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convergence that has stoked my interest about the textual
“roots” of Current-Traditional Rhetoric and brought me back to
them again and again, despite the somewhat disagreeable nature
of those texts themselves.
When I take a proverbial “step back” from those 18 th
and 19 th
Century rhetorics and examine them as situated within
increasingly greater cultural and social contexts throughout the
whole milieu of those still-juvenile “United States of America,”
from education to industry to medicine to science to religion,
they are at the heart of the whole thing. Because of this,
rhetoric in 19 th
Century America, the theories and practices of
writing and the teaching of writing that would, in time, go on
to become that “Current-Traditional Rhetoric,” would seem to
exist as an artifact, evidence from the past testifying to the
atmosphere of the world, or worlds, outside of the American
writing classroom of the day. And it would seem that,
throughout the 1800s, this “atmosphere” was one heavy with
tumultuous change within many facets of the American experience.
According to Robert Connors in his book Composition-Rhetoric,
the exact nature of Current-Traditional Rhetoric, or
“composition-rhetoric” as he chose to refer it, was born out of
“very deep cultural changes in nineteenth-century America” (24).
On how those changes affected the changes that would happen for
rhetoric itself, he writes:
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