MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

of

Gretchen Linnea Dietz

Candidate for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

______Jason Palmeri, Director

______Kate Ronald, Reader

______John Tassoni, Reader

______Elaine Miller, Graduate School Representative

ABSTRACT

RECONNECTING RHETORIC AND POETICS: STYLE AND THE TEACHING OF WRITING

by

Gretchen L. Dietz

This dissertation examines the disconnect between rhetoric and poetics in the field of composition studies and argues that style can mend this frayed relationship. Chapter one asserts that rhetoric and poetics were separated by historical accident; however, the poetic tradition is central to rhetorical study and must be reclaimed, and style serves as a key concept. Chapter two analyzes the figures in rhetorical manuals and recovers these tools for style pedagogy. Chapter three reclaims visual theories from classical rhetoric and shows how these theories reinvigorate pedagogy and allow us to think about style beyond alphabetic text. Chapter four asserts that style can be practiced within a larger aesthetic approach to the teaching of writing that invites creative experimentation and risk. The study includes student writing and student interviews; it also makes the case for alternative assessment practices. Finally, chapter five argues that the field can and should take style seriously, from the first-year writing course to graduate training to overall programmatic goals. This requires imagination and consciously looking beyond our disciplinary limits.

RECONNECTING RHETORIC AND POETICS: STYLE AND THE TEACHING OF WRITING

A DISSERTATION

Presented to the Faculty of

Miami University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

by

Gretchen L. Dietz

The Graduate School Miami University Oxford, Ohio

2016

Dissertation Director: Jason Palmeri

©

Gretchen Linnea Dietz

2016

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication……………………………………………………………………...…………iv

Acknowledgements…………………………………………...……….…………………..v

Chapter 1: Reconnecting Rhetoric and Poetics……………………….…….……………..1

Chapter 2: Reclaiming the Figures…………………………….…………..…………….18

Chapter 3: Reclaiming Theories of the Visual…………….…………..…………………50

Chapter 4: An Aesthetic Approach to Teaching Composition…………….…………….74

Chapter 5: Implications for Pedagogy and Research…………………………...………103

Works Cited…………………………………………………………….………………117

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DEDICATION

For Jo Dietz

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

One needs to be a recluse to write a project like this, but I didn’t complete it alone. Jason Palmeri was ever present and encouraging through email, phone, personal meetings, and his book. I have to say Jason coached me through this entire PhD program, from my first panic-stricken day as a teacher to these final formal pages I type now. He has undoubtedly shaped my thinking and my beliefs. Kate Ronald appeared as an expert at crucial times. She provided the perfect critiques that would shake up everything, make me question what I thought, and just all around work harder. John Tassoni extended advice in his office that looks like a small art gallery; he also travelled across campus to meet me in mine, right before my comprehensive exam, asking passionate questions about pedagogy. Elaine Miller signals my entrance into the intense world of graduate seminars in philosophy. I admire her intelligence, tenacity, and style more than I can express.

Miami University is part of my growing up. Thank you to the people who guided me, notably LuMing Mao, a true inspiration, and a few good friends: Dustin, Tory, and Kirk. Thank you to the Miami University English Department for awarding a fellowship to support the completion of this project, and for sending me to Sun Yat-Sen University in south China during the summer of 2014—a life-changing experience.

Thank you to my family for their endless reserves of support and humor. Mom, Dad, Marcus, Stephanie, and a tribe of aunts, uncles, and cousins loved and cared for me across distances far and wide. Devon, my confidante, provided counsel from the desert. And thank you to my most treasured friends: Dan, Anthony, Kev, Maria, Greg, and Anne. These people are the light of my life.

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Chapter One: Reconnecting Rhetoric and Poetics

As a doctoral student in a rhetoric history seminar, I encountered Aristotle’s Rhetoric as a foundational reading of week one. After completing that seminar, I wondered why I was not asked to read Poetics as well. It did not make sense to me that a field with its foundations in classical rhetoric would ignore one of the most influential works to emerge from that era. While investigating this question, I realized that the centrality of Rhetoric and the lack of attention to Poetics in the rhetoric history seminar is symptomatic of a much larger problem in the field.1 Poetics is not anthologized in The Rhetorical Tradition, the field’s canonical reference text. Consequently, it is not often cited in articles. The current field of composition studies separates rhetoric and poetics. Over time, scholars have thought of these two terms differently, contrasting one against the other, presenting rhetoric and poetics as separate modes of discourse. Rhetoric scholars today tend to define rhetoric as having to do with persuasion and action, whereas poetics is concerned with literature and beauty. For instance, in the 2011 book Rhetorical Style, Jeanne Fahnestock distinguishes between rhetorical persuasion and literary value. She claims that rhetoricians “focus on texts that influence the attitudes and actions of their audiences” while those who study literature “attend to texts (fiction, poetry, drama) prized ultimately for their aesthetic value and uniqueness” (12). However, in the foundations of rhetoric, this dichotomy between persuasion and beauty does not exist. The major contribution of Poetics is that Aristotle distinguishes poetic genres, but at the same time, he explains that these poetic genres are not separate from rhetorical, audience-based considerations. In fact, Aristotle argues that poetic works cannot be fully defined without taking into account their effect on the audience (Aristotle 33).2 The interrelated relationship between rhetoric and poetics is present through rhetorical history and we would do well to return to its origins in classical rhetoric. Aristotle is far from the only thinker who shows that rhetoric and poetics are inseparable. Quintilian encouraged students of rhetoric to analyze the style of literary

