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Saturday, December 13, 2008
At Least It’s An Ethos: Why Merging Rhetoric With Composition Is A Mistake
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, dude, at least it’s an ethos.
-The Big Lebowski
After almost five years teaching writing, English, ESL, and humanities survey courses to high school students and undergraduates, I have come to the conclusion that it is a serious mistake to ground undergraduate instruction in writing in the basics of Aristotelian rhetoric. I believe doing so is increasingly common, and that it is increasingly normal for universities to reframe composition jobs as being in “rhetoric and composition.”
This is a discussion somewhat rooted in the practicalities of teaching first-year undergraduates to write, but it has much broader implications. It is part of a larger conversation about what, exactly, the humanities are supposed to mean at a historical moment when college-level reading and writing skills are quite valuable, yet also when the political and economic conditions put “anti-ideological” pressure on institutions of higher learning. In other words, universities increasingly see themselves as preparing students to write fluently on any topic, from any perspective. This is not the “end” of ideological instruction, naturally, since its final consequence is to encourage students to write for the highest bidder, making every young writer into a copy writer. But it is worth examining how rhetorically themed instruction in writing—especially in ethos, pathos, and logos—arose as a natural way of resolving political conflicts between Western institutions, and to consider the consequences of this paradigm shift for our students. My objection is not merely political; it is also pedagogical, since “rhetoric and composition” forecloses many other valuable ways of teaching reading and writing.
How Critical Thinking Evolved Into Rhetoric
From the middle of the last century until fairly recently, the idea that the purpose of undergraduate education is to foster “critical thinking” has had a virtual monopoly in both academic and popular circles—in 1972, when the American Council on Education surveyed 40,000 faculty members on this question, 97 percent of them invoked critical thinking. It has been institutionalized around the globe (wherever students are tested on “critical reasoning” skills, as they are throughout the United Kingdom, for example).
It is an answer I myself have given on many occasions, and it holds up well for an old chestnut. Nonetheless, it is a difficult code to enforce in a humanities classroom. It is a concept best suited to the inspection of evidence. Education researcher Lion Gardiner described critical reasoning as “the capacity to evaluate skillfully and fairly the quality of evidence and detect error, hypocrisy, manipulation, dissembling, and bias.” Unfortunately, presented with something like a Max Ernst painting or a Martin Luther King speech, students will be hard-pressed to find error, hypocrisy, or bias. Critical reasoning will not help them to “unpack” the text, as we say in the humanities, though it may help when they are called upon to construct a rigorous argument.
Equally important, critical reasoning is pushed to its limits by contemporary culture and politics; perhaps the greatest exemplar and champion of critical reasoning was Theodor Adorno, who was driven by his own feeling of integrity to extreme positions of dissent and hysterical rejections of popular culture. What are we to tell students about critical reasoning when the President and his cabinet simply lie about Iraq in order to drum up popular support for a war? If you watch one hour of television programming, you see about twenty minutes of advertising, all of which is likely contaminated with “error, hypocrisy, manipulation, dissembling, and bias.” While Westerners have invented all sorts of defenses against this assault on reason, they are leaky dams at best; most of us simply cannot keep track of every sort of irrational appeal we are simultaneously trying to ignore, or ironize, or protest against, or embrace in the name of glamour or kitsch. Teaching a class too much in this mode produces an unhappily smug series of field trips through “our stupid popular culture,” “our stupid political landscape,” and so on, along with the depressing feeling that nobody, the instructor included, will follow through in practice on the overwhelmingly negative evaluations of culture that the “critical thinking” method produces.
Rhetoric solved many of these problems by giving critical thinking a positive, broadly applicable core; rather than merely giving students a way to filter out misinformation, we were empowering them to persuade audiences. All of a sudden, a speech by Martin Luther King that had been almost unreadable (was King giving us good evidence about the lives of African-Americans or not?) became full of content, now that we were seeing it through Aristotle’s Big Three: ethos, pathos, and logos.
