Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository
Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository
II. When I was studying for my general exams some years ago, one of the three reading lists came out of an independent study I had taken during the first year of my Ph.D. course work. It was comprised of the original texts of those 18 th and 19 th Century rhetoricians such as George Campbell, Hugh Blair, Richard Whatley, Henry Noble Day, John Franklin, Genung, and others whose work was the foundation of what would come to be referred to – almost like a string of curse words in the years since Richard Young, after Daniel Fogarty in 1959, put it out into the common parlance of compositionists in his 1979 essay, “Paradigms and Problems: Needed Research in Rhetorical Invention” – as “Current-Traditional Rhetoric.” At the time, I was asked, very sincerely, “What is there for you?” It is a good question that still needs to be asked, as I am returning, here and now, to those dusty and time-worn volumes of 19 th Century British and American rhetoric yet again. What am I so very interested in them? I cannot say that those 18 th and 19 th Century rhetorical text++s were, or are, a “pleasure” to read, or that any of them, by themselves, are exactly “memorable.” They are dull and dry and derivative and so very dated. As the 1800s unfolded, those rhetorics offered less and less philosophical or theoretical 32
conversation and, in its place, page after stiff, strict page of prescriptive “Dos and Don’ts” – and a lot more of the latter than the former, or so it seemed to me. They offered no explanation of why you should follow the rhetorical advice collected within them except, simply, that theirs was the way things should be done if a writer is to write properly: within the boundaries of social propriety. In the end, while I may have examined them, I cannot say I truly read them, because, in many ways, they were not really meant to be “read” but ingested, as you would a vaccine against some foreign illness. A possible exception is George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, the book for which the Scottish reverend has become most well-known within the history of rhetoric. It first saw print in 1776 and I have always found that publication date to be ironic, as this seminal work from one of the “founding fathers” of Current-Traditional Rhetoric came out the same year those New World colonies of the British Empire became the “United States” and declared themselves an independent nation. This confluence may be a simple coincidence, but, regardless, it stands as an example of something I have been extremely curious about these past few years: those “dots” throughout the different layers of 19 th Century American culture waiting to be connected and traced down, eventually, to rhetoric: how we write, when we write, why we write. And it is indeed that 33
- Page 1 and 2: Stony Brook University The official
- Page 3 and 4: Copyright by Leon Marcelo 2011 ii
- Page 5 and 6: Abstract of the Dissertation The Un
- Page 7 and 8: I dedicate this work to my daughter
- Page 9 and 10: Introduction This work is the culmi
- Page 11 and 12: But the way out of this philosophic
- Page 13 and 14: through experiences in the writing
- Page 15 and 16: the same old thing all over again.
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- Page 19 and 20: I. With no reservations, I call mys
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- Page 25 and 26: the invisible, hearing the inaudibl
- Page 27 and 28: “problem-posing education”: a
- Page 29 and 30: “uncertainty.” But when it was
- Page 31 and 32: After the study was finished, Perry
- Page 33 and 34: a vehement belief in “writing wit
- Page 35 and 36: philosophies of teaching. In his bo
- Page 37 and 38: until sometime later - after confro
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- Page 43 and 44: [W]hat happened to rhetoric in Amer
- Page 45 and 46: cannot be discussed because they ar
- Page 47 and 48: States of America in the 1800s for
- Page 49 and 50: making and doing” (6). And for De
- Page 51 and 52: “Allegory of the Cave.” It took
- Page 53 and 54: not a denigration of Christianity,
- Page 55 and 56: severe, black or white: either foll
- Page 57 and 58: easoning behind those words. Early
- Page 59 and 60: transcendent reality and thus satis
- Page 61 and 62: imaginative novelty and creative tr
- Page 63 and 64: eality that the faithful were allow
- Page 65 and 66: with which all other societies were
- Page 67 and 68: field of composition was not, as Co
- Page 69 and 70: ecause of its “epistemological su
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- Page 87 and 88: III. Before I continue any further,
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II.<br />
When I was studying for my general exams some years ago,<br />
one of the three reading lists came out of an independent study<br />
I had taken during the first year of my Ph.D. course work. It<br />
was comprised of the original texts of those 18 th and 19 th Century<br />
rhetoricians such as George Campbell, Hugh Blair, Richard<br />
Whatley, Henry Noble Day, John Franklin, Genung, and others<br />
whose work was the foundation of what would come to be referred<br />
to – almost like a string of curse words in the years since<br />
Richard Young, after Daniel Fogarty in 1959, put it out into the<br />
common parlance of compositionists in his 1979 essay, “Paradigms<br />
and Problems: Needed Research in Rhetorical Invention” – as<br />
“Current-Traditional Rhetoric.” At the time, I was asked, very<br />
sincerely, “What is there for you?” It is a good question that<br />
still needs to be asked, as I am returning, here and now, to<br />
those dusty and time-worn volumes of 19 th<br />
Century British and<br />
American rhetoric yet again. What am I so very interested in<br />
them?<br />
I cannot say that those 18 th and 19 th Century rhetorical<br />
text++s were, or are, a “pleasure” to read, or that any of them,<br />
by themselves, are exactly “memorable.” They are dull and dry<br />
and derivative and so very dated. As the 1800s unfolded, those<br />
rhetorics offered less and less philosophical or theoretical<br />
32
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