compsblogrhetoric

Jackson, Jean. “Language Identity of the Columbian Vaupes Indians”

2010-08-11T07:19:00.000-07:00

Jackson, Jean. “Language Identity of the Columbian Vaupes Indians” Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. Eds. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP. 1989.

“Although no single definition of tribe exists, those most frequently offered in the literature are concerned with the presence of factors such as (1) tribal territory; (2) political, ceremonial, or warrior roles as tribesmen; (3) more intra-tribal as opposed to intertribal interaction; (4) some proportion of marriages occurring within the tribal unit; and (5) some cultural differences between neighboring tribes” (50).

“According to Comperz, a speech community is ‘. . .any human aggregate characterized by regular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregates by significant differences in language usage’” (55).

“Barth (1964, 1969) discusses badges of identity, which he refers to as ‘diacritica’ (59).

“Badges and emblems of identity can be seen as a kind of message, the successful transmission, reception, and decoding of which is necessary to the interaction taking place” (59).

“Much of the sociolinguistic literature deals with the ways in which individuals send and receive information about social identity through the use of language” (60).

“an individuals speech can be an indicator of social class, ethnic or regional background, economic mobility, etc.” (60).

“Labov and others have pointed out that language can communicate social information about the speaker. This can be done through speech itself or by common knowledge of individual identification with distinct codes and a certain amount of agreement regarding the implications of such identification. In this manner language can become a codification of many aspects of an individual’s social identity, serving as a badge or emblem of that identity” (64

Abrahams, Roger D. “The Training of the Man of Words in Talking Sweet

2010-08-11T06:52:00.000-07:00

Abrahams, Roger D. “The Training of the Man of Words in Talking Sweet” Verbal Art as
Performance. Richard Bauman. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. 1977

“talking sweet has com to be identified not so much with the Euro-American world as with peasant household values” (118).

“There are different kinds of speechmaking occasions involving different degrees of difficulty in the attainment of the speechmaking skills” (118).

Gossen, Gary H. “Chamula Genres of Verbal Behavior”

2010-08-11T06:26:00.001-07:00

Gossen, Gary H. “Chamula Genres of Verbal Behavior” Verbal Art as Performance. Richard
Bauman. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. 1977.

“Finally, a holistic approach helps to emphasize that patterns of ideal behavior are found throughout the cultural fabric, from court procedure to play, from games to ritual from joking to prayer. A study of these structural patterns offers a comprehensive view of the meaning of esthetic forms, possibly providing an illusion of the old-fashioned idea that esthetics are ethics” (115).

Babcock, Barbara. “The Story in the Story: Metanarration in Folk Narrative”

2010-08-10T08:46:00.000-07:00

Babcock, Barbara. “The Story in the Story: Metanarration in Folk Narrative” Verbal Art as Performance, Richard Bauman. Waveland: Prospect Heights, IL. 1977.

“Or, in Roman Jakobson’s terms, we have tended to focus on the ‘marrated event’ and to neglect the ‘speech event’ within which the former is presented (Jakobson 1957:492-93)” (65).

“Narration is communication and ‘every communication has a content and a relationship aspect such that the latter classifies the former and is therefore a metacommunication’ (Waltzlawick et al. 1967:54)” (65).

“I would suggest that we use the term metanarration to refer specificially to narrative performance and discourse and tothose devices which comment upon the narrator, the narrating, and the narrative both as message and as code” (67).

“In metanarration the subject of discourse is the narrative itself and those elements by which it is constituted and communicated” (68).

Bauman, Richard. Verbal Art as Performance.

2010-08-10T08:33:00.000-07:00

Bauman, Richard. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights, ILL: Waveland. 1977
“Performance as we conceive of it and as our examples have been selected to illustrate, is a unifying thread ting together the marked, segregated esthetic genres and other spheres of verbal behavior into a general unified conception of verbal art as a way of speaking” (5).
“By identifying the nature of performance and distinguishing it from other ways of speaking, we will have, among other things, a measure of the authenticity of collected oral literacy texts” (8).
“Performance involves on the part of the performer an assumption of accountability to an audience for the way in which communication is carried out, above and beyond its referential content” (11).
“Thus conceived performance is a mode of language use, a way of speaking” (11).
“Rather, in terms of the approach being developed here, performance becomes constitutive of the domain of verbal art as spoken communication” (11).
“Bateson’s powerful insight, that it is characteristic of communicative interaction that it include a range of explicit or implicit messages which carry instructions on how to interpret the other message(s) being communicated (15).
“All framing, then, including performance, is accomplished through the employment of culturally conventionalized metacommunication” (16).
“The use of special codes is one of the most widely noted characteristics of verbal art” (17).
“No single feature or device figures more consistently or prominently in accounts of the characteristics of verbal art than figurative language” (17).
“Parallelism , what Leach calls ‘foregrounded regularity’ (1969:62), involves the repetition with systematic variation, of phonic, grammatical, semantic, or prosodic structures, the combination of invariant and variant elements in the construction of an utterance” (18).
“Special formula. Very Familiar to English speaking audiences are formulae such as ‘once upon a time,’ opening a fairy tale, or ‘did you hear the one about. . .’ to introduce a joke (cf. Reaver 1972).
“A list of the kind just given is ultimately of only limited utility, for the essential task in the ethnography of performance is to determine the culture-specific constellations of communicative means that serve to key performance in particular communities (22).
“Art is commonly conceived as an all or nothing phenomenon—something either is or is not art—but conceived as performance, in terms of an interpretive frame verbal art may be culturally defined as varying in intensity as well as range” (24).
“The association of performance with particular genres is a significant aspect of the patterning of performance within communities” (25).
“In the ethnography of performance as a cultural system, the investigator’s attention will frequently be attracted first by those genres that are conventionally performed” (26).
“the most challenging job that faces the student of performance is establishing the continuity between the noticeable and public performance of cultural performances, and the spontaneous, unscheduled, optional performance contexts of everyday life” (28).
“The structure of performance events is a product of the interplay of many factors, including setting, act sequence, and ground rules of performance” (28).
“Also basic to the structure of performance events are the participants, performer(s) and audience” (29).
“Performance, I would offer, constitutes just such a point of departure, the nexus of tradition, practice, and emergence in verbal art. Performance may thus be the connerstone of a new folkloristics, liberated from its backward-facing perspective and able to comprehend much more of the totality of human experience” (48).

Abrahams, Rodger D. “Personal Power and Social Restraint in the Definition of Folklore”

2010-07-01T09:40:00.000-07:00

Abrahams, Rodger D. “Personal Power and Social Restraint in the Definition of Folklore” The
Journal of American Folklore. 84.331. (1971). 16-30

“There are at least two ways one might view the concept of folklore: in one the traditional characteristics of lore are emphasized, with the usual concomitant, word-of-mouth transmission; in the other the emphasis is upon the performance characteristics of lore. The first approach emphasizes the ways in which folklore is a part of culture; the second focuses on the waus that folklore can have personal as well as social uses” (16).

“Let us begin by defining folklore as “all traditional expressions and implementations of knowledge operating within a community’. If knowledge is the power of the mind of solving problems, then traditional knowledge provides inherited solutions to the recurrent problems of groups.” (17).

“There are two kinds of recurrent problems attacked by folklore, and two groups of traditional solutions. The most fundamental problems, of course, are connected witht he physical preservation of the individual and the group—those of staying alive, of satisfying the requirements for food, clothing, and shelter” (17).

“The second kind are social or ethical problems; and their traditional solutions are engineered by suggestion, persuasion, legislation, or play” (17).

“Whereas material folklore is the implemental dimension of culture, ‘expressive folklore’ is the ethical and esthetic dimension” (17).

“That is to say, folklore provides guidelines for behavior. It channels and helps keep in abeyance the antisocial motives arising ina day-to-day intercourse” (18).

“Folklore, then, gives form to energies set into motion by some shared or social anxiety” (19).
For a piece of folklore to control by suggestion and thus guide future action, it must first provide the release afforded by pleasure, a release accomplished by projecting objectifying, and impersonalizing the troublesome situation, thus linking individual experience to public concern” (19).

“The story serves as a pattern of behavior for the future, either through emulation or avoidance, because the piece has been performed well and the pattern of the dramatic movement is familiar” (20).

So we see that one of the obstacles in the path of developing a reasonable, objective view of what folklore is and how it operates has been the consistently untested assumptions made by folklorists about the nature of the ‘traditional’ community and the process of transmission which goes on within it” (24).

“Ultimately, it seems most convenient to come to some working definition of folklore that takes both of these dimensions—tradition and performance—into account” (29).
“Folklore is made up of items that are artificial, with a consistency, integrity, and style of their own” (30).

Ben-amos, Dan. Folklore in Context: Essays.

2010-07-01T09:37:00.000-07:00

Ben-amos, Dan. Folklore in Context: Essays. South Asian Publishers: New Dehli, Madras

“In sum, the materials of folklore are mobile, manipulative, and transcultural” (3).

“On the other hand, folklore is very muich an organic phenomenon in the sense that it is an integral part of culture” (3).

“it is possible to distinguish three basic conceptions of the subject underlying many definitions; accordingly, folklore is one of these: a body of knowledge, a mode of thought, or a kind of art” (4).

“First, folklore can be the sum totoal of knowledge ina society. Since no single member of the community has a complete command of all its facets, folklore inthis sense must be an abstract construct based upon the collective information as it is stored with many individuals, ‘the whole body of people’s traditionary beliefs and customs.’” (5).

"Secondly and in contrast, folklore has been considered on that knowledge shared by every member of the group. This definition excludes any esoteric information to which only selected experts in the community have access, since it restricts folklore to ‘popular knoledge’ alone” (5).

“Lastly folklore can be restricted to customs and observances that each individual adheres to in the privacy of his home, though all the people in the society abide by them” (6).

“Accordingly, folklore represents a particular mode of collective and spontaneous thought . . .” (6).

“Although Levi-Bruhl’s theories are no longer accepted without reservations, they still serve as a basis for defining folklore, as exemplified in Joseph Rysan’s

‘Folklore can be defined as the collective objectifications of basic emotions, such as awe, fear, hatred, reverence, and desire, on thepart of the social group” (6).

“The persistence of the materials in circulation in a culture ‘bequeathed from generation to generation,’ has become the determining criterion for the identifiecation of folklore items” (7).

“To define folklore, it is necessary to examine the phenomena as they exist. In its cultural context, folklore is not an aggregate of things, but a process, --a communicative process, to be exact” (9).

“Once viewed as a process, however, folklore does not have to be a marginal projection or reflection; it can be considered a sphere of interaction in its own right” (17).

“Descriptive folklore fits Hansen’s criterion for a theory because it is ‘an intelligible, systematic, conceptual pattern for observed data’” (21).

“while contextual research in folklore is descriptive, it has the potential to carry folklore studies beyond description and could provide a theoretical explanation for the diversity of folklore” (27).

“For the purpose of avoiding evaluation and valuation or any formulation of hierarchical scales of oral art and written literature we could resort to a rather unoriginal criterion and view berbal creativity in a society as attempts to establish order and disorder in words” (28-9).

“The creation of order is an attempt to conceptually duplicate reality verbally, to tell history ‘as it is’, to narrate experiences as they really happened and to recount visions as they were originally seen” (29).

“Futhermore those narratives that folklorists label legend, like ghost stories could be explained in these terms of order and disorder, thus avoiding the frustrating question of belief. Accordingly, legends, are tales of disorder presented as narratives of order” (29).
Women’s stories of violence!

“Within this verbal axis it is necessary to distinguish between two modes of order and disorder: syntagmatic and paradigmatic. The attempts to create syntagmatic orders involve the sequential relations in causal, temporal, or spatial terms. The paradigmatic orders and disorders have no such relations and are merely categorical arrangements of similarities and contrasts as they are known in culture” (30).

“Comparative folklore research concerns itself with the diffusion of themes in different traditions. Consequently, in this framework, genre is a thematic category” (39).

“According to the holistic conception of folklore genres, takes and songs, riddles and proverbs are not aggregates of episodes of accidental combinations of metaphors. Rather they are formal and thematic entities which have an organic unity of their own” (42).

“Essentially, the holistic approach affirms the ontology of folklore forms and changes the concept of genre from a nominalistic to a realistic entity” (43).

“The functional approach to the categorization of oral literature actually has focused upon the relationships between forms of verbal art and existing culture, psychological, and social needs.

“For the ethnic system of genres constitutes a grammar of folklore a cultural affirmation of the communication rules which governs the expression of complex messages within the cultural context” (48).

“From another perspective, it is possible to regard the ethnic system of genres as a cultural metafolklore. Alan Dundes who first introduced the term, regarded it mainly as oral literary criticism, as ‘a folkloristic commentary about folklore genres’ As examples he cited proberbs about proverbs, jokes about jokes, the interpretations of expressions by the speakers themselves” (49).

“Yet the distinctive attributes which speakers of folklore recognize in their communication can be analytically confined to three levels: prosodic, thematic, and behavioral. The conception of the prosodic nature of an expression is a function of the perception of the relationship between verbal sounds and time: the formation of the thematic attributes is dependent upon the relationships between actions, actors, or metaphors; and the recognition of the behavior characteristics derives from the potential social composition of the communicative event” (50).

“the notion of genre has had only a soncary role in the classificatory effort of folklore scholarship” (68).

“Evolutionary Approaches. The evolutionary emphasis in nineteenth century anthropology and folklore in Britain was on ideas and mental capabilities,not on literary forms. In the views of Tylor, Lang, Frazer and Gomme, man progressed toward rationality, and evolved from magical to religious to scientific thought” (71).

“In other words, historical circumstances, rather than evolution , change the distruibution of themes among the forms of folklore. Each genre has distinct attributes and capabilities, but under differing historical and cultural circumstances the same subject would appear in other genres that correspond to these changes” (72).

“Functional Approaches. The functional theory in anthropology and folklore adds a dynamic aspect to genres as permanent forms of expression. They do not merely exist as constant verybal forms in culture, but also play an active role in social affairs” (73).

“Structural-Morphological Approach. Structural-morphological analyses of folklore forms avoided vacillating between concepts of genres, and consistently assum their existence in oral tradition” (75).

“The ultimate purpose of structural-morphological studies in folklore is the discovery of the distinctive features of each genre, their relations within the respective forms, and their capacity to differentiate genres within the totality of oral tradition” (75).

“Genres have a prescriptive capacity by which the dlineate distinct themes, structures and styles as appropriate for and co-occurent in specific forms. They have also a distinctive capacity. The particular features of genres signify the boundaries of interpretations of folklore expressions establishing the relations of belief, humor or amusement in regard to narrated or sung messages” (80).

Dundes, Alan. Folklore Matters.

2010-07-01T09:35:00.000-07:00

Dundes, Alan. Folklore Matters. Tennessee UP: Knoxville, TN. (1989)

“Thus, identity remains constant even if the physical constituents should change and the same principle can be applied to group identity” (4).

“Let us consider George DeVos’s succinct definition of an ethnic group: “An ethnic group is a self-perceived group of people who hold in common a set of traditions not shared by others with whom they are in contact” (1975:9) (8-9).

“If one substituted folk speech, costume and food habits for language, clothing and food, it would perhaps be more obvious that it is folklore which is responsible in large measure for creating ethnic identity” (9).

“Folklore includes myths, folktales, legends, proverbs, riddles, folk beliefs, costume, folk medicine, traditional foods, folk speech, charms, curses, games, folk music, folk dances, etc.” (9).

“The term “folk” can refer to any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor”(11).

“the modern definition of folk allows one to think of individuals belonging simultaneously to many different and distinct folk groups” (11).

“Just as there are bilinguals, there are also biculturals, individuals who belong to two or more folk groups (for example, his parents may be from different groups)” (15).

“Fakelore is the presentation of spurious and synthetic writings under the claim that they are genuine folklore” (40).

“It seems pointless in one sense to argue that the Paul Bunyan figure produced by writers is ‘ersatz.’ It is far better to accept the fact that fakelore may be an integral element of culture just as folklore is” (53).

“Finally, if either anthropology or folklore is to get beyond the data-gathering or data-amassing stage, bolder and more imaginative forms of the comparative metod are crucial. Fieldwork and Finish method studies should not be ends in themselves. They should be the means by which social sciences of anthropology and folklore are established with definite, testable hypotheses leading eventually to reliable general principles” (74).

“No genre of folklore is so trivial or so insignificant that it cannot provide important data for the study of worldview” (83).
“Methodologically it makes more sense to examine microcosms, and from these examinations, one may have better access to the corresponding macrocosm” (83).

Bauman, Richard. “Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore”

2010-07-01T09:33:00.000-07:00

Bauman, Richard. “Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore” The Journal of American Folklore. 84.331. (1971). 31-41.

“The basic premise which appears to underlie both these formulations is that folklore is a function of shared identity” (32).

“Closely related to the conceptualization of folklore-bearing groups in terms of shared identity is the condeptualization of folklore as a within-group phenomenon”(32).

“once we have shifted our focus from the abstract association of a corpus of folklore with an aggregation of people to the integration of folklore with people at its very source, in performance, we may reexamine the empirical utility or conceptual validity of v iewing folk groups in terms of shared identity” (33).

“As long as folklore is conceptualized as a sef-contained realm of cultural products abstractly connected with some homogeneous body of people identified as folk and participating in it collectively , the use of folklore in situations involving differential identity will be obscured from view” (38).

“Once the necessary reorientation is made it becomes apparent that folklore may be found in both symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships; members of articular groups or social categories may exchange folklore with each other on the basis of shared identity, or with others, on the basis of differential identity” (38).

Sankoff, Guillian. “A Quantatative Paradigm for the Study of Communicative Competence”

2010-07-01T09:31:00.000-07:00

Sankoff, Guillian. “A Quantatative Paradigm for the Study of Communicative Competence” Explorations in the ethnography of speaking: Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language. Eds. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer. Cambridge UP:
Cambridge, MA. (1989).

“The notion of context has been extended to apply not only to linguistic context or environment, but to the social-situational circumstances of the speech event, even to the interest or ends of the speaker” (18).

“Many important concepts were developed during the 1960’s for dealing with systematic sociolinguistic variability, as it came to be generally recognized that no community or individual is limited to a single variety of code (Hymes l967)” (18).

“In any analysis one, one searches for structure, pattern and relationships; I contend that in speech behavior as in mnay other kinds of behavior there is a great deal of statistical variability” (19).

“Gounded in the notion of a speech community, there paradigm involves the collection and analysis of a corpus which adequately represents the speech performance of members of that community” (21).

“That is, in systematically sampling for different types of individuals, it is impossible not to deal with strangers, but the very fact of not knowing people makes it difficult to record them in more than one kind of sitation, usually that of an interview, in which they exhibit only a particular segment of their linguistic repertoire” (23).

“It also often happens that the more informal (natural) the situation, the more difficult it is to record, as background noise seems to increase exponentially with informality” (23).

“Such an assumption does not counter the principle that (socio)linguistic competence is what exists in people’s heads; rather, it takes the position that people can internalize rules which are not contegorical” (47).

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings.

2010-06-22T12:48:00.000-07:00

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard UP: Cambridge, MA. 2005.
“The equivocality of the Bartlebyan aesthetic suggests that there is a special relationship between ugly feelings and irony, a rhetorical attitude with a decidedly affective dimension, if not a “feeling” per se” (9-10).
“Something about the cultural canon itself seems to prefer higher passions and emotions—as if minor or ugly feelings were not only incapable of profucing “major” works, but somehow disabled the works they do drive from acquiring canonical distinction” (11).
“Like rage and fear, ugly feelings such as envy can be described as sysphoric or experientially negative, in the sense that they evoke pain or displeasure” (11).
Guilt definitely fits this category, yet, he does not mention it.
“While important to these specific aesthetic or representational controversies, the question of feeling’s objective or subjective status has in fact been central to numerous philosophical investigations into the exact role and status of emotion I the aesthetic encounter” (23).
“The affect/emotion split originated in psychoanalysis for the practical purpose of distinguishing third-person from first-person representations of feeling, with “affect” designating feeling described from an oabserver’s (analyst’s) perspective, and “emotion” designating feeling that “belongs” to the speaker or analysand’s ‘I’” (25).
“As Grossberg puts it, ‘Unlike emotions, affective states are neither structured narratively nor organized in response tour interpretations of situations” (25).
“Whereas Hobbes and Aristotle have shown how the principle of mutual fear actively binds men into the contracts that support the political commonwealth, and how anger advances the redressing of perceived injustices through relatiation, it is difficult to imagine how either of these actions might be advanced by an affective stat like, say , irritation. While one can be irritated without realizing it, or knowing exactly what one is irritated about, there can be nothing ambiguous about one’s rage or terror, or about what one is terrified of or enraged about” (27).
“My assumption is that affedts are less formed and structured than emotions, but not lacking form or structure altogether; less “sociolinguistically fixed,’ but by no means code-free or meaningless; less ‘organized in response to our interpretations of situations,’ but by no means entirely devoid of organization or diagnostic powers” (27).

hooks, bell. Talking Back: thinking feminist – thinking black.

2010-06-22T12:46:00.000-07:00

hooks, bell. Talking Back: thinking feminist – thinking black. South End Press: Boston. 1989.
“The public reality and institutuional structures of domination make the private space for oppression and exploitation concrete—real” (2).
“And openness is about how to be well and telling the truth is about how to put the broken bits and pieces of the heart back together again” (2).
“Within feminist circles, silence is often seen as the sexist ‘right speech of womanhood’—the sign of woman’s submission to patriarchal authority” (6).
“For us, true speaking is not solely an expression of creative power; it is an act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges politics of domination that would render us nameless and voiceless” (8).
“Speaking becomes both a way to engage in active self-transformation and a rite of passage where one moves from being object to being subject” (12).
“Appropriation of the marginal voice threatens the very core of self-determination and free self-expression for exploited and oppressed peoples” (14).
“The struggle to end domination, the individual struggle to resist colonization, to move from object to subject, is expressed in the effort to establish the liberatory voice—that way of speaking that is no longer determined by one’s status as object—as oppressed being” (15).
“Clearly, differentiation between strong and weak, powerful and powerless, has been a central defining aspect of gender globally, carrying with it the assumption that men should have greater authority than women, and should rule over them” (20).
“It is necessary for us to remember, as we think critically about domination, that we all have the capacity to act in ways that oppress, dominate, wound (whether or not the power is institutionalized). It is necessary to remember that it is first the potential oppressor within that we must resist—the potential victim within that we must rescue—otherwise we cannot hope for an an end to domination for liberation” (21).
“I suggest that defining broadly as ‘a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression’ would enable us to have a common political goal” (23).
YES!
“It would be useful to promote anew the small group setting as an arena for education for the critical consciouosness, so that women and men might come together in neighborhoods and communities to discuss feminist concerns” (24).
“Academic women and menengaged in the production of feminist theory must be responsible for setting up ways to disseminate feminist thought that not only transcend the boundaries of the university setting, but that of the printed page as well” (36).
“As long as university settings are the central site for the production of theory and academics are simultaneously engaged in a competitive work arena that supports and perpetuates all forms of domination, feminist theorists will need to be conscientious about not supporting monolithic notions of theory” (37).
“Cross-ethnic feminist scholarship should emphasize the vale of a scholar’s work as well as the unique perspective that scholar brings to bear on the subject” (48).
Pedagogy of liberation (49). I love that phrase.
“I began to see that courses that work to shift paradigms, to change consciousness cannot necessarily be experienced immediately as fun or positive or safe and this was not a worthwhile criteria to use in evaluation” (53).
“Yet if we are to reach our people and all people, if we are to remain connected (especially those of us whose familial backgrounds and poor and working-class), we must understand that the telling of one’s personal story provides a meaningful example, a way for folks to identify and connect” (77).
“The most powerful resource any of us can have as we study and teach in university settings is full understanding and appreciation of the richness, beauty, and primacy of our familial and community backgrounds” (83).
“Education as the practice of freedom becomes not a force which fragments or separates, but one that brings us closer, expanding our definitions of home and community” (83).
“A distinction must be made between having a terminology that enables women, and all victims of violent acts, to name the problem and categories of labeling that may inhibit that naming” (89).

Toelken, Barre. The Dynamics of Folklore.

2010-06-22T12:44:00.000-07:00

Toelken, Barre. The Dynamics of Folklore. Utah State UP: Logan, Utah. (1996).
Clearly, folklore is alive and well. It constitutes a basic and important educative and expressive setting in which individuals learn how to see, act, respond, and express themselves by the empirical observation of close human interactions and expressions in their immediate socity (tat is family, occupationalor religious group, ethnic or regional community).” (22).
“We use different words and gestures in a joke than in a graduation speech; we speak to friends in slang, but write for strangers in standard English.” (23).
“Actually, folklore is a word very much like culture; it represents a tremendous spectrum of human knowledge and expression that can be studied in a number of ways for a number of reasons” (32).
“As with other disciplines (such as history, literature music, mathematics), the term folklore will no doubt continue to be used in reference both to the content of the field (the Material we collect and study) and to the discipline itself” (33).
“The items and events of folklore are recurrent forms of local, dynamic human expression—artifacts and performances created one at a time under particular circumstances. A quilt or a barn, as practical as its use may be, extends far beyond its mere thingness or its function. It is designed or phrased in such a way as to express and reflect the personal and cultural values in design and workmanship out of which the artisan works, and it is these designs and values, not the quilt or barn itself, that may be said to be dynamic, and thus to be folklore” (34).
“For simple reference, we may refer to these two forces descriptively as the twin laws of folklore process: conservatism and dynamism will probably be the two most prominent characteristics in our perception of (and discussion of) any item tentatively classified as folklore” (39).
“Conservatism refers to all those processes, forces and attitudes that result in the retaining of certain information, beliefs, styles, customs, and the like, and the attempted passing of those materials essentially intact, through time and space in all the channels of vernacular expression” (39).
“Dynamism, at the other extreme, comprises all those elements that function to alter features, contents, meanings, styles, performance, and usage as a particular traditional event takes place repeatedly through space and time” (40).
“Jokes and other kinds of orally transmitted materials, whose function is largely fictional and pleasurable, are likely to be closer to the dynamic end” (40).
“Since in such cases the condition of literacy is really peripheral (if not entirely irrelevant) to the discussion, we might say that folklore is often alliterate. (47).
“In folklore as in the biological world, variation from a hypothetical norm is universal” (48).
“In the study of folklore, we look at many manifestations of everyday human expression, but their shaping is all done by a single force; the interactive dynamics of living culture” (49).
“Chapter 1 suggested that a folkl group can be described as any group of people who share informal vernacular contacts that become the basis for expressive, culture-based communications” (56).
“Because the members share so much information and attitude, folk groups are what Edward T. Hall would call high context groups; for them, meaning and action are more directly related to the simple denotations of the words themselves” (57).
“Probably the smallest group that can be called a folk group is the dyad, two people who participate in an ongoing relationship which is so close that each partner provides an immediate reflexive counterpart to the other: life partners, close friends, dorm mates, occupational or military “buddies,” to name only a few, express their relationship with words, phrases, gesture, insults, and facial expressions which they share more intensely with each other than with anyone else” (57).
“Folk group is therefore not a static label to be applied simply when people are observed to be loggers, quilters, Ozarkers, or Russian Old Believers; rather, the terms should indicate a dynamic system of human interchange where the members of any group interrelate on a high context level of attitude, reference, connotation, sense of meaning, and customary behavior, precisely as members and to be members, of that group” (58).
“Connotation is not limited to spoken or written language. Any communicative event can—and no doubt will—have a connotative level, whether everyone is aware of it or not” (243).
“Worldview’ refers to the manner in which a culture sees and expresses its relation to the world around it” (269).
“Since folklore is comprised of those artistic expressions most heavily governed by the tastes of the group, we should be able to find in folk performances a continual tableau or paradigm more revealing of cultural worldview than we might find in the expressions created independently by individuals” (266).

“Because folklore operates primarily on the cultural level, because its aesthetics, choices, and performances are dictated more by the group than by the individual, the expressions themselves reveal more of group values and assumptions than of consciously framed individual opinions—as I have already suggested” (318).

