Inventing the University--David Bartholomae

11/14/17 • 7 min

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Welcome to MR the podcast for beginngs and insiders aboutt he ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren. This last week I graded my students’ rhetorical analyses. For many of them, this was the first time they had been asked to write a rhetorical analysis and this assignment always makes me nervous. I give them sample papers. We practice writing a rhetorical analysis together. We discuss in depth examples and abuses of ethos, logos, and pathos, but many of them struggle tremendously. I know I could write a 3-page rhetorical analysis in 20 minutes; why do my students take hours and still fail the project?

David Bartholomae wondered, as I do, how students approach projects they’ve never been asked to weigh in on before. In my students’ case, they just barely learned what “ethos” is--how are they supposed to assert how it impacts a particular audience? Writing in the early 80s, Bartholomea, like a score of composition scholars like Mina Shanessey and Linda Flower, were interested in the needs of a population sometimes called Basic Writers. Basic writers are those who, in Bartholomae’s words “shut out from one of the privileged languages of public life” in academic writing, although they are “aware of, but cannot control” that language (64). Not having been exposed to reading or writing much of it, they must fall back on what they think academic writing is supposed to sound like. They have to invent what “university writing” is. This is where you have all those errors that make your students sound like robots on the fritz: “utilization,” “the reason for this is because that,” and endless “therefore”s. It impacts big-picture ideas, too. B mentions that commonplaces that many students fall back on: “mistakes are because of a lack of pride,” “creativity is self-expression,” “the text you assignment to read was life-changing and insightful, o teacher mine!” This is where we roll our eyes and feel slightly manipulated, but the students aren’t being malicious when they try to give us what we want--they’re simply not confident at being able to give us what they want, too.

And every time the task changes, students can find themselves flummoxed. “A student who can write a reasonably correct narrative may fall to pieces when faced with a more unfamiliar assignment,” Bartholomae points out. A student can write smooth, error-free prose in a form that makes sense to them, but asked to assume new authority, and they panic in the new register. And who can blame them? They’ve never encountered it before. Imagine being asked to give a public speech in Japanese without knowing the language. Bartholomae’s students were exposed to many of the same forms ours are “test-taking, report or summary--work ...where they are expected to admire and report on what we do” (68). Certainly I saw that in the rhetorical analyses I read. The background research on the author was good, relevant and cited appropriately. The articles were summarized fairly, with occasional quotes from the text. But when I ask them to apply their knowledge of rhetorical terms to argue how the articles were working and they fall to pieces, just as Bartholomae says. Many of them have never been asked to defend their own scholarly opinion or assert another’s through conjuncture. They can’t possibly make a scholarly argument, so instead they are made by it. They put on a mask of “scholar”--”They begin with a moment of appropriation, Bartholomae says, “a moment when they can offer up a sentence that is not their as though it were their own” (69).

But students who are outside of the academic discourses they write also recognize that it is not fair that they have to be outsiders. Even when they are given supposedly non-academic discourse to write-- “explain kairos to a classmate”--students are thrown into assumed authority: how on earth would they explain kairos--they just learned about kairos! They don’t know anything more about kairos than anyone else in the class! It is, in Bartholome’s words “an act of aggression disguised as an act of charity” (65). Being put into a position of insider to which they beleive they have no claim, some students doggedly imitate while others also subtly criticize. “The write continually audits and pushes against and language that would render him [or her] ‘like everyone else’ and mimics the language and interpretative systems of the privileged community” (79).

What is the solution then? Bartholomae suggests that we meet students on the grounds of their own authority--instead of encouraging them to give tidy, pat answers that imitate what they think the professor is looking for, “well within safe, familiar territory” (80). This can seem quixotic, especially when a grade is on the line. While Bartholomea doesn’t give a comprehensive solution, but he does mention the work of Particia Bizzell and Linda Flower as useful starting points--determini...