1 Aristotle’s mentor, Plato, was aware of the power of poetics. In Book X of The Republic, Plato banishes poets from the ideal city because their use of metaphorical language would deceive and “deform its audience’s minds” (344). 2 Aristotle also unites rhetoric and poetics through the concept of mimesis. The term is often understood simply as representation or imitation. However, scholar and translator Stephen Halliwell explains that for Aristotle, mimesis is not just a copy. It is both a representation of the material of everyday life and an enacted mode of poetry (22). When one reads Poetics, she will find that for Aristotle, mimesis is a thoroughly rhetorical idea because “mimetic artists represent people in action” (Aristotle 33).

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texts and speeches (Quintilian 107). He stated that the teacher of rhetoric could point out “the beauties of authors” so that each student could offer himself to the public as “a master of eloquence” (Quintilian 107). During the Renaissance, Henry Peacham published a handbook that contained the rhetorical figures, and demonstrated how beautiful elements of language function in persuasive discourse (Peacham). When one takes a wide view of rhetorical history, the division between rhetoric as persuasion and poetics as beauty simply does not hold up. Rhetoric and poetics are separated in the current field of composition, and I am calling for their reintegration. To do so, I present evidence to show how these two concepts were never separate in the first place. As a whole, I embrace the historical relationship of rhetoric and poetics as a guiding framework, with a special emphasis on reclaiming poetics. I find that the rhetorical term that best allows for reclaiming poetics is style. While there are several new books in the field that historicize style, none of these books adequately account for the field’s poetic traditions. Brian Ray’s 2015 reference guide on style acknowledges the poetic tradition, but briefly, and presents it as secondary to the rhetorical tradition. This is as an improvement over Paul Butler’s 2010 sourcebook on style, which does not mention poetics at all. Butler played it safe and excerpted from Aristotle’s Rhetoric. I credit these scholars for contributing valuable works to the current renaissance of style, but the field has not yet historicized style enough. If scholars do not continue to historicize style in relation to both poetics and rhetoric, the newfound interest in this concept will dissipate. I seek to complicate the methodologies by which scholars have been historicizing style. Butler’s Out of Style (2008) views the history of style as a clash between opposing forces that expand or constrict stylistic resources (25). Although the methodology of historical dialectic is commonly accepted among academic scholars, this is far from the only method of historical interpretation. In fact, a method that sets historical groups in opposition to one another to reveal difference will undoubtedly obscure similarities. It is more beneficial to theorize what stylistic thinkers share in common throughout rhetorical history. When reclaiming stylistic concepts, I note how these concepts have long, intricate, and interrelated histories. Eschewing a dialectical methodology, I focus on reclaiming key concepts, texts, and moments in the history of style. I draw inspiration from the pragmatist tradition in composition studies, notably utilized by Ann E. Berthoff. In Reclaiming the Imagination, Berthoff identifies important philosophical concepts and re-presents these concepts in order to inspire the work of writing theorists and teachers. I

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employ her methodology of reclaiming, but I reclaim different concepts. All in all, I reinvigorate the current discussion of the history of style by making two key interventions: reclaiming the figures and reclaiming visual theories in classical rhetoric. Ultimately, I do this work so that thinkers and writers can draw upon stylistic resources to create more beautifully striking and rhetorically persuasive writing. Throughout this dissertation, I call for a reintegration of the rhetorical and poetic dimensions of language and outline writing practices that serve that endeavor. When undertaking historical projects, key concepts undoubtedly come into play. For the purposes of this inquiry, the concept of style is essential. As a subordinate inquiry, I analyze the Romantic traditions that shape the field, as well. By rejecting Romanticism, the field has largely rejected poetics and style. It is important to reclaim the Romantics in order to bring style back in conversation. I observe that some of the field’s most daring writers and thinkers, including Ann Berthoff and Julie Jung, employ styles similar to those theorized and enacted by German Romantic philosophers.