“One thing that should be made clear both in the mind of the folklorist and in the perceptions of the tradition-bearer is that even though individuals cannot usually obtain copyright for folk materials, they should be considered owned to some extent by the tradition-bearers or by their community, not by the folklorist” (338).

“Since most people do not “do” their folklore at the drop of a hat, especially for strangers who request it, the folklore fieldworker may as well start out recognizing that the most practical approach to recording folklore is to plan on considerable recognizing that the most practical approach to recording folklore is to plan on considerable reconnaissance and development of rapport with the tradition-bearers most likely to share their materials” (249).

Lawless, Elaine J. Women Escaping Violence:

2010-06-22T12:43:00.000-07:00

CompsLawless
Lawless, Elaine J. Women Escaping Violence: Empowerment Through Narrative. University of Missouri P.
Columbia, MO. 2001
In relation to rhetoric. Silence as rhetoric and stories as rhetoric. Forceful and powerfully motivating stories women tell of their own lives in order to empower others, or to simply give others voice.
“On a more personal note, I believe I was drawn to this work because I, too, survived an abusive marriage. To write that sentence requires almost more strength than I can muster (2).
Interwoven rhetoric here. The rhetoric of the power of giving voice to self, and the rhetoric of the words. Author writes of abuse an immediately volitaile word, and countering that word writes of having “strength” in order to voice the abuse.
“I am aware that the simple fact of my requesting their stories imbues them with an importance they have probably never encountered before. I believe that during the time they spend telling me their stories they feel empowered” (7).
Giving power to words, taking power from words. Empowering self through the words. Empowering the ethnographer through the words.
“What I also hope they hear, because it is part of the move toward healing, is that the women who are furthest from the abuse are the ones who offer the greatest hope for recovery, safety, and a life free from violence.” (9).
“They are asking for escape routes, for education, for tools with which to work the system, for strategies, for strength, and for hope and survival.” (9).
Quoating Cheris Kramarae on telling the story the victim’s own way: “Breaking out of silence means more than being empowered to speak or to write, it also means controlling the form as well as the content of one’s own communication, the power to develop and to share one’s own unique voice” (13).
Small groups, individuals, with power to change social views (article used in Body plenary).
“The effect of the storytelling in this venue is to shore up support for their newfound friends.
“Perhaps the support group sharing time is the most poignant example of the transformative power of narrative in the shelter context” (37).
“Simply being there in that room with other women they see as like them provides the discursive potential for transformation. They are invited to share their story, and “story” here carries the weight of power and potential” (37).
“The woman telling her story may believe that she into the shelter and received help because of what “he did,” when, in fact, she receives aid and shelter based on what she says” (38).
Words persuading others of her need for help, for her validity as a human being, and that she deserves better.
“But in the world of seeking shelter and protection from the man who beats her, she will learn very quickly that she must also develop and relate a story that will help her get assistance” (40).
“While the term most often used to describe situations where men are beating their wives is domestic violence, feminists advocate not using the term because mere “violence” could imply random incidents in a domestic—which could be read as “comfortable”—situation. They insist on more honest in the use of terms, an honesty that acknowledges that in almost every instance, the truth is that a man is beating, hitting, kicking, violating, and raping a woman in the privacy of their shared home. This violence is not “domesticated” and the violence is not randomly distributed among members of the household. Men are beating women” (46).
The rhetoric here is used to evoke how the power of the collectively acceptable terms used to describe such situations do not pinpoint or highlight either victim or perpetrator. This in itself is rhetoric.
When speaking of the term “wife beating” Lawless states, “But if we think more about it, this term, too, erases the perpetrator, dramatizes the act of violence, and draws attention to the receipient of the beating (i.e., a wife), making it seem as ordinary a phrase as “dog catching” or “rabbit hunting” (45).
Again we are experiencing a rhetoric of, as Lawless terms it, erasure. The lack of acknowledgement of the pepetrator, lack of acknowledgement of the individualality of the woman in the scenario, and then the erasure of the underlying brutality through the desensitizing use of a normalized phrase.
Lawless states, “If we are listening carefully to a woman’s story and its gaps, could we, in these narrative ruptures, get a glimpse of the disaster, even though she does not speak of what happened to her?” (61).
Where we find gaps, silences, and portions left untold, we also find a rhetoric that speaks to the power of woman on woman conversation about abuse. The gaps represent the inability to voice or speak of what happened, whether because that happening is too painful to revisit or because the silence speaks more powerfully than words to convey the utter horror at such a situation. This, too, is a rhetoric which empowers each person involved in the telling, teller or listener either one.
Lawless goes on, “Hence, the gap in her narrative calls for us to discern at least two messages: the reality of the disaster, the horror, the pain, the torture; but also the now of her release, her escape” (62).
The woman who is now speaking, in the present time, is speaking powerfully of what it means to leave such a situation and the voice that can be enabled through such a transformation
“Scarry agrees that to name the agency of the pain is to credit that person with power” (64).
“But in doing this kind of work, we acknowledge the power of narrative with which we speak ourselves into being” (159).
The told story is a rhetoric of hope as it reaffirms not only the “being” of the speaker, but reaffirms the ability to live without pain to the listener.
“But the positive endings of the stories in this book are just as real as the stories of near successes and of failures. The hope and the determination that is evidence at the conclusion of the stories I have tape recorded for this research attest to the inherent strength of women and the power of narrative to help them as they attempt to construct their newly emergent selves” (160).
Through the ability to relate to certain aspects of another’s story, those listening are able to take hold of the rhetoric of hope for success that is being produced through that story.

Richards, I.A. and Ogden, C.K. “The Meaning of Meaning”. Bizzell, Patricia and Herzberg, Bruce. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Ti

2010-06-22T12:42:00.000-07:00

Richards, I.A. and Ogden, C.K. “The Meaning of Meaning”. Bizzell, Patricia and Herzberg,
Bruce. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Timesto Present. Bedford/St.
Martin’s: Boston. 2001 (1273-80).
“Symbolism is the study of the part played in human affairs y language and the symbols of all kinds, and especially of their influence on Thought” (1274).

“Language if it is to be used must be a ready instrument” (1275).
“The root of the trouble will be traced to the superstition that words are in some way parts of things or always imply things corresponding to them, historical instances of this still potent instinctive belief being given from many sources” (1276).
“We have not here in view the more familiar ways in which words may be used to deceive. In a later chapter, when the function of language as an instrument for the promotion of pruposes rather than as a means of symbolizing references is fully discussed, we shall see how the intention of the speaker may complicate the situation” (1277).
“Another vairiety of verbal ingenuity closely allied to this, is the deliberate use of symbols to misdirect the listener” (1277).
“Those who allow beyond question that there are people like themselves also interpreting signs and open to study should not find it difficult to admit that their observation of the behavior of others may provide at least a framework within which their own introspection, that special and deceptive case, may be fitted” (1278-79).
“The method which recognizes the common feature of sign interpretation has its dangers, but opens the way to a fresh treatment of many widely different topics” (1279).
Richards, I.A. and Ogden, C.K. “The Philosophy of Rhetoric”. Bizzell, Patricia and Herzberg,
Bruce. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Timesto Present. Bedford/St.
Martin’s: Boston. 2001. (1281-88).
“The old Rhetoric was an offspring of dispute; it developed as the rationale of pleadings and persuadings; it was the theory of the battle of words and has always been itself dominated by the combative impulse” (1281).
“It is no bad preparation for any attempt at exposition—above all of such debatable and contentious matters as those to which I am soon to turn—to realize how easily the combative impulse can put us in mental blinkers and made us take another man’s words in the ways in which we can down him with least trouble” (1281).
“All thinking from the lowest to the highest—whatever else itmay be—is sorting” (1283).
“Our risk is to confuse the abstractness we thus arrive at intellectually with the primordial abstractness out of which these impressions have already grown—before ever any conscious explicit reflection took place” (1285).

“The context theorem of meaning would prevent our making hundreds of baseless and disabling assumptions that we commonly make about meanings, over-simplifications that create false problems interfering with closer comparisons—and that is its main service” (1286).
Warrants and assumptions?

Sedgwick, Eve Kosopsky. Touching Feeling

2010-05-10T08:35:00.000-07:00

Sedgwick, Eve Kosopsky. Touching Feeling : Affect. Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke
UP: Durham, NC. 2003.

“Affects can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions and any number of other things, including other affects. Thus, one can be excited by anger, disgusted by shame, or surprised by joy” (19).

“’ affects may; be either much more casual than any drive could be or much more monopolistic. . . Most of the characteristics which Freud attributed to the Unconcious and to the Id are in fact salient aspects of the affect system. .
.Affects enable both insatiability and extreme lability, fickleness and finickiness (52)’” (21).

“The conventional way of distinguishing shame from guilt is that shame attaches to and sharpens the senese of what one is, whereas guilt attaches to what one does” (37).

Perhaps, but I think it more straightforward when one considers shame to be attached to what one thinks others will think of one and attaches guilt to what one thinks of oneself.

Quoting Silvan Tomkins
“’It was a short step to see that excitement had nothing perse to do with sexuality or with hunger, and that the apparent urgency of the drive system was borrowed from it co-assembly with appropriate affects as necessary amplifiers’” (100).

Quoting Silvan Tomkins
“’I would account for the difference in affect activation by three variants of a single principle—the density of neural firing. By density I mean the frequency of neural firing perunit of time. My theory posits three discrete classes of activators of affect, each of which further amplifies the sources which activate them. These are stimulation increase, stimulation level, and stimulation decrease’” (102).

Wonder if I need to read Sylvan Tomkins?

Hardt, Michael. “Affective Labor”

2010-05-08T06:11:00.000-07:00

Hardt, Michael. “Affective Labor” boundary 2 26.2. (1999).

“The productive circuit of affect and value has thus seemed in many respects as an autonomous circuit for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the process of capitalist valorization” (89).

“Affective labor is one face of what I will call ‘immaterial labor,’ which has assumed a dominant position with respect to the other forms of labor in the global capitalist economy” (90).

“We might call the passage from the second paradigm to the third, from the domination of industry to that of services and information, a process of economic postmodernization, or rather informatization” (90).

“The processes of modernization and industrialization transformed and redefined all elements of the social plane” (90).

“Humanity and its soul are produced in the very processes of economic production. The processes of becoming human and the nature of the human itself were fundamentality transformed in the qualitative shift of modernization” (91).

“The jobs, for the most part, are highly mobile and involve flexible skills. More importantly, they are characterized in general by the central role played by knowledge, information communication, and affect” (91).

“Most services ineed are based on the continual exchange of information and knowledge” (94).

“Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves” (95).

“The other face of immaterial labor is the affective labor of human contact and interaction (95).

“To one degree or another, this affective labor plays a certain role throughout the service industries, from fast-food servers to providers of financial services, embedded in the moments of human interaction and communication” (96).

“Categories such as ‘in-person’ services or services of proximity are often used to identify this kind of labor, but what is essential to it, its in-person aspect, is really the creation and manipulation of affects” (96).

“What affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower” (96).

“Whereas in a first moment, in the comperterization of industry, for example, one might say that communicative action, human relations, and culture have been instrumentalized, reified, and ‘degraded’ to the level of economic interactions, one should add quickly that through a reciprocal process in this second moment, production has become communicative, affective, de-instrmentalized, and ‘elevated’ to the level of human relations—but of course, a level of human relations entirely dominated by and internal to capital” (96).

“Where the production of soul is concerned, as Musil might say, we should no longer look to the soil and organic development, nor to the factory and mechanical development, but rather to today’s dominant economic forms, that is, to the production defined by a combination of cybernetics and affect” (97).

“Biopower is the power of the creation of life; it is the production of collective subjectivities, sociality, and society itself” (98).

“What is created in the networks of affective labor is a form-of-life” (98).

“More important, biopower is the power of the emerging forces of governmentality to create, manage, and control populations—the power to manage life” (98).

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act.

2010-05-06T05:23:00.000-07:00

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).

Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects

2010-05-01T06:12:00.000-07:00

Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Duke UP: Durham, NC. (2007).

“Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences” (2).

“The give circuits and flows the forms of a life. They can be experienced as a pleasure and a shock, as an empty pause or a dragging undertow, as a sensibility that snaps into place or a profound disorientation” (2).

“Their significance lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible” (3).

“Ordinary affects, then, are an animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes, and disjunctures” (3).

“Models of thinking. . .They miss how someone’s ordinary can endure or can sag defeated; how it can shift in the face of events like a shift in the kid’s school schedule or the police at the door” (4).

“each scene is a tangent that performs the sensation that something is happening—something that needs attending to” (5).

“The ordinary registers intensities—regularly, intermittently, urgently, or as a slight shudder” (10).

“The first step in thinking about the force of things is the open question of what counts as an event, a movement, an impact, a reason to react” (16).

“Potentiality is a thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of presence” (21).

Potentiality and anticipatory guilt.

“Affects are not so much forms of signification, or units of knowledge, as they are expressions of ideas or problems performed as a kind of involuntary and powerful learning and participation” (40).

“Ordinary affects highlight the question of the intimate impacts of forces in circulation. They’re not exactly ‘personal’ but they sure can pull the subject into places it didn’t exactly ‘intend’ to go” (40).

“The affective subject is a collection of trajectories and circuits. You can recognize it through fragments of past moments glimpsed unsteadily in the light of the present like the flickering light of a candle” (59).

Gross, Daniel M. The Secret History of Emotion:

2010-04-30T05:16:00.000-07:00

Gross, Daniel M. The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science. Chicago UP: Chicago IL. 2007

“The contours of our emotional world have been shaped by institutions such as slavery and poverty that simply afford some people greater emotional range than others, as they are shaped by publicity that has nothing to do with the inherent value of each human life and everything to do with technologies of recognition and blindness” (4).

“Following Aristotle and Hume, it is useful to think about how the scope of anger afforded a social subordinate is strictly limited to the vanishing point in a world where pride is also limited (as it is, for instance, in Hume’s and Fielding’s Britain, where pride is considered a function of property and strictly limited by custom and law to a narrow segment of the population)" (5).

Emotions have as much to do with social standings as with personal feelings. The women of the conduct books were allowed pride over limited areas of their life. Their social standing (created by family or marriage) their appearance (luck) and their use of manners. Socially they were limited in the emotions they were “allowed” to partake in.

“Aritstotle’s Rhetoric and Thomas Hobbes to outline a “political economy’ wherein passions are (I) constituted as differences in power, and (2) conditioned not by their excess, but by their scarcity” (6).

“Even the recent theoretical turn to “constitutive rhetoric” typically fails to integrate the rhetoric of emotion with the effort to develop a more sophisticated model of persuasion that situates rhetoric in culture rather than in the intention of the orator or author” (10).

“giving up the category of emotion completely would make some important theoretical work and even some historical work impossible” (19).

Brodkey, Linda. “On the Subjects of Class and Gender

2010-04-27T04:08:00.002-07:00

Brodkey, Linda. “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in ‘The Literacy Letters’”
“What Foucault and other poststructuralists have been arguing the last fifteen or twenty years is considerably easier to state than to act on: we are at once constituted and unified as subjects in language and discourse” (677).
“The question then is how to read what students write. And at issue is the unquestioned power of a pedagogical authority that insists that teachers concentrate on form at the expense of content” (678).
“Those who occupy the best subject positions a discourse has to offer would have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion of speaking rather than being spoken by discourse. Postermodern rhetoric would being by assuming that all discourses warrant variable subject positions ranging from mostly satisfying to mostly unsatisfying for those individuals named by them” (679).
“Discursive resistance requires opportunities for resistance. Altering an institutionalized discourse probably requires an unremitting negative critique of its ideology, a critique that is most often carried out in the academy by attempting to replace a particular theory (e.g., of science or art of education or law) with another” (679).

Miller, Richard E. “The Arts of Complicity:

2010-04-27T04:08:00.001-07:00

Miller, Richard E. “The Arts of Complicity: Pragmatism and the Culture of Schooling” (655).
“Citing Freire is, thus, a way of establishing one’s credentials in the field, of showing one’s true colors” (655).
“That there are problems involved in adopting Freire’s pedagogy –originally developed to address the needs of the inlliterate and dispossessed peoples of Brazil—to teach undergraduates in the United States is now commonly recognized . . .” (657)
“why is it that this image of the teacher as liberator of the oppressed, upon which Freire’s pedagogy relies so heavily, has had such a perduring appeal? . . .”what can we learn by problematizing our community’s most cherished self-representation” (657).
“Freire insisted from the beginning that the problem-posing approach had to ‘be forged with, not for, the oppressed. . .’(657).
“In effect, then, Freire, the educator, is saying that it is those who have been most successful in school who are the ones most likely to be deeply wedded to the ideology that stands in the way of communal action” (660).
“what puzzles me is why this vision of teaching and the rhetoric that surrounds it should appeal to teachers, particularly teachers of reading and writing. Why, as a profession, would we be drawn to an approach that depicts professionals in such a negative light?” (660).
Paraphrasing Scott—“The higher one climbs the social ladder, the more one must, in all phases of one’s life, ascribe to the dominanat ideology, the more confined are those spaces for voicing one’s doubts about that ideology the more one must see oneself as always on stage” (663).
So, the point being that we are as locked into ideology by priveledge and education as by the oppressivness that overwhelms the poor and the oppressed. I think there is something to this.
“by noting that students occupy a subordinate position in the educational system, I mean only to suggest that they, too, have their ‘hidden transcripts’ where they store their reservations about what is happening to them in the classroom” (664).
Good point.
“The classroom is, of course, one such place where the labor of others—both teachers and students—is constrained to meet the demands of outside forces. It is to that compromised space that we must now, turn our attention” (666).
“The classroom is, of course, one such place where the labor of others—both teachers and students—is constrained to meet the demands of outside forces. It is to that compromised space that we must now turn our attention” (666).
“Were I a polemicist, I might say what I was after is a pragmatic pedagogy, one grounded in “the arts of complicity, duplicity, and compromise,” the very same arts that are deployed, with such enervating effect, by the host of social, bureaucratic, and corporate institutions that govern our lives” (670).
This article is murky, hard to grasp, I’m not sure at all where this guy is coming from!

Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University” (623)

2010-04-27T04:07:00.001-07:00

Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University” (623).
“The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community” (623).
I need to remember this.
“he must dare to speak it or to carry off the bluff, since speaking and writing will most certainly be required long before the skill is ‘learned’” (624).
Our students need to know that part of what we do in “discourse” is simply assuming the language of the community.
“It is very hard for them to take on the role—the voice, the persona—of an authority whose authority is rooted in scholarship, analysis, or research. They slip, then, into a more immediately available and realizable of authority, the voice of a teacher giving a lesson or the voice of a parent lecturing at the dinner table (625).
“A ‘commonplace,’ then, is a culturally or institutionally authorized concept or statement that carries with it its own necessary elaboration” (626).
“Expert writers. . ., can better imagine how a reader will respond to a text and can transform or restructure what they have to say around a goal shared with a reader” (627).
“What these assignments fail to address is the central problem of academic writing, where a student must assume the right of speaking to someone who knows more about baseball or “To His Coy Mistress” than the student does, a reader for whom the general commonplaces and the readily available utterances about a subject are inadequate” (629).
“It is possible, however, to the the problem as (perhaps simultaneously) a problem in the way subjects are located in a field of discourse” (629).
“A writer does not write (and this is Barthe’s famous paradox) but is, himself, written by the language available to him” (631).
“The student, in effect, has to assume privilege without having any” (632).
“It is true, I think, that education has failed to involve students in scholarly projects, projects that allow students to act as though they were colleagues in an academic enterprise” (632).
Students must realize they can place themselves in an academic discussion.
“Our students, however, must have a place to begin. They cannot sit through lectures and read textbooks and, as a consequence, write a sociologists or write literary criticism. There must be steps along the way. Some of the steps will be marked by drafts and revisions” (645).
How would I go about trying to introduce students to academic language?
“The challenge to researchers, it seems to me, is to turn their attention again to products, to student writing, since the drama in a student’s essay, as he or she struggles with and against the languages of our contemporary life, is as intense and telling as the drama of an essay’s mental preparation or physical production” (649).

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own”

2010-04-27T04:06:00.001-07:00

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own” (611).
“It seems to me that the agreement for inquiry and discovery needs to be deliberately reciprocal” (615).
“We need to get over our tendencies to be too possessive and to resist locking ourselves into the tunnels of our own visions and direct experience” (615).
Whether that be respecting students as individuals, what methods we use to teach, tolerance of others, in anything to do with the idea of teaching this would be good.
Talking about those who write about African American lit?
“However, like W.E.B. Du Bois, I’ve chosen not to be distracted or consumed by my rage at voyeurs, tourists, and trespassers, but to look at what I can do” (616).
“How do we negotiate the privilege of interpretation?” (618).
I find this annoying, anger making. Why should there be any privilege to interpretation? I have read, and attempted to interpret Shakespeare, but I’m not a man and never (or do not remember having) lived in his time. To me this is selfish and ridiculous. What am I missing?
Maybe I just lost the point of this article?

Rose, Mike “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University”

2010-04-27T04:05:00.000-07:00

Rose, Mike “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University” (547).
“Writing is a skill or a tool rather than a discipline.” [conclusions drawn from snippets of conversation about writing by writing instructors.]
“I realize how caught up we all are in a political-semantic web that restricts the way we think about the place of writing in the academy” (548).
Aren’t we though! Instead of talking about the act of writing, we talk about where writing stands in the university, the levels of our students, and other things that have no direct impact on the teaching of writing.
“And the movements of the last four decades that have most influenced the teaching of writing—life adjustment, liberal studies, and writing as process—have each, in their very different ways, placed writing pedagogy in the context of broad concerns: personal development and adjustment, a rhetorical-literary tradition, the psychology of composing” (549).
“they found a Latin and Greed-influenced school grammar that was primarily a set of prescriptions for conducting socially acceptable discourse, a list of the arcane do’s and don’ts of usage for the ever-increasing numbers of children—many from lower classes and immigrant groups—entering the educational system” (550).
So, today it seems we fight strongly against that “prescription” and want to work toward a writing that does not use “rules”. However, those rules are still necessary, to some extent, in order to create some kind of order out of chaos. Can we give our students a “fluidity” within our teaching which accepts rules and breaks them at the same time?
“It gives us a method—a putatively objective one—to the strong desire of our society to maintain correct language use” (552).
I wonder if the word “correct” is the right one. Yes, we desire a uniform use of language, but is it therefore because we desire “correctness” or because we desire understanding, clarity, etc. I find it difficult to believe that a written language in which there is no uniformity would be able to be understood by all. I academia we have articles that inform, to inform as many as possible we attempt to hold onto a certain use of language. That language could be IMing for all I care, but the uniformity seems necessary.
“To view writing as a skill in the university context reduces the possibility of perceiving it as a complex ability that is continually developing as one engages in new tasks with new materials for new audiences” (554).
Yes, and to not view it as at least a skill, in part, would be to believe you either can or you can’t.
“So, to reduce writing to second-class intellectual status is to influence the way faculty, students, and society view the teaching of writing” (555). YES!!
“What is remedial for a school like UCLA might well be standard for other state or community colleges and what is considered standard during one era might well be tagged remedial in the next” (556).
“The model we advance must honor the cognitive and emotional and situational dimensions of language, be psycholinguistic as well as literary and rhetorical in its focus, and aid us in understanding what we can observe as well as what we can only infer” (565).
While I understand and agree with this, I also think it is a little bit much! Too much for one human to attempt while teaching others.
“Consider, though, the message that would be sent to the schools and to the society at large if the university embraced- not just financially but conceptually—the teaching of writing; if we gave it full status, championed its rich relationship with inquiry, insisted on the importance of craft and grace, incorporated it into the heart of our currciculum” (567).
DEFINITELY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bizzell, Patricia. “’Contact Zones’ and English Studies” (481).

2010-04-27T04:04:00.000-07:00

Bizzell, Patricia. “’Contact Zones’ and English Studies” (481).
“I suggest that we address this problem by employing Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the ‘contact zone’:
I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (34)” (482).
F”Focusing on a contact zone as a way of organizing literary study would mean attempting to include all material relevant to the struggles on on there” (482).
[New England 1600—1800 as contact zone] “We would be working with categories that treated multiculturalism as a defining feature, that assumed the richest literary treasures could be found in situations in which different histories, lifeways, and languages are trying to communicate and deal with the unequal power distribution among them” (484).
“this approach fully integrates composition and rhetoric into literary studies. Studying texts as they respond to contact zone conditions is studying them rhetorically, studying them as efforts of rhetoric” (484).
I’m not sure I agree with this! One could approach this rhetorically, but it would certainly not be necessary or a given.
“It would also mean reorganizing graduate study and professional scholarly work in ways I hardly dare to suggest. I suppose that one would no longer become a specialist in American literature, a “Shakespeare man,” or a “compositionist.” Rather,people’s areas of focus would be determined by the kinds of rhetorical problems in which they were interested” (485).
Lu, Min-Zahn. “Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone”
Would someone please tell me what are we teaching? I feel as though I’m caught in an argument that consists of people arguing for the total education of the student in anything even slightly related to the humanities in a composition course. I want my students to write. I want them to write well, and to recognize that “style” of writing changes as does “style” of dress. We put forth a different image for different occasions. Tuxes at a formal party, academic talk for academic papers. Jeans and a T-shirt for hanging out and IMing for chatting with friends. My students should, at those opportunities which arise, be introduced to acceptance of our multi-cultural world, but I would rather teach writing. Why isn’t writing—the kind of writing students learn in comp I, important to anyone? Exploration of creative writing, exploration of blogging, etc., could be taken in other places!
“My second concern has to do with a division many of us feel between our role as composition teachers and the role we play as students, teachers, or scholars in other, supposedly more central areas of English Studies” (488).
OF COURSE THERE IS A DIVISION!!!!!! Geeze!
“This exchange between an indignant Stein and an embarrassed “young man” reveals some of the criteria used by “educated America” when dealing with an idiosyncratic style” (489).
“Most of the readings I assign for these classes call attention to writers’ need and right to contest the unifying force of hegemonic discourses, and thus make Dreiser’s submission to the authority of the “better educated” appear dated and passive” (490).
“Why is it that in spite of our developing ability to acknowledge the political need and right of “real” writers to experiment with “style,” we continue to cling to the belief that such a need and right does not belong to student writers”?” (491).
It isn’t a matter of what “belongs” to student writers, it is a matter of time! How do you expect me to teach a student to a) write in a way his biology teacher can understand, b) master the art of clarity, c) explore different styles, d)use his own language. CRAP! One Person, One TERM!
Where does style belong? What is style? Aren’t we teaching one of many, even sometimes two?
“I do so by asking students to explore the full range of choices and options, including those excluded by the conventions of academic discourses” (492).
Could we please decide WHAT it is we are ATTEMPTING to teach?
“At this point, a “contact zone” would begin to take shape with three conflicting positions on the meanings of “can” and “able to”; the position of a speaker of idiomatic English, the position of the dictionary and the position of a “foreign” student writer” (496).
This is good, I like the idea of a “contact zone” being the difference between writers and their ways of writing. I want to do something with it, but I’m not sure what.
“Therefore, learning to become comfortable in making blunders is central to this type of teaching. In fact, there is no better way to teach students the importance of negotiation than by allowing them the opportunity to watch a teacher work her way through a chancy and volatile dialogue” (501).