Furthermore, the rhetorical approach seemed to resolve the increasingly tense problem of what students ought to be reading or otherwise studying. There were visual and auditory rhetorics earning the attention of scholars in every field; in fact, anything that had an audience apparently had a rhetoric, so you could finally teach pop culture alongside of canonical literature without drearily insisting that pop culture was lies, damn lies, and false advertising. You could seamlessly blend new media into traditional writing curriculums, which was good since students had less stomach for reading, less training in it, and more of an appetite for mixed media or short pieces. Overall, the rhetorical approach tended to produce surprisingly positive evaluations of, well, just about everything, because rhetoric became a pleasure in and of itself: the film Thank You For Smoking is a product of the New Age of Rhetoric, where even a cigarette ad can be the object of much grudging classroom admiration. If an audience liked it or was influenced by it, you were hard-pressed to say, as a detached rhetorician, that the audience was wrong.
The Politics of Teaching Rhetoric
In addition to substituting something more agreeable for the relentlessly negative core of the “critical thinking” curriculum, rhetoric solved an urgent political problem: how institutions of higher education were supposed to weather the Bush years without being relentlessly punished for “extreme” political leanings. After 9/11, when David Horowitz’s star was on the rise, the Congress was majority Republican, governorships were going Republican all over the country, and Dubya had consolidated his popular base, there was a feeling throughout academia that blindly going forward with some version or another of post-structuralist Marxism was simply irresponsible: it wasn’t responsive to contemporary political realities (the USSR wasn’t coming back), and it was out-of-touch with the populace. Academics talked and wrote as though they were trying out for a new edition of The Best and the Brightest—as though they were the cabinet advisors to some non-existent moderate Democratic administration, presumably run by Martin Sheen. I remember being dumbfounded when a famous interpreter of the Frankfurt School (a group of philosophers that included Adorno), coming to give a talk at UC Irvine, chucked all that critical nonsense about dialectics to discuss how Bush could have done better at international diplomacy. This was also the period, you may remember, when the American right pushed the hardest for “balanced” course readers and syllabi. It was the second coming of the Intentional Design movement. All across the country, TAs and adjuncts murmured to each other about how to teach critical thinking without “silencing” conservative perspectives.
Of course, looking back, the post-Clinton years seem like some kind of bad dream, an epiphenomenon that has now been brought to an end by Obama’s election. That may be true at the highest levels of American government, but institutional changes within the academy do not reverse themselves so quickly, particularly when a whole generation of graduate students are trained under a certain politically ambivalent model. Rhetoric, which was already prominent for the reasons I mentioned earlier, easily adapted itself to this environment by simultaneously avowing its neutrality (let’s analyze a speech by George W. Bush!) and promising a sort of sideways “rhetorical critique” that would lead students to the truth. In theory, you could show students that Bush’s speeches used all kinds of logical fallacies in order to divide the word along axes of good and evil, or that his rhetoric was inconsistent in its appeals and therefore untrustworthy.
In reality, however, teachers tended to fall back on truth-claims whenever they tried to perform a rhetorical critique of politically successful discourse. For example, if you wanted to prove that George Bush presented an overly polarized picture of nations and human beings, you had to invoke your own personal theory that out there, in the real world that transcends discourse, things weren’t so “black and white.” Or, in a different example, you might have to just announce that most scientists believe in evolution or global warming, thus giving your students the “right answer” independent of audience or Aristotle’s categories of appeals. Students will, of course, dutifully reproduce this kind of information in the essays they submit, but the frame created by the focus on rhetoric makes such information look like bias. Hanging over every discussion is the idea that all perspectives contain bias, or the equivalent idea that everyone has a valid belief. This relativism is inherent to rhetoric itself, when it is isolated as a field of study. It is something that Aristotle narrowly avoided by simply announcing that his essentially technical discourses on rhetoric were subordinate to truth, and that only truthful orators could use rhetoric rightfully. His important corollary has been lost in the contemporary revival of ethos, pathos, and logos. If everyone is right, or everyone is biased, then alliances, not truths, are the highest values.
It may seem strange to talk about evolution or global warming or geopolitics period in this context; after all, our subject is writing courses, which are taught mostly by people with apolitical degrees (English, History, Philosophy, etc.). In high school there is a much sharper delineation between English or Language Arts, which covers literature, expository writing, and creative writing, and other classes that cover recent history or introductory political science. Well, it is strange. The centrist politicizing of the writing classroom is not especially helpful to students, who are neither challenged politically nor pushed as hard as they could be as writers. The political focus is simply the result of the growing power of Composition as a discipline, a discipline that blindly attempts to separate writing from literature, and that justifies itself intellectually by citing the supposed political value of rhetorical analysis.
