Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

Traditional Rhetoric” represented an almost utterly exclusive
promotion of Certainty, something that satisfied a 19 th
century
America’s hunger for industrialization, the scientific method,
and a peculiarly Western perspective of reality and “truth” that
sought to control, order, and, in the end, rule natural
phenomena. Through this examination, I root that zeitgeist of
19 th century America in a “quest for Certainty,” as John Dewey
called it, that also defined Western Religion, Western Science,
and Western Politics, thus distinguishing them as the true
forebears of Current-Traditional Rhetoric.
After this, I explore, conversely, the worship of
Uncertainty that began with its arrival to the forefront of
composition philosophy and pedagogy during the latter half of
the 20 th
century in response to the decades-long reign of that
Current-Traditional Rhetoric and its perceived limitations and
ills. But through vehement attempts to undo what postmodern
writing theorists and instructors saw as not only an
intellectually but also socially domineering paradigm, some of
them would privilege Uncertainty to such an extreme that it
became – as Linda Flower called it – the “new certainty”: the
attempt of “postmodern theory” to “assert its own unassailable
assumptions” (Learning to Rival 157) With this examination, I
explain how this pursuit of, again, the different and the
questionable and the new transmogrified back into Certainty:
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