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Articles Conference Reviews |
Session H8Reclaiming Ann E. Berthoff for the Twenty-First Century Poking fun at the way we rhetoricians like to re-visit everything, and the propensity for we feminists to “re-claim” whatever has been previously undervalued, Kate Ronald reminded us of Berthoff’s definition of reclaim: “to help bring back alive from captivity,” and this indeed provided the theme and inspiration for this panel who feels that Berthoff’s work is as relevant as it has ever been, if not more so. Kate Ronald and Hephzibah Roskelly have spent enough time with both Berthoff the scholar, and Berthoff the irascible conference-goer, that they were able to weave more than a few amusing anecdotes into their presentations. The third speaker, Jason Palmeri, made a cogent argument for the application of Berthoff’s insights to multi-modal composing. Kate Ronald opened the session by urging the audience to re-visit Berthoff’s books in order to re-employ “her work as tools in this post-modern world.” Ronald hypothesized that Berthoff’s work became isolated because it avoided categorization—though she was sometimes labeled as a romantic, sometimes an expressivist, and by others a social epistemic—which, Ronald quipped, Ann would claim was an adjective, NOT a noun. Ronald concluded her trip down memory lane with a final quote from Berthoff: “We need to teach our students to write better—not exhort them to!” Hephzibah Roskelly spoke next on this panel, positing that Berthoff’s work has been neglected because of her insistence that we take ourselves to task, an unpopular position in the Reagan 80’s when positivism and overcategorization were the idols of the day. Berthoff was “prescient,” Roskelly declared, in pointing out the dangers of “outcome based education” and “our continual push for definitions rather than actions.” Roskelly asked us to reconsider the titles of Berthoff’s many books—and to gather up all the action words in them: forming, thinking, writing, learning, making, reading, and, of course, reclaiming. Although Roskelly didn’t directly make the link between action words and advocacy, she did state this: “For Ann, and for Coleridge before her, the imagination is the forming power of the mind, and, if to compose is to form, then through syllogism, when we imagine we must compose.” Like Wordsworth, who defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflowing of emotion, recollected in tranquility,” Roskelly re-visited the connection between imagination and reflection, revealing invention to be a “re-cognizing of experience and using it to recreate words and worlds.” Roskelly re-visited Berthoff’s definition of rhetoric, which, to date, is my favorite: “the study of misunderstandings and their remedies.” Jason Palmeri spoke about “Reclaiming Berthoff for the Digital Age.” “What drew me to Berthoff,” he began, “was her capacious vision of what it means to compose.” Because he is familiar with multi-modal composing, Palmeri needed a larger vision, a “generative vocabulary” to help him talk about his composing. “When I’m making a video,” remarked Palmeri, “everything happens all at once—no pre-writing, drafting, or revising happens in a linear way.” Heeding Berthoff’s belief that “you need to see imagination in action in order to understand the diverse ways people make meaning in the world,” Palmeri found himself looking closely at elementary classrooms where students do not yet separate the visual arts from the written word—as stories are often accompanied with pictures. Palmeri left the audience with food for thought, stating that “multiple symbol systems might be the way to generate the state of chaos needed for invention.” Later, in the Q & A when Peter Elbow asked why Berthoff was so hard to read, Palmeri compared her writing to that of experimental hypertext, pointing out that “her structure was associative, which was also the logic of new media.” He reminded us that Berthoff’s teachings will forever be relevant in a field as reflexive as ours—that thrives upon “observing our observations and interpreting our interpretations.” What I am failing to convey is the exquisite combination of theory and humor presented by all three panelists, a perfect homage to the scholar/creator/comedian that Berthoff is. Ann Berthoff herself was invited to this session, though she declined to attend. She is 86 years old, in pretty good health we were told, and I am sure I speak for many of us there that day when I say that we would have loved to give her a standing ovation, albeit virtual. |