell and Blair, I disagree. With Blair at least the connection to Whately is clear to me. After all, Blair favored looking at classical models and what more classical model could there be than the great Aristotle? I guess I just don't see the distinction in their types of rhetoric that Berlin does. Neither did Newman either I guess except for his mania for classification.
While I do believe that differentiations between different modes of writing can be necessary for effective study Newman's definition on page 445 of the Connors article seems to allow no possibility for intermixing of different modes of writing something which I would think would soon prove faulty to anyone who's done much writing it all, even if that writing isn't in any way literary. Also, as an aspiring poet I take offense at Bain's assertion mentioned on page 445 of the Connors article assertion that certainly appears to downgrade poetry and literature in general. Granted, English 701 is not a literature class, but wouldn't you think that proponents of rhetoric having sort of been under literature's thumb for so many years would just maybe not mention literature at all except where it helped their cause.
It makes sense to me that Bain's model would have a better chance of being accepted than that of Newman and his contemporaries who only mentioned their theories as apparent afterthoughts incidental to whatever else they were doing. Bain had the proper perspective don't just mention your theory within the context of something else, build your entire context out of your particular theory. Of course that doesn't necessarily mean everyone's going to agree with you, Hill seminal figure in the creation of the Harvard model and we read about last week only adopted Bain's ideas when his own began falling out of favor.
Like Corbett I've also wondered why the grand exalted field of "rhetoric" only seems to deal with, from a literature major’s point of view, with huge formal speeches (I have a dream, etc.) when those study rhetoric should know that there are relatively few situations in life where anyone has to speak that way. As Corbett points out most of life is small talk, you know, asking someone how their day went, and such like. I don't want to irritate anybody, but maybe that's why rhetoric got such a raw deal for so many years. Maybe a lot of English departments felt that rhetoric had less of a connection to the rest of the world than did literature. Put another way, maybe it was believed that a piece of literature, let's say Huckleberry Finn, was more widely known to most readers and therefore more likely to help them understand the concepts they needed to learn than some of Cicero's writings or speeches.
Corbett's examples with advertising sort of fall flat with me, mainly because I cannot tell what in the world the advertisement is supposed to be. Moreover, when he starts going on and on about copiers I think his argument starts to get muddled. I think the point can be and is made just as effectively without the foray into advertising. (I'm sorry, I'm not a marketing major and I do not wish to be).
Kinneavy, in our text, writes that he wants to deal with full context not just individual words in isolation. Moreover he wants to deal with what effect they have on readers. This puts him in line with Campbell, though not necessarily Blair said he really doesn't make a lot of mention of working from specifically classical models. I do like that Kinneavy brings up the intentional fallacy, that is, the falseness of the idea that we can determine with 100% accuracy an authors view upon a subject based upon what he or she writes. Now, granted, most writers, if given the choice, would probably put something of their own views into what they write. However, to draw a strict one-to-one correlation denies the possibility first of all of fiction, and second of all that a writer may compose a particular work at the request of someone else who may hold a different point of view than does the author. In particular now I'm thinking of writers like Shakespeare who had to write to please the particular case of their patrons whatever they happened to be.
Thank you so much for your time,
James Altman
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Number 1: for the week of Thursday, January 21, 2010
My dear readers,
Overall the articles for this week give the impression of composition studies as a field only just now in the last few decades coming into itself and beginning to attain self-knowledge. Moreover several articles, notably Introduction, with its historical overview of what the American college experience used to be like, shows both the relative youth of the field and that not everyone has always agreed on what the discipline should follow.
What is composition studies, and what should it be? That is what I kept hearing repeated again and again in one form or another throughout the articles we read. Mind you, that question, for most of American intellectual history, could be better phrased as what is a proper university education and what should it do? In other words, should composition studies, whether called rhetoric, composition, or just plain old English, have a traditional academic focus, concerning itself only with a small minority of the population who have attended the right prep schools and been exposed to certain masterworks to the conscious exclusion of many other types of knowledge? Or should composition studies and education in general try to embrace all comers regardless of their previous experiences?
Hill struggles with this even before the much lauded inception of the Harvard model which based on German principles of lecture, free inquiry, and academic self determination through electives and individual disciplines was meant to improve upon the pre-1860 American model which privileged orality and rote memorization over the modern idea of written expression of ideas. Of course, as we read although orality was clearly supreme at Yale in 1766 and North Carolina Chapel Hill in the early 19th century writing did get done. The important thing however was the focus on the content of the writing was based almost entirely on classics, either Greco Roman or English, which most of the wider American population never encountered regularly.
Although the Harvard model was seen by many as an improvement over the old American system where college presidents could spoonfeed their small student bodies virtually any mix of religion and classics that they personally felt comfortable with, the eventual Harvard entrance exam, based as it was only a few major literary works, probably excluded as many or more of the type of students Harvard wanted and could have benefited from, as it allowed in. This is because even today no one can be exposed to everything. That is the question then. Who or what should be privileged in academia? Also, who gets to define whether a particular population of students is literate or not?
Today classroom populations at all levels are more diverse than ever. Yet the old guard gatekeepers of academia are just as homogeneous, by and large, as they were when Elliott took charge at Harvard. In other words, there is a disconnect between the traditional academic elite and members of new student populations wishing to participate in academia. This can include minorities, women, and those with physical impairments. Traditional academia makes no provisions for these groups because all else being equal it would rather not deal with them.