Why Reconnect Rhetoric and Poetics? In Experimental Writing in Composition (2012), Patricia Suzanne Sullivan urges more interdisciplinary approaches in composition studies. Reflecting on her own research project, she explains, “On a good day, I was at the exciting intersection of creative writing, composition and rhetoric, and literary and cultural studies. On a bad day, I was somewhere in the cracks between…” (7-8). Composition studies has its roots in classical rhetoric, philosophy, and literature. This modern field of study is well established yet still exists mostly under the larger umbrella of English studies, which is shaped by long, complex traditions. In order to understand our current disciplinary problems, namely the rhetoric-poetic split, we need to look back at our shared historical origins. The history of style is shaped by interrelated arguments of classical rhetoricians Aristotle, Longinus, Demetritus, Quintilian, and Henry Peacham; literary scholars like and Sister Miriam Joseph; Romantic thinkers and theorists Samuel Taylor Coleridge and M.H. Abrams; German Romantic philosophers A.W. Schlegel and Freidrich Schlegel; and contemporary rhetoricians like I.A. Richards and Kenneth Burke to name a few. I believe in historicizing style via a combined historical, theoretical, and pedagogical methodology. In this way, I diverge from the historical dialectic so prominently employed in the field. Methodologically, I am influenced by the work of composition scholars Ann Berthoff,

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Byron Hawk, Sherrie Gradin, and Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald, who share a common interest in the romantics and how romantic theories influence composition. The field is shaped by romantic thinkers to a degree, but I assert that it can and should be even more so. Berthoff’s books draw upon romantic theories and break from traditional research methods and expectations. I seek to do the same. I view rhetorical and poetic traditions as being of equal importance, but composition has overlooked the poetic tradition. As a result, that is where we must focus our attention. The concepts of rhetoric and poetic have shifted in meaning throughout history, so much that the field’s current understanding of poetics is distorted. Historicizing this concept can free scholars from limitations, some of which are products of historical circumstances and others that are merely self-imposed. Much of the problem of the rhetoric and poetics separation is rooted in the 18th and 19th centuries. During that time, shifting economic structures and the democratization of the American university system caused rhetoric and writing to become associated with practical work. Literature became the domain of style, poetics, and beauty (Berlin; Connors; Graff; S. Miller; T. Miller; Scholes). As the field of composition emerged in the 1960s-1970s, scholars attempted to mend the dichotomy between rhetoric and poetics. James Britton’s 1975 The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18) studied writing abilities in children aged eleven to eighteen and assessed the major categories of discourse taught in schools. This important book does not separate the rhetorical and poetic dimensions of discourse. Britton contrasts the characteristics of transactional and poetic writing. He explains that transactional writing has immediate impact on an outside entity and takes the form necessary to achieve that end. As a result, it downplays the forms of language (93-94). Poetic writing, on the other hand, is a “verbal artifact” and form matters—“the arrangement is the construct” and attention to forms of language is essential to the reader’s response, and to the unity of the work (93-94). Britton notes that categories of writing often interact and overlap in multiple ways. For instance, “Fictional narratives may have a transactional function” (102). This is an important moment in which a modern theorist reclaims the rhetorical tradition of rhetoric and poetics not as separate categories, but as potentially at work at the same time in a composition. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the relationship between rhetoric and poetics grew tenuous. In the United States, shifting economic structures and the democratization of the

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American university system caused rhetoric and writing to become associated with practical work. In Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, James Berlin argues that shifting economic structures moved the aesthetic into the literary domain, while rhetoric was relegated to more mundane, mechanical concerns (7). Literature was set against the economic order and thought to be imaginative, whereas rhetoric was “practical” work and “rational and informative discourse” (7). Thus, rhetoric came to be associated with the practical and mechanistic, while poetics moved into literature (7). Many historians of English studies have noted this shift (Crowley; Graff; S. Miller; T. Miller; Scholes). Berlin’s project made an important contribution, but I ultimately disagree with his claim that “the attempt to introduce the aesthetic into ordinary daily experience in a material and social world made ugly by the ruthless pursuit of profit would eventually be declared impossible” (7). Not so. I read the rhetorical as poetic, and vice versa, and I assert that the key to understanding this relationship is style. Robert Connors published a well-known history in the field entitled Composition- Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy (1997). Connors observes that in the early twentieth century, “rhetoric was becoming seen as mechanical and reductive, unable to cope with the complexities of style” (275). On the other hand, literary study was seen as “capacious and flexible enough” to account for style (276). The separation of rhetoric and poetics was no longer merely a theoretical debate. It now had fundamental differences in materials and locations within the English department in the American university system. Connors’ focus on style in this passage is noteworthy due to its historical insight. At this historical moment, style was viewed as complex, while rhetoric was viewed as simple. In theory, the split between rhetoric and poetics is purely fictional. But the real material conditions and economic necessities of the early twentieth century resulted in a split that still needs to be mended. An influential piece of legislation may shed more light on the separation between rhetoric and poetics. The Morrill Act of 1862 helped establish many major state universities (Connors 9). This legislation reframed American higher education in relation to the constituencies it could serve (Parker 347). Historian William Riley Parker cites westward expansion, post-Civil war unease, industrialization, and “the impact of science” as factors that repositioned higher education during this time (347). It is important for scholars to conceptualize the economic and social phenomena that shaped our current situations. When referencing the rhetoric and poetics separation in English departments during the 18th and 19th centuries, historians must remember

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that this separation was not an isolated occurrence within the university. The separation is a symptom of larger political, economic, and social movements beyond the university, and a shifting mindset over what college was for, and how it should serve students.