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Previous Episode

Halloween special: Freud, the Uncanny and "The Sandman"

Weeeeellllcommmme to Meeeeeereeee Rhetoooooric! It’s our annual Halloween episode, which means a little bit of the people, ideas and movements who have shaped rhetorical history, but mostly a ghost story. This year, we’re going with our first not-MR-James story. Don’t worry--there are still intials--but first--to business.

If you’re going to talk about ghost stories and influential thinkers, you won’t dig long until you come across Freud’s contribution, a little piece called “The Uncanny.” You might not peg Sigmund Freud as a connoisseur of boogeymen, but he was capital-f freaked capital-o out by ETA Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman.” If Hoffmann’s name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you know him from writing the story of the Nutcracker ballet. Look at that--our annual tradition here at Mere Rhetoric just founds 3-degrees of separation to every ballet company’s annual tradition! Anyway, the Sandman is a freaky sci-fi horror tale that eventually inspired another ballet called Coppelia. The original is even more terrifying. Don’t worry--it’s coming up after we talk about Freud. Right now all you need to know is that the line between reality and madness is thin, thin and shaky.

Freud was, as you might expect, very into that. He draws heavily on a German pun--evidentally heimlich means both homey or familiar and secret or hidden. In terms of the uncanny, things are most terrifying when we think we’re playing in the realm of our daylight reality and then suddenly the rules change. No one, for example, is horrified when Snow White RISES FROM THE DEAD, because we already are accepting that we’re in a fairy tale with, like, singing animals who do housework. As Freud says, ““as soon as it is given an arbitrary and unrealistic setting in fiction it is apt to lose its quality of the uncanny” (19). And what are these eerie occurances? Because Freud is a master classifier, they can be split across “either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed (17)--so he believes either the terrors of childhood or of primitive man resurface in our horror stories. The parts of us that we repress resurface as ghosts and witches and we confront them in physical manifestations separate from us. For example, the supernatural power of, like, a giant or a firestarter, relates to our own narcissistic impulses to dominate others. Freud goes through and gives a catalogue of things that are uncanny:

dismembering
the double
living dolls
repetition (like seeing the same number all day)
evil eye
ghosts
witchcraft
madness

As you listen to this year’s Halloween episode, The Sandman, you can point out where these pop up--see if you can get Uncanny Bingo!

NATHANEL TO LOTHAIRE

Certainly you must all be uneasy that I have not written for so long - so very long. My mother, am sure, is angry, and Clara will believe that I am passing my time in dissipation, entirely forgetful of her fair, angelic image that is so deeply imprinted on my heart. Such, however, is not the case. Daily and hourly I think of you all; and the dear form of my lovely Clara passes before me in my dreams, smiling upon me with her bright eyes as she did when I was among you. But how can I write to you in the distracted mood which has been disturbing my every thought! A horrible thing has crossed my path. Dark forebodings of a cruel, threatening fate tower over me like dark clouds, which no friendly sunbeam can penetrate. I will now tell you what has occurred. I must do so - that I plainly see - the mere thought of it sets me laughing like a madman. Ah, my dear Lothaire, how shall I begin ? How shall I make you in any way realize that what happened to me a few days ago can really have had such a fatal effect on my life? If you were here you could see for yourself; but, as it is, you will certainly take me for a crazy fellow who sees ghosts. To be brief, this horrible occurrence, the painful impression of which I am in vain endeavoring to throw off, is nothing more than this - that some days ago, namely on the 30th of October at twelve o'clock noon, a barometer-dealer came into my room and offered me his wares. I bought nothing, and threatened to throw him downstairs, upon which he took himself off of his own accord.

Only circumstances of the most peculiar kind, you will suspect, and exerting the greatest influence over my life, can have given any import to this occurrence. Moreover, the person of that unlucky dealer must have had an evil effect upon me. So it was, indeed. I must use every endeavor to collect myself, and patiently and quietly tell you so much of my early youth as will bring the picture plainly and clearly before your eyes. As I am about to begin, I fancy that I hear you laughing, and Clara exclaiming, 'Childish stories indeed...