Teaching Them What They Already Know: Composition and Literature
Anyone who is not mentally ill has, within certain familiar realms, a very sophisticated, intuitive understanding of rhetorical strategy. Teenagers understand very well how to shift from one vocabulary to another, depending on audience, and sound completely different in their essays than they do in casual conversation or on IM programs. They have different ways of speaking to parents and friends, and they work hard on crafting online and offline persona that others will find appealing. This is not because they’re teenagers; actually, everybody does these things. One of the gratifying things about teaching rhetoric is that, up to a point, students “get it” right away, and manage to rapidly produce useful observations. This is especially true when they are dealing with something comfortable, like a scene from a movie.
On a deeper level, though, students “get” rhetoric (and we find it easy to teach) because it follows a similar intersubjective logic as capital. Rhetoric goes hand-in-hand with advertising, the dominant language of contemporary desire. Students find themselves growing up in a world where demographics—audiences—are created out of thin air by advertising in its various forms, and where mass production aligns itself to the desires of a consumer audience. Furthermore, rhetorical analysis is dissociative: anyone who has tried to teach ethos, pathos, and logos as operations to be performed on a text knows how students arbitrarily divide the text up into “emotional” sections and “argumentative” sections, even though such divisions are rarely defensible. This is not the students’ fault, as we send them gunning for whatever holism a text possesses. The lysis of the text feels oddly familiar, though, because contemporary culture is similarly dissociative. Logic is the calculated process of competition and oppression, emotion is the catharsis of sentimentality, and personality is likeability; to put the matter crudely, ethos, pathos, and logos correspond to the capitalist triptych of the advertiser (the “front man"), the consumer, and the accountant.
Holism is not always wanted. There are times when ad hoc writing is the most logical response to a particular situation, and there is also a place for the modest ambitions of, say, a humor column. Nonetheless, I believe that teachers of writing ought to see it as their particular mission to teach holism, particularly as it manifests in the peculiar written technologies of literature and longer creative nonfiction. In short, our mission is to teach English, not composition or writing, regardless of what our students choose for their major.
Literature tends to be de-emphasized in composition courses because it is hard to abstract arguments from it, impossible to put your finger on the “speaker’s ethos,” and tough to separate the emotional resonances from the ideas. Even earlier works of non-fiction are less invested in ethos: I taught both Joseph Mitchell and Chuck Klosterman this year, and found that Klosterman but not Mitchell can be easily analyzed for ethos. Klosterman is a 21st Century writer, eager to tell you about what he bought at the Gap or how he seduced a woman in Michigan. Mitchell, on the other hand, writes “I caught up with Joe Gould...”, and then the rest is about Gould, not Mitchell. Over the course of a whole book like Women In Love, we certainly get a sense of something like the breadth of D. H. Lawrence’s personality, but always indirectly, mediated as it is by plot, character, setting, and the rest.
The same problem recurs with studies of literature’s audiences; especially in 2008, trying to discuss the “audience” of Jane Austen is frequently unhelpful. The people Austen was ostensibly writing “for” did not include Edward Said, but by now Said is an important part of any discussion about Austen. There are texts that are heavily determined by (and determining of) audience, and others that are not. There are historical claims to be made about literature’s audiences, but these claims never exhaust the work itself.
There is a great deal of general anxiety among teachers that students will not read big books, particularly big books that aren’t anthologies. This premonition is very often correct; over the course of my life, I have been assigned a lot of big books that I didn’t finish. Nonetheless, by setting the bar high, we get more from students than we otherwise would. The big problem occurs when the alternative, having students write about short opinion pieces and pop culture, gets so entrenched that instruction in writing becomes completely generalized, indistinguishable from the incidental flow of words that fills up the day. It is true that other artistic forms are just as holistic as literature, but unfortunately they do not simultaneously teach writing. Without imagination, subtlety, and compassion, our students will make poor writers anyhow. They will be competent, but not compelling. A mixed approach, focusing on literature, serious creative non-fiction, and criticism, with rhetoric as a useful but limited subcategory, will give students the horizon they need to excel as writers, regardless of the genre they eventually pursue.