Style as Key Concept Style is a well-known rhetorical concept and one of the five canons of classical rhetoric. It has witnessed a resurgence of interest in the past decade. Paul Butler’s Out of Style (2008) and Style in Rhetoric and Composition (2010) historicize style as a rhetorical concept and a pedagogical undertaking. Further contributions to the pedagogy of style include T. R. Johnson and Tom Pace’s Refiguring Prose Style (2005) and Chris Holcomb and Jimmie Killingsworth’s Performing Prose (2010). Mike Duncan and Star Medzerian Vanguri’s The Centrality of Style (2014) is a recent edited collection that incorporates perspectives on style from rhetoric, linguistics, literature, creative writing, cognitive psychology, and technical communication. Style is back. Style transcends the borders between the various sub-disciplines of English studies, which are more closely related than scholars often care to see. Just last year (2015), Brian Ray published a reference guide entitled Style: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy. His book presents a succinct survey of what is currently known about style and urges for new research on this topic. I reanimate the conversation by drawing from the work of these scholars. I appreciate Butler’s contributions, but I employ a different methodology. Instead of setting groups in opposition, I show what stylistic thinkers have in common at important historical moments. I take a cue from T.R. Johnson and Tom Pace, who demonstrate that research on style in composition studies can be greatly enhanced by including student voices. Much recent work on style in the field does not feature student voices. I include person-based research in this project because I believe it is important to not just talk about style, but to take it a step further and show what happens when stylistic theories are enacted in real teaching situations. Encompassing my approach to both theory and practice is an explicit reorientation to poetic traditions. This philosophical perspective has been largely overlooked in recent scholarship. By ignoring poetics, we forget our own history. Style serves as a useful concept for connecting rhetoric and poetics. Classical rhetoricians described style as a rhetor-audience relationship. Both Aristotle and Cicero wrote of stylistic

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ornament as integral to crafting rhetorically effective works (Joseph 40). Instead of an afterthought, or decoration, style is central to the overall effectiveness of a rhetorical composition. Longinus hoped the pleasures of style would be “useful to public men” (Longinus 154). Throughout history, rhetoricians have theorized style as eloquence or beauty, which is essential to persuasion. Henry Peacham notably outlines this view of style in his 1593 rhetorical manual The Garden of Eloquence. Hugh Blair continues the tradition with the 1783 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. New Rhetoric thinkers, such as Kenneth Burke, animate the connection between persuasion and eloquence as well (Burke 41, 125). It is nearly impossible to separate style theory from pedagogy. After all, Robert Scholes notes, historical accounts of English studies cannot distinguish between theory and teaching, since these histories rely upon the work of students and teachers (36). I reclaim style history because I see it as an effective means to create new pedagogical knowledge. Longinus, Quintilian, and Peacham make arguments about style that aim to inspire and assist students of rhetoric. In my opinion, the best projects have pedagogical aims. Style is our greatest resource as writers, scholars, and teachers. It is a way of restricting or freeing, a way of copying and creating, a way of teaching and entertaining. In fact, in The Orator, Cicero identifies three duties of the rhetorician: to teach, to delight, and to move (367). The problem is that rhetoric and poetics have been severed from their former historical relation. Style is key to understanding the relationship between these two terms. Recent conversations on style in the field assert the continued need to historicize style (Butler, Duncan and Vanguri, Ray). I believe it is important to both historicize style and show the implications of research for writing teachers. Scholars are often content to historicize a term and leave the pedagogical applications for someone else to figure out. I assume the stance of Roskelly and Ronald who believe theory needs to be connected to the work of the classroom, tested against practictioner knowledge and student experience. If theories only compete with each other for dominance and are never negotiated in practical situations, then the theories cannot be considered rigorous (11). I analyze the interplay of theory and classroom practice because they are mutually informing, helping to create a more well-informed and ethical picture. Style plays a central role in my work because it can serve as a means of understanding the sometimes harmonious and other times troubled relationship between rhetoric and poetics. In order to do this work, scholars need to seek effective methodologies that may very well deviate

