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