Introduction
Delivery problems
Re-mediating and
re-distributing delivery
The rhetorical scene
Take 1: Revising the canons
Society and socialization
Take 2: A cultural-historical remapping of rhetorical activity
Mapping literate activity
Using CHAT to form new canons
From the core text to the data nodes
References
Take 1: Revising the canons
Re-staging the scene of rhetorical encounters calls for an expanded dialogical mapping of rhetorical activity. Writers, for example, routinely work to shape the reception of their texts. We might hand a draft to someone and suggest a motive for reading (“I thought you might want to read this before our meeting, so you’d know how things are going in the program); or a framing (“It’s still a rough draft”); or a kind of desired response (“Please let me know if I’ve addressed your concerns”). We might work more diffusely to build a positive climate for reception. Oddly (and as one of the clearest signs of a dyadic, production-oriented perspective), audience is not one of the canons. Audience is addressed, considered through back doors (e.g., in invention by way of the commonplaces), but real audiences receiving the text and doing something with it are not figured in. Taking into account the reception and the response of audiences would expand the canons. It would imagine rhetorical utterances as dialogic in Valentin Voloshinov's (1973) and Mikhail Bakhtin's (1986) sense, a circuit only completed through the flow of contact. Folded back into the process, reception directs our attention to the many different receptions, chains that stretch from a writer’s moment-to-moment reviewing of a text to the kind of in-progress oral, written, and material responses to a series of texts cycled through an organization. Where are we now? Perhaps we might revise the canons by elaborating the two senses of delivery and adding reception.
Revising the canons: Take 1
Invention
Arrangement
Style
Memory
Mediation
Distribution
Reception