In Yancey's article she talks about the democratization of reading and 19th century Britain new forms particularly newspapers allowed more people to share an experience more ideas than ever before. I can only imagine that scared the hell out of the traditional pillars of British society. According to Yancey the same sort of thing may be beginning today with the emergence of electronic media e-mail personal homepages Facebook and so on. Today, just as in 19th century Britain more people are mattering in a true intellectual sense of being able to grapple with and analyze the world around them without the mediating influence of their social betters than ever before. Unfortunately, it does not surprise me that traditional authorities like secondary education are nervous about this. Of course they would be, this is a form of discourse they cannot control. This is a part of society they cannot polish up and place in a glass case for display to the world as proof of their own glory and effectiveness.
Rightly or wrongly, when I hear teachers at any of the levels I have taught at the moment their students cannot write effectively, I cannot help thinking that every teacher of writing inevitably says that as if they were the first person to receive such a revelation. Do we as writing teachers only say that because we are frustrated that our students have not had the sort of experiences that we had with writing, those kinds of positive experiences which made us want to become writing teachers in the first place? The same type of question enters my mind when I read the re-examination of the study by Durst. Please understand, the conclusions drawn both in the study by Durst, and the re-examination about 15 years later are not necessarily what troubled me. I don't have any problem with what they did simply with the gap they never thought of. They define their groups simply by age. To me this is insufficient just because someone is over age 18 and therefore considered an adult are we supposed to believe that everyone's experiences are the same regardless of demographics geographic location presence or lack of some physical impairment etc. I say no, and I see a study which does not take these other factors into account in the same way that I see the entrance exam to Harvard in Elliott's time as at best excluding information and talent it could make better use of, or at worst hiding its head in the sand to the realities of a changing world.
Yours truly,
James Altman
My dear readers,
Overall the articles for this week give the impression of composition studies as a field only just now in the last few decades coming into itself and beginning to attain self-knowledge. Moreover several articles, notably Introduction, with its historical overview of what the American college experience used to be like, shows both the relative youth of the field and that not everyone has always agreed on what the discipline should follow.
What is composition studies, and what should it be? That is what I kept hearing repeated again and again in one form or another throughout the articles we read. Mind you, that question, for most of American intellectual history, could be better phrased as what is a proper university education and what should it do? In other words, should composition studies, whether called rhetoric, composition, or just plain old English, have a traditional academic focus, concerning itself only with a small minority of the population who have attended the right prep schools and been exposed to certain masterworks to the conscious exclusion of many other types of knowledge? Or should composition studies and education in general try to embrace all comers regardless of their previous experiences?
Hill struggles with this even before the much lauded inception of the Harvard model which based on German principles of lecture, free inquiry, and academic self determination through electives and individual disciplines was meant to improve upon the pre-1860 American model which privileged orality and rote memorization over the modern idea of written expression of ideas. Of course, as we read although orality was clearly supreme at Yale in 1766 and North Carolina Chapel Hill in the early 19th century writing did get done. The important thing however was the focus on the content of the writing was based almost entirely on classics, either Greco Roman or English, which most of the wider American population never encountered regularly.
Although the Harvard model was seen by many as an improvement over the old American system where college presidents could spoonfeed their small student bodies virtually any mix of religion and classics that they personally felt comfortable with, the eventual Harvard entrance exam, based as it was only a few major literary works, probably excluded as many or more of the type of students Harvard wanted and could have benefited from, as it allowed in. This is because even today no one can be exposed to everything. That is the question then. Who or what should be privileged in academia? Also, who gets to define whether a particular population of students is literate or not?
Today classroom populations at all levels are more diverse than ever. Yet the old guard gatekeepers of academia are just as homogeneous, by and large, as they were when Elliott took charge at Harvard. In other words, there is a disconnect between the traditional academic elite and members of new student populations wishing to participate in academia. This can include minorities, women, and those with physical impairments. Traditional academia makes no provisions for these groups because all else being equal it would rather not deal with them.
In Yancey's article she talks about the democratization of reading and 19th century Britain new forms particularly newspapers allowed more people to share an experience more ideas than ever before. I can only imagine that scared the hell out of the traditional pillars of British society. According to Yancey the same sort of thing may be beginning today with the emergence of electronic media e-mail personal homepages Facebook and so on. Today, just as in 19th century Britain more people are mattering in a true intellectual sense of being able to grapple with and analyze the world around them without the mediating influence of their social betters than ever before. Unfortunately, it does not surprise me that traditional authorities like secondary education are nervous about this. Of course they would be, this is a form of discourse they cannot control. This is a part of society they cannot polish up and place in a glass case for display to the world as proof of their own glory and effectiveness.
Rightly or wrongly, when I hear teachers at any of the levels I have taught at the moment their students cannot write effectively, I cannot help thinking that every teacher of writing inevitably says that as if they were the first person to receive such a revelation. Do we as writing teachers only say that because we are frustrated that our students have not had the sort of experiences that we had with writing, those kinds of positive experiences which made us want to become writing teachers in the first place? The same type of question enters my mind when I read the re-examination of the study by Durst. Please understand, the conclusions drawn both in the study by Durst, and the re-examination about 15 years later are not necessarily what troubled me. I don't have any problem with what they did simply with the gap they never thought of. They define their groups simply by age. To me this is insufficient just because someone is over age 18 and therefore considered an adult are we supposed to believe that everyone's experiences are the same regardless of demographics geographic location presence or lack of some physical impairment etc. I say no, and I see a study which does not take these other factors into account in the same way that I see the entrance exam to Harvard in Elliott's time as at best excluding information and talent it could make better use of, or at worst hiding its head in the sand to the realities of a changing world.
Yours truly,
James Altman
Sunday, January 17, 2010
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