LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act.

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Southern Illinois UP: Carbondale, IL. (1987).

“Invention is regarded as an unfolding, a manifestation of an individual’s ideas, feelings, voice, personality, and patterns of thought” (2).
“invention is powerfully influenced by social collectives, such as institutions, bureaucracies, and governments, which transmit expectations and prohibitions, encouraging certain ideas and discouraging others” (2).

“I think that composition studies too often tend to treat rhetorical invention as an isolated phenomenon occurring in the composition class, while overlooking the import of ‘invention’ in its broader sense” (4).

“Language is regarded as at best a vehicle to represent a material object or a process or a scientific abstraction, and at worst, an obstacle or appendage, a necessary evil that conveys some approximation of things or ideas that exist prior to or beyond words” (6).

“Francis Bacon, who in the seventeenth century voiced a complaint that the word ‘invention’ was being improperly applied: ‘for to invent’ Bacon wrote, ‘is to discover that we know not, and not to recover or resummon that which we already know’; in Bacon’s view rhetorical invention wsa generally (and properly) regarded not as an act of creation but rather of remembering or locating knowledge that people already possessed” (6).

“More particularly, composition theory and pedagogy in nineteenth and twentieth century America have been founded on a Platonic view of invention, one which assumes that the individual possesses innate knowledge or mental structures that are the chief source of invention” (11).

“One would expect the predominant ideology of a society and its received views about the nature of human thought to affect and reinforce one another. Thus it is not surprising that the work of Soviet psychologists such as L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria stresses a reciprocal relationship between social activity and individual cognition, accomplished by language” (19).

“Luria bases his study on the assumption that consciousness is not something given in advance but is shaped by social activity and used to restructure conditions as well as to adapt to them. His experiments with Russian peasants confirmed his hypothesis that an individual’s mental processes and self-perception depend on, and change with, social history and social practices such as education and the organization of labor” (19).

Even if women believed in themselves the constant social practices and the conduct books would shape their view of self within society to be docile and subservient.


“The individualistic view of rhetorical invention goes hand in hand with conventional ways of acknowledging inventors of material objects, ideas, and texts” (30).

“The inventing ‘self’ is socially influenced, even socially constituted, according to a variety of theorists such as George Herbert Mead, Martin Buber, Clifford Geertz, and Wayne Booth” (33).

“Invention builds on a foundation of knowledge accumulated from previous generations, knowledge that constitutes a social legacy of ideas, forms and ways of thinking” (34).

So, if previous generations were constantly being told to be docile, subservient, and less intellectual in stands to reason that it is handed down, with or without the knowledge of women today.

“Invention is powerfully influenced by social collectives, such as institutions, bureaucracies, governments, and ‘invisible colleges’ of academic disciplinary committees” (34).

“Framed in terms of unhelpful oppositions they imply that ‘individual’ and ‘social’ can be neatly separated and that one can be said to cause the other. What I am suggesting however, is that they be regarded as dialectically connected, always codefining and interdependent. A change in the individual influences social dimensions, which in turn influence the individual” (37).

“Aristotle defines rhetoric as the art of finding the available means of persuasion, which means that it must involve others who are to be persuaded” (45).

Women reading conduct books.


“This ‘clustering’ of creative thinkers has led some to conclude that creativity is not merely a chance manifestation of biological or psychological factors, but is subject to environmental influence” (66).