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from the old and accepted standards. I believe the historical work will be more comprehensive and engaging if scholars aim to reclaim and synthesize rather than polarize and drive apart. It is crucial for composition studies as a field to be willing to entertain an interdisciplinary mindset. Our field did not emerge from nowhere. We must know our long history. Looking only within our respective academic sub-discipline, which developed over the past six decades, gives such a limited picture. Composition studies has not yet arrived. It is still forming. Style is vital to understanding where we came from and where we are going. In Refiguring Prose Style, editors T. R. Johnson and Tom Pace bring attention to an important problem in the field of composition studies. The editors cite Kate Ronald and Hephzibah Roskelly who lament that composition defines itself in opposition to other categories and in doing so, categories become hardened (ix). Johnson and Pace contend that categories limit how the field defines style—it is pedantic, it is not an exciting tool for meaning making (ix-x). Their book aims to rejuvenate the discussion by engaging historical, aesthetic, practical and theoretical issues around style. On a historical note, Pace observes that style was prominent in the field in the late 1960s-1970s, but as compositionists started to investigate social contexts, stylistics became associated with simplistic thinking (Johnson and Pace 22). Paul Butler also notes that since around 1985, the field of composition has tended to ignore style (Out of Style 131). Peter Elbow identifies a split between literary and composition studies, in which style is addressed only in literary studies (Butler, Out of Style 138). Butler does not see the schism as that clear cut; rather, he identifies the problem as composition professionals’ inability to articulate “the value of stylistic study in the field” (138). Both Elbow’s and Butler’s points are important. Elbow points out the existence of the problem. More recent work by Butler does substantial historical research to try to solve it. I make two necessary interventions. These include reclaiming the figures and returning to theories of the visual in classical rhetoric. These interventions recognize the combined power of rhetoric and poetics. I also heed the call of Roskelly and Ronald, who write in Reason to Believe (1998) that composition scholars need reasons to believe “in the larger purposes and immediate usefulness of the work of teaching writing” (1). These reclaimed concepts do not have much value until they are tested in practice. Concepts rooted in an ancient past are still incredibly useful to teachers today.

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Romanticism In the field of composition studies, scholars have claimed that Romanticism is essential for conceptualizing our work as theorists and teachers. Scholars including Ann E. Berthoff, Byron Hawk, Sherrie Gradin, James Kinneavy, and Hepzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald analyze Romantic thought in relation to writing. The extent to which Romantic thought should shape writing pedagogy has been subject to debate. Before mapping this connection, let us first understand the basic idea of Romanticism. Literary critic M. H. Abrams explains that a central idea of Romanticism is organicism.3 This idea celebrates growth as “an open-ended process, nurturing a sense of the promise of the incomplete, and the glory of the imperfect” (220). Growth and process are dynamic, and opposed to the alternative of fitting thought into rigid structures. Abrams notes that organicism is opposed to taste, “the clear, the concordant, and the complete” (220). Romantic thinkers used many metaphors of plants and the natural world to embody these ideas. In discussions of the sublime, the technique is often described as a repurposing of organic elements, similar to how a plant assimilates materials of earth and air (220). The imagination is viewed as a powerful synthesizing instrument. Abrams explains, “the synthetic power of imagination ‘reveals itself’” by reconciling “opposite or discordant qualities” (220). What results is “a complex inter-relation of living, indeterminate, and endlessly changing components” (22). These ideas of interrelation and indeterminacy are not always a natural fit for an academic field of study. Surely they were not an easy choice for a field like composition studies that was trying to establish itself and build upon the formulation of knowledge. Ann E. Berthoff is the thinker who does the most to forge the connection between the Romantics and the field of composition studies. She does this in a number of ways: by embracing chaos, by recovering Coleridge, and by urging writing practices that engage the relationship of writing and the visual. However, not all scholars in the field agreed with her methods. Debates between Berthoff and Janice Lauer reveal a historical clash between Romantic inquiry and a problem-solving approach. In these debates, Berthoff responds to Lauer’s argument that composition scholars should adopt a psychology-based approach to writing that would employ the use of heuristics (“Response” 415). It was a clash between “cognitive skills” and “creativity,” Berthoff siding

3 I cite Abrams because composition scholars have referenced his work when shaping philosophies of composition (Fulkerson 431).

