The Substance of Style : Invention, Arrangement, and Paralogic Rhetoric
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THE SUBSTANCE OF STYLE; INVENTION, ARRANGEMENT, AND PARALOGIC RHETORIC IN THE COMPOSITION CLASSROOM f r m ’ /S'* 1 • DION CLAUDE CAUTRELL A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2002 Copyright 2002 by Dion Claude Cautrell ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to extend my sincerest gratitude to the members of my dissertation committee, whose willingness to provide comments, to ask questions and to engage in debate have taught me that sound scholarship and good writing are humane as well as human endeavors. While any remaining defects are solely my responsibility, whatever this dissertation does well, it does because of their commitment and their friendship. I wish also to thank the many teachers and mentors who have worked with me for more than two decades. They are living examples of the best reason anyone could hope to teach writing or to devote himself to the loving study of words. TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii ABSTRACT vi CHAPTERS 1 THE STYLISTICS OF RETROFITTING 1 Notes 23 2 A RHETORICAL HISTORY LESSON, PART ONE 27 Isocrates: Thought, Affect, World 32 Gorgias: Ornament, Effect, Audience 38 Interludium: Demetrius’ On Style 44 Cicero and Quintilian: A Rhetoric of Ethics 48 An Ethics of Style 58 The Classical Spirit in a Contemporaiy World 63 Notes 73 3 A RHETORICAL HISTORY LESSON, PART TWO 76 Burke: Audience Identification and the Transformandum 81 Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca: An Argument for Style 91 Fahnestock: Figures As Epitomes of Argument 101 An Ethics of Pedagogy 112 Notes 129 4 (RE)WRITING PEDAGOGIES WITH STYLE 132 Interludium: Retrofitting the Rhetorical Canons 140 Stylistic Invention and Governing Principles 142 Exemplum: The Rhetorical Question 153 Stylistic Arrangement and Shaping Ideas 164 Exemplum: Enumeratio and Division/Classification 172 The Horizon of Pragmatic Possibility 183 Notes 190 5 THE PARALOGIC FUTURE OF RHETORIC-COMPOSITION 193 Extemalism and Triangulation 199 The Principle of Charity 210 Prior/Passing Theories 222 Some Additional Words on Why Style Matters 232 IV Notes 242 APPENDIX: TOWARD A STYLISTIC CLASSROOM 244 In-class Journals 245 Entry One 246 Entry Two 246 Entry Three 247 Entiy Four 248 Entry Five 248 Take-home Responses 248 Response One 249 Response Two 250 Response Three 251 Formal Essays 251 Paper One 253 Paper Two 254 WORKS CITED 257 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 262 V Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy THE SUBSTANCE OF STYLE; INVENTION, ARRANGEMENT, AND PARALOGIC RHETORIC IN THE COMPOSITION CLASSROOM By Dion Claude Cautrell May 2002 Chair: Sidney I. Dobrin Major Department: English This dissertation explores the intersection between the rhetorical canon of style and current post-process approaches to writing. Because most contemporary theories argue for a social and interpretive definition of discourse, writing scholars and teachers have increasingly sought some means for describing and enacting textual practices derived from those principles. Indeed, current theories like paralogic rhetoric, as formulated by Thomas Kent and based on the ideas of philosopher Donald Davidson, argue that writing cannot be taught or learned, at least in the usual senses of those words. Traditional rhetorical theories, however, are based on practice and are directed toward textual creation. Consequently, determining the ways in which classical stylistics might be interjected into twenty-first-century writing classrooms provides some opportunity for creating a theory stylistic of rhetoric that is both pragmatic and interpretive. If stylistics is a study of the elementary patterns of language and of language use, then it is a small matter to argue that both reading and writing depend on how, when, and why language users make choices using stylistic principles. Rhetoricians from Isocrates to Cicero, Kenneth Burke to Jeanne Fahnestock VI have theorized and enacted a stylistics that while often overlooked, may provide theoretical rigor as well as pragmatic effectiveness. This stylistic theory posits traditional schemes and tropes, including metaphor, listing and repetition, as strategies that writers tactically employ to generate and organize discourse and to engage readers intellectually and emotionally. By constructing writing situations as choice-based and contextually delimited, the principles of a stylistic pedagogy reveal opportunities for student-writers and others to gain the right to speak and to be heard through writing; in the very act of writing, the writer simultaneously creates and enacts the authority necessary to engage and to affect the material world, including other human beings. vii CHAPTER 1 THE STYLISTICS OF RETROFITTING For you know that a writing class is not an excuse to study Navaho folkways or to train vest-pocket literary critics, any more than it is an incitation to unremitting workbook drill on usage and mechanics. You know that the subject of a writing course is writing [. .]