Truimbur, John. “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning”

2010-04-27T04:03:00.000-07:00

Truimbur, John. “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning” (461).
“The aim of collaborative learning its advocates hold, is to reach consensus through an expanding conversations” (461).
“These critics of collaborative learning want to rescue the sovereignty and autonomy of the individual from what Johnson calls collaborative learning’s “peer indoctrination classes.’” (462).
“Consensus, I will argue, can be a powerful instrument for students to generate differences, to identify the systems of authority that organize these differences, and to transform the relations of power that determine who may speak and what counts as a meaningful statement” (462).
[about Bruffee] “Their effort to save the individual from the group is based on an unhelpful and unnecessary polarization of the individual and society” (463).
“What Bruffee takes from Dewey is a strong appreciation of the generativity of group life and its promise for classroom teaching” (463).
“If anything, it is through the social interaction of shared activity that individuals realize their own power to take control of their situation by collaborating with others” (463).
“Dewey’s educational pragmatism recasts the fear that consensus will ineveitably lead to conformity as a fear of group life itself” (463).
“Consensus does not necessarily violate the individual but instead can enable individuals to empower each other through social activity” (464).
“Knowledge, in this account, is not the result of the confrontation of the individual mind with reality but of the conversation that organizes the available means we have at any given time to talk about reality” (465).
“Rorty acknowledges, for example, the tendency of discourse to normalize itself and to block the flow of conversation by posing a “canonical vocabulary” (467).
This makes a lot of sense to me, those participating in the conversation can be deterred by that same “canonical vocabulary” by means of not having access to that vocabulary. We limit participation in our conversations when we “over jargon” them with terms that are not readily available to all.
“The ‘power of strangeness’ in abnormal discourse ‘to take us out of our old selves’ and ‘to make us into new beings’ . . .simply reaffirms our solidarity with the conversation” (468).
“Instead, abnormal discourse represents the result at any given time of the set of power relations that organizes normal discourse: the acts of permission and prohibition, of incorporation and exclusion that institute the structure and practices of discourse communities” (469).
“In the account I’m suggesting, it also refers to the relations of power that determine what falls within the current consensus and what is assigned the status of dissent. Abnormal discourse, from this perspective is neither as romantic or as pragmatic as Rorty makes it out to be. Rather it offers a way to analyze the strategic moves by which discourse communities legitimize their own conversation by marginalizing others. It becomes a critical term to describe the conflict among discourses and collective wills in the heterogeneous conversation in contemporary public life” (469).
“Bruffee uses the term vernacular to call attention to the plurality of voices that constitute our verbal thought. The intersecting vernaculars that we experience contending for our attention and social allegiance, however, are not just plural. They are also organized in hierarchical relations of power” (469).
“Myers argues, correctly I think, that Bruffee’s use of consensus risks accepting the current production and distribution of knowledge and discourse as unproblematical and given” (470).
[Wells says] “They can learn, that is, not how consensus is achieved through collaborative negotiation but rather how differences in interest produce conflicts that may in fact block communication and prohibit the development of consensus” (471).
“If one of the goals of collaborative learning is to replace the traditional hierarchical relations of teaching and learning with the practices of participatory democracy, we must acknowledge that one of the functions of the professions and the modern university has been to specialize and to remove knowledge from public discourse and decision-making, to reduce it to a matter of expertise and technique” (472).
Rather than opening communications with the outside world, we are closing off by continuing to narrowly define ourselves so that one must have an especial knowledge of the field in order to discuss it!
“Collaborative learning, that is, seeks to locate authority in neither the text nor the reader but in what Stanley fish calls interpretive communities” (474).
“In contrast, I think we need to begin collaborative classes by asking why interpretation has become the unquestioned goal of literary studies and what other kinds of readings thereby have been excluded and devalued” (474).
“One of the benefits of emphasizing the dissensus that surrounds the act of reading is that it poses consensus not as the goal of the conversation but rather as a critical measure to help students identify the structures of power that inhibit communication among readers (and between teachers and students) by authorizing certain styles of reading while excluding others” (475).
“We need to see consensus, I think, not as an agreement that reconciles differences through an ideal conversation but rather as the desire of humans to live and work together with differences” (476).
This was good, thought provoking.

Myers, Greg. “Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Composition

2010-04-27T04:02:00.000-07:00

Myers, Greg. “Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Composition Teaching”
“Schools not only teach academic knowledge, they teach work according to schedule, acceptance of authority, and competition among individuals and between groups” (439).
[about Leonard] “But the most important influence on him and an important influence still on composition theory, was the work of John Dewey. It was from Dewey that Leonard took his central theme—and the theme of most importance to us in trying to criticize his work—the idea of the school as an image of society” (441).
“The danger is that the teacher has merely embodied his or her authority in the more effective guise of class consensus. This guided consensus has a power of individual students that a teacher can not have alone” (442).
So, we take authoritative “pressure” off the students, authority in the guise of instructor, and place them under peer pressure. Geeze.
“By treating the ‘real world’ as the bedrock of our teaching we perpetuate the idea that reality is something outside us and beyond our efforts to change it” (445).
“If what we think of as facts are determined by our ideological framework, the facts cannot themselves get us beyond that framework” (445).
“His demand that development in school lead to the world of work and community responsibility, while it frees the school from the empty formalism of lectures, drills, and theme topics, ironically makes it more subservient to ideology” (446).
“For Leonard, as for Dewey, to criticize the subordination of education to the needs of business and government is to fail to face reality” (446).
“All these associations, whatever the pedagogical value of the materials they propose, beg the question of just how we come to define a real world, and accept that world as something given” (447).
“I have questions about the way these reformers define themselves against the dubious practices of traditional teachers, who are often at a lower level of the hierarchy of educational prestige” (447).
“Thus in each generation it is the reformers who chair committees, write articles, and edit the journals; by these standards it is the reformers who are the establishment and the opponents they label traditionalists are the outsiders” (448).
“What is needed to break this circle is more understanding of the conditions under which people teach, and the ideological frameworks within which they think” (448).
“For Elbow, as for Leonard, power over real audiences comes from an immediate connection with reality gained through a breaking down of stifling conventions” (449).
“The problem with this call for direct experience of reality is that, as with Leonard, one must ask to which reality is one admitted” (449).
EXCELLENT QUESTION!!!!!!!!
“analysis of the social conditions of our writing” (450). Good idea.
“He refers often to his own internal struggles in writing the book. I would argue, though, that its rhetorical power comes not from these struggles, but from its place in a group of texts” (450).
“My point is that both Elbow and I write within discourses developed in social processes, and that his account ignores these processes” (450).
“If we turn a blind eye to social factors we are likely merely to perpetuate the provision of different kinds of knowledge for the rich and the poor” (452).
“This stance requires a sort of doubleness: an awareness that one’s course is part of an ideological structure that keeps people from thinking about their situation, but also a belief that one can resist this structure and help students to criticize it” (454).
I like the way this guy thinks, but boy is he a boring writer.

Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’”

2010-04-27T04:01:00.000-07:00

Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’”
Too much talk for too little info.
“collaborative learning is discussed sometimes as a process that constitutes fields or disciplines of study and sometimes as a pedagogical tool that “works” in teaching composition and literature” (416).
Collaborate learning began to interest American college folk in the 1980’s, but term coined in the 50’s and 60’s (416).
“The help colleges offered, in the main, were tutoring and counseling programs staffed by graduate students and other professionals. These programs failed because undergraduates refused to use them” (417).
“one type of collaborative learning, peer criticism (also called peer evaluation), students learn to describe the organizational structure of a peer’s paper, paraphrase it, and comment both on what seems well done and what the author might do to improve the work” (418).
“human conversation takes place within us as well as among us” (419).
“any effort to understand how we think requires us to understand the nature of conversation, and any effort to understand conversation requires us to understand the nature of community life that generates and maintains conversations” (421). Huh? I don’t think I agree.
“Richard Rorty argues . . .that to understand any kind of knowledge we must understand what he calls the social justification of belief. That is, we must understand how knowledge is established and maintained in the ‘normal discourse’ of communities of knowledgeable peers” (421).
“our task must involve engaging students in conversation among themselves at as many points in both the writing and the reading process as possible, and that we should contrive to ensure that students conversation about what they read and write is similar in as many ways as possible to the way we would like them eventually to read and write” (422).
“A community of knowledgeable peers is a group of people who accept, and whose work is guided by, the same paradigms and the same code of values and assumptions” (423).
“What students do when working collaboratively on their writing is not write or edit or, least of all, read proof. What they do is converse. They talk about the subject and about the assignment” (425).
“To learn is to work collaboratively to establish and maintain knowledge among a community of knowledgeable peers through the process that Richard Rorty calls ‘socially justifying belief’”(427).
I LOVE ABNORMAL DISCOURSE!!!!!!!!!
“Abnormal discourse, Rorty says, ‘is what happens when someone joins in the discourse who is ignorant of the conventions governing that discourse ‘ or who sets them aside’” (429).
“’the product of abnormal discourse can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution’”(429).
“Thus collaborative learning can help students joint the established knowledge communities of academic studies, business, and the professions. But it should also help students learn something else. They should learn, Trimbur says, ‘something about how this social transition takes place, how it involves crises of identity and authority, how students can begin to generate a transitional language to bridge the gap between communities’ (private correspondence)” (430).
[Teachers are] “Responsible to both sets of values, therefore, we must perform as conservators and agents of change, as custodians of prevailing community values and as agents of social transition and reacculturation” (432).

Bizell, Patricia. “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty

2010-04-27T04:00:00.000-07:00

Bizell, Patricia. “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing” (387).
Of the articles relating to cognitive writing, I find Bizzell’s the most useful, and the most thoughtful. “Science-a-tizing” writing may answer some questions, but it leaves much to be desired. Writing is a synthesis of many things.
“This profound effect on students is themore to be expected because of the terms in which the ‘writing problem’ has appeared to us—terms that suggest that students’ thinking needs remediation as much as their writing. Seeing the problem this way makes it very clear that our teaching task is not only to convey information but also to transform students’ whole world view” (387).
“We now see the ‘writing problem’ as a thinking problem primarily because we used to take our students’ thinking for granted” (387).
“Composition specialists generally agree about some fundamental elements in the development of language and thought. We agree that the normal human individual posses innate mental capacities to learn a language and to assemble complex conceptual structures” (388).
“One theoretical camp sees writing as primarily inner-directed, and so is more interested in the structure of language-learning and thinking processes in their earliest state, prior to social influence. The other main theoretical camp sees writing as primarily outer-directed, and so is more interested in the social processes whereby language-learning and thinking capacities are shaped and used in particular communities” (388).
“Inner-directed theorists further claim, in a similar paradox, that the universal, fundamental structures of thought and language can be taught” (390).
“In contrast, outer-directed theorists believe that universal, fundamental structures can’t be taught: thinking and language use can never occur free of social context that conditions them “(390).
“Outer directed theorists would argue that we have no reason to believe, and no convincing way to determine, that our students can’t think or use language in complex ways. It’s just that they can’t think or use language in the ways we want them to” (392).
Discourse analysis goes beyond audience analysis because what is most significant about members of a discourse community is not their personal preferences, prejudices, and so on, but rather the expectations they share by virtue of belonging to that particular community” (392).
“We need to explain the cognitive and the social factors in writing development, and even more important the relationship between them” (392).
“On the other hand, we find out eventually [referring to Flower] that ‘monitor’ means simply ‘the writer’s mind making decisions.’ Borrowing a term from programming masks the question of why the writer makes certain decisions” (395).

Rose, Mike. “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reduction” (345).

2010-04-27T03:59:00.002-07:00

Rose, Mike. “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reduction” (345).
Whoa! Lots of psychobabble! A lesson in Piaget and other cognitivists.
“Cognitive style, broadly defined, is an “individual’s characteristic and consistent manner of processing and organizing what he [or she] sees and thinks about’ (Harre and Lamb 98)” (347).
“it is not a measure of how much people know or how well they mentally perform a task, but the manner in which they perform, their way of going about solving a problem, their style” (347).
Witkin articulated (or anylitic) vs. global perception:
“At one extreme there is a consistent tendency for experience to be global and diffuse;
The organization of the field as a whole dictates the manner in which its parts are experienced. At the other extreme there is a tendency for experience to be delineated and structured; parts of a field are experienced as discrete and the field as a whole organized” (348).
“field-dependent people are more socially oriented, more responsive to a myriad of information, etc. while field-independent people tend to be individualistic, interested in abstract subject matter and so on” (352).
“We in the West are drawn to the idea of consistency in personality (from Renaissance humors to Jungian types0, and that attraction, I think, compels us to seek out similar, interrelated consistencies in cognition” (552).
“All current theories of cognition that I’m familiar with posit that human beings bring coherence to behavior by abstracting general principles from experiences, by interpreting and structuring what they see and do” (353).
“But attempts to comprehend or generate writing—what is perceived or produced as logical or metaphoric or coherent or textured—involve a stunning range of competencies: from letter recognition to syntactic fluency to an understanding of discourse structure and genre (see, e.g. Gardner and Winner 376-80). And such a range, according toeverything we know, involves the whole brain in ways that defy the broad claims of the hemisphericity theorists (360).
“suffice it to say that a large number of studies has demonstrated that brief training sessions can have dramatic results on performance” (364).
“Much problem-solving and, I suspect, the reasoning involved in the production of most kinds of writing rely not only on abstract logical operations, but, as well, on the rich interplay of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic associations, feelings, metaphor, social perception, the matching of mental representations of past experience with new experience, and so on. And writing as the whole span of rhetorical theory makes clear, is deeply embedded in the particulars of the human situation” (367).
“The operative verb here is “transformed.” Writing transforms human cognition” (367).
“But it appears to be historically, culturally, and economically reductive—and politically naïve—to view literacy as embodying an automatic transformational power” (371).
“theories end up leveling rather than elaborating individual differences in cognition. At best, people are placed along slots on a single continuum; at worst they are split into mutually exclusive camps—with one camp clearly having cognitive and social privilege over the other” (276).
“the theories inadvertently reflect cultural stereotypes that should themselves, be the subject of our investigation. At least since Plato, we in the West have separated heart from head, and in one powerful manifestation of that split we contrast rational thought with emotional sensibility, intellectual acuity with social awareness—and we often link the analytical vs. holistic opposition to the polarities” (377).
I wish I had someone to discuss this with!!!!!!

Flower, Linda and Hayes, John. “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing”

2010-04-27T03:59:00.001-07:00

Flower, Linda and Hayes, John. “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing” 273.
I found this article extremely difficult to focus on. The ideas behind it, I think, are quite good, but the language of the article itself, the charts, and the length were a pain. Trying to break writing down into a scientifically styled process does not work for me. Writing, like language itself, is a living breathing thing that changes in geographical, academic, and personal arenas. It grows and develops within the person applying the written language to an idea. We can try all we want to make it a “scientific process”, but in the end it will be what it is.
What drives a writer? (275-76).
“In a process model, the major units of analysis are elementary mental processes, such as the process of generating ideas” (276).
More than a process, this is a fluid mental evolution of a writer’s ideas.
“The act of writing involves three major elements which are reflected in the three units of the model: the task environment, the writer’s long-term memory, and the writing process” (277).
“The third element in our model contains writing processes themselves, specifically the basic processes of Planning, Translating, and Reviewing, which are under the control of a Monitor” (277).
“Just as a title constrains the content of a paper and a topic sentence shapes the options of a paragraph, each word in the growing text determines and limits the choices of what can come next” (279).
“In the planning process writers form an internal representation of the knowledge that will be used in writing” (280).
“Planning or the act of building this internal representation, involves a number of sub-processes. The most obvious is the act of generating ideas which includes retrieving relevant information from long-term memory.
“the sub-process of organizing takes on the job of helping the writer make meaning,” (281).
“Goal-setting is indeed a third, little-studied but major, aspect of the planning process” (281).
“The most important thing about writing goals is the fact that they are created by the writer” (281).
Yes, but then this also means that the goals are constantly changing and being recreated. The goals are also influenced by multiple sources—the writers REASON for writing (i.e., for a course); the writer’s desired outcome of the writing (i.e., money or a good grade or self-satisfaction) and multiple others. This makes “goals” a rather tenuous thing to try to study.
Moment to moment process of composing.
[Translating] “This is essentially the process of putting ideas into visible language. We have chosen the term translate for this process over other terms such as “transcribe” or “write” in order to emphasize the peculiar qualities of the task” (282).
Taking visual representations and other items from the mind and placing them into words.
[Reviewing] “Reviewing itself, may be a conscious process in which writers choose to read what they have written either as a springboard to further translating or with an eye to systematically evaluating and or/revising the text” (283).
[The Monitor] “As writers compose, they also monitor their current process and progress. The monitor functions as a writing strategist which determines when the writer moves from one process to the next” (283).
“In order to understand a writer’s goals, then, we must be sensitive to the broad range of plans, goals, and criteria that grow out of goal-directed thinking” (287).
“4. Writers create their own goals in two key ways: by generating goals and supporting sub-goals which embody a purpose; and, at times, by changing or regenerating their own top-level goals in light of what they have learned by writing” (290).
“Explore and Consolidate”
“State and Develop”
“Write and Regenerate” (291).

Berlin, James A. “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories

2010-04-27T03:58:00.001-07:00

Berlin, James A. “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories”255-270
“From this point of view the composing process is always and everywhere the same because writer, reality, reader, and language are always and everywhere the same. Differences in teaching theories, then, are mere cavils about which of these features to emphasize in the classroom” (255).
Cavil--to raise trivial and frivolous objection
“I do, however, strongly disagree with the contention that the differences in approaches to teaching writing can be explained by attending to the degree of emphasis given to universally defined elements of a universally defined writing process. The differences in these teaching approaches should instead be located in diverging definitions of the composing process itself—that is, in the way the elements that make up the process—writer, reality, audience, and language—are envisioned” (256).
“Rhetorical theories differ from each other in the way writer, reality, audience, and language are conceived—both, as separate units and in the way units relate to each other” (256).
“To teach writing is to argue for a version of reality, and the best way of knowing and communicating it--. . .in the metarhetorical realm of epistemology and linguistics” (256).
“The dismay students display about writing is, I am convinced, at least occasionally the result of teachers unconsciously offering contradictory advice about composing—guidance grounded in assumptions that simply do not square with each other” (256-7).
“Thus rhetoric is primarily concerned with the provision of inventional devices whereby the speaker may discover his or her argument, with these devices naturally falling into three categories: the rational, the emotional, and the ethical” (258).
“The aim of rhetoric is to teach how to adapt the discourse to its hearers—and here the uncomplicated correspondence of the faculties and the world is emphasized” (260).
“In the Platonic scheme, truth is not based on sensory experience since the material world is always in flux and thus unreliable. Truth is instead discovered through an internal apprehension, a private vision of a world that transcends the physical”(261).
(Platonic) “The purpose of rhetoric then becomes not the transmission of truth, but the correction of error, the removal of that which obstructs the personal apprehension of the truth” (261).
“The major tenets of theis Platonic rhetoric form the center of what are commonly called “Expressionist” textbooks. Truth is conceived as the result of a private vision that must be constantly consulted in writing” (263).
“Classical Rhetoric considers truth to be located in the rational operation of the mind, Positivist Rhetoric in the correct perception of sense impressions, and Neo-Platonic Rhetoric within the individual, attainable only through an internal apprehension. In each case knowledge is a commodity situated in a permanent location, a repository to which the individual goes to be enlightened” (264).
The problem is that “knowledge is a commodity situated in a permanent location”. I find that to be untrue as well, knowledge is a living growing thing that moves within and without the mind.
“For the New Rhetoric, knowledge is not cimply a static entity available for retrieval. Truth is dynamic and dialectical, the result of a process involving the interaction of opposing elements” (264).
True, and great way to think of it, but why do we associate these things as to developing into the “truth”?
“Young, Becker and Pike state the same notion:
‘Constantly changing, bafflingly complex, the external world is not a neat, well-ordered
Place replete with meaning, but an enigma requiring interpretation” (265).
“For the New Rhetoric truth is impossible without language since it is language that embodies and gnerates truth” (265).
“Berthoff agrees: ‘The relationship between thought and language is dialectical: ideas are conceived by language; language is generated by thought’ (p. 47)” (265).
“In the New Rhetoric the message arises out of the interaction of the writer, language, reality, and the audience. Truths are operative only within a given universe of discourse, and this universe is shaped by all of these elements, including audience” (266).
“The way we make sense of the world is to see something with respect to, in terms of, in relation to something else” (266).
“The New Rhetoric sees the writer as a creator of meaning, a shaper of reality, rather than a passive receptor of the immutably given” (267).
“Structure and language are a part of the formation of meaning, are at the center of the discovery of truth, not simply the dress of thought” (267).
“In teaching writing we are not simply offering training in a useful technical skill that is meant as a simple complement to the more important studies of other areas. We are teaching a way of experiencing the world, a way of ordering and making sense of it” (268).
Everyone teaches the process of writing, but everyone does not teach the same process. The test of one’s competence as a composition instructor, it seems to me, resides in being able to recognize and justify the version of the process being taught, complete with all of its significance for the student” (269).
It is in the fact that we all teach writing differently that we in turn get progressively differing theories of the pedagogy.

Witte, Stephen P. and Faigley, Lester “Coherence, Cohesion,

2010-04-27T03:57:00.001-07:00

Witte, Stephen P. and Faigley, Lester “Coherence, Cohesion, and Writing Quality”
This article was extremely confusing, leaving it difficult to haul out aspects which are worth remembering, and holding onto. Should be discussed with someone. Geeze. Below, four important definitions.
Syntax: 1 a: the way in which linguistic elements (as words) are put together to form constituents (as phrases or clauses) b: the part of grammar dealing with this
Lexical: 1 : of or relating to words or the vocabulary of a language as distinguished from its grammar and construction
Taxonomy: 1: the study of the general principles of scientific classification
Semantics : the study of meanings: a: the historical and psychological study and the classification of changes in the signification of words or forms viewed as factors in linguistic development
“Cohesion defines those mechanisms that hold a text together, while coherence defines those underlying semantic relations that allow a text to be understood and used” (251).

“Cohesion, therefore, defines a text as a text. A cohesive tie ‘is a semantic relation between an element in a text and some other element that is crucial to the interpretation of it” (236).
“Halliday and Hasan call within-text cohesive ties endorphic and references to items outside the text exophoric” (236).
“For Halliday and Hasan, cohesion depends upon lexical and grammatical relationships that allow sentence sequences to be understood as connected discourse rather than as autonomous sentences” (236).
“Lexical cohesion is the predominant means of connecting sentences in discourse” (240).
“Collocation refers to lexical cohesion ‘that is achieved through the association of lexical items that regularly co-occur (p. 284)” (240).
“At the most general level of analysis, the high rated essays are much more dense in cohesion than the low-rated essays” (243).
“better writers tend to establish stronger cohesive bonds between individual T-units than do the writers of the low-rated essays” (243).
“The better writers seem to have a better command of invention skills that allow them to elaborate and extend the concepts they introduce” (244).
“Analyses of cohesion thus measure some aspects of invention skills. The low-rated essays stall frequently, repeating ideas instead of elaborating them” (246).
“One implication of the present study is that if cohesion is better understood, it can be better taught” (249).
“A great portion of the advice in composition textbooks stops at sentence boundaries. Numerous exercises teach clause and sentence structure in isolation, ignoring the textual, and the situational, considerations for using that structure” (250).
“Cohesion defines those mechanisms that hold a text together, while coherence defines those underlying semantic relations that allow a text to be understood and used” (251).

Hartwell, Patrick. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar”

2010-04-27T03:56:00.001-07:00

Hartwell, Patrick. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar” 205—234
“what does experimental research tell us about the value of teaching formal grammar? But seventy-five years of experimental research has for all practical purposes told us nothing” (206).
“Thus we might suspect that the grammar issue is itself embedded in larger models of the transmission of literacy, part of quite different assumptions about the teaching of composition” (208).
What is meant by grammar W. Nelson Francis, quoted by author:
‘the set of formal patterns in which the words of a language are arranged in order to convey larger meanings’ (209).
“In fact, all speakers of a language above the age of five or six know how to use its complex forms of organization with considerable skill; in this sense of the word—call it ‘Grammar 1’—they are thoroughly familiar with its grammar” (209).
‘Grammar 2”—is ‘the branch of linguistic science which is concerned with the description, analysis, and formulization of formal language patterns’ (210).
‘linguistic etiquette. This we may call ‘Grammar 3.’ The word in this sense is often coupled with a derogatory adjective: we say that the expression ‘he ain’t here’ is ‘bad grammar.’
“Criticism of this sort is based on the wholly unproven assumption that teaching Grammar 2 will improve the student’s proficiency in Grammar 1 or improve his manners in Grammar 3” (210).
Grammar 4 the grammar used in schools (211).
“Grammar 5, ‘stylistic grammar,’ defined as ‘grammatical terms used in the interest of teaching prose style’ (211).
“So Grammar 1 is eminently usable knowledge—the way we make our life through language—but it is not accessible knowledge in a profound sense, we do not know that we have it” (212).
Quoting Mark Lester, ‘there simply appears to be no correlation between a writer’s study of language and his ability to write’ (216).
Does this (the fact that we don’t learn to write through learning the mechanics) have something to do with the constant idea that using literature is the way to teach writing? We assume that canonical literature is good in style and grammatically correct—it would make sense. Could we accomplish the same thing by having students read well-written student papers, essays published and unpublished, or any number of other materials?
“Arthur S. Reber, in a classic 1967 experiment, demonstrated that mere exposure to grammatical sentences produced tacit learning: subjects who copied several grammatical sentences performed far above chance in judging the grammaticality of other letter strings” (218).
“R. Scott Baldwin and James M. Coady, studying how readers respond to punctuation signals (“psycholinguistic Approaches to a Theory of Punctuation,” Journal of Reading Behavior, 10 [1978], 363-83), conclude that conventional rules of punctuation are ‘a complete sham’ (p. 375).
“It may simply be that as hyperliterate adults we are conscious of “using rules” when we are in fact doing something else, something far more complex, accessing tacit heuristics honed by print literacy itself. We can clarify this notion by reaching for an acronym coined by technical writers to explain the readability of complex prose—COIK: “clear only if known.” The rules of Grammar 4—no, we can at this point be more honest—the incantations of Grammar 4 are COIK” (221).
We need to. . .”shuck off our hyperliterate perception of the value of formal rules, and to regain the confidence in the tacit power of unconscious knowledge that our theory of language gives us” (223).
“More general research findings suggest a clear relationship between measures of metalinguistic awareness and measures of literacy level (224).
“The analysis here suggests that the causal relationship works the other way, that it is the mastery of written language that increases one’s awareness of language as language” (224).
“Print is a complex cultural code—or better yet, a system of codes—and my bet is that regardless of instruction, one masters those codes from the top down, from pragmatic questions of voice, tone, audience, register, and rhetorical strategy, not from the bottom up, from grammar to usage to fixed forms of organization” (224).
“We might put the matter in the following terms. Writers need to develop skills at two levels. One, broadly rhetorical, involves communication in meaningful contexts (the strategies, registers, and procedures of discourse across a range of modes, audiences, contexts, and purposes). The other, broadly metalinguistic rather than linguistic, involves active manipulation of language with conscious attention to surface form” (225).

Ede, Lisa and Lunsford, Andrea “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked:

2010-04-27T03:55:00.001-07:00

Ede, Lisa and Lunsford, Andrea “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy.
“the fluid, dynamic character of rhetorical situations; and (2) the integrated, indterdependent nature of reading and writing” (78).
“The ‘addressed’ audience refers to those actual or real-life people who read a discourse, while the ‘invoked’ audience refers to the audience called up or imagined by the writer” (78).
In audience theory that focuses on the writer: “The ‘writer’ model is limited because it defines writing as either self expression or ‘fideltity to fact’ (p. 255) –epistemologically naïve assumptions which result in troubling pedagogical inconsistencies. And the ‘written product’ model, which is characterized by an emphasis on ‘certain intrinsic features[such as a] lack of comma splices and fragments’ (p.258), is challenged by the continued inability of teachers of writing (not to mention those in other professions) to agree upon the precise intrinsic features which characterize ‘good’ writing” (79).
“Neither the writer model nor the written product model pays serious attention to invention, the term used to describe those methods designed to aid in retrieving information, forming concepts, analyzing complex events, and solving certain kinds of problems’ (79).
Invention should be a major part of any writing model, shouldn’t it? It is the imagination which leads to invention and invention which leads to cutting edge ideas put into words clearly enough and passionately enough to incite others.
“Mitchell and Taylor argue that a major limitation of the ‘writer’ model is its emphasis on the self, the person writing, as the only potential judge of effective discourse” (80).
“emphasizing the creative role of readers who, they observe, ‘actively contribute to the meaning of what they read and will respond according to a complex set of expectations, preconceptions, and provocations’ (p. 251), but wrong in failing to recognize the equally essential role writers play throughout the composing process not only as creators but also as readers of their own writing” (81).
A game of weaving intellectual abilities in creating, observing, using language to communicate.
“Anthony Petrosky cautions us that ‘reading, responding, and composing are aspects of understanding, and theories that attempt to account for them outside of their interaction with each other run the serious risk of building reductive models of human understanding’5” (82).
Herbert Simons “He goes on to note that: “Between these two extremes are such groups as the following: (1) the pedestrian audience, persons who happen to pass a soap box orator. . . ; (2) the passive, occasional audience, persons who come to hear a noted lecturer in a large auditorium . . . ; (3) the active, occasional audience, persons who meet only on specific occasions but actively interact when they do meet’ (pp. 97-98)” (84).
So, a question for students might be, what KIND of audience will you have?
“Another weakness of research based on the concept of audience as invoked is that it distorts the processes of writing and reading by overemphasizing the power of the writer and undervaluing that of the reader” (88).
“It is the writer who, as writer and reader of his or her own text, one guided by a sense of purpose and by the particularities of a specific rhetorical situation, establishes the range of potential roles an audience may play. (Readers may, of course, accept or reject the role or roles the writer wishes them to adopt in responding to a text.)” (89).
“The addressed audience, the actual or intended readers of a discourse, exists outside of the text” (90).
Is it just me or are these articles becoming more boring?