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with the latter, and reviving Romantic thought in the process. Berthoff argued that student inquiry needn’t be cordoned into heuristics; it could be learned via the “creative imagination . . . the principal legacy of the Romantic movement” (“Response” 415). A commitment to the spirit of Romantic inquiry is present across all of her works. The Berthoff-Lauer debates were never reconciled. In A Counter-history of Composition, Byron Hawk explains, “[a]fter their lively exchange, Lauer continued to work with cognitive psychology and heuristics, while Berthoff focused on Coleridge and method” (18). Their philosophical differences developed into “two different trajectories” (18). These trajectories led to continued philosophical confusion within the field (18). These debates represent a very important moment in the history of the field. I wonder why these debates are not referenced very often in graduate scholarship. I think they should be. Without these debates, scholars in the field continue to create new knowledge absent of a well-informed historical-philosophical context. When chronicling the historical influence of the poetic tradition, it is important to also bring attention to the influence of the Romantics on composition studies. During the Romantic era, Coleridge articulated a position of rhetoric and poetics in unison by theorizing the activity of the creative mind (Abrams 115). While the poet Wordsworth had defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of feeling,” Coleridge took a different view and called a poem a means to an “object,” “purpose,” or “end” (117). Thus, Coleridge established the making of poems to be a deliberate, rhetorical act (117). The current field of composition is not particularly interested in romantic theories, but should be, since these theories offer useful perspectives for theorists and teachers. Berthoff refers to Coleridge as “our best guide in developing a philosophy of rhetoric” because he offers a theory of imagination that is useful for theorists and teachers of writing (28). Coleridge unites poetic creation and deliberate rhetorical craft. Roskelly and Ronald have also detailed the influence of romanticism on the field. In Reason to Believe, they outline a philosophical practice of romantic/pragmatic rhetoric. The authors assert pragmatism offers a method of explaining how principles of romanticism operate in the world (25). A romantic/pragmatic rhetoric relies upon the interplay of observation and reflection in order to systematize belief so it can be continually tested and rethought in changing contexts (137). Roskelly and Ronald also credit Sherrie Gradin for recognizing that composition as a field too often neglects to realize that romanticism is a theory of rhetoric with impulses toward action (36).

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In Romancing Rhetorics (1995), Gradin revises the romantic tradition so that it can account for what composition theorists and teachers currently know about writing. In an attempt to merge expressive and social epistemic writing, Gradin offers a social expressivist perspective. This perspective attempted to mediate between two conflicting pedagogical approaches. This perspective was important for the field at that time, but I believe Gradin’s contribution can be enhanced. While Gradin reclaims the Romantics, she focuses solely on the British Romantics and overlooks the German Romantics. I assert that German Romantic thinkers have much to offer the field of composition in terms of stylistic theory and experiment, which I discuss in the following section. In A Counter-History of Composition (2007), Byron Hawk asserts that the contemporary binaries of rhetoric and poetics reduce the complexity of writing. Hawk rereads Coleridge and notes that Coleridge found argument could take two possible forms, poetic or rhetorical. Both forms reveal errors in thinking—however, the poetic does so in a less confrontational and more pleasurable way than the rhetorical (53). Coleridge observed that rhetorical argumentation could be disturbing to audience members because it directly challenges their beliefs (53). Ultimately, Coleridge values poetic forms more than rhetorical arguments because he thinks poetic forms are more rhetorically effective (53). Drawing inspiration from Coleridge and Hawk, I call for a reintegration of the rhetorical and poetic elements of written language, finding that they often work in tandem. Romanticism has been highly contested in the field. While scholars agree that expressivism has origins in Romanticism, they disagree over what that means for the contemporary status of expressive writing. James Kinneavy asserts that Romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge influenced American expressive discourse, resulting in extraordinary political power (418). Kinneavy cites The Declaration of Independence as an example (418). Jeanette Harris, on the other hand, is more cautious. She points out that the term “expressive writing” is so misunderstood that it is barely useful (ix). A main reason Romanticism is viewed with wariness by some scholars is because it is widely regarded as the predecessor of expressivist writing (Johnson, “Apology” 39). This theoretical orientation toward writing has been subject to critique and not without reason (39). T. R. Johnson notes that Romanticism entered the field in the 1970s through scholars like Macrorie, Elbow, Coles, Murray, and Stewart, but by the 1980s, significant critiques had mounted (39).

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These critiques asserted that “these new Romantics . . . emphasize only cathartic experiences of composing, and they neglect the power of convention and the needs of the audience, promoting instead solipsism and anarchy,” Johnson explains (39). As he reads these critiques a decade after the fact, in the 1990s, Johnson notes that the “business” of writing instruction has changed, and the infinite experimentation and creative ecstasy often associated with Romanticism is no longer easily compatible (“Apology” 54). Even so, Johnson sees Romanticism as important and relevant to the field because it offers a theory of pleasure that counters the field’s sense that “it doesn’t matter and . . . it antagonizes the goal of making contact with the audience” (54). Johnson advocates for Romanticism as a theoretical tradition in the field; at the same time, he reveals that Romanticism has fallen from dominance and is viewed as less relevant to current theories of teaching writing (54). Reading Johnson’s essay nearly two decades after its publication, I do not find much Romantic theory left in the field, and so I aim to recover it. Of Romantic thinkers in composition studies, Berthoff is highly relevant, so I return my discussion to her work. In “Learning the Uses of Chaos”, Berthoff challenges common assumptions about writing—namely, that writing is merely a tool, and that it is “sequential or linear” (Making 69). This essay theorizes writing as a process of making meaning (69). “Meanings don’t just happen,” Berthoff writes, “we make them; we find and form them” (69). Where do these meanings come from? We shape them “out of a chaos of images, half-truths, remembrances, syntactic fragments, from the mysterious and unformed” (70). It is not hard to see Berthoff embracing the spirit of Romantic thinkers and furthering their ideas by placing them in the context of the writing classroom. Shaping words from a chaos of images acknowledges a dynamic, incomplete system from which we make knowledge. Berthoff frequently draws inspiration from Coleridge. In the 1978 book Forming, Thinking, Writing, she refers to Coleridge as “our best guide in developing a philosophy of rhetoric” (64). Composition scholars have noted Berthoff’s Romantic influences. Sherrie Gradin points out that Berthoff borrows extensively from Coleridge when she describes the imagination as “the shaping spirit,” “a doer, an agent,” and the “form-finding form-creating power” (Gradin 39). I theorize how Berthoff borrows from Coleridge in chapter three.

