Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

said, I would pose another question: how do you avoid that
possibility from becoming a reality then?
I believe I found an answer that resonated strongly with me
in a very unlikely place. Before, I had said that, according to
common portraits of the history of composition and rhetoric,
Uncertainty is said to have come to the field with the Post-
Modern Age. However, while there was no doubt a flourishing of
those schools of thought within academia during this time, some
composition and rhetoric theorists see that Uncertainty was
inherent to rhetoric from rhetoric’s very inception, with the
founding works of the Greeks and Romans. In Rhetorical
Traditions and the Teaching of Writing, Knoblauch and Brannon
severely criticized this so-called “classical” rhetoric –
perhaps more so any contemporary uses of its various theories
and methods - as an antiquated disseminator of a “a longdiscarded
worldview” (4), of “ancient assumptions about
knowledge, learning, and discourse” (17), that is a veritable
anathema to those teachers of writing who would become “openminded
and reflective.” In particular, their greatest problem
with any continued reliance upon classical rhetoric is that
“classrooms continue to attempt artificial resuscitation of a
view of composition long ago separated from the epistemological
atmosphere that had once supported it” (23). For them, with
such rhetoric, “[t]he point of expression was to preserve and
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