Berthoff, Ann E. “Is Teaching Still Possible?

2010-04-27T03:54:00.001-07:00

Berthoff, Ann E. “Is Teaching Still Possible? Writing, Meaning, and Higher Order Reasoning”—329-343
“(No writer ever puts in words which he or she thinks are unnecessary; learning to discover that some are is one of the chief challenges in learning to write.)” (330).
“unless and until the mind of the learner is engaged, no meaning will be made, no knowledge can be won” (330).
“linguistic structures or texts or speech acts can only be studied by interpreting the interdependencies of meanings—and by interpreting our interpretations” (331).
Researcher who does not know how to respect the language according to I.A. Richards “He thinks of it as a code and has not yet learned that it is an organ—the supreme organ of the mind’s self-ordering growth” (331).
“The failure to understand the interdependence of language and thought is consonant with the misconception of the role of instruction which, like test design, is considered by Peiaget in mechanistic terms” (335).
“if we let our practice be guided by whatever we are told has been validated by empricial research, we will get what we have got: a conception of learning as contingent on development in astraightforward, linear fashion; of development as pre-self program which is autonomous and does not require instruction; of language as words used as labels, of meanings as a one-directional, one-dimensional attribute; of the human mind as an adaptive mechanism” (336).
“Abstraction is natural, normal; it is the way we make sense of the world in perception, in dreaming, in all expressive acts, in works of art, in all imagining. Abstraction is the work of the active mind: it is what the mind does as it forms” (337).
“What we have to do is show students how to reclaim their imaginations so that “the prime agent of all human perception” can be for them a living model of what they do when they write” (337).
Triadicity is an idea whose time has come. It can help us take charge of the criticism of our assumptions about teaching because in the triadic conception of the sign, the symbol –user, the knower, the learner is integral to the process of making meaning. The curious triangle, but thus representing the mediating function of interpretation, can serve as an emblem for the pedagogy of knowing (338—339).
“Looking and looking again helps students learn to transform things into questions; they learn to see names as “titles for situations,’ as Kenneth Burke puts it. In looking and naming, looking again and re-naming, they develop perspectives and contexts, discovering how each controls the other. They are composing; they are forming; they are abstracting” (339-340).
“The ‘natural environment’ necessary to the growth and development of the discursive power of language requires dialogue” (340).
“The first step of the analysis should be to look at the character of the assignments, at the sequence of ‘tasks.’ In an interesting variation on this theme of ‘narrative good, exposition terrible,’ one researcher contrasts how well students do with persuasion and how poorly they do with argument’ (341).
“They will thus be able to ‘think abstractly’ because they will be learning how means make further meanings possible, how form finds further form. And we will, in our pedagogy of knowing, be giving our students back their language so that they can reclaim it as an instrument for controlling their becoming” (342).

Kinneavy, James L. “The Basic Aims of Discourse

2010-04-27T03:53:00.002-07:00

Kinneavy, James L. “The Basic Aims of Discourse”—129-140
“’Discourse’ here means the full text, oral or written, delivered at a specific time and place or delivered at several instances. A discourse may be a single sentence, ‘Fire,’ screamed from a hotel window, or a joke, or a sonnet, or a three-hour talk, or a tragedy, or Toynbee’s twelve volumes of A Study of History” (129).
“By aim of discourse is meant the effect that the discourse is oriented to achieve in the average listener or reader for whom it is intended” (129).
I find this all very confusing.
“The determination of the basic aims of discourse and some working agreement in this area among rhetoricians would be a landmark in the field of composition. For it is to the achievement of these aims that all our efforts as teachers of composition are directed” (130).
“It is dangerous in literature (and even more in persuasion) to assume that what the author says he is trying to do is actually what the work really accomplishes” (130).
“Discourses exist in a continuum with decreasing referential and increasing emotive affirmations. Pure reference discourse is scientific, pure emotive discourse is poetic. Any appreciable mixture of the two is rhetoric” (134).
This makes lots of sense, but I’m not sure I totally agree. There seems to be something lacking.
“Discourse dominated by subject matter (reality talked about) is called referential discourse. There are three kinds of referential discourse: exploratory, informative and scientific” (134).
“And it is equally important to distinguish a kind of discourse which asks a question (exploratory, dialectic, interrogative in some formulations) from discourse which answers it (informative) and proves the answer (scientific). Yet all three of these kinds of discourse are subject-matter or reference dominated” (134).
“as Buhler, Jakobson and Aristotle point out, discourse which focuses on eliciting a specific reation from the decoder and is dominated by this request for reaction emerges as persuasion or rhetoric” (136).
“when the language product is dominated by the clear design of the writer or speaker to discharge his emotions or achieve his own individuality or embody his personal or group aspirations in a discourse, then the discourse tends to be expressive” (136).
“the product or text or work itself may be the focus of the process as an object worthy of be appreciated in its own right. Such appreciation gives pleasure to the beholder” (136).
“At the college level, in English departments during the period immediately preceeding the present, the restriction of composition to expository writing and the reading of literary texts has had two equally dangerous consequences. First, the neglect of expressionism, as a reaction to progressive education, has stifled self-expression in the student and partially, at least, is a cause of the unorthodox and extreme forms of deviant self-expression now indulged in by college students on many campuses today” (137).

Ong, Walter J. S. J. “The Writer’s Audience is Always Fiction”

2010-04-27T03:53:00.001-07:00

Ong, Walter J. S. J. “The Writer’s Audience is Always Fiction”—55-76
“Over two millennia, rhetoric has been gradually extended to include writing more and more, until today, in highly technological cultures, this is its principal concern” (55).
On studies about reading. “But most of these studies, except perhaps literary criticism and linguistic studies, treat only perfunctorily, if at all, the roles imposed on the reader by a written or printed text not imposed by spoken utterance” (56).
“mock reader,” as does Henry James, whom Booth also cites, in his discussion of the way an author makes “his reader very much as he makes his character’2”(56) last para on page
Audiences whether for academia or for literary writers are imagined in the head of the writer.
“For the speaker, the audience is in front of him. For the writer, the audience is simply further away, in time or space or both” (57).
“Writing normally calls for some kind of withdrawl” (58).
Yes.
“More properly, a writer addresses readers—only, he does not quite “address” them either: he writes to or for them. The orator has before him an audience which is a true audience, a collectivity” (58).
“But ‘readership’ is not a collective noun. It is an abstraction in a way that ‘audience’ is not” (58).
“If the student kne4w what he was up against better than the teacher giving the assignment seemingly does, he might ask, ‘Who wants to know?’ (59).
If we could get a student to create his reader of someone who was passionate about whatever he was saying, someone who really wanted to know, would that make his writing better? Imagine an audience, a readership if you will, of only those who are intimately acquainted with the topic and who strive to learn every subtle nuance about the topic. I think that is something like what I do. How can I convey this audience representation to students?
“The subject [of a student’s writing] may be in-close; the use it is to be put to remains unfamiliar, strained, bizarre” (59).
On Jame Austen’s work, “The reader had to be reminded (and the narrator too) that the recipient of the story was indeed a reader—not a listener, not one of the crowd, but an individual isolated with a text” (69).
Readers do not become a “collective”. They remain individual and isolated AS THEY READ. The work of reading is isolated in the mind of the reader.
“Today the academic reader’s role is hardest to describe. Some of its complexities can be hinted at by attending to certain fictions which writers of learned articles and books generally observe and which have to do with reader status” (72).
Is this, in part, because each academic approaches the ‘learned article’ from a place which includes his own curiousity, his own knowledge, his own ability to synthesize the information, and ultimately his own reason for having chosen to read that ‘learned article’?
“No matter what pitch of frankness, directness, or authenticity he may strive for, the writer’s mask and the reader’s are less removable than those of the oral communicator and his hearer. For writing is itself an indirection. Direct communication by script is impossible. This makes writing not less but more interesting, although perhaps less noble than speech” (74).
Yes, to all of the above, with the exception of the ‘less noble’ aspect. Writers have more to contend with as far as audience is concerned. There is no automatic feedback, no subtle nuance of the voice he can use to insinuate meaning, no body language or facial expression which can be used to emphasize a point.

Sommers, Nancy Revision Strategies

2010-04-27T03:52:00.001-07:00

Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” 43-55
“What is impossible in speech is revision: like the example Barthes gives revision in speech is an afterthought” (44).
“One reason, Barthes suggests, is that “there is a fundamental tie between teaching and speech.” While “writing begins at the point where speech becomes impossible.”6” The spoken word cannot be revised. The possibility of revision distinguishes the written text from speech” (45).
“Four revision operations were identified: deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering” (45).
“Lexical changes are the major revision activities of the students because economy is their goal. They are governed, like the linear model itself, by the Law of Occam’s razor that prohibits Logically needless repetition; redundancy and superfluity” (47).
“For the students, writing is translating: the thought to the page, the language of speech to the more formal language of prose, the word to its synonym” (47).
“By rewording their sentences to avoid the lexical repetition, the students solve the immediate problem, but blind themselves to problems on a textual level; although they are using different words, they are sometimes merely restating the same idea with different words” (48).
“Because students do not see revision as an activity in which they modify and develop perspectives and ideas they feel that if they know what they want to say, then there is little reason for making revisions” (48).
That’s true, but how do I explain to them that revising further is important? Why would it be?
“What they lack, however, is a set of strategies to help them identify the “something larger” that they sensed was wrong and work from there” (48).
“The students decide to stop revising when they decide that they have not violated any of the rules for revising. These rules, such as “Never begin a sentence with a conjunction” or Never end a sentence with a preposition,” are lexically cued and rigidly applied”(49).
“The experienced writers describe their primary objective when revising as finding the form or shape of their argument” (50).
“Thus experienced writers say their drafts are “not determined by time,” that rewriting is a “constant process,” that they feel as if (they) “can go on forever” (50).
“But these revision strategies are a process of more than communication: they are part of the process of discovering meaning altogether” (51).
“The musical composition—a ‘composition’ of parts—creates its ‘key’ as in an over-all structure which determines the value (meaning) of its parts. The analogy with music is readily seen in the compositions of experienced writers: both sorts of composition are based precisely on those structures experienced writers seek in their writing. It is this complicated relationship between the parts and the whole in the work of experienced writers which destroys the linear model; writing cannot develop ‘like a line’ because each addition or deletion is a reordering of the whole” (51).
“But student writers constantly struggle to bring their essays into congruence with a predefined meaning. The experienced writers to the opposite: they seek to discover (to create) meaning in the engagement with their writing, in revision. They seek to emphasize and exploit the lack of clarity, the difference of meaning, the dissonance, that writing as opposed to speech allows in the possibility of revision (52).
“The writers ask: what does my essay as a whole need for form, balance, rhythm, or communication” (52).
“It is a sense of writing as discovery—a repeated process of beginning over again, starting out new—that the students failed to have” (53).

Emig, Janet. Writing as mode of learning

2010-04-27T03:50:00.001-07:00

Emig, Janet. “Writing as a Mode of Learning”—7-16
“Writing serves learning uniquely because writing as a process-and-product possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies” (7).
YES!
“Here I have a prior purpose: to describe as tellingly as possible how writing uniquely corresponds to certain powerful learning strategies. Making such a case for the uniqueness of writing should logically and theoretically involve establishing many contrasts, distinctions between (1) writing and all other verbal languaging processes—listening, reading, and especially talking; (2) writing and all other forms of composing, such as composing a painting, a symphony, a dance, a film, a building; and (3) composing in words and composing in the two other major graphic symbol systems of mathematical equations and scientific formulae” (7).
“The less useful distinction is that between listening and reading as receptive functions and talking and writing as productive functions” (8).
“Writing is originating and creating a unique verbal construct that is graphically recorded. Reading is creating or re-creating but not originating a verbal construct that is graphically recorded. . . Note that a distinction is being made between creating and originating, separable processes” (8).
“But to say that talking is a valuable form of pre-writing is not to say that writing is talk recorded, an inaccuracy appearing in far too many composition texts” (9).

Grassi, Ernesto. Rhetoric as Philosophy

2010-04-26T11:47:00.000-07:00

Grassi, Ernesto. Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Human Tradition. Trans. John Michael Krois and
Azodi. Southern Illinois UP: Carbondale, IL. 1980.

“The problem of rhetoric—as the speech that acts on the emotionspcan be treated from two points of view. It can be considered simply as a doctrine of a type of speech that the traditional rhetors, politicians, and preachers need, i.e., only as an art, as a technique of persuading” (18).

“Theoretical thinking, as a rational process, excludes every rhetorical element because pathetic influences—the influences of feeling—disturb the clarity of rational thought” (18).

“Locke writes:
But yet if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness; all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so are perfect cheats.” (18).

“Kant writes:
“Rhetoric so far as this is taken to mean the art of persuasion, i.e., the art of deluding by means of a fair semblance [as ars oratoria], and not merely excellence of speech (eloquence and style0, is a dialectic, which borrows from poetry only so much as it is necessary to win over men’s minds to the side of the speaker before they have weighed the matter, and to rob their verdict of its freedom. . .(19).

“The indicative or allusive [semeinein] speech provides the framework within which the proof can come into existence” (20).

“Such speech is immediately a ‘showing’ ==and for this reason ‘figurative’ or ‘imaginative,’ and thus in the original sense ‘theoretical’ (theorein—i.e., to see]” (20)>

“If the image, the metaphor, belongs to rhetorical speech (and for this reason it has a pathetic character), we also are obliged to recognize that every original, former, ‘archaic’ speech (archaic in the sense of dominant, arche archomai; archontes or the dominants) cannot have a rational but only a rhetorical character” (20).

“This original speech, because of its ‘archaic’ character, sketches the framework for every rational consideration, and for this reason we are obliged to say that rhetorical speech ‘comes before’ every rationtional speech, i.e., it has a ‘prophetic’ [prophainesthai] character and never again cah be comprehended from a rational, deductive point of view” (20).

“we must distinguish between two kinds of language: the rational language, which is dialectical, mediating, and demonstrative, i.e., apodictic and without any pathetic character, and the semantic language, which is immediate, not deductive or demonstrative, illuminating, purely indicative, and which has a preeminence opposite the rationsal language. On the basis of its figurative, metaphorical character, this language has an original pathetic essence” (21).

“It seems useful to quote another Aristotelian passage: ‘’The principles—all or some—must necessarily be lent more belief that what is deduced. He who arrives at a certain knowledge through proof must necessarily . . .know and believe the principles to a higher degree than what is decuced from them’ (Anal. Post. 72a 37)” (26).

“The techne of rhetoric, as the art of persuasion, of forming belief, structures the emotive framework which creates the tension within which words, questions that are dealt with, and actions that are discussed, acquire their passionate significance” (26).

“Since emotional life unrolls in the framework of directly indicative signs, a word must evoke these signs in order to relieve or to soothe the passions. As a passionate, and not exclusively rational, being, man is in need of the emotive word” (26).

“So over the centuries, under the aspect of the relationship between content and form, the thesis was again and again developed that images and rhetoric were to be appreciated primarily from outside, for pedagogical reasons, that is, as aids to ‘alleviate’ the ‘severity’ and ‘dryness’ of rational language” (26).

“According to the traditional interpretation Plato’s attitude against rhetoric is a rejection of the doxa, or opinion, and of the impact of images, upon which the art of rhetoric relies; at the same time his attitude is considered as a defense of the theoretical, rational speech, that is, of episteme” (28).

Micciche, Laura R., Doing Emotion:

2010-04-24T04:02:00.000-07:00

Micciche, Laura R., Doing Emotion: Rheoric, Writing, Teaching. Boynton/Cook: Portsmouth, NH.
2007.

“I argue that to best understand emotion’s role in binding the social body together (and tearing it apart), we need to grasp emotion as a category of analysis” (1).
“One of the problems associated with positioning emotion as a category of analysis is the tendency within intellectual as well as popular thought to collapse emotion with all things feminine, a marker that, at least in the history of academic discourse, has signaled a tendency to be weak, shallow, petty, vain, and narcissistic” (3).
“To say that an argument is ‘merely’ emotive is tantamount to saying it is not representative, but instead personal and idiosuyncratic; not thoughtful but solely reliant on opinion, which academics are more than ready to cast as suspicious, often with good reason (3).
“how we think about wht constitutes evidence and grounds for an argument—indeed, how we come to decide that an issue deserves to be ‘argued’—is already shaped by our emotional investments in how things ought to be” (3).
“emotion is always bound up with knowledge, what is thought rather than exclusively felt” (6).
“by demonstrating that emotion is part of what makes ideas adhere, generating investments and attachments that get recognized as position and/or perspectives, this study challenges longstanding views of emotion as unreasonable” (6).
“Binding emotion to the personal ignores emotion’s contribution to everyday acts of communication: it also seriously diminishes the place of emotion in rhetorical studies” (7).
“This definition holds that emotion is experienced between people within a particular context (and so resides both in people and in culture) and that emotion is an expression, experience , and perception mediated by language, body and culture” (8).
“Emotions for an economy of relations among people and within culture; they are produced by what Sara Ahmed calls “effects of circulation” (Ahmed 2003, 8) (12).
“emotions are a complex blend of at least three factors: first, a ‘person’s psychological past’; second, ‘the socially and culturally determined range of emotions and their characteristic behavioral and linguistic expressions’; and third, ‘a person’s constitutional inheritance, the set of genetically fixed threshold sensitivities and patterns of response’ (Rorty, 1980, 105)” (13).
“I use emotion as the key term, rather than feeling or affect, because it best evokes the potential to enact and construct, name and defile, become and undo—to perform meanings and to stand as a marker for meanings that get performed. These are rhetorical activities because they have to dowith consequences and effects, interpretation and judgment, change and movement” (14).
“By emphasizing categories of emotion as perceived rather than ontologically fixed states, Barrett’s work lends support to the idea that emotion is a rhetorical construct requiring a critical vocabulary to enable its rhetoricality to come into full view” (14).
“Blindness to emotion as a social concept may be attributed to what feminist theorists have long recognized as the feminization of emotion, a persistent historical and cultural (at least in the West) association of emotion with irrationality, manipulation, essence, and, of course, women—associations that have amounted to emotion’s subordinate status in knowledge-building and critical projects of all sorts (for critiques of this association, see Bartky 1990; Lutz 1990)” (16).
“Cvetkovich taps into the rhetorical function of emotion throughout her study; her emphasis on trauma as a part of everyday life, and so not reserved for describing catastrophic events, builds toward the idea that extreme often painful emotional experiences can become heightened sites from which to develop strategies of resistance operative within cultures and communities” (17).
“note that the ancients did not address emotion’s role in the invention process of formulating a position; instead, emotion is relegated to matters of arrangement or where to put an emotional appeal—and how to put it—to most effectively move an audience” (20).
“I am not talking about emotion as additive—which assumes that reason, logic, and rationality are normative, staple ingredients—but emotion as integral to communication, persuasion, attachments of all sorts, and to notions of self and other” (24).
“Narratives in general have the power to attach feeling to scripts of identity and belonging, a lesson I have come to understand more fully through family stories” (26). FOLKLORE
“emotion is dynamic and relational, taking form through collisions of contact between people as well as between people and the objects, narratives, beliefs, and so forth that we encounter in the world” (28).
“In fact, “Chris Gallagher (2005) argues that streamlining effect of disciplinarity—including the production of insiders and outsiders—causes what he calls “disciplinary guilt” among composintionists who ‘tend to think of our very mission as legitimizing and rendering audible the discourses of others, especially when they are marginalized’ (Gallagher 2005, 79)” (30).
“my goal is not to delegitimize that work but to ask what effects the emotional subjection expressed through identity metaphors have on compositionists’ political efficacy and intellectual work. The persistence of these metaphors, especially in arguments for institutional change, suggests that they have power to shift thinking and belief, to facilitate a new paradigm for composition. Yet, the conditions remain, as do the metaphors” (37).
Metaphors accrue a certain amount of stickiness through repetition and circulation, shaping constructions and perceptions of reality while creating affective spaces. They participate in a transference of affect that adheres (usually without our notice) through the force of repetition and regularity,” (38).
“These metaphors develop into what Wendy Brown (1995) calls wounded attachments, or attachments to loss, exclusion, and suffering that become entwined with politicized identity” (38).
“Thus, wonder and other emotional experiences may be considered teachable both outside and inside the classroom—a strange and perhaps counterintuitive idea, on that may even seem beside the point in the context of teaching writing” (48).
“An alternative framework for examining how meanings take form and circulate, performativity offers promising potential for critical study of the claim that ‘subjects do their emotions; emotions do not just happen to them’ (Zembylas 2003, 115)” (50).
“Performance studies examines the continually expanding range of behaviors invented by human beings to communicate with each other, especially those which are rehearsed, replayed, or consciously constructed” (50).
“Everyday performances of any sort—those constructing, for instance, identity, experience, or family history—are constituting acts in that they help to articulate who we are and how we live through crafted narratives and familiar plot-lines. They are also transformative acts capable of crafting new, whifting narratives that help us to live differently” (51).
“In assuming emotions are accessible exclusively through language, we fail to grapple with their performative and embodies aspects” (51).
Can we see performance of emotion in writing?
“Learning to see emotion as a usable resource, as grounds for doing rhetoric, is crucial if we are to trouble binaries that insist on planting reason on the side of decency and emotion on the side of shame” (67).

Damasio: Looking for Spinoza

2010-04-05T08:44:00.000-07:00

Damasio, Antonio. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. New York:
Harcourt. 2003.
“Living organisms are designed with an ability to react emtotionally to different objects and events. The reaction is followed by some pattern of feeling and a variation of pleasure or pain is a necessary component of feeling” (11). =E
“But in our attempt to understand the complex chain of events that begtins with emotion and ends up in feeling we can be helped by a principal separation between the part of the process that is made public and the part that remains private. For the purposes of my work I will call the former part emotion and the later part feeling in keeping with the meaning of the term feeling I outlined earlier” (27). =B & E
“In the context of this book then, emotions are actions or movements, many of them public, visible to others as they occur in the face, in the voice, in specific behaviors. To be sure, some components of the emotion process are not visible to the naked eye, but can be made “visible” with current scientific probes such as hormonal assays and electrophysiological wave patterns. Feelings on the other hand, are always hidden, like all mental images necessarily are, unseen to anyone other than their rightful owner, the most private property of the organism in whose brain they occur” (28). =B
Damasio calls them private and hidden and Massumi says they are unnarrativizable. Pretty much the same thing, but vastly different at the same time.
“Turning emotion and feeling into separate research objects helps us discover how it is we feel” (28). =B
“It turns out that is feelings that are mostly shadows of the external manner of emotions” (29). =B & E
“Emotions proper. This is where we find the crown jewel of automated life regulation: emotions in the narrow sense of the term—from joy and sorrow and fear, to pride and sham and sympathy. And in case you wonder what we find at the very top, the answer is simple: feelings” (34). =B
“The range of reactions encompasses not only highly visible emotions such as fear or anger, but also drives, motivations, and behaviors associated with pain or pleasure” (39). =B
“Even the emotions proper—disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, sympathy, and shame—aim directly at life regulation by staving off dangers or helping the organism take advantage of an opportunity, or indirectly by facilitating social relations” (39). =E
“The primary (or basic) emotions are easier to define because there is an established tradition of disgust, surprise, sadness, and happiness—the emotions that first come to mind whenever the term emotion is invoked” (44).=E
“The social emotions include sympathy, embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, jealousy, envy, gratitude, admiration, indignation, and contempt. The nesting principle applies to social emotions as well” (45). =E
“Emotions-proper influence appetites, and vice versa. For example the emotion fear inhibits hunger and sensual drives, and so do sadness and disgust. On the contrary, happiness promotes both hunger and sexual drives” (50). =B
“Feeling in the pure and narrow sense of the word, was the idea of the body being in a certain way. In this definition you can substitute idea for ‘thought’ or ‘perception.’ Once you looked beyond the objects that caused the feeling and the thoughts and mode of thinking consequent to it, the core of the feeling came into focus. Its contents consisted of representing a particular state of the body” (85). =B
“a provisional definition, is that a feeling is the perception of a certain state of the body along with the perception of a certain mode of thinking and of thoughts with certain themes” (86). =E
“My view is that feelings are functionally distinctive because their essence consists of the thoughts that represent the body involved in a reactive process” (86). =E
“In brief, the essential content of feelings is the mapping of a particular body state; the substrate of feelings is the set of neural patterns that map the body state and from which a mental image of the body state can emerge” (88).
“In other words, feelings are not a passive perception or a flash in time, especially not in the case of feelings of joy and sorrow. For a while after an occasion of such feelings begins—for seconds or for minutes—there is a dynamic engagement of the body, almost certainly in repeated fashion, and a subsequent dynamic variation of the perception” (92). =E

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual:

2010-03-12T06:18:00.000-08:00

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke UP: Durham, NC.
2002
“The dynamic enabling the back-formation is “intensive” in the sense that movement, in process, cannot be determinately indexed to anything outside of itself. It has withdrawn into an all-encompassing relation with what it will be. It is in becoming, absorbed in occupying its field of potential” (7).
“Cultural laws of positioning and ideology are accurate ina certain sphere (where the tendency to arrest dominates). Right or wrong is not the issue. The issue is to demarcate their sphere of applicability—when the ‘ground’ upon which they operate is continuously moving” (7).
“Passage precedes construction. But construction does not effectively backform its reality. Grids happen. So social and cultural determination feed back into the process from which they arose” (8).
“A concept is by nature connectable to other concepts” (20).
“When you uproot a concept from its network of systemic connections with other concepts, you still have its connectibility” (20).
“Their only positive conclusion emphasized the primacy of the affective in image reception” (24).
“Accepting and expanding up that, it may be noted that the primacy of the affective is marked by a gap between content and effect: it would appear that the strength or duration of an image’s effect is not logically connected to the content in any straightforward way” (24).
“the strength or duration of the image’s effect could be called its intensity” (24).
“To translate this negative observation into a positive one: the event of image reception is multilevel, or at least bi-level. There is an immediate bifurcation in response into two systems” (24).
“Intensity is embodied in purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the skin—at the surface of the body, at its interface with things” (25).
“Matter of factness dampens intensity” (25).
“The qualifications of emotional content enhanced the images’ effect, as if they resonated with the level of intensity rather than interfering with it, An emotional qualification breaks narrative continueity for a moment to register a state—actually to re-register an already felt state, for the skin is faster than the word” (25).
Why just skin?
“Intensity would seem to be associated with nonlinear process resonation and feedback that momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future. Intensity is qualifiable as an emotional state, and that state is static—temporal and narrative noise. It is a state of suspense, potentially of disruption” (26).
“Of course, the qualification of an emotion is quite often, in other contexts, itself a narrative element and that moves the action ahead, taking its place in socially recognized lines of action and reaction” (26).
“For present purposes, intensity will be equated with affect” (27).
“Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized” (28).
“Will and consciousness are subtractive. They are limitative, derived functions that reduce a complexity too rich to be functionally expressed” (28).
Which is why I have trouble with Massumi.
“Intensity and experience accompany one another like two mutually presupposing dimensions or like two sides of a coin” (33).
“Intensity is asocial, but not presocial—it includes social elements but mixes them with elements belonging to other levels of functioning and combines them according to different logic” (30).
“’Implicit’ form is a bundling of potential functions, an infolding or contraction of potential interactions (intension). The playing out of those potentials requires an unfolding in three-dimensional space and linear time—extension as actualization; actualization as expression. It is in expression that the fade-out occurs. The limits of the field of emergence are in its actual expression” (35).
“Affects are virtual systesthetic perspectives anchored in )functionally limited by) the actually existing, particular things that embody them. The authomy of affect is its participation in the virtual. Its autonomy is its openness. Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is. Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the most intense (most contracted_ expression of that capture—and of the fact that something has always and again escaped” (35).
“But it is also continuous, like a background perception that accompanies every event, however quotidian” (36).

