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through experiences in the writing classroom early in my
doctoral studies, to the unfortunate inadequacy of worshipping
the one extreme while shunning the other. These experiences
revealed to me the problematic nature of such a “black or white”
privileging and, consequently, that crucial necessity of
deliberately and strenuously working towards founding that
dialectic between Uncertainty and Certainty. And thus arose my
fundamental question: how?
With this established, in the second chapter, I explore the
worship of Certainty that happened during the late 18 th
and 19 th
century in America with the birth of what would come to be
known, most often derisively, as “Current-Traditional Rhetoric.”
It was this time that Robert Connors believed exhibited
“extraordinary changes [in rhetoric] that took place over just
long enough a period that they were taken as normal evolution by
those involved” (Composition-Rhetoric 24), these “changes”
almost utterly transmuting a “2,500-year-old intellectual
tradition” through “deep cultural changes in nineteenth-century
America” (24). To Sharon Crowley, these rhetorical “changes”
that Connors observed were rooted in a singularly “modern”
epistemology that “standardize[d] and forecast[ed] how the
writing process should develop” (The Methodical Memory 167),
thus “associat[ing] discourse production with only one faculty –
reason” (157). Because of this, the rise of “Current-
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