Next Episode

Steven Mailloux--Rhetorical Power

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, terms and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and I’ve been reading A Christmas Carol this holiday season because I’m playing Mrs. Crachit in a community theatre production. And wow. There is a story behind that. But becaue I was interested in The christmas carol, so I started reading The Man Who Invented Christmas, Les Standiford’s history of Dickens’s masterpeice. I was surprised to hear how A Christmas Carol had solidified Christmas as we know it, a home-and-family holiday rather than a racacus drunken orgy of disrule. Yeah, Christmas used to be like that. In fact, there was a debate about Christmas raging over several centuries when Scrooge came on the scene. After Dickens, though, industrialists started giving their employees Christmas Day off, and everyone started sending their workers the ubiquitous Christmas turkey. Robert Louis Stevenson, upon reading Dickens’s Christmas Carol first cried his eyes out and then committed to donate money to the poor. Even Dickens’s best frienemy and critic, William Makepeace Thackery, was deeply moved by it. Dickens’s book had, in the words of Lord Jeffrey “fostered more kindly feelings and prompted more positive acts of beneficence” than all the sermons in all the churches pervious. So if literature is so powerful to change the way people live, why isn’t it considered rhetoric?

That question is probably best addressed in Steven Mailloux (My-U)’s Rhetorical Power. In the book that would in some ways define his career, Mailloux advances a rhetorical perspective of literature that would present a middle ground between idealist and realist literary theory. He calls the exercise of this perspective “rhetorical hermeneutics” which he suggests as an “anti-Theory theory” that will “determine how texts are established as meaningful through rhetorical exchanges” (15). It isn’t just the content or, to use the old fashioned phrase, “theme” of a book that impacts people, but the way the story is drawn through, and the techniques that the author gets us to buy into.

Such a reading differs wildly from the notions of New Criticisms that would restrict interpretation to the page and from even Stanley Fish’s narrow academic interpretative community. Instead, the work is rooted in a specific history, rhetorical tradition, and cultural conversation (145-6). We can be impacted by 19th century books, but not the in same way that Lord Jeffrey and Stevenson were. There are conversations going on and arguments made in the book catalogs of any culture.

Mailloux claims that this perspective is not only engaged in the world outside the text, but also describes the temporal experience of reading. In this way, literature exits circles of elite academic interpretative communities and instead belongs to the community of readers at large. The text has an individual influence as well. Mailloux describes how a text can educate a reader (41) and train the reader to see and think a certain way as the text progresses (99). This education depends on the form of the work, how the work develops from premise to premise. Moby Dick is Mailloux’s main example of this kind of trained reading. The disappearing narrator through chapters isn’t just an error; it’s an education. In this way, rhetorical hermeneutics seem to draw on both Kenneth Burke’s discussion of form in Counter-statement and Wayne Booth’s concerns about immoral narration in The Rhetoric of Fiction. While Mailloux uses Moby Dick as his primary example of the education of the reader within the pages of a book, he spends more time discussing the way that a text’s educating qualities relate to a community’s debate, and what better example could he use than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

In Mark Twain’s book, Mailloux has a prime example of the way a work “includes rhetorical histories of interpretative disputes” (135). Because of the way Twain’s work was part of the national debates of the “Negro Question” and the “Bad Boy Boom,” it can clearly demonstrate a reading that prioritizes not the “isolated readers and isolated texts” but the entire “rhetorical exchanges among interpreters embedded in discursive and other social practices at specific historical moments” (133). We often think of Huckleberry Finn in terms of race only, because that’s the predominant issue from the book for our culture, but the issue of “bad boys” was even more pressing on Twain’s contemporaries, which may seems a shocking undersight to modern readers. Huckleberry Finn was originally banned from some schools and library for showing a bad boy getting away with rebellion. Mailloux demonstrates that there were many pieces of literature of all sorts discussing what to do with juvenile delinquent boys, and ...