Katchadourian, Herant. Guilt: The Bite of Conscience

2010-03-11T04:41:00.000-08:00

Katchadourian, Herant. Guilt: The Bite of Conscience. Stanford UP: Stanford, CA. 2010.
“The capacity for guilt is innate—we are born with it hard-wired into our brain through evolution. Guilt serves a variety of functions in connection with social control, hence its experiences are subject to cultural variation. Like other emotions, guilt is neutral in itself, neither good nor bad as such” (xiii). =E

“The word emotion is associated with psychological excitement ( from the Latin “I was moved”; “I got upset”). The more informal term for emotion—feeling—may be used both as a noun (“I have a gut feeling”) as well as a verb (“I feel guilty”). Emotions are states of heightened psychological arousal accompanied by physical manifestations, like the pounding heart of fear and the blush of embarrassment” (4). =E

“Emotions are at the core of human nature” (4). =E

“Natural as they are, emotions do not just happen—they occur for some reason” (5). =E
“Earlier investigators focused on primary emotions such as anger and fear (as well as sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise). These core emotions have a biological basis (hence they are shared with higher animals) and distinctive physiological manifestations” (5). =B & E

“The subjective experiences of guilt, shame, regret, embarrassment, and pride place them squarely in the emotional ballpark. However, they lack some of the universal components of the primary emotions, and hence are called secondary emotions. It is easier to tell if a person is angry or afraid than if a person feels guilty or ashamed. Secondary emotions are more subject to social conditioning, and thus show greater cultural differences in their experience and expression” (5). =E

“However, secondary does not eman of secondary importance. These secondary emotions play a central role in regulating our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors” (5).
“Psychologists call guilt, shame, embarrassment, and pride social emotions because they are heavily dependant on social interactions” (7). =E

“Psychologists now generally refer to guilt shame, embarrassment, and pride as self-concious emotions” (7). =B & E

“What the term is meant to convey is that such emotions reflect the evaluations of the self by others. . .To call them emotions of self-assessment would be even less cryptic, but that term is far less commonly used” (7). =E

“The word shame is derived from the Old German term skew (“to cover”0. This points to the association of shaming with exposure, which we described as the essential element in embarrassment” (15). = B

“Non-moral shame results from public exposure of defects that lead to loss of social status; in that sense, it may overlap with embarrassment” (16). =B

“Guilty action and guilty feeling do not always go together. It is possible to be guilty but not feel guilty, or feel guilty without having done anything wrong” (21).

(Goes with conduct books and the guilt they induce).

“ancient Greek has no word for guilt in the sense of “feeling guilty” (21).

“guilt is a part of the ‘currency’ we use carrying out our personal transactions with others. It is a powerful influence technique (laying ‘guilt trips’) to change the behavior of others” (22). =E ***

“guilt remains a common source of distress in the modern world’ (22).

“In existential terms, guilt ties us down to the past, making it difficult for us to live in an authentic present. It underminds the trust we have in the adequacy of our selves and leads to a loss of self-esteem and self-confidence” (23). =E ***

“There are no reliable physical manifestations of ‘looking guilty,’ despite Darwin’s claim that the expression of guilt could be recognized across culturess. Studies based on photographic expressions of self-conscious emotions have so far failed to find distinctive features of guilt” (23) ***

“we feel guilt when our actions have caused pain, suffering, fear, and disappointment’ (26). =E

“Guilt has a complex relationship with pride, Feelings of superiority, at the expense of others, makes us feel bad. The sense of guilt is especially acute when we are contemptuous toward those who are close to us (46). =B

“There is a special form of guilt called positive inequity that is associated with privilege. Some affluent people assuage their guilt by being charitable, but one can also be charitable out of compassion, a sense of moral obligation and social responsibility” (54).

“Since guilt is a painful emotion, we need to deal with it. If we shove it under the carpet, it will not go away. We usually try to deal with guilt in the privacy of our conscience; less often, by approaching the person we have offended” (60).

“Interpersonal relationship is the term that refers to all forms of relationships between people” (64). =B

“The primary purpose of guilt in these contexts is to deter wrongdoing and to repair the damage to the relationship (65). =B

“Like money, guilt can be used effectively, but also abused or debased. It may be used to pay an honest debt, or it may be contrived” (66).

“The second source of guilt is associated with exclusion anxiety, which results from the sense of alientation from the relationship partner we have hurt” (66).

“The particular techniques of inducing guilt vary from the subtle . . . to the theatrical (68).

“the power of guilt in seeking out vulnerable spots and striking where it hurts most” (69).

“Since guilt is a distressing feeling, people have a generally negative view of it. Nobody wants to feel guilty” (75).

“Psychologists now view guilt as an emotion that promotes prosocial effects. It moves people to admit responsibility for their wrong actions, to make amends, and repair damaged relationships. However useful it might be, guilt still carries a serious pathological potential” (75).

“Yet there are instances when one feels guilty without having done anything wrong. Survivor guilt is one such example” (89). =B

“A second form of such guilt results from the feeling of personal responsibility for the wrong that the members of one’s group have done—collective guilt. Finally there is existential guilt—the feeling of guilt for more puzzling reasons ranging from being better off to merely being human” (89). =B

“Collective guilt results from feelings of culpability for unjust or criminal actions perpetrated by a group one identifies with. The common bond may be based on nationality, ethnicity, or some other social bond” (96).= B & E

Collective guilt and women and the Eve problem. Men would associate all women with Eve creating a sense of collective guilt for women.

“The justification for collective guilt goes back to the biblical injunction that children will pay for the sins of their fathers for many generations. (97). =B

“Since the value of what we have is relative to what others have, the guilt of positive inequity is expressed not in the absolute but relative terms. It is not an issue of having too much or too little, but having more or less relative to others we compare ourselves with” (134). =B

“In its more popularized versions, existential guilt can also said to arise from the failure to develop our full potential as human beings” (110). =B

“In the medieval period, popular senteiment, usually but not always backed by church doctrine, fostered the idea that feeling guilty was a good thing—it reflected a healthy conscience—hence, the guiltier one felt, the better one could resist sin” (118). =B

“By the end of the nineteenth century, the stricture of Victorian morality led Nietzsche and Freud to protest against prevailsocial mores that induced needless guilt (117). =B $ E

“However, psychoanalysts distinguish between conscious and unconscious guilt” (119). =E

“The medieval church’s view of human nature was laden with guilt. The secular perspective that followed it in the Renaissance was equally bleak. Niccolo Machiavelli described his contemporaries as ‘ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, anxious to feel danger, and covetous of gain” (169). =B

“When we say that our capacity for feeling guilt is innate, what we mean is that the moral behavior can be adaptive in genetic terms by virtue of having provided our ancestors with a reproductive advantage. It does not mean than an innate trait will assert itself irrespective of the environment. Nor does it mean that it will lead to universal patterns of moral behavior across all cultures at all times and in all places. To avoid the use of nebulous labels, ethologists now use the term fixed action pattern to refer to behaviors that emerge without prior learning” (171).
Guilt, shame, and embarrassment are forms of social control” (186). =E ***

“These emotions may not always be portrayed in these terms, but that is how they have evolved and become embedded in our cultural beliefs and practices” (186). = E***

“Consequently, shame has been generally assumed to be the predominant sentiment that motivated and restrained the ancient Greeks. Their shame culture was based on public esteem” (189).

“I agree with the perception that guilt is a distinctive emotion—and quite separate from shame, embarrassment, and disgust” (307). =B

“A serious problem in the psychological literature on guilt and shame is the lack of sufficient attention to the cultural context of these emotions, although this problem is now being more widely recognized” (307).

Hariman, Robert and Lucaites, John Jouis. No Caption Needed:

2010-03-09T05:13:00.000-08:00

Hariman, Robert and Lucaites, John Jouis. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture,and Liberal Democracy. Chicago UP: Chicago. (2007).

“Popular images disseminated, promoted and repeatedly reproduced by large-scale corporations and seamlessly sutured into the material practices of ordinary life—whether documenting victory or disaster, surely these images exemplify ideology at work” (2). =E
“But we are hardly alone: the study of various practices of visual representation is booming, so much so that it seems similar in scope to the ‘linguistic turn’ that expanded across the human sciences in the twentieth century” (5). =E
“Iconic photographs provide an accessible and centrally positioned set of images for exploring how political action (and inaction) can be constituted and controlled through visual media” (5). =E
“The most complicated relationship between the photographic image and public opinion occurs because images communicate social knowledge” (10). =E
“we define photo-jounalistic icons as those photographic images appearing in print, electronic, or digital media that are widely recognized and remembered, are understood to be representations of historically significan events, activiate strong emotional identification or response, and are reproduced across a wide range of media, genres or topics” (27).
“the iconic photograph is an aesthetically familiar form of civic performance coordinating an array of semiotic transcriptions that prject an emotional scenario to manage a basic contradiction or recurrent crisis” (29). =B & E
“by being placed amidst prin journalism, the icons can also work in conjunction with other discourses of polity such as speeches, declarations, official reports, judicial opinions, and editorial commentary” (30). =B & E.
“To capture the aesthetic engagement that we believe is central to its appeal, we make a second assumption that the iconic photograph functions as a mode of civic performance” (30). B & E.
“Photography is grounded in phenomenological devices crucial to establishing the performative experience. Framing, for example, whether by the theatrical state or the rectangular boundaries of any photo, marks the work s a special selection of reality that acquires greater intensity than the flow of experience before and after it (31). A+E
“The repeatedness of any photograph is in itself an iconic representation of the object to be seen within its frame: that object is not a unique conjunction of materials, but a typical, recurring feature of one’s environment. Thus, the photograph is capable of providing deep knowledge of social reality, both in its specific manifestations and as it is itself an unending process of repetition” (32). B & E
“By analogy, we would suggest that photojournalism, when it is operating as a form of ritual performance in a literate society, acquires the capability to reveal or suggest what is unsayable or at least not being said or seen in print” (33).
“Through phenomenological devices such as framing, the iconic image highlights the deeply repetitive features of social life, a condition reinforced further by the mechanical reproduction of the photograph itself” (33). B
“In addition, to have popular appeal a work must be open to multiple and often inconsistent perspectives” (34). B & E
“iconic photographs provide the viewing public with powerful evocations of emotional experience. Performances traffic in bodies, and they evoke emotional responses precisely because they place the expressive body in a social space. The photograph is such a space, and the iconic image constructs a scenario in which specific emotional responses to an event become a powerful basis for understanding and action” (35). B& E.
“David Hume observed that we feel more through the public exposure to others’ emotions than t hrough an interior circuit of sensations, and contemporary scholarship on the social construction of the emotions provides strong confirmation of this fact. The photograph’s focus on bodily expression not only displays emotions but also places the viewing in an affective relationship with the people in the picture” (35). =E ***
“The significant entailment is that the ideological implications of specific texts or images are necessary but not sufficient for understanding how public address fulfills the interrelated functions of constructing public identity and motivating political behavior” (48). B & E
“A photograph captures a tiny sliver of time and space yet can reveal in a flash the social order. Photojournalism shows what can be done in public, and it allows one to think that what is not shown cannot be done” (287). A& E ***
Exactly, the photos from the charities show only a moment, and only a certain part of that moment.
“For it is only by understanding how they worked—how they were formal compositions negotiating specific social and political problems—that talk of change can be effective” (288). B & E
“The first limitation of iconic memory is that it is necessarily mainstream. The icon is that which can inspire widespread identification, even when it is a disturbing image or one that supports political dissent” (289).
“Whether transgrtessive or utopian, the marginal image—or, the image of the marginal experience—is off to the side in the virtual space of the national cathedral” (289). B & E
“considerable energy still goes into either promoting or warning against visual media, rather than understanding how they are tangled together to create culture” (295). B & E
Words along with the visual media become enmeshed in order to create culture. All tangled up.
“The origin of rhetoric as a practice of reflection is instructive in this regard. From the first the art provoked intense discussion regarding its cognitive, moral and political effects” (295).
“You might say that rhetoric was speaking as it came to be seen through the lens of writing” (295). B
Does this mean that seeing photo rhetoric means that it becomes virtual through the picture. We can imagine ourselves there, in that photo, and what we would see?
“Our conclusions regarding iconic photographs cannot cover all of photojournalism, but we are positive that the entire medium is laden with complex negotiations of multiple social codes, political ideas, practical reasoning, and emotional intelligence” (297).
“What is seen? Our approach has put great emphasis on the content of the individual photograph. We should caution against too much of this. Public spectatorship depends primarily on the continual production and circulation of images” (300).
“Photographs capture moments of social interaction while situating viewers in social relationships. Public reason emerges as a practice of looking at and thinking about these things, and as a considered negotiation of the relationships in question” (301).
“The images come to present the public audience with an opportunity to reimagine itself” (305).

Cicero, On the Ideal Orator Trans. May, James M. and Wisse, Jakob.

2010-02-23T03:12:00.000-08:00

Cicero, On the Ideal Orator Trans. May, James M. and Wisse, Jakob. Oxford, UP: New York (2001).

“Yet again, if you look at this group, where excellence is so very rare, and are willing to make a careful selection both from our number and from that of the Greeks, you will find that there have been far fewer good orators than good poets” (60).

“To begin with, one must acquire knowledge of a great number of things, for without this a ready flow of words is empty and ridiculous; the language itself has to be shaped not only by the choice of words but by their arrangement as well; also required is a thorough acquaintance with all the emotions with which nature has endowed the human race, because in soothing or in exciting the feelings of the audience the full force of oratory and all its available means must be brought into play” (61).

In this work I particularly admired Plato for the way in which, while making fun of orators, he appeared to be a supreme orator himself” (69).

I find this particularly interesting as I was thinking the same as I watched
Socrates argue in circles, but argue with eminent superiority.

“For everyone knows that the power of an orator is most manifest in dealing with people’s feelings, when he is stirring them to anger or to hatred and resentment, or is calling them back from these same emotions to mildness and compassion” (70).

“Well, then,” said Crassus, “in my opinion it is, in the first place natural ability and talent that make a very important contribution to oratory” (83).

“First, so the rules say, the duty of the orator is to speak in a manner suited to persuasion. Next, every speech is concerned either with the investigation of an indefinite, general matter, in which the persons or occasions are unspecified, or with a matter that is tied to specific persons or occasions. Furthermore, in both cases, whatever the point at issue may be, the question always posed is either whether or not the deed was done, or , if it was, what its nature is, or again by what name it should be called, or as some add whether or not it seems to have been done justly. Furthermore, issues also arise from the inpretation of written documents, if some part of the test gives rise to ambiguity with intent” (89).

Invention: Arguments

Arguments are derived from connecdted terms, from a genus, from a simkilarity, and from attendant circumstances, from consistencies and from antecedents and from contradictions. (167).

Invention: ethos and pathos

“For nothing in oratory, Catulus, is more important that for the orator to be favorably regarded by the audience, and for the audience itself to be moved in such a way as to be ruled by some strong emotional impulse rather than by a reasoned judgment” (170).

“Now, the following emotions are the most important for us to arouse with our speech in the hearts of the jurors, or of any other audience we addresss: affection, hate, anger, envy, pity, hope, joy, fear, and grief” (178).

Again, no mention of guilt at all.

“It is also pleasant and often tremendously useful to employ human and witticisms” ((180).

“Prompted by this experience, he is then said to have made the discovery that order is what brings light to our memory” (219).

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Jowett, Benjamin

2010-02-22T05:02:00.000-08:00

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Jowett, Benjamin
Every one sees that love is a desire, and we know also that non-lovers desire the beautiful and good. Now in what way is the lover to be distinguished from the non-lover? Let us note that in every one of us there are two guiding and ruling principles which lead us whither they will; one is the natural desire of pleasure, the other is an acquired opinion which aspires after the best; and these two are sometimes in harmony and then again at war, and sometimes the one, sometimes the other conquers.

And so he runs away and is constrained to be a defaulter; the oyster-shell has fallen with the other side uppermost-he changes pursuit into flight, while the other is compelled to follow him with passion and imprecation not knowing that he ought never from the first to have accepted a demented lover instead of a sensible non-lover; and that in making such a choice he was giving himself up to a faithless, morose, envious, disagreeable being, hurtful to his estate, hurtful to his bodily health, and still more hurtful to the cultivation of his mind, than which there neither is nor ever will be anything more honoured in the eyes both of gods and men. Consider this, fair youth, and know that in the friendship of the lover there is no real kindness; he has an appetite and wants to feed upon you:

But he who, having no touch of the Muses' madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art-he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man disappears and is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman.

Phaedr. I thought, Socrates, that he was. And you are aware that the greatest and most influential statesmen are ashamed of writing speeches and leaving them in a written form, lest they should be called Sophists by posterity.

Phaedr. And yet, Socrates, I have heard that he who would be an orator has nothing to do with true justice, but only with that which is likely to be approved by the many who sit in judgment; nor with the truly good or honourable, but only with opinion about them, and that from opinion comes persuasion, and not from the truth.

And when the orator instead of putting an ass in the place of a horse puts good for evil being himself as ignorant of their true nature as the city on which he imposes is ignorant; and having studied the notions of the multitude, falsely persuades them not about "the shadow of an ass," which he confounds with a horse, but about good which he confounds with evily-what will be the harvest which rhetoric will be likely to gather after the sowing of that seed?

Phaedr. The reverse of good.

Soc. The art of disputation, then, is not confined to the courts and the assembly, but is one and the same in every use of language; this is the art, if there be such an art, which is able to find a likeness of everything to which a likeness can be found, and draws into the light of day the likenesses and disguises which are used by others? **

Soc. In which are we more likely to be deceived, and in which has rhetoric the greater power?

Phaedr. Clearly, in the uncertain class.

Soc. Then the rhetorician ought to make a regular division, and acquire a distinct notion of both classes, as well of that in which the many err, as of that in which they do not err?

Phaedr. He who made such a distinction would have an excellent principle.

Soc. Yes; and in the next place he must have a keen eye for the observation of particulars in speaking, and not make a mistake about the class to which they are to be referred.

Phaedr. Certainly.

Soc. Now to which class does love belong-to the debatable or to the undisputed class?

Phaedr. To the debatable, clearly; for if not, do you think that love would have allowed you to say as you did, that he is an evil both to the lover and the beloved, and also the greatest possible good? **

Soc. First, the comprehension of scattered particulars in one idea; as in our definition of love, which whether true or false certainly gave clearness and consistency to the discourse, the speaker should define his several notions and so make his meaning clear.

The second principle is that of division into species according to the natural formation, where the joint is, not breaking any part as a bad carver might. Just as our two discourses, alike assumed, first of all, a single form of unreason; and then, as the body which from being one becomes double and may be divided into a left side and right side, each having parts right and left of the same name-after this manner the speaker proceeded to divide the parts of the left side and did not desist until he found in them an evil or left-handed love which he justly reviled; and the other discourse leading us to the madness which lay on the right side, found another love, also having the same name, but divine, which the speaker held up before us and applauded and affirmed to be the author of the greatest benefits.

es; thank you for reminding me:-There is the exordium, showing how the speech should begin, if I remember rightly; that is what you mean-the niceties of the art?

Phaedr. Yes.

Soc. Then follows the statement of facts, and upon that witnesses; thirdly, proofs; fourthly, probabilities are to come; the great Byzantian word-maker also speaks, if I am not mistaken, of confirmation and further confirmation.
Yes; and he tells how refutation or further refutation is to be managed, whether in accusation or defence. I ought also to mention the illustrious Parian, Evenus, who first invented insinuations and indirect praises; and also indirect censures, which according to some he put into verse to help the memory. But shall I "to dumb forgetfulness consign" Tisias and Gorgias, who are not ignorant that probability is superior to truth, and who by: force of argument make the little appear great and the great little, disguise the new in old fashions and the old in new fashions, and have discovered forms for everything, either short or going on to infinity. I remember Prodicus laughing when I told him of this; he said that he had himself discovered the true rule of art, which was to be neither long nor short, but of a convenient length.
The perfection which is required of the finished orator is, or rather must be, like the perfection of anything else; partly given by nature, but may also be assisted by art. If you have the natural power and add to it knowledge and practice, you will be a distinguished speaker; if you fall short in either of these, you will be to that extent defective. But the art, as far as there is an art, of rhetoric does not lie in the direction of Lysias or Thrasymachus.
Oratory is the art of enchanting the soul, and therefore he who would be an orator has to learn the differences of human souls-they are so many and of such a nature, and from them come the differences between man and man. Having proceeded thus far in his analysis, he will next divide speeches into their different classes:-"Such and such persons," he will say, are affected by this or that kind of speech in this or that way," and he will tell you why. The pupil must have a good theoretical notion of them first, and then he must have experience of them in actual life, and be able to follow them with all his senses about him, or he will never get beyond the precepts of his masters. But when he understands what persons are persuaded by what arguments, and sees the person about whom he was speaking in the abstract actually before him, and knows that it is he, and can say to himself, "This is the man or this is the character who ought to have a certain argument applied to him in order to convince him of a certain opinion"; -he who knows all this, and knows also when he should speak and when he should refrain, and when he should use pithy sayings, pathetic appeals, sensational effects, and all the other modes of speech which he has learned;-when, I say, he knows the times and seasons of all these things, then, and not till then, he is a perfect master of his art; but if he fail in any of these points, whether in speaking or teaching or writing them, and yet declares that he speaks by rules of art, he who says "I don't believe you" has the better of him. Well, the teacher will say, is this, and Socrates, your account of the so-called art of rhetoric, or am I to look for another?

Until a man knows the truth of the several particulars of which he is writing or speaking, and is able to define them as they are, and having defined them again to divide them until they can be no longer divided, and until in like manner he is able to discern the nature of the soul, and discover the different modes of discourse which are adapted to different natures, and to arrange and dispose them in such a way that the simple form of speech may be addressed to the simpler nature, and the complex and composite to the more complex nature-until he has accomplished all this, he will be unable to handle arguments according to rules of art, as far as their nature allows them to be subjected to art, either for the purpose of teaching or persuading;-such is the view which is implied in the whole preceding argument.

Plato. “Gorgias”

2010-02-22T03:43:00.000-08:00

Plato. “Gorgias” Trans. Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archives. Web. 2
November 2009. < http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html>.

“Socrates: And now let us have from you, Gorgias the truth about rhetoric: which you would admit (would you not) to be one of those arts which act always and fulfil all their ends through the medium of words” (6). =B

“GORGIAS: That good, Socrates, which is trutl7y the greatest being that which gives to men freedom in their own persons, and to individuals the power of ruling over others in their several states” (7). =B

“GORGIAS: What is there greater than the word which persuades the judges in the courts, or the senators in the council, or the citizens in the assembly, or at any other political meeting.—if you have the power of uttering this word, you will have the physician your slave, and the trainer your slave, and the money-maker of whom you talk will be found to gather treasures, not for himself, but for you who are able to speak and to persuade the multitude” (7). =B

“SOCRATES: . . .rhetoric is the artificer of persuasion, having this and no other business, and that this is her crown and end. Do you know any other effect of rhetoric over and above that of producing persuasion?” =B

“GORGIAS: . . .rhetoric is the art of persuasion in courts of law and other assemblies, as I was just now saying, and about the just and unjust” (9). =B

“GORGIAS: . . .in a contest with a man of any other profession the rhetorician more than any one would have the power of getting himself chosen, for he can speak more persuasively to the multitude than any of them, and on any subject” (11). =B

“SOCRATES; And the same holds of the relation of rhetoric to all the other arts; the rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discoversome way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know?” (13). =B

Cookery and rhetoric are part of the same profession. (17).

“SOCRATES: In my opinion then, Gorgias, the whole of which rhetoric is a part is not an art at all, but the habit of a bold and ready wit, which knows how to manage mankind: this habit I sum up under the word ‘flatery’, and it appears to me to have many other parts, one of which is cookery, which may seem to be an art, but, as I maintain, is only an experience or routine and not an art:--another part is rhetoric, and the art of attiring and sophistry are two others: thus there are four branches,(18). =B

“SOCRATES. . .that great power is a benefit to a man if his actions turn out to his advantage, and that this is the meaning of great power; and if not, then his power is an evil and is no power” (26). =B

“SOCRATES: but in my opinion, Polus, the unjust or doing of the unjust actions is miserable in any case—more miserable, however, if he be not punished and does not meet with retribution, and less miserable if he be punished and meets with retribution at the hands of gods and men” (28). =B

“SOCRATES: Tell me then:--you say, do you not, that in the rightly developed man the passions ought not to be controlled, but that we should let them grow to the utmost and somehow or other satisfy them, and that is virtue?” (49). =B

“SOCRATES: I am contented with the admission that rhetoric is of two sorts; one, which is mere flattery and disgraceful declamation; the other, which is noble and aims at the training and improvement of the souls of the citizens, and strives to say what is best, “ (63). =B

Reminds me of Augustine’s ability to see that rhetoric can be used for both evil and good.

“SOCRATES: And will not the true rhetorician who is honest and understands his art have his eye fixed upon these, in all the words which he addresses to the souls of men, and in all hi actions both in what he gives and in what he takes away? Will not his aim be to implant justice in the souls of his citizens and take away injustice?” (65). =B

“SOCRATES: I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict” (82). =B

“Let us, then, take the argument as our guide which has revealed to us that the best way of life is to practice justice and every virtue in life and death” (83). =B

Gillman, Alice. “Collaboration, Ethics, and the Emotional A Way to Move

2010-02-20T11:27:00.000-08:00

Gillman, Alice. “Collaboration, Ethics, and the Emotional labor of WPA’s” A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies. Eds. Dale Jacobs & Laura R. Micciche. Boyton/CooK: Portsmouth, NH.

“masculine agency described by Ed White in ‘Use It or Lose It: Power and the WPA’ (1991); aggressive and decisive action, tough talk, and strategic, preemptive moves” (116).

“In her groundbreaking study The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983), Hochschild defines emotional labor as requiring ‘one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (117).

Boy, howdy, isn’t that the truth!

“While most jobs require some management of feeling, Hochschild contends that if we are too successful in censoring private feelings and publicly performing contrary ones, we risk ‘losing the signal function of feeling’ (21). Drawing on Freaud’s notion that feelings perform a ‘signal’ or epistemic function in revealing inner perspectives and external realities” (118).

“First, I think that all writing program administration involves ministration or service in the name of other agencies and agendas and we ignore this or are blind to it it to our own detriment. Second, I think that over identification with an idea, principle, policy or programmatic model can lead to the kind of epistemic and ethical “lean” Barrky discusses even if the idea or principle is far more enlightened than the notion of certifiable proficiency for all. In other words, caretaking of even noble principles can be blinding and can work against self-critique.
Further, I think that women administrators may be more vulnerable to overidentification. (119).

“Despite the invaluable contribution of the WPA position statement on’Evaluating the Intellectual Work of Writing Administration’ in validating WPA work, it reifies the distinction between intellectual and emotional labor and ignores the less visible and commodifiable aspects of our work” (123).

