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concluded, in The Methodical Memory, was the unfortunate hallmark of the empirical science-spurred advent of Current- Traditional Rhetoric in nineteenth century America. For Crowley, the rigorous privileging of Reason by the “natural” or “physical” Sciences – engendered through scientific investigation and the collection and cataloguing of scientific knowledge and “truth” – manifested itself in rhetoric through a “quasi-scientific bias” against anything that was “nonrational” or simply “irrational”: all that is disparate and unpredictable and impetuous and, yet again, uncertain. And 19 th century rhetoricians’ adoption of those Reason-headed principles and even practices of the science laboratory was inappropriate because, as Crowley declares, “Rhetoric is notoriously unscientific” (10), explaining further, later in her book, that, “Given its inextricable connection with specific cultural and social contexts, […] rhetorical practice and its effects are not predictable in the ways in which philosophers of rhetoric have assumed them to be. That is to say, rhetorical theory cannot be scientific” (166). But, unfortunately, those rhetorical theorists and practitioners whose work would serve as the foundation for Current-Traditional Rhetoric did indeed imitate Science, or at least attempt to, most crucially its deification of Reason. Upon the consequences of this privileging of Reason 60
ecause of its “epistemological superiority” by 19 th century rhetoricians, Crowley writes: The modern faith in scientific knowledge as the resource that would ultimately improve the quality of human life, along with the modern reduction of language to a medium of representation, had disastrous effects for a number of classical disciplines. Among these, rhetoric was a primary casualty. […] [M]odern epistemology, with its insistence on the superiority of reason, its interest in systems, and its assumption that language is a docile, reflective medium, was inimical to rhetoric. (9-10). Further explaining those “disastrous effects” in much more detail towards the end of her book during an examination of the influence of 19 th Scottish rhetorician Alexander Bain, she spares little criticism: Current-traditional rhetoric […] associated discourse production with only one faculty - reason. […] [Bain’s] privileging of the understanding ghettoized those genres of discourse - oratory and poetry – which were assumed to appeal to the less uniform and less predictable faculties. […] The faith of current-traditional rhetoric was that the dissemination of knowledge, if suitably packaged, would eliminate disagreements among informed persons. And for Bain, at least, a welcome consequence of the realization of this ideal would be the death of rhetoric. […] Its emphasis on reason also explains why writers in the textbook tradition were so firmly opposed to students exercising their imagination. […] Since a writer's use of artistic method depended on the specific rhetorical situations in which she found herself, its movements were not generalizable or predictable. The very reason for the textbooks' subscription to reason as the dominant faculty was its postulated uniform operation in every person; the guarantee for this uniformity was the production of uniformly similar discourses. Deviation from the norm was simply not thinkable, not only because such discourse was imaginative, or impassioned, or will not, but because it was irrational. (157) 61
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Stony Brook University The official
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Copyright by Leon Marcelo 2011 ii
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Abstract of the Dissertation The Un
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I dedicate this work to my daughter
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Introduction This work is the culmi
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But the way out of this philosophic
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through experiences in the writing
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the same old thing all over again.
Page 17 and 18: theory and research permeating thro
Page 19 and 20: I. With no reservations, I call mys
Page 21 and 22: fill in all of the empty variables.
Page 23 and 24: now have my doubts, which is what b
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
Page 39 and 40: eginnings of humanity itself. In th
Page 41 and 42: conversation and, in its place, pag
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: field of composition was not, as Co
Page 71 and 72: proclamation “Cogito Ergo Sum,”
Page 73 and 74: This power of modern Western scienc
Page 75 and 76: under the aegis of Western medicine
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Page 79 and 80: and, during this time, “assimilat
Page 81 and 82: as in specific political, ideologic
Page 83 and 84: Darkness. For Said, it was in the p
Page 85 and 86: In its institutionalized form - fre
Page 87 and 88: III. Before I continue any further,
Page 89 and 90: It is an unavoidable fact of life.
Page 91 and 92: Tarnas refers to those “contradic
Page 93 and 94: news” of such pervasive and overw
Page 95 and 96: when writers shrink from that uncer
Page 97 and 98: Uncertainty and the prolonging of U
Page 99 and 100: falling away to such a “shift”
Page 101 and 102: Rhetoric. She would root that “sh
Page 103 and 104: For my real purpose here then, it i
Page 105 and 106: Although Hairston is writing about
Page 107 and 108: of them, I was enlightened. I was p
Page 109 and 110: All experiences, even the scientifi
Page 111 and 112: the tendency of that reality to mak
Page 113 and 114: asking the same question: What had
Page 115 and 116: and “truth” simply ends where i
Page 117 and 118: silence we have so often deplored [
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attempting to make room for the exc
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said, I would pose another question
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From [a theoretical] point of view,
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It was this “technical rhetoric
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synonym for doing or making as in
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former I will not really pay much a
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avoid Certainty put forward as Unce
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Derrida’s purpose for “deconstr
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“subversion” and there is no
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IV. As a teacher, how do you not be
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urge to “write with Uncertainty,
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his book Embracing Contraries, he e
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iochemical workings of the human bo
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with the densest, most unyielding o
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are, as LuMing Mao explains in his
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a compromise and a retreat, yet ano
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more fully human is curtailed. Eros
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“cooking”: “Between People,
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palpable. To teachers of writing st
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een greatly influenced by this conc
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attribute that movement, that progr
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But this is a somewhat vague answer
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where students perceive “all know
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with a graduation from college or u
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call for thinking. In essence, it i
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Difficulty or obstruction in the wa
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education, but it ends with his con
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is also the rise of the other. But,
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processes? “Morals”? Deliberate
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exactly is that teacher to evoke fo
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The more remote supplies the stimul
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would say a few things about my ped
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to coin wholly new and different mo
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“middling” and Knoblauch’s ow
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question of how their educational e
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of the readings and, quoting the as
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genetics and chemistry? Or is the i
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ibliography, and a final report, wh
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turned outward, towards society and
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as a whole. These essays attempted
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students had to do it from and for
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teacher staring back at me. A lazy
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ut inwards, to themselves, and to p
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Again, if I took that long, hard lo
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subjectivity” of those same “po
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eflecting writing and those questio
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work” (318). For me, it is this s
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ut what is thought and, possibly, w
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of the “Deweyan” community - th
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question, “Can writing be used to
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Shapiro took those seventy essays a
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instructor’s standing within such
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in responding to drafts, in confere
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elevance of context is what finally
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different composition scholars and
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a human being living in this world
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that “perplexity” and “disequ
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development” (219). If my experie
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e seen as “diverse” or “diffe
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from without, and, because of it, w
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twelve- to fourteen-week college se
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for granted. And once you have take
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learning community therein. Because
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or white” perceptions of reality
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to renovate his portrait, Elbow off
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Elbow, for example, have said about
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Works Consulted Aristotle. Rhetoric
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and Process Models of Composing"."
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---. "The Winds of Change: Thomas K
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Ong, Walter J. Fighting for Life: C
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