That kind of curriculum in today’s academic environment requires immense dedication on the part of students, and it means leaving enough room in student schedules so that they can puzzle over long and unfamiliar texts. Out of discussions of character and circumstance, real conversations about situational ethics and diverse viewpoints can take place, on a far more sophisticated level than discussions of rhetorical efficacy that boil down to relativism. Society can be judged complexly; it does not need to automatically be scolded in the name of “critical reasoning,” or praised because it runs on rhetoric. Out of the intricacies of narration, criticism, and poetics, a conversation about style can take place that allows students to discover authorial voice and to take a writerly approach to individuality that goes infinitely beyond Bush’s “cowboy” schtick. Finally, the classroom can be a place where a felt response to imaginary circumstances prepares students for a world in which they will frequently have to make ethical decisions whose implications go far beyond anything they can directly see or experience.
Such courses seldom reflect what undergraduates “already do” every day, and success will be a struggle for them. It is probably not what they already know, but I fully believe it is what they hope to learn.
Comments
Shouldn’t you be submitting something this long to n+1 instead of posting it on a blog?
An interesting post, but I’m not quite sure that it really addresses what’s going on as opposed to the justifications for what’s going on. The purpose of these freshman classes is to teach students the basic skills of how to read and write at a college level, right? I don’t think that they ever taught critical thinking, nor do they now teach rhetoric; they teach students how to read and produce sentences and paragraphs of an acceptable standard for a white collar job.
To return to anecdote, I remember my experience as a TA for freshman astronomy classes. Despite it being a science, we most assuredly did not teach them “critical thinking” and so on. We taught them a mixture of basic skills, e.g. by forcing them to learn how to memorize and plug-and-chug an equation, and basic information, such as that the Earth goes around the Sun. In short, we did what a high school or grade school class was supposed to do, but hadn’t done for our students.
Are freshman composition courses really doing more than that?
Joseph, I think you’re completely off-track here.
Let’s take Corbett’s *Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student* as the basis for an education in composition through the lens of classical rhetoric. Rhetoric is more than “logos, ethos, and pathos.” It’s more than a grudging admiration for “effective” speech or writing. Aristotelean rhetoric, as opposed to sophism, is the study of the most effective way to convince others of the truth. It’s not the sociopathic pursuit of persuasion by any means necessary. Nor is it the study of any speech-act that makes some money.
Rhetorical analysis involves logical analysis. When I use Corbett with my high school students, they learn to identify logical fallacies and to use syllogistic and enthymemic reasoning to construct arguments. They learn the topoi of invention, which often involve forms of abstract, logical reasoning (cause and effect, definition, sameness and difference, etc.). They also learn their tropes and figures.
Now, I don’t teach “composition” classes. I teach sophomore and junior English. But I direct my instruction from a rhetorical perspective because it speaks both to literary analysis ("What is the author trying to do and how does s/he do it?") and composition ("How can you take a position on the readings that is logical and persuasive?"). A rhetorical approach to literature helps students consider the dominant effects of the readings and to analyze how authors create these effects. The traditional rhetorical emphasis on stylistic emulation also helps integrate the literature into the composition area of the class. For example, Hamlet’s soliloquies are excellent examples of dialectical reasoning, even as they reveal the dangers of using the dialectic to avoid decision. My students can both analyze the form of the soliloquy while drawing from it to form their own arguments by emulating Shakespeare in their own soliloquies. (My favorite this week was “To dance or not to dance,” involving the inner conflict between a love of expression and a need to balance personal pleasures with peer and family expectations.)
You seem to use “rhetoric” as a synonym for cultural studies here, and I’d argue that this relativistic, over-generalized, and often cynical approach to comp that you’re describing has more in common with cultural studies (of the American variety) than with classical rhetoric.
Thanks Joseph. This is of interest to those of us who like to keep up with the academic and literary stuff even though it’s been quite some time since we passed through the academic world.
Adam,
Pretty snarky. Was that really called for?
I’m trying to help Kugelmass’s career. How is that snarky?
Good post. I’m surprised you didn’t mention the baser pragmatic reasons for this change, however: teaching short, layman’s nonfiction pieces requires little expertise beyond the general knowledge of how to teach writing, whereas the in-depth English classes you describe require a certain amount of individual specialization and interpretation. The teachers of those classes aren’t interchangeable, which is a major drawback in the heavily adjunctified landscape of writing pedagogy.
