Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

the tendency of that reality to make us or to make others less
than fully human” (136). I believe Knoblauch defined, with Lil
Brannon, such an end most profoundly in their book, Rhetorical
Traditions and the Teaching of Writing, their repudiation of
“classic” rhetoric and celebration of the “modern.” When
discussing the influence of the “epistemological crisis of the
seventeenth century” upon the rise of what they call “modern
rhetoric” and its results, they write:
The natural tendency of discourse is to explore, to
progress from what is known to what is not yet known.
The process of starting and interrelating assertions
eventually takes the writer into new intellectual
territory because it forces experiments in the making
of connections that have not been made before. […]
“Creative” writers are creative because they retain
the imaginative flexibility needed to abandon earlier
discourses in order to see things in new ways. The
most powerful learning comes, not from the effort to
validate some existing state of knowledge (though
that is a useful activity), but from the discovery of
a new conception which changes the very dimensions of
knowledge. (72, emphasis mine)
This is a promotion of Uncertainty as the beginning and the end
of writing and thinking and learning - and very well better than
I could have offered myself. Without it, it would seem, you are
doing none of the three. Without it, writing exists simply as
“a mechanical act of selecting prefabricated forms of
preconceived content” (4), “a perfunctory, ceremonial exercise,
not designed to discover new learning but only to recapitulate
in decorous prose what people already know” (24). And without
the likes of Berlin and Knoblauch and Brannon and those other
critics and theorists – again, whether named or not - whose work
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