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flourishing of Current-Traditional Rhetoric in the late 19 th
and
20 th century. And through that convergence of influence upon the
head of rhetoric, what emerged was the teaching not so much of a
way to “write” but a way to think: a way to perceive and
conceive phenomena, “reality” and “truth,” in a very particular
way, one stamped with the deepest philosophies and principles of
Western culture. And for me, the aenima that roused and drove
that “nesting doll” whose portrait I had tried to paint earlier
– that convergence of broader social and cultural influences
that goaded, as Connors said it before, “a 2,500-year-old
intellectual tradition [to adopt] an almost completely new base
of theory, a variety of novel pedagogies, an almost completely
changed audience and constituency, and a wholly new cultural
status in less than eighty years” – was Certainty.
What has brought me back to the 19 th
century, then, is
Certainty: an almost wholesale pursuit and perpetuation of
certainty that defined American culture and society and, with
it, what became known to composition scholars like Crowley,
Berlin, and Connors as “Current-Traditional Rhetoric.”
Certainty, a way of seeing the “truth” of the world and reality
in terms of, as William Perry had explained it very explicitly,
the “polar terms of we-right-good vs. other-wrong-bad” through
ignoring the contradictory, the foreign, and the unknown, was
needed by the different spheres of those burgeoning United
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