Murray, Piper. “Containing Creatures A Way to Move

2010-02-20T05:00:00.000-08:00

Murray, Piper. “Containing Creatures We Barely Imagine: Responding to ‘Bad’ Students’ Writing. A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies. Eds. Dale Jacobs & Laura R. Micciche. Boyton/CooK: Portsmouth, NH

“what is our relationship to our theories about student writing that they should find us—those who find ourselves both ‘out there in the teaching world’ and at the same time very much ‘in here’ in Composition—much more easily embarrassed by the ‘truths’ than some surly senior professor, who clearly knows nothing of such matters?”

“No matter how much pleasure we may take in its telling, few of us entertain any illusions that the writing process movement really brought the revolution in the teaching of writing that we like to think it did” (95).

There’s been not genuine revolution, only a gathering of ideas and information in order to re-evaluate how we teach in order to use old ideas in combination with new to teach in a better way.

“Here we find that the responses associated with each form do indeed break down into fairly oppositional—and fairly telling—terms: frustration and blame belonging to one grand category, interest and analysis to another” (96).

“Thus, at the same time as Miller exposes as fantasy the idea ‘that two ‘grand theories’ have sequentially controlled the teaching of writing’ (70),it would seem that she ultimately preserves that fantasy—if only as an ideal-- when it comes to how we respond to ‘bad’ student writing (96).

“Writing theory may have done away with the idea or ‘theory’ that students ought to be faulted for writing ‘badly’. But as our ongoing frustration and blame continue to assert—in spite of all our wishful thinking that it were otherwise—writing theory cannot do away with the feeling that at least some ‘bad’ student writing is, after all, the product of ‘bad’ students(97).

Now, and only now, does this sense that we must “throw away” older theories make sense to me. We are not disregarding the theories, whether we know it or not, we are fighting against the urge to “blame” students when writing is poorly executed!

“In other words, reread as a structure of feeling, the dissonance we feel between interest and analysis on the one hand, and frustration and blame on the other, might be taken, not as a sign that our theory and practice are often at odds with one another (which is news to no one), but instead as a sign that there are aspects of our experience that remain in tension with both our theory and practice” (100).

Ryden, Wendy. “Conflict and Kitsch:A Way to Move:

2010-02-20T04:25:00.000-08:00

Ryden, Wendy. “Conflict and Kitsch: The Politics of Politeness in the Writing Class” A Way to Move:
Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies. Eds. Dale Jacobs & Laura R. Micciche. Boyton/CooK: Portsmouth, NH
“This manufacturing of consent is what theorists of political kitsch ulti9mately see as the consequence of an idyllic culture aesthetic that favors harmony over rupture” (83).
“A slippery term, I take ‘crisis’ to mean not so much that crisis should be induced, but rather responded to” (91).

Strickland, Donna and Crawford, Ilene. “Error and Racialized A Way to Move

2010-02-20T03:40:00.000-08:00

Strickland, Donna and Crawford, Ilene. “Error and Racialized Performances of Emotion in the Teaching Of Wrirting.” A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies. Eds. Dale Jacobs & Laura R. Micciche. Boyton/CooK: Portsmouth, NH.

“The ‘habitus,’ for Bourdieu, ‘is a set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways. The disposition generates practices, perceptions and attitudes which are ‘regular’ without being consciously co-ordinated or governed by any ‘rule’ (68).

“Further, the primary work of this dominant pedagogical violence ‘is to organize an emotional world, to inculcate patterns of feeling that support the dominant interests, patterns that are especially appropriate to gender, race, and class locations’ (1998, 223)” (68).

“Williams discovered that people claim to be equally sensitive to all errors when, in fact, there are a number of errors people miss most of the time. Most likely to be noticed and responded to immediately are errors that violate ‘the rules that define bedrock standard English’ (Williams 1981, 159).”

The thing of it is, I agree. We are in a place, the university, where we are attempting to teach a language. This language is standardized for more efficient performance on the part of both reader and writer.
“In addition to controlled behavior, controlled speech was another important way in which whites could distinguish themselves as morally different from Blacks” (71).

Why is it that people assume that language correction correlates with a feeling of superiority and morality? If I cannot understand you, we do not communicate. Race notwithstanding.

“The similarities between emotional and linguistic schooling are telling. Both are a set of skills that ‘normal’ children develop to succeed in life—in the schoolyard and later in the workplace” (72).

“These historical and contemporary examples demonstrate that the schooling of language and the schooling of emotion are never far apart” (72).
“Jane Hill demonstrates that ‘language panics are not really about language. Instead, they are about race. . .” (73).

I don’t care how people speak—outside the college classroom. Even inside the classroom when they are just talking. Language takes precedence when the conversation is meant to be academic in nature and not casual communication between friends or acquaintances. Can I not have it this way without being considered racist? Just out of curiosity, what would have happened if I’d have submitted my writing sample with the GRE in Ozarkian normal?

“Emotion is a powerful technology that connects language, morality, and order, producing a highly racialized sense of self” (79).

Farrydiddles. I’m the one that this article is pointing fingers at. I’m the person who expects papers to be turned in in an appropriate collegiate form of Englisih. I’m also the one who will correct how my students speak in the classroom. Why? Because I believe that if we are to promote an academic style of writing, and why else would we teach composition, then we should do so. I do not do this with malice, and I certainly do not “cut down” my students’ use of localized language. What I say to them is that “This is an English class. We want to learn how to write in a way that is efficient and effective across the board in an academic setting. It is not a matter of race, but a matter of language difference. What would have happened had I gone into a Spanish or German classroom and simply learned some of the language, but reserved the rest for my own interpretation? Adding English words where I felt it was more my own upbringing? I’d not have passed the course.

Kirtley, Susan. “What’s Love Got to Do with It?A Way to Move:

2010-02-19T05:11:00.000-08:00

Kirtley, Susan. “What’s Love Got to Do with It? Eros in the Writing Classroom” .” A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies. Eds. Dale Jacobs & Laura R. Micciche. Boyton/CooK: Portsmouth, NH.

“It was thus early on that ‘heart knowledge’ was linked with ‘the body, emotions, women’ as well as the vernacular or common language, and therefore devalued, hidden, and concealed” (58).

“Writing feels to me like an attempt to make an association. The power of composition resides in thie ‘space between.’ Though the author may be long gone, once a link is fashioned with a reader, immortality is indeed achieved” (65).

“There is an intimate, alluring element in the composing process—isn’t writing an attempt to seduce readers, to entice them to see and feel the world as you wish them to? The writer issues an invitation and reaches out to the reader, much as the lover beckons to the beloved” (65). =A & E
My thoughts exactly.

“the joy of writing is not only in the product, but in the process as well, in the act of crafting language” (65). =A & E

“For me the erotic writing class is about an embodied, intellectual passion that bridges gaps as a daimon might (65). =B

Cain, Mary Ann. “Moved by ‘Their’ Words A Way to Move

2010-02-19T03:56:00.000-08:00

Cain, Mary Ann. “Moved by ‘Their’ Words: Emotion and the Participant Observer.” A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies. Eds. Dale Jacobs & Laura R. Micciche. Boyton/CooK: Portsmouth, NH.

“In short, we need narratives that will, on one hand, make readers aware of how certain discursive practices invite one to ‘overtake’ a text and, on the other hand, offer possibilities for resisting such ‘overtakings’ in our reading practices so that alternative viewpoints may be articulated’ (45). =A

“Similarly, in Composition scholarship, we either embrace emotions acritically (as in classroom narratives and professional memoirs) as ‘powerful’ or ignore them (as in conventional research since no ‘evidence’ exists to ‘prove an interpretation of a subject’s emotions” (54). =B

“Yet when scholarly practices preclude critical engagement with the emotional, they also deny the pedagogical aspects of all discursive exchanges including those between researchers and subjects” (54). =A

“However, by reframing the personal (and, in turn, the emotional) as always/already present within social formations of control and regulation, emotion as a ‘third factor’ in both scholarship and teaching in Composition Studies can serve to make the cultural forms it takes more visible” (54). =E

Moon, Gretchen Flesher. “The Pathos of Pathos:A Way to Move

2010-02-19T03:41:00.000-08:00

Moon, Gretchen Flesher. “The Pathos of Pathos: The treatment of Emotion in Contemporary Composition Textbooks.” A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies. Eds. Dale Jacobs & Laura R. Micciche. Boyton/CooK: Portsmouth, NH.

“When Aristotle delineates three appeals in the Rhetoric—logos, pathos, ethos—he establishes not only a system of classification, but a principle of valuation for study by the generations of rhetoricians to follow him” (33).

“Aristotle understands, accepts, and promotes emotional appeals and devotes a major portion of his treastie to them” (33). =A

“He claims at the outset that ‘the man who is to be in command of [the pisteis] must, it is clear, be able to reason logically, to understand human characters and excellences, and to understand the emotions—that , to know what they are, their nature, their causes and the way in which they are excited’” (1156a 22) (34). =A& E

“in the province of rhetoric as Aristotle defined it—is to find the common ground between rhetor and audience in attitudes and states of mind” (34). =E

He and Burke are thinking alike here. Burke believes one needs to identify with the audience and that identification is finding common ground.

“The writers this textbook imagines, and their audiences, are apparently apt to agree that emtotions play a useful role, but a potentially unsavory one” (35). =B

“The dominant impression after such a survey is that appeals to emotion are understood to be a kind of compromise for the postlapsarian world, infinitely dangerous and detached from rational process” (38).

“Similarly, cognitivist approaches to composition schematize the highly conscious, linear processes of rationality and largely ignore the unconscious and chaotic affective ones” (40). =B

“What would a textbook that took emotions seriously look like? It would not make composing look simple. It would recognize and provoke analysis of both the discourse of emotions and emotional discourse” (40). =B

Kerr, Tom. “The Feeling of What Happens in Departments

2010-02-18T08:25:00.000-08:00

Kerr, Tom. “The Feeling of What Happens in Departments of English.” A way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion & Composition Studies. Eds. Dale Jacobs & Laura R. Micciche. Boyton/Cook:Portsmouth, NH. (2003). 23.

“And yet, what Brand observes of the writing classroom may also be said of English departments, material conditions notwithstanding: ‘when things are stalled. . .it is because of emotion. When things go well, it is also because of emotion (Brand 2000, 216).

“It is imperative that we understand emotion quite explicitly as symbolic communication, as a highly inflected semiotic system—a rhetoric of the body, if you will—that relies on signs and representations at both the molecular (interior, biochemical) and molar (exterior, behavioral) levels of the organism” (27).

“As for the second economy, emotional communication regulates the internal states of our organism, ‘providing increased blood flow to arteries in the legs so that muscles receive extra oxygen and glucose, in the case of a flight reaction, or changing heart and breathing rythms,’ in the case say, of presenting a paper before an audience (54). Emotions not only signal our intentions and reactions to others, they also tell our own bodies what to do and when to do it” (27).

“But the ideological manipulation of emotion takes on much finer hues and textures as well; the systemic, culturally sanctioned suppression of the emotions that one finds in departments of English serves as a good example (30).

Quandahl, Ellen. “A Feeling for Aristotle A Way to Move

2010-02-18T05:24:00.000-08:00

Quandahl, Ellen. “A Feeling for Aristotle: Emotion in the Sphere of Ethics” A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies. Eds. Dale Jacobs & Laura R. Micciche. Boyton/CooK: Portsmouth, NH.

“Aristotle.. . .A patient observer and analyst of culture who gives emotion a significant place in living well generally, in ethics and in politics” (12).

“This linking of rhetoric with ethics and moral psychology is historically long-standing” (12). =E

“So in Aristotle there is a significant connection and interplay of emotion with ethics as well as persuasion” (13). =E
And even though that is true, there is little or no mention of guilt. However, it is also proof that those who claim rhetoric shoud be, and has been based on logic alone, are off base” (13). =E

“1. ‘Thumos’ is a social force. Scholars have discovered a crucial hinge between emotions and ethics/politics in a Greek word associated with spirited-ness, and also with heart, or the seat or capacity for emotions, thumos” (13). =B & E.
(Barbara Koziak) “She reminds us of a conundrum in Plato—that, on the one hand, in his mythic, tripartite psychology, reason tames and controls the emotional part, but on the other hand, Plato analogizes philosophy with eros, so that knowing involves desire” (14).

“Koziak and others recognize that Aristotle fully opens this door, giving a significant place to emotion in moral conduct” (14). **=E

“Koziak argues that emotions of the Rhetoric are ‘desires for certain state of social realations’ (2000, 96). The capacity to feel these emotions could also be called a social capacity” (14). **=E

“the survey of emotions in the Rhetoric could be said to examine already developed ways in which people are moved in social situations” (15). **=E

“Rhetoricians have been clear that the realm of rhetoric comprises the messy areas in which judgments must be made even where there is not a precise science of inquiry and where nonexperts have to address complex issues” (16). ** =B & E.

“Cooper points out that the feeling of an emotion includes for Aristotle three central elements: distress or pleasure, its cause by the way things seem to one, and the social dimension that we have already seen—desire for some behavior in response or change in the social situation” (1999, 422)” (17). =B

“deliberate emotional education, then, ought to include deep thought about how institutions teach and manage emotion, and broad opportunities to learn and reflect on what happens when people feel in particular situations” (20). =A

“It is language study that allows us to see what happens when people feel this way, about this person, in this situation” (21).

Farrell, Thomas B. “Knowledge, Consensus, and Rhetorical

2010-02-16T04:09:00.000-08:00

Farrell, Thomas B. “Knowledge, Consensus, and Rhetorical Theory” The Quarterly Journal of Speech. 62.1 (1975).

“In Aristotle’s early expansive vision, then, rhetoric was the art which employed the common knowledge of a particular audience to inform and guide reasoned judgments about matters of public interest” (1). -B

“Aristotle was able to posit a body of common knowledge as a natural corollary to his idealizations of human nature, the potential of human reason, and the norms and procedures of public decision making” (2). =B

“With each alteration in our conception of knowledge, then, the art of rhetoric—which seems to depend upon a kind of collective knowledge—altered its status and function accordingly” (2-3). =A

As we change, so does rhetoric. It bases itself around what is, for the time, considered reality. Now, reality is that women are not less than men nor do they have a special code of conduct.

“It is neither possible nor practical to exhaustively refute all conceptions of knowledge which once impeded the current inquiry; fortunately, it is also unnecessary. The contradictions of extreme realism, radical empiricism, and logical positivism are now clearly apparent to all but their most steadfast adherents. Contemporary philosophy has now moved away from the detached derivation of criteria for knowledge and toward more inclusive study of human activity in all its forms—even as this activity informs the process of scientific knowing itself (3).
=B & E

“Thomas Kuhn terms consensual agreements on a structured universe of discourse, ‘paradigms,’ and suggests that without such a consensual context, even the developed sciences would lose their rigor and analycity” (3). =B

“No criterion for knowledge can be polemically proclaimed; at the very least, it must require the cooperation of others in some form” (3). =B

Knowledge is created through an exchange of ideas, but is not handed down singularly. It must work in concert with other knowledge bases in order to create a genuinely knowledgable experience.

“The analytic rigor and synthetic precision of any body of knowledge, then, would seem to vary in direct relation to two interdependent factors:
(1) the degree of actual consensus on methods of investigation, procedures of analysis and operation of measurement.
(2) the knowers’ degree of detachment from human interests related to the object of knowledge” (4). =B & A

“I call this knowledge ‘social knowledge’ and define it as follows:
Social knowledge comprises conceptions of symbolic relationships among problems, persons, interests, and actions, which imply (when accepted) certain notions of preferable public behavior” (4). =B

“Social knowledge is a kind of general and symbolic relationship which acquires its rhetorical function when it is assumed to be shared by knowers in their unique capacity as audience. Whereas technical or specialized knowledge is actualized through its perceived correspondence to the external world, social knowledge is actualized through the decision and action of an audience (4). =B

“And rhetoric (barring the use of force) is the primary process by which social conduct is corrdinated” (5). =B & E

This is how conduct books work. They begin by pulling on social knowledge, and then using rhetoric to imply the importance of that knowledge and those rules.

‘social knowledge depends upon an ‘acquaintance with’ (to use James’ phrase) or a personal relationship to other actors in the social world” (5). =B & A

Thus if we all “know” something socially, it is because we know others who agree with that “knowing”. Burke’s theory of identity.

“the attribution of consensus is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for social knowledge to be rhetorically impactful” (78). =B

“By definition, then, the knowledge which is distinctly rhetorical in function—that is, social knowledge—must be based upon a consensus which is attributed rather than fully realized” (8). =B

“social knowledge becomes the emergent property of a collectivity. It is an attribution which is general in scope rather than abstract in epistemic status”(9). =B

“Rather than being fixed, permanent and static, therefore, social knowledge is transitional and generative” (9). =B & E

The collective owns the knowledge, like community, which is why the folklore in “Space on the side of the Road” works so well. It is all knowledge based on a community knowing, which then makes the rhetoric more effective.

“the most elusive and important characteristic of social knowledge. I refer to its affective or normative impact on decision-making” (10). =B

“More problematic is the tendency of mass media to publicize, even create social knowledge which forces options without suggesting actional outlets for mass concern” (11). =B

“The overarching function of social knowledge is to transform the society into a community” (11). =B & A

FOLKLORE!

“social knowledge helps define a ‘zone of relevance’ in matters of human choice’ (12). =B

“social knowledge is a way of imparting significance to the numerous ‘bits’ of information which are disseminated to the mass of public citizens” (12). =B

‘social knowledge allows each social actor to confront a set of generalized assumptions suggesting the relative priority of collective commitments held by others” (12). =B

Augustine. “On Christian Doctrine: Book IV”

2010-02-10T05:48:00.000-08:00

Augustine. “On Christian Doctrine: Book IV” The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings
From Classical Times to the Present. Eds., Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzburg Bedford: Boston 2001.

“3. For since throught the art of rhetoric both truth and falsehood are pleaded, who would be so bold as to say that against falsehood, truth as regards its own dfenders ought to stand unarmed, so that, forsooth, those who attempt to plead false causes know from the beginning how to make their audience well-disposed, attentive, and that the former utter their lies concisely, clearly, with the appearance of truth, and that the later state the truth in a way that is wearisome to listen to, not clear to understand, and finally, not pleasant to believe;” (457). =B & E

"Nay, more I believe there are scarcely any who can do both things, viz., speak well, and in order to do so, think of the rules of oratory while speaking” (457). =B

“21. And indeed many more things which pertain to the rules of eloquence can be discovered in this same passage which we have taken as an example. But its value lies not so much in the instruction it affords a good audience if it be analyzed carefully, as in the sentiment it enkindles if it be read with feeling” (464). B & E

Augustine is talking about invoking feeling in his audience. He specifically talks about evoking emotion through emotion.

“For though one gives pleasure when he clears up matters that need to be made understood, he becomes wearisome when he keeps hammering at things which are already understood, at least to those men whose whole expectation was centered in the solution of the difficulty in the matter under discussion” (465). =B

“27. And so, a well-known orator has said, and has said truly thant an orator ought to speak in such a way as to instruct, to please, and to persuade” (466). B & E
“It belongs, therefore, to the duty of the teacher not only to make clear obscure matters, and to solve the difficulties in question, but also while this is being done, to anticipate other questions” (472). M&E

“42. The grand style of speaking differs from this moderate style especially in that this is not so much adorned by ornate expressions, as rendered passionate by the heart’s emotions” (474). B & E.

He’s speaking directly to the use of emotion to evoke response, move the audience, etc.

“47. The well-known encomium of virgininity in Cyprian is an example of the moderate style. ‘Now our discourse directs itself to the virgins, who as their honor is higher, are therefore our greater care. They are the flower of the tree of the Church, the beauty and ornament of spiritual grace, its bright natural virtue; of its praise and honor, a work pure and untarnished, the image of God, answering to the sancity of the Lord, the brighter portion of the flock of Christ” (476). =B & E

Did this very strange obsession with virginity, strange because it is praised not as a natural state, but as a higher state of being, contribute to the obsession we now know as pedophilia?

“51. No one should suppose that is its against the rule to mingle these three styles. On the contrary as far as it can properly be done, one should vary his diction by using all three” (478). =B
Syles = grand, moderate, and subdued.

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Astell, Mary. “A Serious Proposal to the Ladies

2010-02-10T03:44:00.000-08:00

Astell, Mary. “A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II” The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings From Classical Times to the Present. Eds., Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzburg. Bedford: Boston 2001.

“It is not enough to wish and to would it, or t’afford a faint Encomium upon what you pretend is beyond your Power; Imitation is the heartiest Praise you can give and is a Debt which Justice requires to be paid to every worthy Action” (847). =E

“If you approve, Why don’t you follow? Andi if you Wish, Why shou’d you not Endeavour? Especially since that wou’d reduce your Wishes to Act, and make you com glorious Examples of them” (847). =E

Speaking directly to what she believes should inspire women to act. She reminds me of Emerson in her belief that action is necessary to prove worth.

“Firmness and strength of Mind will carry us thro all these little persecutions, which may create us some uneasiness for a while, but will afterwards end in our Glory and Triumph” (848). =E

Even if women were looked down on for using their minds, they should push through. Emerson, King, Sojouner Truth.

"Alas, Human Knowledge is at best defective, and always progressive, so that she who knows the most has only this advantage, that she has made a little more speed than her Neighbors” (850).

Astell recognizes that pride works on women too. The woman is a veritable bulldozer when it comes to rhetoric.

“we hope that our Proposition was such that all impartial Readers are convinc’d it wou’d answer the Design, that is, tend very much to the real advantage and improvement of the Ladies” (851).

“So that when we have cast up our Account and estimated the Present Advantages that false Arguings bring us, I fear what we have got by a Pretence to Truth, won’t be found to countervail the loss we shall sustain by the Discovery that it was no more. Which may induce us (if other Considerations will not) to be wary in receiving any Proposition our selves, and restrain us from being forward to impose our Sentiments on others” (852).

“I shall not therefore recommend under the name of Rhetoric an Art of speaking floridly on all subjects, and of dressing up Error and Impertinence in quaint and taking garb” (852).

Her appeals range from the emotional to the completely logical. By referring to “dressing” up error she hits home with the ladies. Her idea of saying that even if it looks good, it has to be good, goes back to Aristotle.

“but we shou’d fold up our Thoughts so closely and neatly, expressing them in such significant tho few words, as that the Readers Mind may easily open and enlarge them” (853). =E

Again, she is directly hitting on things women were used to dealing with, in this case folding things to make them more compact.

“Neither Reason nor Wit entertain us if they are driven beyond a certain pitch, and Pleasure it self is offensive if it be not judiciously dispenc’d” (854). =B

“So that to guess what success we are like to have, we need only suppose our selves in the place of those we Address to, and consider how such Discourse wou’d operate on us, if we had their Infirmities and Thoughts about us” (854). =E & M

Directly tapping into empathy as a way of addressing an audience.

"We shou’d diligently watch for Opportunities, and carefully improve them, accommodating our Discourse to the Understanding and Genius of all we cou’d hope to do good to” (855). =E & M

“I have made no distinction in what has been said between Speaking and Writing, because tho they are talents which do not always meet, they there is no material difference between ‘em” (856).

“For it is little purpose to Think well and speak well, unless we Live well, this is our great Affair and truest Excellency, the other are no further to be regarded than as they may assist us in this. She who does not draw this Inference from her Studies has Thought in vain, her notions are Erroneous and Mistaken” (858).

Again, she reminds me of Emerson in her desire not only to teach women to think on their own, but to act on their own thoughts!

“Nor will Knowledge lie dead upon their hands who have no Children to Instruct; the whole World is a single Lady’s Family, her opportunities of doing good are not lessen’d but encreas’d by her being unconfin’d” (860).
This lady is good.

Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By

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Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago UP: Chicago. 1980,

“Since communication is based on the same conceptual system that we use in thinking and acting, language is an important source of evidence for what that system is like” (3). =B

“Because the metaphorical concept is systematic, the language we use to talka bout that aspect of the concept is systematic” (7). =B

“The metaphorical concepts TIME IS MONEY, TIME IS A RESOURCE and TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITY form a single system based on subcategorization, since in our society money is a limited resource and limited resources are valuable commodities. These subcategorization relationships characterize entailment relationships between the metaphors” (9).=M

“Reddy obersves that our language about language is structured roughly by the following complex metaphor:
Ideas (or meanings) are objects.
Linguistic expressions are containers.
Communication is sending. =B & M

Since we put such a physical face on intangible objects such as ideas and language, we are using our minds to create links between physicality and thought.

“metaphorical concepts can be extended beyond the range of ordinary literal ways of thinking and talking into the range of what is called figurative, poetic, colorful, or fanciful though and language” (13). =B & M

This is how we stretch the understanding of certain ideas. It is also how we communicate the understanding. Burke?

“there is another kind of metaphorical concept, one that does not structure one concept in terms of another but instead organizes a whole system of concepts with respect to one another. We will call these orientational metaphors, since most of them have to do with special orientation: (14). =B

“Most of our fundamental concepts are organized in terms of one or more spatialization metaphors (17). =B

“The most fundamental values in a culture will be coherent with the metaphorical structure of the most fundamental concepts in the culture” (22). B & A

“The various subcultures of a mainstream culture share basic values but give them different priorities” (23). =B

“our experiences with physical objects (especially our own bodies) provide the basis for an extraordinarily wide variety of ontological metaphors, that is ways of viewing events activities, emotions, ideas, etc., as entities and substances (25). =B

“We project our own in-out orientation onto other physical objects that are bounded by surfaces. Thus we also view them as containers with an inside and an outside” (29). =B

“Perhaps the most obvious ontological metaphors are those where the physical object is further specified as being a person. This allows us to comprehend a wide variety of experiences with nonhuman entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics and activities” (33). =B & M

“The point here is that personification is a general category that covers a very wide range of metaphors, each picking out different aspects of a person or a way of looking at a person” (34) =B

“we are using one entity to refer to another that is related to it. This is a case of what we will call metonymy” (35). =B

Delving deeper into apparent and hidden metaphors goes toward discovering motive. Burke.
(called synecdoche by rhetoricians).

“The conceptual systems of culture and religions are metaphorical in nature” (41). =B

Women equal Eve equal sin?

“We claim that most of our normal conceptual system is metaphorically structured; that is, most concepts are partially understood in terms of other concepts” (56). =B

“metaphors allow us to conceptualize our emotions in more sharply defined terms and also relate them to other concepts having to do with general well-being . . .” (58).

“Structural metaphors allow us to do much more than just orient concepts, refer to them, quantify them, etc., as we do with simple orientational and ontological metaphors; they allow us, in addition, to use one highly structured and clearly delineated concept to structure another.
Like orientational and ontological metaphors, structural metaphors are grounded in systematic correlations within our experience” (61).

“Standard theories of meaning assume that all of our complex concepts can be analyzed into undecomposable primitives. Such primitives are taken to be the ‘building blocks’ of meaning. (69).

“We conceptualize changes of this kind—from one state into another, having a new form and function—in terms of the metaphor THE OBJECT COMES OUT OF THE SUBSTANCE. That is why the expression out of is used. . .” (73).

This is the same with “into”. A young woman who is marriageable and pure “turns into” a social outcast when she is sullied by her own choice or another’s. Conduct books.

“Another way we can ceptualize making is by elaborating on direct manipulation, using another metaphor: THE SUBSTANCE GOES INTO THE OBJECT.” (73). =B
“the concept of CAUSATION is based on the prototype of DIRECT MANIPULATION, which emerges directly from our experience (75). =B

Eve at the apple and all women turned into evil.

Conversation dimensions of structure:
“Participants: The participants are of a certain natural kind, namely, people.
“Parts: The parts consists of a certain natural kind of activity, namely, talking.
Stages: beginning middle and end
Linear sequence: Participants take turns.
Causation: The finish of one turn is expected to result in the beginning of the next turn.
Purpose: Polite social interaction. [PARAPHRASE] (79). =B

“A ONE-PARTY RATIONAL ARGUMENT is a specific branch of the general concept ARGUMENT and, as such, has many special constraints on it” (88). =B
Content: enough supporting evidence.
Progress: premises to conclusion
Structure: appropriate logical connections among the various parts.
Strength: The ability of the argument to withstand assault depends on the evidence and tightness of logical connections.
Basicness: Some claims are more important to maintain and defend than others, since subsequent claims will be based up-on them.
Obviousness: In any argument there will be things which are not obvious and need to be identified and explored.
Directness: The force of an argument can depend on how straightforwardly you move from premisis to conclusion.
Clairty: What you are claiming and the connections must be clear. (88-9). [PARAPHRASE]

Can we say write a paper?

