| Date: Mon, 25
May 1998 05:21:36 -0700 (PDT)
From: janet cross <hceng028@email.csun.edu> To: RHETNET-L@lists.missouri.edu Subject: janet's statement Mid-semester I promised myself two things I felt would help me get over "re-entry" at the end of another hectic semester: first I would inform my family I was again available, then send them off to a movie so I could sit down, uninterrupted, and re-read Jim Berlin's Rhetoric and Reality. And so I did. And so they scoffed, knowing full well I would not be really available until I had spent just a few more hours, a few more days, doing what I don't normally get to do during the course of a semester: re-think where I have been and where I want to go next time. Re-entry is the twilight zone. Had I not been invited to share these ruminations for the Town Hall Meeting, my family would have had to listen to this, so they thank you for standing in, as it were, as they go off to enjoy whatever it is they do when I'm not looking. This discussion follows hard on the heels (and still in the midst) of fast, furious exchanges about global/ local literacy/ies, naming, self/other/community identity/ies, to school, or not to school. And through all this, I still return to Lisa Gerrard's descriptive taxonomy of C&W conference titles, troping our rhetoric/s fantastic: Blending opposing forces-electronic and rhetorical, academic and homey, doubtful and optimistic-we've created a rich hybrid. This coexistence of opposites is what I've seen of our language so far. Maybe it's the beginning of a rhetoric."What we will have become..." seems to necessarily follow where we have been. So I re-visit Berlin's monograph Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985 and am reminded that our "material conditions" have not changed overmuch from one fin de siecle to the next, yet writing instruction has changed with expectations of what "literacy" is or ought to be. Berlin reminds me: Changes in rhetorical theory and practice will be related to changes in the notion of literacy, as indicated by developments in the college curriculum. The curriculum, in turn, is always responsive to the changing economic, social, and political conditions in a society (5).Well, ok. This has been well noted on the list, you say. Yet Berlin insists the "college writing course...responds quickly to changes in American society as a whole." Emphasis here on *quickly.* Sometimes it's hard to see change in the midst of change. Berlin writes, "[In] 1874 the freshman English course at Harvard was established, by 1894 was the only requirement except for a modern language, and by 1897 was the only required course in the curriculum, consisting of a two semester sequence" (20). What was rapid change at Harvard seems slow in comparison to the change we are experiencing just in the closing decade of this century. So what then is writing becoming, we ask at the 14th Computer and Writing conference. If Berlin is right and literacy is the "intermediary" between the writing course and society, then who indeed shapes the writing course? And what is/are our rhetoric/s? Can we move toward, or begin to shape, a new rhetoric/s? A place to begin (and we certainly have already begun) might be in describing our own emerging taxonomy/ies of what such rhetoric/s might look like as we have begun/ are beginning/will begin. Berlin never claimed to be exhaustive in his monograph. He notes in his conclusion: I should at the start mention that the taxonomy I have used in discussing rhetoric and writing up to 1975 does not prove as descriptive after this date. The more important reason for this has been the tendency of certain rhetorics within the subjective and transactional categories to move in the direction of the epistemic, regarding rhetoric as principally a method of discovering and even creating knowledge, frequently within socially defined discourse communities (183).After nutshelling what folks were up to in their various "approaches," their contributions, he locates cmc in the transactional "cognitive" category this way: The considerable work in computers and composing also belongs in this category, with contributors too numerous to mention here, although the 1984 monograph on the subject by Jeanne W. Halpern and Sarah Liggett is a good initial overview of these developments (186).1987 to 1998 -- the rate of change is mind boggling at times. I could fill pages with lists of folks who have contributed to the development of our field. I have found Berlin's taxonomy useful in my own ruminations and here offer to nutshell his nutshell in his overview, hoping this will provide yet another productive way of grounding the discussion. Berlin describes an epistemological taxonomy of three major theories of rhetoric which co-mingle in this century: objective, subjective, and transactional. Objective rhetorics are based on a positivistic epistemology, asserting that the real is located in the material world. From this perspective, only that which is empirically verifiable or which can be grounded in empirically verifiable phenomena is real. Dominant form: current traditionalSubjective theories of rhetoric locate truth either within the individual or within a realm that is accessible only through the individual's internal apprehension, apart from the empirically verifiable sensory world. Features: metaphors, journals, peer editing groups Truth transcends the material realm, is attainable through a solitary vision, and resists expression. In this interpretation, though, the possibilities of rhetoric are expanded by calling on a different conception of language.Transactional rhetoric is based on an epistemology that sees truth as arising out of the interaction of the elements of the rhetorical situation: an interaction of subject and object or of subject and audience or even all the elements -- subject, object, audience, and language--operating simultaneously. Dominant forms: Classical: Truth located in a social construct involving the interaction of the interlocutor and audience (or discourse community). Truths are uncertain, open to debate, contingent, probable. Science, outside the bounds of rhetoric because claims are empirically verifiable, hence not open to debate, may be helpful to rhetoric, but not necessary. Cognitive rhetoric assumes a correspondence between the structures of the mind and the structures of nature. Emphasis is on the developmental stages of individuals who arrive at truth by engaging and examining the external world. Epistemic: posits a transaction that involves all elements of the rhetorical situation: interlocutor, audience, material reality, and language. Here language becomes a central concern. All experiences, even the scientific, and logical, are grounded in language, and language determines their content and structure.Let the wild rumpus start. |
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MOOlog of Online Town Hall Meeting hosted by Karen Schwalm
and Janet Cross on Mon., May 25, 1998 |
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Eric Crump
Lisa Gerrard
Steve Krause |
Paul LeBlanc
Karen Schwalm |