Rhetorical Memory, Synaptic Mapping, and Ethical Grounding

DODSON, WILLIAM, Ph.D. Rhetorical Memory, Synaptic Mapping, and Ethical Grounding. (2014) Directed by Dr. Stephen R. Yarbrough. 214 pp. This research applies neuroscience to classical accounts of rhetorical memory, and argues that the physical operations of memory via synaptic activity support causal theories of language, and account for individual agency in systematically considering, creating, and revising our stances toward rhetorical situations. The dissertation explores ways that rhetorical memory grounds the work of the other canons of rhetoric in specific contexts, thereby expanding memory’s classical function as “custodian” to the canons. In this approach, rhetorical memory actively orients the canons as interdependent phases of discursive communicative acts, and grounds them in an ethical baseline from which we enter discourse. Finally, the work applies its re-conception of rhetorical memory to various aspects of composition and Living Learning Community educational models via practical and deliberate interpretation and arrangement of our synaptic “maps.” RHETORICAL MEMORY, SYNAPTIC MAPPING, AND ETHICAL GROUNDING by William Dodson A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2014 Approved by Dr. Stephen R. Yarbrough Committee Chair APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by William Dodson has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair Dr. Stephen R. Yarbrough Committee Members Dr. Walter H. Beale Dr. Risa Applegarth November 22, 2013 Date of Acceptance by Committee November 22, 2013 Date of Final Oral Examination ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. COURTING MNEMONSYNE .......................................................................... 1 II. REMEMBERING RHETORICAL MEMORY................................................. 25 III. SYNAPTIC MAPPING AND CAUSAL LANGUAGE ................................... 49 IV. ETHOS AND DISCOURSE ............................................................................ 89 V. ETHICAL GROUNDING AND THE PHASES OF COMPOSITION ................................................................................. 113 VI. PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS ............................................................... 138 NOTES........................................................................................................................ 159 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................ 176 APPENDIX A. PHAEDRUS, FORGETFULNESS, AND ETHICAL GROUNDING ............................................................. 194 APPENDIX B. GEORGE CAMPBELL AND RHETORICAL EDUCATION ................................................................................ 209 iii CHAPTER I COURTING MNEMOSYNE If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient—at others, so bewildered and so weak— and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control!—We are to be sure a miracle every way—but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out. --Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen The Muses in Greek mythology protect and inspire the arts, sciences, history, philosophy, and rhetoric. That their mother is Mnemosyne—Memory—signifies the fundamental importance of memory to all inquiry, the desire for knowledge. To the Greeks, memory was our highest and most mysterious gift. Plato’s entire philosophy was a system of memory intended to lead us back to knowledge of the Forms, universal truths forgotten when humans descended from the heavens onto the world. Aristotle and subsequent philosophers and rhetoricians analogized memory to various forms of writing, most famously a wax tablet that bears the imprints of experience. As literacy spread among educated classes and mediums for writing became more portable and convenient, memory began to lose its central emphasis in systems of thought. This is particularly true in rhetoric, where, partly due to the influence of Quintilian and later Peter Ramus, memory has been reduced to strategies for rote memorization and topical invention, and the canons have been isolated as separate 1 components of composition. While the canons of rhetoric have been debated and reconsidered since they were codified in Cicero’s De Inventione and the Ad Herennium,1 and style and delivery have made recent comebacks in composition studies,2 there have been few explorations and reconsiderations of memory. The most well-known studies of memory in medieval and Renaissance eras, Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory (1966) and Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990), convincingly argue that memory remained central to crafting imagery and rhetoric after Roman times. Outside of Yates and Carruthers, of the few modern rhetoric and composition studies that have been conducted, none has yet made a major impact on the field due in no small part, I suggest, to memory’s complicated history in rhetoric, which dissipated its use and undermined attempts to articulate practical applications of memory to composition and interpretation.3 Furthermore, ambiguous metaphors of memory, such as the memory palace, can seem anachronistic to modern students.4 Renaissance memory studies were heavily influenced by occult mysticism, and discussed memory in more and more elaborately abstract terms, culminating in vast memory theaters whose complexity dwarfed the memory palaces. Contemporary theorists still rely on these abstract metaphors and have not developed a critical vocabulary that renders memory into concrete terms as they have with the other canons. As a further handicap, any treatments on the subject face the entrenched perception of rhetorical memory as mnemonics or topical archives. This perception is wholly inaccurate, but nonetheless endorsed and reinforced by such influential scholars as the late Edward P.J. Corbett. Most current work in rhetoric 2 falls in line with Corbett’s categorical dismissal of memory from the canons of rhetoric. In every edition (1965, 1971, 1991, 1999) of Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student—still a common textbook for training graduate students—Corbett claims, falsely, that memory never received much consideration by classical rhetoricians, and “[t]he reason for the neglect of this aspect of rhetoric is probably that not much can be said … [so there] will be no consideration in this book of this aspect of rhetoric” (22). This attitude remains dominant, even in the latest textbooks.5 The science of memory is a hot topic at the moment. Enter any bookstore or, more likely, browse the virtual titles of an online vendor, and you will find among the pubescent wizards, teenaged vampires, and hunger gamers dozens upon dozens of books aimed at popular readership about the science of memory. Scientists and science journalists write books for general audiences that relay the latest discoveries and make speculative applications to decision-making, self-improvement, reading, and so on.6 Many of these applications have specific connections to rhetoric and composition, and moreover, memory in particular is a compelling subject because, from a neuroscientific standpoint, consciousness itself is memory, since, as Michael Greenberg notes, “what the brain is doing at all times and in all of its operations is remembering” (10). From the intricacies of procedural memory—the unconscious memories of how to do physical activities from walking to putting together an engine—to the mysteries of declarative memory—the narrative memories of our lives—memory underlies most questions we ask about ourselves, both as individuals and as groups. 3 Many of these new studies in memory offer important insights that can lead to fruitful applications to rhetorical memory, the canon that remains most neglected in the field. Some rhetoric and composition scholars already apply aspects of neuroscience via cognitive psychology to their pedagogies, beginning most notably with Linda Flower,7 and many are beginning to approach what Jordynn Jack calls “neurorhetorics,”8 but few if any have reconsidered classical concepts of rhetoric in concert with modern neuroscience. This study aims to do just that, and further, in reclaiming and restoring rhetorical memory to contemporary scholarship, it aims to demonstrate the interdependent, recursive relationship of the canons of rhetoric. This synthesis of neurological and rhetorical principles will be, I hope, useful to composition pedagogy and theory in providing a stance toward and vocabulary with which we can understand our own agency in how we interpret, consider, recall, and revise our memories, our perceptions, and our discourse. As my study explores and applies these consequences, it offers an anchor point from which to consider the impact of neuroscience on the field(s) of rhetoric and composition. Despite the highly theoretical ambiguity of many new experimental findings, educators across the disciplines are beginning to draw quick and possibly premature conclusions about the cognitive traits of their students and

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