“We can get some idea of the mechanism of coherence within a single metaphorical structuring by starting with the metaphor AN ARGUMENT IS A JOURNEY” (89). =B

“Because we conceptualize linguistic form in spatial terms, it is possible for certain spaceial metaphors to apply directly to the form of a sentence, as we conceive of spatially”(126).

“Thus, they can give new meaning to our pasts, to our daily activity, and to what we know and believe” (139). (metaphors). =B

Metaphors allow for an expansion of understanding and that expansion allows for new knowledge to be taken in, synthesized, and reformed.

“Ontological metaphors also make similarities possible” (146).

“TIME IS A SUBSTANCE and LABOR IS A SUBSTANCE allows us to view them both as being similar to physical resources and hence similar to each other” (147.)

Larson, Richard L. “Classifying Discourse:Rhetoric and Modern

2010-02-08T06:33:00.000-08:00

Larson, Richard L. “Classifying Discourse: Limitations and Alternatives” Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse. Southern Illinois UP: Carbondale. 1984.

“Cicero and Quintilian accepted and elaborated in their own way the division of rhetorical discourse into kinds, and further divided into classes the various questions that rhetorical discourse treats) = B

“A recent inquirty into one effort to categorize discourse is Rober Connors’ ‘The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse. Connors locates the beginnings of the theory of ‘modes’ narration, description, exposition, argument—“ (204). =B

“But whether or not one agrees with Connors that the ‘modes’ are dead or moribund, the impulse to organize thinking and discussion about discourse by finding systems of classification are very much alive” (204). =B

“But probably the best plan known today for dividing up the members of the universe of discourse was advanced by James Kinneavy in A Theory of Discourse” (205). =B

*communications triangle—James Kinneavy

Apex-writer Second apex—the audience Third apex—subject of discourse. (206).

“The ‘modes’ as Frank D’Angelo observed in A Conceptual Theory of Rhetoric, arise from the recognition that writers do ineed sometimes describe, theydo sometime narrate, they do sometimes explain, and they do sometimes hope to persuade—“ (206).

“topi (procedures for generating or arranging data for use in discourse) (205). =B

“The limitations in these categories of discourse do not emerge, then, from theorists’ derivations of the categories. Rather, they emerge from the inferences and conclusions drawn from those origins: that a finished piece of discourse can be classified into a box on a taxonomic chart; that in so classifying, a theorist has made a useful statement about that piece of discourse; and –even more significant—that one can employ these categories to erect a structure for teaching others to produce discourse” (207). = B & M

“Placing pieces of discourse into boxes on taxonomies, I would argue, fairls to respond to a reader’s experience of the piece as read. And for those who teach composing, the advantage offered by these taxonomies—the advantage of helping to formulate a neat convenient curriculum—is an illusory advantage” (209).

“Moffett identifies two dimensions along which any discourse can be defined: 1) the distance of writer from reader and the relative familiarity of writer with reader (the closest audience ot the writer is the writer himself or herself; the most distant is a large variegated audience whose members are unknown to the writer0; 2) the degree to which the materials of discourse are abstracted from immediate experience—what Mofftt calls their ‘abstractive altitude’ (210).

“But devising one or two scales is not a self-evidently preferable replacement for building taxonomies of discourse. The points ona single scale can too easily become the boxes in a taxonomy” (211). =B

“I think I can identify seven dimensions of discourse, each capable of being described as a scale or continuum along which a piece can be located.

1) The occasion or stimulous for writing
2) Readers’ expectations.
3) The distance, character, and attitudes of the audience.
4) The writer’s goal—the reaction or response desired in the readers by the writer.
5) The abstractive altitude of the subject matter; (direct sensory experience to statements about events that might or ought to occur later).
6) The density of detail required.
7) The extent to which the individual writer’s idiosyncratic perceptions, comments, and feelings permeate, or can permeate the discourse.

Graves, Richard L. “Symmetrical Form and the RhetoricRhetoric and Modern

2010-02-08T06:30:00.000-08:00

Graves, Richard L. “Symmetrical Form and the Rhetoric of the Sentence” Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse. Southern Illinois UP: Carbondale. 1984.

“’Gorgianic’ is said to be there only for effect or to make an impression, a thin veneer with no substance at all” (170). =B [the concept of symmetry within a sentence]

“Moreover we see the concept of symmetry expressed everywhere, all around us in all kinds of human institutions” (171). =B
“Thus seens, symmetry is not merely a cold, static form, but rather, a potentially dynamic, life-giving force” (172). =B

“Attneave was interested in studying, in quantitative terms, a belief long held by Gestalt physchologists, namely that symmetry has a positive effect on memory” (172). =B

“Attneave’s experiments and Burke’s comments on innate form suggest the potential fruitfulness of efforts to develop a syntactic rhetoric based on symmetry and parallelism—one which could, in combination with other related activities, serve as a powerful heuristic tool” (174). =B

“Parallelism is shown as consisting of four major categories: 10the repetition of key words, 2) the use of opposite words, 3) the repetition of grammatical elements, and 4) combinations of these, in which selected elements function together” (174). =B

Johnson, Nan. “Ethos and the Aims of Rhetoric” Essays on Classical

2010-02-08T06:27:00.000-08:00

Johnson, Nan. “Ethos and the Aims of Rhetoric” Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse. Southern Illinois UP: Carbondale. 1984.

“ In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates observes that “the supreme object of a man’s efforts in public and private life must be the reality rather than the appearance of goodness” (99). =B

“In Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus, the role of rhetoric is defined as the instruction of ideal truth. Plato proposes in Gorgias that the true aim of oratory should be the ‘moral good,’ not merely persuasion as an end in itself” (99). =B
“Dialectic discovers or identifies ideal truth while rhetoric provides instruction for the community about the application of philosophy in life” (100). =B & M

“Persuasion through the spoken word is of three kinds; ethos, “the personal character of the speaker”; pathos, “putting the audience into a certain frame of mind”; and logos, ‘the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself’ (101). = B

“Aristotle perceives excellence or the Good as perfection of form possible through the effects of individual acts and mutual understanding; Plato defines the Good as an ideal which is only revealed to us in philosophical inquiry or spiritual edification” (103). =B

“Quntilian perceives rhetoric as an ethical activity which grounds citizens in “the priniciples of upright and honorable living” (103). =B

“Rhetoric is presented in De Oratore (55 B.C.) as the art of speaking well, and Cicero outlines the province of oratory or “eloquence” to be matters relevant to the maintenance of ‘peace and tranquility’ in communities and nations” (104). =B

“While Campbell evaluates ethos as a strategy in terms of what is ‘natural’ Blair assesses the significance of ethos and rhetorical principles in general with regard to how expression advances Taste” (108)” = B

“In the rhetorics of Campbell and Blair we see how classical definitions of the practical and ethical functions of ethos are adapted to popular philosophical views of the eighteenth century and to expanded notions of the province of rhetoric” (109). =B

“Whatley defines rhetoric as an ‘architectural’ art of composing arguments, and he defines ethos as a strategy of gaining sympathy. Like Campbell, Whatley sees sympathy as the key to moving the Will to action, and he defines ethos as ‘an impression produced by the projection of good sense, good principle and Good Will” (109-10).

“Channing shares Blair’s view that sincerity is a prerequisite to the composition and delivery of public address” (110). =B

“The concept of ethos rarely appears in current texts by name. Rather, it is discussed under such varied stylistic headings as ‘tone’ ‘writer’s voice’ ‘personal appeal’, ‘attitude,’ ‘persona,’ and ‘credibility.’ (112).

“One of the major goals of rhetoricians such as Richard Weaver and Wayne Booth has been to restore a balance between pragmatic and objective ideals as a basis for rhetorical theory and practice” (113).

Golden, James Plato Essays on Classical Rhetoric

2010-02-08T02:34:00.000-08:00

Golden, James L. “Plato Revisited: A Theory of Discourse for all Seasons” Connors, Robert J., Ede, Lisa, S., and Lunsford, Andrea A. Eds. Essays on Classical Rhetoricand Modern Discourse. Southern Illinois UP: Carbondale. 1984.

“Plato, first of all, was a highly significant thinker who recognized the centrality of discourse in its myriad forms, not only in the doing of philosophy but in the conducting of human affairs” (17). =B

“When examining Plato’s commitment to the value of discourse, it is incumbent on us to appreciate the broad scope which his theory of rhetoric entails. Rhetoric, he held, embraces any form of discourse designed to win the soul” (18). =B & A.

“It is evident, therefore, that Plato, like Kenneth Burke and Chaim Perelman in the modern era, saw the need to place the interpersonal communication pattern within the sphere of rhetoric” (18). =B

“Further proof of Plato’s willingness to regard public communication, despite its partiality for an uninterrupted flow of discourse, as a legitimate and vital part of rhetoric, is his occasional practice of constructing orations as integral parts of his dialogues” (18). =B

“A second important aaspect of Plato’s theory of discourse is an abiding belief in the premise that a major function of rhetoric is to generate, create, and discover knowledge” (19). =B & A

“. . .Plato was committed to an argument centered theory of rhetoric” (21). =B

“Plato carefully demonstrates the need for a communicator to display courage in articulating his arguments and convictions” (22). =B & A

“Plato viewed widom as an ultimate goal in life” (23). =B

“He further held that the person who achieves knowledge or wisdom experiences the true meaning of what it is to be good; and it is he alone who rids himself of false opinions, becomes an expert in a chosen field, enjoys full happiness, and comes into the presence of the gods” (23).=B & A.

“Plato, as noted earlier, had a world view that gave primacy to reason as the principle motivating force to help us grasp the meaning of ideal forms” (24). =B

Is this where rhetoric began its journey into reason and away from emotion?

“Plato, despite disclaimers to the contrary in portions of ‘Gorgias,’ was fully devoted to the idea of rhetoric as action” (24). = B & A.

“Of all the emotions, the one which receives the greatest attention from Plato is love---“ (25). =B

“Plato found his rationale for supporting a form of persuasion that was moral/philosophical in nature. Persuasion, he came to believe, was necessary for the successful leadership of the state” (25.

“The single most useful and effective communication method is the dialogue form which Plato invented and called dialectic. Dialectic as described by Plato ‘is the copingstone of the sciences’—a science which is set above all other sciences” (30). =B & A & M

1.“Dialectic when practiced in a proper manner adheres to a clearly organized pattern which moves in a chronological sequence beginning with a definition of terms and ending with a vision of the ideal as seen in universals” (30). =B & M.

2.“Division and integration or unification, consisting of analysis and synthesis, is a second step in the dialectical process” (30).

3.“the interlocutor proceeds to the their step which includes refutation and cross-examination” =B

4.”Following the refutation and cross-examination, a fourth and final step is instituted consisting of a modification of the original position” (31). =B

“Even more remarkable, I feel, is Plato’s relevance for contemporary students of rhetoric. His conviction that human discourse is central to man’s existence; that rhetoric at its highest seeks to create knowledge, promote values, and produce action; and that dialectic, with its reliance on argument, represents the ideal rhetorical method place him squarely in the tradition of modern thought” (35). = B & A.

“Plato’s strong preference for an ethics-centered theory of discourse gave to his ideas a permanent relevance” (36). =B

“the rhetorical teachings of Plato, while emphasizing the various forms of communication, highlight inan impressive way the potential influence of dialectic as an innovative and powerful instructional device” =B

Connors, Robert J. Essays on Classical Rhetoric

2010-02-08T02:31:00.000-08:00

Connors, Robert J., “The Revival of Rhetoric in America” Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse. Southern Illinois UP: Carbondale. 1984.

“The earliest rhetorical instruction and theory in America were not classical in nature; they were informed not by Aristotle, Cicero, or Quintilian, but by Peter Ramus and Omer Talon” =B

“the first ‘revival’ of classical rhetoric actually took place in eithteenth-century America and can perhaps be best associated with John Ward’s A System of Oratory (Longdon, 1759), which Warren Guthrie views as the most pervasive synthesis of Greek and Roman theory then available” (1). =B

“Ironic as it may seem, the growing emphasis on writing in colleges, particularly the shift from oral to written evaluation of students, also played an important role” (4). =B

Scholars of oral rhetoric chose not to be ignored by English departments anymore and struck out on their own to form the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking. (6).
PARAPHRASE.

“Not until the late 1930’s and the early 1940’s did the first signs of a second revival of rhetoric begin to emerge” (8). =B

“The rediscovery of classical rhetoric in its application to writing pedagogy began in 1962, when P. Albert Duhamel and his collegue Richard E. Hughes published Rhetoric: Principles and Usage” (10).

“The impact of this rhetorical revival on composition studies was confirmed by the 1963 CCCC” (10). =B

“The twentieth-century revival of rhetoric entails a recovery of the classical tradition, with its marriage of a rich and fully articulated theory with an equally efficacious practice” (15).

Brummett, Barry. Rhetorical Dimensions of Pop Culture

2010-02-07T04:26:00.000-08:00

Brummett, Barry. Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Cultures. Alabama UP: Tuscaloosa. 1991.

Media determinism may be defined as the belief that the content of a culture (its habits of thought, typical concerns, vocabulary norms and values, key symbols) is dictated by the inevitable domination of a medium of communication” (5). =E

Conduct books fell within that realm. They were using the most popular and prevalent method of the day which was books, tracts, etc.

“A media determinist finds formal or structural links between a medium and a culture” (6). =B & E.

“Medium refers to patterns of social usage of communication technology in a particular culture” (6). =B

“Walter Ong (1967), writing in the tradition of Harold Innis (1951), diplays deterministic leanings in his argument that the dominant medium in a culture will strongly influence the habits of thought in that culture (6). =B & E & A.

So, when books were the dominant medium (16, 17th centuries) that produced the most influence. Images are now the most dominant medium, aren’t they? So the images of the starving children carry a great deal of influence.

“Postman (1985, p. 130) argues that television induces its audiences to see al problems as quickly solvable throught the application of commodities grounded in modern technology” (13).

“The relatively small size of the television screen makes it in appropriate for depicting large panoramic scenes. Close-up shots of smaller objects are therefore needed to allow the medium’s primarily visual codes to work . . . An icon particularly well suited to such close-up depeiction is the human body, particularly the face. Therefore, television focuses on character over action . . ., and the actor has primacy. . .” (15).

This makes TV and print media very good for save the children type ads.

“As we have seen, the audience (in capitalist America) is urged to think in terms of commodity solutions toward life’s problems, to think inpersonal terms rather than broader public terms (which would lead one to consider such issues as class, distribution of power among groups, and exploitation of whole classes of other people)” (16). =E

“Television is also intimate in the sense that it is placed within familial contexts and is almost always viewed domestically. . . Picirillo . . .argues that this insertion of television into the daily routine intensifies televisual realism because it makes television presentations seem as normal and taken-for-granted as the domestic surroundings” (15).

Books can do this as well. They are very intimate objects.

“Television encourages narcissistic preoccupations with personal appearance, but it also fosters widespread personal empathy for starving Ethiopians thousands of mailes away”(21).

Save the Children ads.

“How the public is wooed by competing interests to render the decisions that it has made throughout history has been the province of rhetoric” (36). =B & E
“rhetoric is essentially a complex, multilevel social function that is carried out through correspondingly complex manifestations” (37). =B & E

“As a necessary function of societies, rhetoric is thus a dimension of any life lived under social influence; thus, rhetoric is that part of an act or object that influences how social meanings are created, maintained, and opposed” (38). =E

That social function, that influence, is what made the rhetoric of conduct books so pervasive in society. It became the social norm.

“At one end of the continuum, rhetoric serves an exigent function: it addresses exigencies of the moment, pressing problems, perceived quandaries, and frank questions (Bitzer 1968)” (39). =B

“The exigent is carried out by certain manifestations of rhetoric, which I will call interventionist manifestations. When rhetoric is manifested as interventionist, it has at least three characteristics: 1) People are consciously aware that a rhetorical function is being performed because it is manifested in signs that suggest explicitly suasory intent” (40). =B
“2) Because rhetors know that they are specifically attempting to influence meanings, they take (or are in a position to be expected to take) responsibility for doing so. It is clear that someone has made an intentional, planned, and strategic effort to address a problem” (40). =B
“3) interventionist messages take the form of discrete texts defined by their sources” (40). =B

“The middle of the rhetorical function continuum I am calling the quotidian, for here are managed the public and personal meanings that affect everyday, even minute-to-minute decisions” (41). =B

This is where there is no “immediate need” where the rhetoric influences actions and ways of thought that are continuous, not a one time deal. Conduct Books.

“Meanings are managed and people are influenced by a flow of signs, including table settings, a spouse’s facial expressions, styles of dress, forms of greeting and farewell, small talk, the ambiance of a restaurant, the severe architecture of a court building, elevator music, rap music coming from a neighborhood window, and the decoration of a dentist’s office” (41). =E

“To perform the quotidian function, people appropriate phrases, slogans, actions, nonverbal signs, etc., that are already available in the society or organization within which one is acting” (42). =E

So, where conduct literature is concerned, we pick up on the “speak” of where we are wanting to fit in. Young women adopted and adapted to the expectations of these works.

In contrast to interventionist manifestations, people are 1) relatively (recall that we are dealing with a continuum) less consciously aware that the management of shared meanings is under way” (42). =E

“Because people are less consciously aware that meaning is being managed, they are 20 less likely to take or assign responsibility for a rhetorical effort” (42). =E

If they are less aware that meaning is being managed then they are also less aware that they, their opinions, and their actions are being managed. This is definitely hooked to conduct literature.

“Because the construction of texts is relatively less consciously and clearly defined by a responsible source, the appropriational manifestation of rhetoric involves 3) diffuse rather than discrete texts” (43). =E

“The quotidian level is where a group’s common sense is managed. ‘Common sense’ is not a unified or simple category; it includes whatever people take for granted as well as assumptions that they come to question (43). =E

Thus, people (scholars and laity alike) develop a habit of regarding rhetoric as not a dimension of experience but as an exclusively interventionist manifestation: a whole, discrete text, a separate class of actions or events “ (50). =E

Rhetoric does not have to be a “discrete text”, but can be something much more pervasive, and something that we don’t “see” as readily as a discrete text.

“To restrict the term ‘rhetoric’ to but one manifestation of but one level of a social function is to ignore the broader placement of that level and that manifestation within a whole social system” (56). =E

So, it is not simply a manner of finding a “means to persuade”, but also figuring out who is doing the persuading. The persuasion can come from outside the text, but within the social system.

“Becker’s model suggests that this is how all of us experience communication when we are not deferring to a source’s definition of discrete texts: We move through an environment of “bits” of information, bits contained in media broadcasts, posters, comments heard or overheard, writings on cereal boxes, the physicial condition of buildings or streets, the weather, etc. And as we move through this environment, we assemble bits into messages which Becker described as ‘mosaics” (64). = B & E

The idea of the mosaic is extremely interesting when thinking of rhetoric. We assume a simple idea or way of framing an idea does all the work. This is untrue. In conduct books the bits of the mosaic were made up of not only what the ladies read, but when they lived, with whom they associated, the social “norm”, etc.

“We have seen how traditional rhetorical theory treats rhetoric as a set of discrete texts rather than as a complex function manifested in complex ways” (67). =B
“As rhetorical scholars we need to preserve a sensitivity to the full range of functions and manifestations” (67). =B & E

“So when we speak of mosaics here, we are at the same time speaking of kinds of rhetorical manifestations and the functions they perform” (72). =B

“Rhetoric which is the struggle over meaning management, is thus also a struggle over which patterns to employ in making meaning” (75). = B & E

“Let us read “bit” for “event”, and understand that by bit, I mean an event, an object, a person, in short, any experience of sensations that we perceive as a unit, a package, an entity, because we have been socially influenced to so perceieve them” (77). =B & E

Bits are parts of mosaics.

“It should be clear than some patterns will serve the interest of some groups in society while other patterns serve other interests” (80). =A & E.
‘people themselves are extensions of the field of bits, texts and cultural artifacts which is ordered into mosaics” (80). =B & E

“To see text and experience as distinct is the work of a mosaic; I am arguing that apart from that work, text and experience distinct in any absolute privileged sense” (85). =B

A mosaic takes separate pieces to create a whole which runs together indistinguishably from the bits.

“I have defended here a vision of the human being as a social and ordering creature. In ordering experience, the form that guides the ordering also situates and creates the subject. The subject is thus continuous with the world that is being ordered, and the subject is an agent for expanding the mosaic, the order or meaning achieved backward and forward in time because the subject supplies the context for the creation of the mosaic text" (104).

The “bits” flow through the timeline as do the people who are the subject.But what does time do to either?

“This theory is keyed to the term homology, the formal linkage underlying structuring and unifying a mosaic” (111). =B

Gatchet, Roger. A Hystery of Colonial Witchcraft Uncovering Hidden

2010-02-03T04:20:00.000-08:00

Gatchet, Roger “A Hytery of Colonial Witchcraft: Witch-Hunt Tourism and Commenoration in Salem, Massachussetts. Uncovering Hidden Rhetorics: Social Issues in Disguise. Ed. Barry Brummett. Sage: Los Angeles. 2008.

“The ‘witch’ label, so often used as a discursive marker to identify the so-called “monsters” of society, functions as “an approved mechanism for the disguiser, and discharge of social violence’ . . .Calling someone a monster, a witch, or any label that denotes monstrosity or “Otherness” does far more than place that person in an undesirable category—it often leads to serious real-life effects like persecution, alienation, and violence” (179). =E

So labeling women chaste or unchaste, wanton, etc. gave society an opportunity to take certain females out of the social realm.

“A dominant narrative is a privileged story, account , or way of understanding that is produced by an authority” (179). =E

So, men had the dominant narrative over social issues in conduct books, white non-profit organizations have the dominanant narrative over third world countries, etc.

“The narratives that Salem tourists encounter disguise the relationships between patriarchy and gender, and capitalism and violence, relationships essential for understanding why the hunt happened” (192). =B

“They are framed by a narrative, or narratives, that do rhetorical work leading to real life consequences (194). =E

Aguayo, Angela J. The Revisioned American Dream Uncovering Hidden

2010-02-03T03:37:00.000-08:00

Aguayo, Angela J. “The Re-visioned American Dream: The Wildlife Documentary Form as
Conservative Nostalgia” Uncovering Hidden Rhetorics: Social Issues in Disguise. Ed. Barry Brummett. Sage: Los Angeles. 2008.

“Form or pattern embodied in many different texts, is a powerful mediator between the message and audience” (144). =A

“the audience consumes images as though the action is happening right before their eyes. In that moment, the camera’s eye becomes the human eye, and the images function as sensory evidence” (145). =E

Does it work the same way with still images?

Objectivity could be considered the problematic term of our time. Objectivity demands that impartiality be embedded into our social fabric” (152). =E

This is important.

Winslo, Luke. Classy Morality Uncovering Hidden

2010-02-03T03:34:00.000-08:00

Winslow, Luke. “Classy Morality: The Rhetoric of Joel Osteen” Uncovering Hidden Rhetorics: Social Issues in Disguise. Ed. Barry Brummett. Sage: Los Angeles. 2008.

“Power is often obtained and reinforced through the evaluations and judgments we make about the people around us” (123).
Perception is the key to power. It’s how people perceive each other, a situation, etc. It’s how we identify with the people to whom we are attempting to relate. How does this relate to Burke’s theory of identity? Does it?

“Class is another criterion we often use to make judgments about other people” (123). =A & E

“But another benefit that is rarely openly acknowledged is the assignment of higher moral status to the upper class. In the same way that we connect good looks with intelligence, we make moral judgments based on class standing. This allows class standing to represent much more than wealth” (124).
Very prominent within conduct books. The elite wrote them, using their class standing as backing for their own morality and the lower classes purchased or read them in order to imitate the upper classes. This gave a feeling of not only raising one’s class standing, but gave one the feeling of taking on the “morally correct” way of approaching the social.

“as a society we would prefer to avoid the class issue. bell hooks, in her book Where We Stand, argues that, nowadays we would rather talk about race and gender than class” (125). =E

Is that because we find race and gender more pertinent or is it because as scholars people tend to feel that they have elevated their “class” standing, and do not want to disrupt that?

“The best way to understand form is to think about it as a consistent structure or pattern found in the language of text (Burke, Counter-Statement 31) (127). =E & M
This whole idea of class as morality is great. I find that I think it will help reinforce my argument.

Olson, Kathryn M. “Detecting a Common Uncovering Hidden

2010-02-02T04:34:00.000-08:00

Olson, Kathryn M. “Detecting a Common Interpretive Framework for Impersonal Violence:
The Homology in Participants’ Rhetoric on Sport Hunting, “Hate Crimes” and Stranger Rape” Uncovering Hidden Rhetorics: Social Issues in Disguise. Ed. Barry Brummett. Sage: Los Angeles. 2008.

“According to dictionary definitions, a “homology” is the quality or condition of exhibiting correspondence or similarity in position, value, function, or structure; for example, a seal’s flippers are homologous to a human’s arms. . .A rhetorical homology is a formal parrell that cuts across seemingly dissimilar discourses” (87). =B

“I present the rhetorical homology explicityly as a recurring socially held and strategically applied symbolic pattern within contemporary American culture, rather than one emerging from nature or from human’s psycholocial structures” (88).
“Symbolically grounded violence can be resisted with more persuasive counter-symbol use” (115). =E

So then, guilt rhetoric based on Eve’s original sin, could symbolically be countered with rhetoric based upon other Bible information that appears to counter this.

Perks, Lisa Glebatis. “The Evil Albino Uncovering Hidden

2010-02-02T04:30:00.000-08:00

Perks, Lisa Glebatis. “The Evil Albino: Cinematic Othering and Scapegoating of Extreme Whites.” Uncovering Hidden Rhetorics: Social Issues in Disguise. Ed. Barry Brummett. Sage: Los Angeles. 2008.

“Obviously, the trend of evil signification may cultivate discrimination toward albinos, but the consistent correlation of skin color with morality may have more severe consequences for collective society” (72).=E

So, if we look at the fact that we have “evilized” blacks throughout history and add to that the consistent barrage of advertisements about wretchedly poor and uncared for children put on by the not-for profit orgs which raise money that way, then we have a multi-faceted social problem. Not only do we see these black children as desperately needing help, we see them as abandonded by careless parents, living in a country which produces people who are uncaring, and in a place where people cannot figure out the simplest manner of carring for self and for family.

“Barry Brummett’s method of homological criticism is a fruitful tool. This critical method looks past surface features to uncover underlying formal persuasive appeals among disparate texts and experiences” (73).

Brummett, Barry Whispers of a Racial Past Uncovering

2010-02-02T02:53:00.000-08:00

Brummett, Barry. “Whispers of a Racial Past: Forms of White Liberal History in The Horse Whisperer. Uncovering Hidden Rhetorics: Social Issues in Disguise. Ed. Barry Brummett. Sage: Los Angeles. 2008.

“The Myth depends upon constructing people of color in certain ways. The Myth constructs an image of Otherness in people of color, based upon certain recurring attributed dimensions of those people. As The Myth is reindiviualated in particular texts, stock characters must be created to embody those stereotypical dimensions” =B

If The Myth is constructing people in certain ways, then perhaps it constructs identities so as to encourage the “othered” to identify with it. Burke’s theory of identity does state that we identify with others and this draws us into being convinced. Also, if the myth is identifying one sector of society in a particular way, then it follows that identity is one which is propogated by another sector thereby creating the identification with the myth in the ways that Burke proposes.

