I offer a link to our definitions work space for today, and I hope we will also have time to revisit the theoretical turns, in the interest of re/combining some of what we read for today into intertextual conversations or threads. Even as we have our hands full with grasping the parameters of our theoretical texts each week, it is not a bad idea to begin returning to this larger ecology (or, matrix-of-concerns-on-the-way-to-becoming-an-ecology) so as to begin rehearsing what it means to re-see.
For example, after today's discussion we may want to ask ourselves whether Corbett, Gage, Kinneavy, Brooks & Mara, and Sheridan, et al, respectively help us to newly conceptualize a "grammar" or a "rhetoric." If so, then how could we unpack those concepts in order to understand how their subconcepts had to align?
Or, assuming we had to make an argument for composition as knowing without necessarily drawing on a reappropriation of Classical rhetorical theories, we might want to ask on what other aspects of their arguments could we draw?
Or, assuming we wanted to rethink the focus of today's discussion as "digital writing" or "literacy studies" or "WAC/WID (Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines)," how would we need to be able to situate these readings into viable conversations so as to support the development of those other themes?
Update on 9/28/17:
I think we did a good job during Tuesday's conversation of trying to figure out the "here" and "there" of each of the readings, i.e., Corbett's, Kinneavy's, and Gage's particular stakes, as well as Sheridan, et al's and Brooks & Mara's newer imperatives with kairos. When we read deeply into their classroom contexts, spanning from the 1960s to the 2000s, we have a better appreciation of the problems in which each theorist was trying to intervene. We also have several options for reading them historiographically.
For example -- option 1:
- Corbett drew on the art, form, and function of rhetoric as audience-specific discourse, emphasizing composition as the engagement of the whole person.
- Gage offered method in place of what was typically understood as status quo.
- Kinneavy offered a convergence of the writer's awareness, understanding, and ability to identify audience.
- Brooks & Mara enacted this convergence multimodally.
- Sheridan, et al, demonstrated that composition theorizing is concurrent, collaborative, and participatory.
Or -- option 2:
- Taken together, C, K, & G find fault in systems of composition instruction that either remove rhetoric from the process of making knowledge (Corbett), that ask the writer to write for "Universal" or "all-purpose" audiences (Gage), or that ignore the creative power that writers can use when examining the full situation around writing (Kinneavy).
- This fault-finding could offer one justification for composing multimodal enactments of the Trivium and of kairos.
- Alternatively, this fault-finding could have inspired Sheridan, et al, or Brooks & Mara to identify what the most important aspects of the discourse situation might be today, i.e., memory vs. circulation, circulation vs. delivery, a priori vs. a posteriori knowledge, etc.
- Perhaps we also see some interesting groundwork being lain for re-purposing Classical rhetorical concepts, allowing us a better sense of what those concepts might have been used for prior to our theorizing, and suggesting what they could be used for since.
Finally, I have been reflecting on a few passages since last class, primarily in response to our final question about whether any of these theories could be seen as promoting or enabling a multicultural imperative. In my reflection, I realized that, although each passage appears in only one of our texts, several passages could easily have appeared in more than one of the texts. I also recognized a thread I hadn't noticed before: precursors to theorizing that form has function. For example:
- "I am not calling for a mechanical adoption of figures to prettify our prose; I am calling rather for a realization of the functions of style, in all its aspects, in effecting our purpose. We are all vaguely aware of the function of style; classical rhetoric can make us clearly aware" (Corbett 104) (but it resonates with Sheridan, et al). At some point, it became feasible for Corbett to suggest writing for the sake of writing itself.
- When Gage argues for the importance of knowing the "intentional cause of investigation" (Gage 36), I get the sense that he is pushing for a mechanism by which all writers can begin to mature from personal expression to situated expression, and that kairos is the most advantageous mechanism.
- While Corbett thought he was addressing the need to return to audience-specific prose (rather than mode-specific exposition), it is after Gage, when the concept of "mode" became more sufficiently broad. And then Kinneavy will define fluidity between the whole human and the world.
- Relatedly, Kinneavy's solution to re-incorporating kairos into the composition curriculum--without losing its complexity--is to "devise a college composition program that will have ethical, epistemological, rhetorical, aesthetic, and political dimensions involving something like a notion of contemporary practical relevance to the young women and men of today" (Kinneavy 93-94). The principle of "proper measure" is more elusive/difficult to determine than the principle of "right timing" (Kinneavy 85): "To apply [the transcendent idea] to man, the divine ideas must become immanent in human life through kairos. This can be achieved when the writer enters into the 'psychological situation of whoever has perpetrated the deed [being written about], trying to understand its individual character.' This, for Gorgias, came about only through the deceptions of persuasive rhetoric and poetry" (Kinneavy 89).
-Dr. Graban