. (Richard Gebhardt, “The Subject Is Writing”) During the twentieth century, literary scholars, classicists and linguists increasingly became interested in stylistics—the study of rhetorical style (elocutio). Rhetoricians dealt with style when appropriate or necessary, but the third canon of classical rhetoric lost much of its perceived usefulness in the wake of the communications studies movement, which attended to the larger forces at work within communication as well as the rhetorical canons of invention (inventio), arrangement {dispositio) and delivery (actio). While the fourth canon (memory or memoria) continued to suffer from neglect as it had for centuries, style’s predicament, though equally as old, occurred for vastly different reasons.^ Whatever historical causes might be enumerated, rhetoric- composition and its practitioners have implicitly marginalized the third canon throughout the last century. For writing scholars and teachers, style usually occupies a nebulous position on the list of priorities for investigation and teaching. In most contemporary handbooks, for example, “style” describes broad qualities of writing such as clarity or concision. In writing classrooms the term most often finds its way into discussions of a writer’s tone or approach: a student-writer might be accused of using “too conversational a style” in her academic essays, or an author under consideration might be described by an instructor as “a stylist.” None of these applications accurately reflects the intellectual depth and writerly value of the canon or the strategies-tropes and schemes—associated with it.^ Although classical rhetoricians did consider qualities like appropriateness and, what is now called, tone to be within style’s purview, they imagined the 1 2 canon’s functioning in more sophisticated ways than many of the compositionists who have taken over the (post)modem investigation of writing and rhetoric.^ Whereas style is now often connected to the aesthetic or other readerly aspects of a text, ancient rhetoricians made it integral to the rhetor’s struggle to make meaning and to communicate effectively. Classical stylisticians were certainly concerned with form, but they also used the canon to understand the forces that both literally and figuratively drove discourse creation. Indeed, because of rhetoric’s modem dispersal across various fields of inquiry, many compositionists and writers overlook the fact that all five canons of classical rhetoric were originally formulated as complementary approaches to creating texts and were only later applied to interpreting them. That said, style’s diminution within rhetoric-composition has not been solely a result of its misapplication or marginalization. The decline has also been spurred by compositionists’ fascination with other areas of textuality—beginning with the cognitive processes underlying writing, including revised versions of invention and arrangement, and later turning to cultural studies and other distinctly postmodern methodologies.^ Because these trends have been well documented by others, I focus here on rhetoric-composition’s present disciplinary difficulties and how a pragmatic stylistics helps the field to seek out and evaluate remedies.^ Beyond the immense amount that elocutio still offers writers and teachers of writing, two current aspects of rhetoric- composition and its position in the academy motivate this study. First, because of the discipline’s relatively short history as an academically recognized area of inquiry, compositionists continue to suffer from a pathological dependency on other disciplines. Only rarely since its formalization in the nineteenth century has rhetoric-composition relied on its own devices to determine its subject matter, conventions, or goals. In the field’s earliest years, philology, literary criticism and speech (communications) provided compositionists with methodologies and material—both pedagogical 3 and human. Writing courses revolved around lecturing, rote drill in grammar and other “basic” skills, and the instilling of distinctly elitist attitudes about writing’s social functions. During the 1960s, the field’s dependence was not ended as much as transformed by the writing-process movement, which drew its inspiration and its scientistic methodology from behavioral and cognitive psyehology. Although there was a brief love affair with expressivism—which