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German Romanticism While scholars in the field like Sherrie Gradin and Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald present theories based on British and American romantics, the potential contributions of the German Romantics have largely been ignored. The German Romantics can offer us a more complex understanding of certain useful terms. One of these terms is the sublime, which I detail at greater length in chapter three. Coleridge was influenced by A. W. Schlegel, the forerunner of German Romanticism (Abrams 218). Schlegel’s critiques are useful for understanding the concept of the sublime. In fact, the only way to understand Schlegel’s concept is by considering his critiques of fellow philosophers. German scholars Andreas Michel and Assenka Oksiloff note Schlegel’s critiques of several thinkers including philosopher Edmund Burke (160-164). Schlegel critiques Burke for presenting a concept of the sublime that is too much an affect prompted by nature. Burke’s version of the sublime is too closely identified with “the sensual and physiological level of experience,” Michel and Oksiloff explain (160). Schegel is unsatisfied with the sublime being theorized as an overpowering feeling. In my reading of Schlegel, I note that he is unsatisfied with Immanuel Kant’s definition of the sublime as well. He finds Kant’s view of the sublime is too focused on conceptual resolution. The Kantian sublime is “a conflict within the interests of our sensibility [Sinnlichkeit] that dissolves in harmony with higher faculties” (A. W. Schlegel 194). Schlegel resists this explanation. Whereas Kant wants the sublime to dissolve, Schlegel does not (Michel and Oksiloff 163). Rather, he wants to harness the disruptive power of the sublime and for the beautiful and sublime to be in union (Michel and Oksiloff 163). For Schlegel, the beautiful becomes “a symbolic representation of the infinite” (A. W. Schlegel 209). I reference these philosophical debates not just because they are historically interesting. The definitions of concepts limit or enhance what thinkers can do. If sublimity is a strong feeling (E. Burke), one can merely experience it or describe it. But if the sublime is a conflict within the senses (Kant), that is a different way of comprehending. And finally, if the sublime is a symbolic representation, that is different still. Edmund Burke’s concept of the sublime does not give us much to do other than to be overpowered and reflect upon it. Kant categorizes the sublime as an intellectual resolution. Schlegel invites us to theorize the sublime for what it represents, and how it joins with other concepts, like beauty.

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The German Romantics can contribute significantly not only to our understanding of the concept of the sublime, but also to a theory of style. German Romantic thinkers articulated the desire to resist coherence, favoring instead the philosophical fragment. These writers influence composition scholars more than the field has noted thus far. I note a heretofore-unrecognized historical trajectory that illustrates how the German Romantic writers influenced modern thinkers like Berthoff. It is not a leap to say that Berthoff’s Reclaiming the Imagination (1984) unfolds in the style of influential German Romantic writers. I notice this likely because I have always had sympathies for the partial and the unfinished. I am not the only composition scholar to think this way. In Revisionary Rhetoric (2005), Julie Jung writes in a multigenre style, predicated on the idea that readerly confusion might be useful (3). By choosing this style, Jung is interested in deliberately “delaying clarification of meaning so that differences can be heard, explored, and understood” (3). It’s a risky project that might not be understood; Jung writes that she was angry at a colleague who described an interest in multigenre texts as “cute” (xvi). But Jung persevered, weaving together academic and personal voices, and even excerpting from a diary she wrote in second grade (111). When Jung describes these creative risks, I find that she sounds incredibly reminiscent of the German Romantics. She explains, “[f]or most of my life, I have been energized intellectually and personally by the disruptions that result when I put two ‘wrong’ things together” (xi). By resisting coherence, and deliberately forcing ideas together that cannot be resolved, Jung enacts a sort of German Romantic project without explicitly mentioning it. Nancy Welch, too, celebrates the unfinished. In a 1998 address to the Conference on College Composition and Communication entitled “No Apology: Challenging the ‘Uselessness’ of Creative Writing,” she probes the question of teaching creative writing in composition courses.4 Welch cites a student’s unfinished story, claiming that its unfinished state creates “uncomfortable awareness” and motivates “the desire to discover other options for this character and for herself” (Welch). According to Welch, student writers can use writing to explore, to wonder (Welch). She is careful to point out, however, that students are not experiencing “a wild, unmitigated freedom with no boundaries, no rules, no principles of reality to get in the way of

4 I cite Nancy Welch’s address at the 1998 CCCC for its compelling language and ideas. The address was published at greater length in an article in JAC a year later, but the style of that piece is more obfuscating and, in my view, not as powerful.

