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by Rich Rice
Texas Tech University
The roots of contemporary composition stem from classical rhetoric with
the Sophists in the 5th-Century B.C.E., followed by the great teacher Isocrates,
the idealist Plato,
the philosopher-father Socrates,
the systems theorist Aristotle,
the great rhetor Demosthenes,
the stasis theorist Hermagoras,
and other practitioners. Classical Rhetoric courses typically trace rhetorical
theory through Greece into the Roman rhetoric of the statesman Cicero
and the educational psychologist Quintilian,
to the medieval religious leader Augustine.
The classical system includes the canons of invention,
arrangement,
style,
memory,
and delivery.
And teachers prompt student discussion over concepts like stasis
theory, commonplaces,
kairos,
true
and false rhetoric, imitatio,
enthymemes,
the rhetorical
paideia, phronesis
or practical wisdom, the topoi,
the appeals,
how classic inventio
differs from its modern use, neoclassical and contemporary applications
of the classical system, and how the seemingly disparate twin legs of Plato's
dialectic and Aristotle's rhetoric come together in Augustine's Christian
rhetoric to form a sort of epistemological conceit. Teachers also focus
on the social functions of the ancients' emphasis on deliberative
speeches, forensic
speeches, and epideictic
speeches. The deliberative is the political, the forensic is
the legal, and the epideictic helps the audience understand and celebrate
the present. The Classical Rhetoric course emphasizes the situational and
the contextual, and this is what contemporary composition theory concentrates
on, as well. It's the conceptual framework that modern theorists often hammer
into the well-known shape of the rhetorical
triangle.
There it is. That is my conjecture. The Classical Rhetoric course in a paragraph. Enter new media.
Content must be contextualized, teachers must bring theory into practice, and students must relate the objective via the subjective.
To move forward the tone of the course must be personally meaningful.