“One recurring dimension of Thy Myth is the emasculation of people of color. Strong males and, more important, male principles of control, law, and dominance are understood by The Myth to be recessive if not downright absent” (52). =E

“The Myth’s assertion of a lack of connection and communication among people of diverse backgrounds, and suggests that the snippy social manner of the matriarchal Others may be largely to blame for the disjunction” (59). =E

This statement is so reminiscent of the way conduct books are posed. The male writer often trying to come off as “mothering” the young women toward a behavior in order to “better” them and make them understand the “world”. It created and maintained that social disjunction placing young women on the outside and in positions of extreme distress.

“This study thus illustrates the importance of thinking about rhetorical homologies as highly adaptive engines for ordering social consciousness in the service of powier” (69).= E

Perks, Winslow and Avital Limited Representation Hidden Rhetorics

2010-02-02T02:31:00.000-08:00

Perks, Lisa Glebatis, Winslow, Luke, Avital, Sharon. “Limited Representation: A Homology of Discriminatory Media Portrayals of Little People and African Americans” Uncovering Hidden Rhetorics: Social Issues in Disguise. Ed. Barry Brummett. Sage: Los Angeles. 2008.

"Discursive structures, which may be thought of as underlying patterns of language that influence word choice, order, and meaning, inevitably develop out of our use of language to communicate with one another. While these language patterns offer us a shared means of communication, they also organize relationships between people that may empower some groups and disempower others” (32). =B

This covers the nuances which are hard to pinpoint when talking about subtle rhetorics, especially guilt rhetorics. It is perfect for my research, and no I don’t see connections here, yet, but I bet I will.

“Being able to identify discursive patterns like these can assist you in discerning mechanisms of marginalization hidden in unexpected places” (32). =M

“The method of homological rhetorical criticism involves uncovering formal patterns among disparate texts or experiences. Because everyone is socialized in a particular society, stable categories are created in our consciousness that help us process and organize information” (33).=M

This information is one way in which I’ll be able to discover the subtle influences I see in guilt rhetoric that I have as yet been unable to explain. I really believe it will be very helpful to my work. I’m ‘cited!

“Clearly, universal similarity only strengthens the positioning of already dominant groups as the norm, the center from which everyone else deviates . . .Such portrayals make already marginalized groups feel not just different but inferior,” (43). =A

“discursive mechanisms of Othering may work to marginalize various groups of people, not just on the basis of race but on body shape, gender, or other attributes” (44). =E

Hoerl, Kristen Hidden Rhetorics Mississippi Burning

2010-02-01T12:41:00.000-08:00

Hoerl, Kristen. Remembering and Forgetting Black Power in Mississippi Burning. Uncovering Hidden Rhetorics: Social Issues in Disguise. Ed. Barry Brummett. Sage: Los Angeles. 2008.

“Barry Brummett describes a homology as a situation in which ‘two or more kinds of experiencing appear or can be shown to be structured according to the same pattern in some important particulars of their manifestiations” (15). =B

“By facing similar obstacles that black activists faced during the civil rights era, Mississippi Burning thus positions Ward and Anderson as symbolic stand-ins for black activists (22). =M

“Mississippi Burning is a homology for Black Power not necessarily due to any intentional or conscious efforts of the filmmakers but because both the film and Black Power proponents underscore the experience of African Americans and groups who have struggled to change oppressive laws, customs, and other structural barriers to political inclusion, economic equality, and social justice” =E

So, these homologies do not always (may even mostly) do not arrive through purpose. They simply happen, perhaps as a subconscious way of dealing with racial or gender issues?

“The patterns across Mississippi Burning and the Black Power movement suggest that films can give meaning to the past even if they aren’t explicitly based on historical events” (29) =E

Brummett, Barry Uncovering Hidden Rhetorics

2010-02-01T11:24:00.000-08:00

Brummett, Barry ed. “Introduction” Uncovering Hidden Rhetorics: Social Issues in Disguise.
Sage: Los Angeles. 2008
“That is to say, a text or message may seem to be about one thing on the surface, but it is also about another thing, if we know how to unlock the text” (1). =E

He actually uses the phrase “sneaky rhetoric” in this book. It is so much like what I’m wanting to talk about it scares me, but then it’s not alike at all.
“Because it is important to know what we are doing if we engage social issues in talk, films,popular music, television, and so forth, understanding how social issues may be disguised in discourse is an important goal” (4).=E
I don’t think the arts are the only places in which we should look for such things. Television commercials, as opposed to shows, editorials, novels, etc. should also be included.
“Another way to look for metaphor is by searching for what we might call compression. Even language or images that are not surprising may, upon reflection, have many complex and even contradictory meanings packed within them, so many that some are bound to be in disguise when we use such terms and images in everyday life” (6).=M
So by using images in the “guilt” advertisements we are creating metaphors. Danphurians appear like this. Their children are hungry, dirty, and have no one to care for them. Things like this are metaphorical, and pack multiple image messages into a small space.
“Homological analysis and formal analysis really lie on a continuum; you reach homological analysis as you branch out and consider more and more different kinds of texts and experiences as ordered by the same underlying form” (10). =M
Both Burke and Aristotle refer to form frequently, however; I did not see the term pattern too often. I don’t know if I overlooked it, but it appears to be a good rhetorical strategy, as is repetition.

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives

2010-02-01T05:24:00.000-08:00

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkley: California UP, 1969.

I had a lot of trouble finding things I found useful in this book. I love Burke, and I don’t know if it is just me being foggy headed, or if it is the infinite ability of Burke’s to be obscure. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

“We shall use five terms as generating principle of our investigation. They are: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose. In a rounded statement about motives you must have some word that names the act (names what took place, in thought or deed), and another that names the scene (the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred); and also you must indicate what kind of person (agent) performed the act, what means or instruments he used (agency), and the pupose” (xv). =M
Aristotle did not talk of motives, per se; but he did speak of what needed to be placed in the mind of the rhetorician when he was inventing. All of these things were in there albeit mentioned in different terminology. Bitzer’s rhetorical situation is also in this one small piece. One must know how to “situate” what is being said, or what one will say. Agency could be seen as pathos or logos. This is reflective, or reflected in, a whole slew of other authors.
“For in the course of this work, we shall deal with many kinds of transformation—and it isi in the areas of ambiguity that transformations take place; in fact, without such areas transformation would be impossible” (xix). =B
So, Aristotle’s speakers are attempting to transform—move—the audience into a newly formed idea about a certain structure.
“The word ‘ground,’ much used in both formal philosophy and everday speech when discussing motives, is likewise scenic, though readily encroaching upon the areas more directly covered by ‘agent’ and ‘purpose’ (12). =B
“Political commentators now generally use the word ‘situation’ as their synonym for scene, though often without any clear concept of its function as a statement about motives” (13). =M
In The Rhetorical Situation, Bitzer asks, “Why and how do they result in the creation of rhetoric?” (1). This speaks directly to motive in my view as it is apparent that the why and the how tell us what has spurred the writer/speaker into action.
“The most clear sounding of words can thus be used for the vaguest of reference quite as we speak of a “certain thing” when we have no particular thing in mind” (52). =B & M
This reminds me of Aritstotle’s “fridgidity” a term he uses to voice the opposite of clarity. Fridgidity creates ambiguity through a number of means, including inappropriate metaphors and double wording. Both Aristotle and Burke have a problem with this, but it does appear in most rhetoric, that lack of clarity.
“Our five terms are “transcendental” rather than formal (and are to this extent Kantian) in being categories which human thought necessarily explifies” (317).
“Language being essentially human, we would view human relations in terms of the linguistic instrument. Not mere ‘conciousness of abstracting,’ but consciousness of linguistic action generally, is needed if men are to temper absurd ambitions that have their source in faulty terminologies” (317). =B&M
Booth mentions something similar in Rhetoric of Rhetoric, by explaining that we must be able to recognize faulty arguments in order to genuinely communicate what is going on around us. Aristotle talks of faulty arguments which must, of course, begin with faulty terminologies in order to recognize what is wrong with an argument. Being able to view the faults within language and argument are important to rhetoricians in order to be able to, in Aristotle’s terms, “untie” another’s argument.
“The attitude of itself would be grounded in the systematic development of method. The method would involve the explicit study of language as the ‘critical moment’ at which human motives take form, since a linguistic factor at every point in human experience complicates and to some extend transcends the purely biological aspects of motivation” (318). =B
“Remember always that no modern instrument could have been invented, or could be produced, without the use of a vast linguistic complexity” (319).

Aristotle Rhetoric

2010-01-31T12:06:00.000-08:00

Aristotle. Aristotle on Rhetoric. Trans. George Kennedy. New York: Oxford UP. 2007.

George Kennedy Introduction
“3. Forms of persuasion are either:
a. Non-artistic: direct evidence (facts, withnesses, documents, etc.) that the speaker uses but does not—or should not—invent; or
b. Artistic: logical arguments constructed by the speak, of two types;
i. Inductive argument, called paradigm, or example, drawing a particular conclusion from one or more parallels
ii. Deductive argument, called enthymeme, or rhetorical syllogism, drawing a conclusion from stated or implied premises.

4. In rhetoric the speaker or writer almost always deals with probabilities—what would have happened or can happen based on what happens for the most part in such situations.
This relates both to background and method. The background being just the basic forms of persuasion. The method referring to “or can happen based on w hat happens for the most part in such situations” which, I believe, is what O’keefe is doing with anticipatory guilt. Interesting.
“And further, it is clear that the opponents have no function except to show that something is or is not true or has happened or has not happened; whether it is important or trivial or just or unjust in so far as the lawmaker has not provided a definition, the juror should somehow decide himself and not learn from the opponents” (32). =Background & Method
Pistis=proof
“That rhetoric, therefore, does not belong to a single defined genus of subject but is like dialectic and that it is useful is clear—and that its function [ergon] is not to persuade but to see the available means of persuasion in each case, as is true also in all the other arts;” (36).
Which means it makes sense that it shows up in Communications and English, and that it is important across the board in the academy because all studies appear to use rhetoric of one sort or another for varying reasons. =Background
“As stated here, the actuality produced by the pontentiality of rhetoric is not the written or oral text of a speech, or even persuasion, but the art of “seeing” how persuasion may be affected” (37).
The art of rhetoric is in perception as much as in the acting of it.
Persuasion through proofs, character/credibility, through emotion, through logos. (39).
Enthymeme—a rhetorical syllogism
Syllogism—a deductive argument in dialectic consisting of major premise, minor premise, and conclusion.
Paradigm—introduction
“I call a rhetorical syllogism an enthymeme, a rhetorical induction a paradigm” (40). =B
“But there are “specifics” that come from the premises of each species and genus [of knowledge]; for example, in physics there are premises from which there is neither an enthymeme nor a syllogism applicable to ethics; and in ethics [there are] others not useful in physics” (45). =B
Every field can beneifit from rhetorical procedure, but rhetorical procedures do not benefit from every field.
“9.justice, courage, temperance, magnaminity, magnificence, and similar dispositions (for they are virtues of the soul) (62). =A
These are listed as what one needs for happiness. However; many of the men in his time and later were perfectly happy without being magnanimous or displaying justice. The treatment of different races, the female gender, etc. prove this. How come they never noticed? One is not magnanimous when one tells the other gender over and over what their shortcomings are as was done in the conduct books.
“30.And most of all, each category of people [values as a good]that to which their character is disposed; for example, those fond of victory [value something] if it will be a victory, those fond of honor if it will be an honor, those fond of money if there will be money, and others similarly” (64). =A
Do we value what our characters are disposed toward, or what we are told our characters are disposed toward? Men value pride, women value modesty, etc. because that is the way it was SUPPOSED to be, or because it was true?
“38. [In epideictic] one should also use many kinds of amplification for example, if the subject [of praise] is the only one or the first or one of a few who most has done something; for all these things are honorable” (81). =M (to define the methods of others).
So if not many people act in a manner, and you do, you should be praised?
“In this chapter Aristotle adopts the definition of pleasure as kinesin tina tes psyches, ‘a certain movement of the soul’” (87). =E
Affective rhetoric is a movement of the soul. Is this what Aristotle is referring to? Is this where the definition begins to find its place?
“Aristotle identified three artistic modes of persuasion, derived from presenting the character (ethos) of the speaker in a favorable light, awakening emotion (pathos) in the audience so as to induce them to make the judgment desired, and showing the probability of what is said by logical argument (logos) (111). =B
8.The emotions [pathe]are those things through which, by undergoing change, people come to differ in their judgments and which are accompanied by pain and pleasure, for example, anger, pity, fear and other such things as their opposites” (113). =B
Never any mention of guilt.
“3. Belittling [oligoria] is an actualization of opinion about what seems worthless (we think both good and bad things worth serious attention, also things that contributed to them, but whatever amounts to little or nothing we suppose worthless), and there are three species of belittling: contempts. . ., spite. . ., and insult. . .; =M & A
Aristotle is using these as ways to insight anger, but I’ve seen them used in conduct books, so does the anger come from belittling or from the guilt thrown at the person?
“Let the matters just discussed be regarded as understood, and let the virtue of style [lexeos aerie]be defined as “to be clear” [saphe](speech is a kind of sighn so if it does not make clear it will not perform its function)—and neither flat nor above the dignity of the subject, but appropriate [prepon] (197). =M
Composition in its infancy?
One thing becomes apparent after having read this. Aristotle had a huge hand in helping to develop and further rhetoric, composition, law, and philosophy.

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Rhetoric

2010-01-30T02:58:00.000-08:00

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Rehtoric. Balckwell: Malden, MA. (2004).

"Since we are all flooded daily with rhetoric, admirable and contemptible, we are in desparate need of serious rhetorical study, everywhere" (Preface ix).

If we are unable to recognize the "designing rhetorics" which surround and encompass us (interppelate us) then we are unable to avoid the consequences of such rhetoric. He is so right.

"To study the rhetoric of rhetoric is one thing; to work as a rhetor, as I am doing most of the time here--arguing for sometimes even preaching about, the importance of that kind of study -- is quite different. Yet we all often travel under the same term: "My field is rhetoric."

That being said, what if one studies composition and rhetoric. I mean it becomes even more convoluted as we try to explain what we study. I've finally gotten down to, my field is composition and rhetoric, emphasis rhetoric, emphasis affective rhetoric. However, this doesn't mean I have no interest otherwise.

"In short, rhetoric does not make Reality One, Unchangeable Truths. It aids us in discovering them, as it makes and remakes our circumstances and beliefs -- our temporary realities -- along the way" (14).

From Aristotle and Cicerto to Edbauer and Booth, everyone talks about how rhetoric "creates" reality and/or truth, and all come up with different ways of looking at it. Basically, I think, that the point is that reality helps to create the individual's truth for that moment. Women as individuals interpellating ideologies in the 1700's were living the truth, the truth as it stood for them.

"Augustine in the end decided that, since the devil has in his hands the resources of rhetoric, we on God's side must feel free to use it in defense" (26).

"One of the saddest forms of LR-d comes when it is obviously impossible to fight back: either surrender and engage in self-censorship or die. 'I must say what those with power over me want me to say'" (49).

LRD is what Booth calls "surrender-rhetoric" rhetoric which persuades the listener that there is no other alternative other than to follow the dictates of the writer/author/authority. Designing rehtorics share this feature in that somehow they insinuate themselves so deeply there seems to be little alternative. I think this must be done through something like Burke's consubstantiation or through interpellation. We are absorbed into our belief systems.

"No rhetorical effort can succeed if it fails to join in the beliefs and passions of the audience addressed, and that almost always requires some 'accomodation,' 'adjustment', or 'adaptation' to the audience's needs and expectations" (51).

Aristotle's idea that one should find an emotional key into the audience.

"Any nation is in trouble if its citizenhs are not trained for critical response to the flood of misinformation poured over them daily" (89).

"Such practice of 'situation ethics'--what T.S. Eliot called a 'balance of contrarities' -- is required of us daily, quite aside from politics" (120).

If we are unable to disclose rhetoric as individuals, that "situational ethics" question becomes even more important. Transnational rhetoric and things such as "Save the Children" being one that comes to mind. That situation draws people in through their desire to be able to see themselves as caring and giving, and yet at the same time gives them misconceived notions about people in certain geographies.

Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

2010-01-30T02:52:00.000-08:00

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism. Norton & Company: New York. (2001).
“I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey you there!’” (1504).
An ideology “speaks” to certain individuals within its particular circle. The ideology we now recognize as “Repulican” or “Democrat” would not have been spoken to a woman of the 1700’s. Although it may have ‘spoken’ to a few, for the most part that kind of political ideology would not have been picked up by women. However; the ideology of being a woman, of being a lady, spoke to women strongly, and thereby conduct books used interpellation (according to Althusser) to draw them into the ideology or the rhetoric which they were handing out.
Drawing on Burke’s theory of identity, if we identify ourselves as subjects (even without knowing we are doing so) then ideology “recruits” us. This recruitment could be even stronger through Burke’s theory of consubstantiality. He states, ‘a way of life is an acting together; and in acting together men have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas attitudes that make them consubstantial.” (21) Rhetoric of Motives.
We are subjects through ideologies—ideologies also contribute to consubstantiality. Does consubstantiality create interpellation? If we recognize one another in order to hail the other fellow then we have a commonality—that hailing is interpellation and that hailing creates the consubstantiality or at least solidifies it.

Biesecker, Barbara A. Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation

2010-01-27T11:13:00.000-08:00

Biesecker, Barbara A. “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Difference”
Philosophy and Rhetoric 22.2 (1989).
“if we posit the audience of any rhetorical event as no more than a conglomeration of subjects whose identity is fixed prior to the rhetorical event itself, then we must also admit that those subjects have an essence that cannot be affected by the discourse. Thus, the power of rhetoric is circumscribed: it has the potency to influence an audience, to realign their allegiances, but not to form new identities” (111).
But it does have the ability to form new identities. Have allegiances swayed creates a new personal outlook, and thus, a new person.
"That is to say, the “rhetorical dimension” names both the means by which an idea or argument is expressed and the initial formative intervention that, in centering a differential situation makes possible the production of meaning” (112).
“If both situation and speaker can stand in for cause, “if either cause of effect can occupy the position of origin, then origin is no longer originary; it loses its metaphysical privilege (115).
“there is invariably a moment in the text ‘which harbors the unbalancing of the equation, the sleight of hand at the limit of a text which cannot be dismissed simply as a contradiction.’ This textual knot or inadvertent ‘sleight of hand’ marks the rhetoricity of the text and, in so doing, enables us to locate the unwitting and interested gesture that finessed differance in such a way that the writing could proceed” (121).
"Yet, even in essays explicitly seeking to develop a theory of the rhetorical situation (with audience invariably identified as one of its constituent elements), the concept of audience itself receives little critical attention: in most cases, audience is simply named, identified as the target of discursive practice, and then dropped (122).
“Derrida deconstructs the subject by showing us how the identity of any subject, what I earlier called the core of the human being, like the value of any element in any system is structured by differance. This forces us to think of subjectivity not an essence but as an effect of the subject’s place in an economy of difference” (124).

Neel, Jasper Rhet & Comp Intellectual Work

2010-01-27T10:46:00.000-08:00

Neel, Jasper. “Reclaiming our Theoretical Heritage” Rhetoric and composition as intellectual work. Olson, Gary A., ed. Carbondale:
Southern. Illinois UP, 2002.
Praxis
1 : action, practice: as a : exercise or practice of an art, science, or skill b : customary practice or conduct
2 : practical application of a theory
“It is an intractable conundrum, the theory versus praxis split—more intractable and more confusing in rhetoric and composition than in most other disciplines because contemporary rhet/comp grew from the classroom” (3).
“Composition becomes mature, however, able to sustain itself, when it constantly scrutinizes its theoretical underpinnings” (9).
“Rhetoric and composition as a field exists in the North American university. The North American university is perhaps the most theory driven, theory conscious situation in human history. It would be naïve to retreat from theory, and it would be exceedingly selfish, because the only faculty who truly have the option of doing so already have tenure and have already passed through the process of find a voice with which to speak” (10).
“By 1950, we had lost our theory of being. . . .we can continue to abandon theory, and wait for the composition equivalent of cable television, McDonald’s, and interstatate highways across the tundra. Or . . . we can try to reclaim our theoretical heritage, remaking it for a new time” (11).

“rhetoric and composition can sacrifice itself on the alter of the Romantic ego. But before we do, we had better read Wordsworth and Coleridge carefully to make sure we are willing to sit in the center of the pedagogical ego supported only by those theories that we intentionally blind ourselves to” (11).
“Theory forces one to interrogate one’s position. Ignorance of theory blinds one to the knowledge that changing one’s position changes what one sees and how one sees it” (11).

Edbauer, Jenny Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation

2010-01-27T05:19:00.000-08:00

Edbauer, Jenny “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to
Rhetorical Ecologies” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 25.4 (2005).

“Vatz argues that exigencies are created for audiences through the rhetor’s work” (6).
“Phelps’ critique seeks to recontextualize these elements in a wider sphere of active, historical, and lived processes. That is the elements of a rhetorical situation can be re-read against the historical fluxes in which they move” (8).
By placing the rhetoric in the time in which it was written, under the circumstances for which it was written, and the situation of those to whom it was directed, allows us, then, to view it far more effectively.
“The exigence is more like a complex of various audience/speaker perceptions and institutional material constraints” (8).
Perception is the key. Perception of the rhetor of the audience, audience of rhetor, and audience of the issue.
“That is, the elements of a rhetorical situation can be re-read against the historical fluxes in which they move” (8).
Fluid. Rhetoric. Situations. It’s all fluid, which is why it is always the same and different.
“The exigence is more like a complex of various audience/speaker perceptions and institutional or material constraints” (8).
“Consequently, the concept of “rhetorical situation” is appropriately named insofar as the models of rhetorical situation describe the scene of rhetorical action as “located” around the exigence that generates a response. We thus find a connection between certain models of rhetorical situation and a sense of place” (9).
In the case of conduct books the “exigence” would be keeping women in their place while at the same time not letting them know that this is what is really going on.
“To say that we are connected is another way of saying that we are never outside the networked interconnection of forces, energies, rhetorics, moods, and experiences” (10).
I wonder why it isn’t “a networked”?
“By extension, we might say that a rhetorical situation is better conceptualized as a mixture of processes and encounters” (13).
“The intensity, force, and circulatory range of a rhetoric are always expanding through the mutations and new exposures attached to that given rhetoric, much like a virus” (13).
“A given rhetoric is not contained by the elements that comprise its rhetorical situation (exigence, rhetor, audience, constraints). Rather, a rhetoric emerges already infected by the viral intensities that are circulating in the social field” (14).
Our rhetoric is infused with the ideas that are prominent at that time, and perhaps, from the past.
“Rhetorical situations involve the amalgamation and mixture of many different events and happenings that are not properly segmented into audience, text, or rhetorician. We must, therefore consider whether our popular models reflect the fullness of rhetoric’s operation in public” (20).
Consequently, though rhetorical situation models are undeniably helpful for thinking of rhetoric’s contextual character, they fall somewhat short when accounting for the amalgamations and transformations—the spread—of a given rhetoric within its wider ecology” (20).

Horner, Bruce. Terms of Work for Composition

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Horner, Bruce. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique. New York UP: Albany, NY.
2000.
“In the academy, intellectual labor, in the form of “scholarship” is deemed to be one’s own work, treated as divorced from material social conditions, a product of the autonomous scholar” (2).
“One common criticism of this way of representing academic work, especially within Composition, highlights the relative emphasis given scholarship in comparison to teaching. Lists of publications and other presentations of research, for example, are often given more prominence in CVs than the lists of courses taught or services rendered” (4).
“Composition, of course, occupies a marginal position in relation to English studies, the “humanities, “ and the academy generally. As a consequence, its experience of and responses to the torsion between capitalization and proletariaanization differ from that of faculty more comfortably ensconced within these other realms” (14).
“often framed in terms of “what works” or “worked,” we isolate specific pedagogical techniques from the immediate material circumstances of their use, locating our work (and that of our students) not in the social, historical material process but in the commodifications of that work” (19).
“I have argued above that Composition has enjoyed less intellectual and work autonomy than others in the humanities and the academy generally because of its perceived greater organic significance to socioeconomic production, a significance it shares with primary and secondary school education” (23).
“The alternative challenge Composition faces is how teachers and students can confront the ways in which each material act of writing and reading mediates, in the sense of actively re-forming and transforming, and is mediated by social identification, difference and power, both responding to and reconstructing or revising these” (37). Identification
“That is to say, we need to place all our work in the material social-historical process, resisting dominant definitions of our work, our students, and ourselves” (72).
“Like their students composition faculty seem to have no more than a slippery place in the academy and return the ambivalence with which the academy treats them with ambivalence of their own” (105).
Not necessarily true.

Bitzer, Lloyd. The Rhetorical Situation

2010-01-26T04:58:00.000-08:00

Bitzer, Lloyd F. “The Rhetorical Situation” Philosophy and Rheortic, Supplementary Issue.
(1992).
“it does not follow that a situation exists only when the discourse exists” (1).
“Nor should we assume that a rhetorical address gives existence to the situation; on the contrary, it is the situation which calls the discourse into existence.
This makes me wonder what rhetorical situation I’m looking into. I think that the situation changes with each occurrence of guilt rhetoric. In the instance of the conduct book the situation was keeping women in their place. In the instance of ads asking us for monetary help for children is making money?
“It seems clear that rhetoric is situational” (2).
It appears rhetoric is a type of call and response. A situation calls out for recognition or “fixing” and the rhetorician answers with his response to the call.
“Nor would I equate rhetorical situation with persuasive situation, which exists whenever an audience can be changed in belief or action by means of speech” (2).
I don’t understand how this could be. Rhetoric and persuasion work hand in hand, so how do we separate the two, an audience is moved to act, change, become aware, whatever. It is rhetoric.
“I shall argue [that rhetoric] does obtain its character-as-rhetorical from the situation which generates it” (3).
“An act is moral because it is an act performed in a situation of a certain kind; similarly, a work is rhetorical because it is a response to a situation of a certain kind” (3).
“The rhetor alters reality by bringing into existence a discourse of such character that the audience, its thought and action, is so engaged that it becomes mediator of change. In this sense rhetoric is always persuasive” (3-4).
If the audience is women then the change was to become more “ladylike”. If the audience were those who were caught up with the “feed the children” campaigns then the change is to send money to relieve suffering. However, what Bitzer does not address is “fallout” from this type of encouragement to change.
“Rhetorical situation may be defined as a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence (6).
“An exigence which cannot be modified is not rhetorical” (death winter, etc.) (6).
“Further, an exigence which can be modified only by means other than discourse is not rhetorical: thus, an exigence is not rhetorical when its modification requires merely one’s own action or the application of a tool, but neither requires nor invites the assistance of discourse” (6).
“In any rhetorical situation there will be at least one controlling exigence which functions as the organizing principle: it specifies the audience to be addressed and the change to be effected. The exigence may or may not be perceieved clearly by the rhetor or other persons in the situation; it may be strong or weak depending upon the clarity of their perception and the degree of their interest in it; . . .” (7).
The audience is an active party to rhetoric, it isn’t placed upon them, but served to them for them to partake in.
“But the rhetorical audience must be capable of serving as mediator of the change which the discourse functions to produce” (8).
“Besides exigence and audience, every rhetorical situation contains a set of constraints made up of persons, events objects, and relations which are parts of the situation because they have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify the exigence (8).
Huh?
“There are two main classes of constraints: (1) those originated or managed by the rhetor and his method (Aristotle called these “artistic proofs”), and (2) those other constraints in the situation, which may be operative (Aristotle’s “inartistic proofs)” (8).
So, perhaps guilt played on by the rhetor as apposed to photos that produce guilt?
“Rhetorical discourse is called into existence by situation; the situation which the rhetor perceives amounts to an invitation to create and present discourse” (8).
“Thus the second characteristic of rhetorical situations is that it invites a fitting response, a response that fits the situation”
“To say that a rhetorical response fits a situation is to say it meets the requirements established by the situation” (10).
“The exigence and the complex of persons, objects, events and relations which generate rhetorical discourse are located in reality, are objective and publicly observable historical facts in the world we experience, are therefore available for scrutiny by an observer or critic who attends to them” (11).
“rhetorical situations come into existence, then either mature or decay or mature and persist—conceivably some persist indefinitely” (12).