I do think Luther makes some good points about the value of rhetoric, which I think should maintain an important place in generally required writing and literature courses (as distinct from courses specific to the English major, for instance). Students studying advertisements for the first time have often never considered, in a conscious way, the different sorts of appeals advertisers use to persuade them. From there, it’s a smooth transition to considering the degree to which beliefs and values they think they hold “naturally” are in fact a function of having been persuaded, as well as considering the ways in which they themselves employ rhetoric, often unconsciously. I don’t think this is as intuitive to students as you do, and I think the “getting it right away” experience you describe is actually substantially valuable (at least for some of the students), not just superficially satisfying. I think Luther’s right that rhetoric can be helpful and important to studying literature (since you mention Said, he does this effectively in regards to Austen and others). I also think that lessons in rhetoric and critical thinking are extremely relevant to the questions of how the Bush Administration sold the Iraq War, and how some were fooled while others weren’t.
However, I think that in practice, too much of composition’s focus on rhetoric ends up being based in the terror that we might bore students, or challenge them excessively. In particular, you make good points on the emphasis on multimedia--we’re anxious to assure students that they hardly have to read at all (let alone enjoy reading), so long as they understand these universally applicable principles of rhetoric. Too many courses present “rhetoric” as a one-size-fits-all approach to language and composition, and I agree that a more balanced approach would serve students better.
Adam,
You’re right, at least, it’s certainly not a bad thing to ensure he knows the way the world really works.
I don’t understand these criticisms of rhetoric as a “one size fits all” approach to language or as an overly generalized approach privileging less challenging readings.
First off, I’m disturbed that no one (besides me) has actually cited a rhet/comp text or any research that supports Joseph’s claims that some bastard child of classical rhetoric has taken over literature or freshman comp classes.
Second, literature is often “de-emphasized” in composition classes because they are not literature courses. There is no reason to make courses in writing skills also courses in specifically literary analysis. There are, in fact, reasons not to do so: (a) research shows that writing quality is inversely proportional to the writer’s grasp of the material, so asking students to learn how to write at the same time they are learning a field-specific skill such as literary analysis can bring down the quality of student writing; (b) research shows that there are no general writing or critical thinking skills, that skills are “domain specific,” and so writing classes need to focus on the variety of writing tasks a college student will face, from memos to abstracts to summaries to research papers.
Finally, I don’t see ANY of the major schools of literary criticism advancing any ideas that weren’t implicit in classical rhetoric. Nor have I found major innovations in rhet/comp that weren’t a part of traditional rhet training. Peter Elbow, for example, positions himself against formal rhetorical training, but his own work is simply a variety of rhetoric with a peculiar and at times enlightening emphasis on “invention” strategies.
Finally, David Gold’s essay in *Profession 2008* deals with the mistaken notion that freshman comp or freshman English was once a noble, rigorous discipline. He draws attention to the fact that, while our grandparents’ generation attended more to an elevation of style, their writings were often devoid of the “critical thinking” or analytic components emphasized in today’s comp classes. Students used to write very rote essays—compare three products and take a position on which is best—in order to concentrate on the finer points of writing: elegant turns of phrases, classical arrangements, memorization of topoi. Today’s students are forced to do a lot more invention, to think a lot more originally and analytically, on top of learning the basics of style.
Joseph writes:
“A mixed approach, focusing on literature, serious creative non-fiction, and criticism, with rhetoric as a useful but limited subcategory, will give students the horizon they need to excel as writers, regardless of the genre they eventually pursue.”
From a teacher’s perspective, Joe, this sounds great. You’re proposing, at least in part, that we raise the bar in terms of the reading we assign, that we do a little less pop culture and short op-ed. We’re not challenging them enough, you seem to be saying.
One of the problems with this, as Rich gestures at, is that some of these students are terribly deficient in their basic writing skills. You’d think that their mere presence in the classroom—their *being* in college—would indicate a certain level of basic competence in writing and reading comprehension. And perhaps at some institutions this is the case. But at the UC campus where I teach, there are hundreds of entering freshmen—and not just ESL students—whose writing and reading levels are nowhere near where they’ll need to be in order to finish college, let alone successfully complete their gen-ed English requirements.
