Steven Mailloux--Rhetorical Power

12/11/17 • 6 min

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 ...

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Inventing the University--David Bartholomae

[intro]

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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The Meaningful Writing Project

Welcome to MR the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history

It’s the start of another semester, which, for me, means a season of wonder. I wonder about who my students will be. I wonder whether my schedule will be crushingly busy. Mostly, though, I wonder how my students will react to the syllabi and assignments that I have lovingly crafted. Will they understand the instructions? Will they learn what I hope they will? Will they find it meaningful?

Many compositionists have wondered these same questions and have argued about what kinds of assignments are best for students--digital or analog? Open-ended or directed? Reflective or projective? The authors of the Meaningful Writing Project,Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, Neal Lerner , had similar questions. But instead of pontificating, they just asked the students themselves.

And, boy howdy, did they! They surveyed students at a varied of schools--big state, small private, research and community college--and asked them which (if any) of their writing projects had been the most “meaningful” for them. What they found surprised them, and it surprised me too.

The researchers were expecting on finding a small cohort of “meaningful project” professors who had skillfully crafted assignments that were more meaningful to their students, but instead they found that the meaningful projects were scattered across instructors. Some of the instructors were veterans, some were novices; some were full professors and some were adjuncts. There weren’t clear patterns in who assigned meaningful projects. There was also no pattern on where these meaning projects were taking place. Meaningful writing projects occurred in big classes and small, required courses and capstones and in no courses at all. This might seem like a null result--what can we say about meaningful writing projects if any sort of instructor can assign them in any sort of class?

Again, the answer is in listening to the students. The authors found that these projects focus on the past (students' personal connection and previous experience) and the future (application to the students' sense of their future selves). These projects recognize that education doesn’t happen in discrete modules, but builds upon past lived experience and anticipates the classes, jobs and lifestyles students will eventually enter.

Almost 70% of the students in the study said that the writing project was related to what they expect to do in the future, usually related to their prospective jobs (41). They said things like “”As a teacher, I must write lesson plans that are creative,” “As a physician assistant I will have to write referral letters,” and “As a career artist I..must be able to write about my work when I submit it to juried exhibitions” (41). Recognizing connections to their future lives envigorates writing for these students. The past also matters, even when the comparison to the past was uneven. One participant, Leah, described her previous writing experience as “neutral.”

Leah also gave a good insight into the importance of choice in writing projects.The authors note that the “balance between allow and require once again seems key...[because] Leah’s experiences up tot his point were too close to the require end o the continuum with not enough allow” (48). Accordingly, student choice means a lot--encouraging students to delve into personal interest and to feel "invited and encouraged" (133). This is always a hard balance for me too--do I let my students choose to write on whatever topic they want, assuming that they will write with more passion about the topic of their choice? Or do they not have any particular passion yet, and fall back on standard fare: gun control, abortion, illegal immigration. Similiarly, do they lack the content knowledge to know how to approach that topic and will falter, unable to come up with a meaningful area of research? It’s not enough just to dump novice students into it--”You decide what to write and how to write it,” sounds like agency, but it also sounds like neglect. Instead, the authors say we teachers can “intentionally build optimal conditions for agency to emerge” like directing students to make use of the skills and thoughts that they have developed in and out of the class (53). That’s kind of a big deal, not just for a student’s writing ability, but for their developing sense of self.

As the authors put it, the meaningful projects were "holistic--not merely about content or genre or process but also about mind and body, heart and head--and to act as a kind of mirror in which students see their pasts and fu...