With the course I just finished teaching, it wouldn’t have made any sense whatsoever to assign Song of Solomon or In Cold Blood in addition to the shorter, more level-appropriate essays in our textbook. They have to walk before they can run, Joe, right?
Perhaps I’ve misconstrued or misunderstood your argument, but it just seems that your essay imagines a student—if not an entire classroom—with impeccable grammar and sufficient reading comprehension, one that is capable of taking on the challenges you describe. Very few of my own freshmen and sophomores would benefit from this approach.
Luther, tomemos, Mike, Bianca et al. --
Thanks so much for your comments. As a version of this post is likely to appear elsewhere soon, I’m going to postpone responding until that happens. I apologize for the delay, as these are excellent remarks that deserve prompt replies.
(To others who would like to comment, please do, as I will answer everyone who writes in. Eh, except for the trolls, if in fact there are composition trolls out there.)
Adam, no offense taken, I read your comment as a welcome piece of encouragement, salted with your usual skepticism about blogs.
Where does Burke enter into all of this?
More than Burke’s absence, I wonder about the absence of Hugh Blair to these discussions. Blair was the first professor of rhetoric and belles lettres at Edinburgh, and his published lectures were very influential. The institutionalization of English as a discipline can be traced back to 18th century Scots like Blair, who turned attention to the systematic study of English (the “metropolitan” language, to use po-co terms) to aid the advancement of Scottish cultural institutions along English lines.
Blair’s lectures on literary composition and rhetoric are New Criticism before the fact. And they suggest that there’s no opposition between a study of rhetoric and a study of literature.
Like others, I’m not certain I really get this post. When discussing literature at the freshman level, I’m certain most of us use the conventional terms: symbolism, imagery, metaphor, setting, form, rhythm, meter, etc. Nothing in the Greek rhetoric filtered through Roman pedagogy and further modified over the centuries precludes that. As used in freshman texts, rhetoric forms the broadest outlines—appeals, topos, invention, kairos, etc. To paraphrase Aristotle, you have to use the right tool for the job. To say all this is ethically neutral is to say nothing more than metaphor and setting or nails and hammers are ethically neutral. Nothing in rhetorical theory prevents the application of ethical judgments, though implicit is that ethical judgments should be analyzed.
Remember that until historically recently, pedagogy had a strong focus on oratory. Rather than framing the use of rhetorical theory as a way of making critical thought less negative, I’d frame it as a realization that freshman composition was as rhetorical (as is everything) as oratory. I don’t see this something that prevents any other type of analysis; rather every other type is subsumed. When I started at university in 1980, I wrote tons of essays in a vacuum—no thought of audience, no thought of critical points of agreement or disagreement, etc. To the extent that we now provide a metaframe for discourse, I think we’re doing a better job, but ... and this is a big hairy but ... we shouldn’t think we can stop at the big concepts. Introducing the concept of logos, for example, is meaningless unless we also introduce various specific tools of analysis—and in literature that takes us right back to imagery, metaphor, irony, setting, etc. Neither should we think it’s always particularly useful to refer to every appeal—essays which systemically, in paragraphs devoted to logos, ethos, and pathos, discuss the appeals would be just as mechanical and artificial as the typical five-paragraph essay. We shouldn’t forget that organicism is also part of the history of rhetoric. Plant that mental seed and watch it grow.
Rhetoric is a more logical match for composition instruction than is literature analysis. I am a historian who never excelled at literature analysis comparably to my other subjects. A few years ago, I taught composition online at Kaplan University. Students chose their own essay topics, with almost anything possible, and course examples ran the gamut of subjects.
An argument can be made for requiring literature courses. But pairing such a requirement with composition is a severe impediment to the latter.
One of the current debates within composition studies is precisely what “content” is the best match for writing instruction in first-year writing courses. It’s a fairly intense debate, with some contending that students best learn *to* write at the college level when they’re also studying research in the field of writing studies. Many of those same people would argue that teaching rhetoric—the New Rhetoric, more than classical rhetoric—is essential. There’s another school that argues that students become better writers by being immersed in the discourse and knowledge communities in which they need to participate; this is essentially an argument for a topic-based, interdisciplinary and discipline-based approach to first-year writing. That, however, is both expensive and difficult to administer.