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pure inventive pleasure” (Welch). Rather, students continue to test boundaries, negotiate, shape, and reshape stories (Welch). The German Romantics allow one to see this style of writing as part of a longer literary tradition. Friedrich Schlegel, A. W. Schlegel’s brother and fellow Romantic theorist, asserts that “many a product whose coherence is never doubted, is … rather only a fragment” (F. Schlegel 317). Though a work may appear finished, it is “completely unnatural” and constructed to create “the illusion of unity” (F. Schlegel 317-318). Perhaps we strive for unified works, he muses, because we are driven by “the fear of being ridiculous” (F. Schlegel 318). When reading the contributions of the German Romantics, one finds partial essays and catalogs of thoughts— written that way on purpose. This method is referred to as the German Romantic fragmentary imperative (Strathman). I observe an important connection between the German Romantic fragmentary imperative and Berthoff’s 1984 Reclaiming the Imagination. That text is, after all, a collection of philosophical fragments for writing teachers. Berthoff arranges pieces from various thinkers and artists into a collection of philosophical thought. One passage does not logically follow the other; selections are purposefully incomplete. Theorists in the field who have definitive alternate styles, like Berthoff and Geoffrey Sirc, show the valuable contributions of stylistic experiments. Their respective texts Reclaiming the Imagination and Composition as a Happening reveal alternatives to the disciplinary norms by embracing thinkers and artists who don’t fit neatly into the disciplinary mainstream. Later in this dissertation, I show how students rethink what counts as “composition” by appreciating the incomplete, the in-process, the invented pieces of writing on the way to becoming an essay. Forgoing unity in favor of learning “the uses of chaos,” Berthoff is far from the only thinker in the field whose roots stem from German Romantic thought (Reclaiming 262). John T. Gage employs a similar strategy when he concludes his 1980 article “Philosophies of Style and Their Implications for Composition” with juxtaposed epigrams that express contrary sentiments. He asserts that “we feel no compulsion to have to chose [sic] between them” (622). Tracing the history of the concept of the sublime reveals a long rhetorical history—a history we do not want to lose. While this history begins with classical rhetoric, it makes forays into the realms of the

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literary. Tracking this concept reveals the complex interplay of the rhetorical, philosophical, and literary traditions that shaped our field. We must not forget our rich and overlapping histories.5

Overview of Chapters The subsequent chapters of this project address the problem of the rhetoric-poetic split in relation to theories and pedagogies of style. Since this is a large problem incapable of being solved in one project alone, I work on the problem by making two interventions. The first is that I reclaim the figures in rhetorical history, as tools that rely upon the connection of rhetoric and poetics and have been used by humans for over two thousand years. The second intervention is that I reclaim the visual traditions in rhetorical history. This includes recovering a set of visual concepts—the imagination, the sublime, ekphrasis, and enargeia—that have long inspired writers to forge the connections between language and the visual, the persuasive and the beautiful, the controlled and the chaotic. In chapter two, “Reclaiming the Figures,” I recover the figures as part of the larger project of historicizing style. The figures are prominent throughout rhetorical history, appearing in manuals for rhetors in a systematic fashion. The figures are simultaneously artful and strategic, beautifully striking and persuasively deployed. I draw attention to four important texts that span rhetorical history. These include Rhetorica ad Herennium (1st century BCE), The Garden of Eloquence (1593), Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), and The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936). The first three are rhetorical manuals designed to teach the art of rhetoric with special focus on the figures. The fourth is not a manual, but offers insight into the complexity of metaphor, which is central to understanding how the figures function. This chapter offers close readings and critical assessments of each selected text’s contribution and value. Chapter three, “Reclaiming Visual Theories” recovers visual traditions in classical rhetoric history. Classical rhetoricians theorized the connections between language and image. Their theories manifest in concepts and techniques that are useful for reconnecting rhetoric and poetics in theory and practice today. In this chapter, I reclaim four important concepts: the imagination, the sublime, ekphrasis, and energia. This chapter also considers how to make these

5 The question of what role literature should play in composition courses has been vigorously debated, but Berthoff explains that these debates miss the point. The point of teaching reading and writing is teaching interpretation, “what goes with what, how this goes with that” (“How” 85). By teaching writing, we are teaching “ways of making meaning, ways of interpreting our interpretations” (“How” 85).

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concepts teachable. Specifically, I outline heuristics for two writing practices, formal analysis and ekphrasis, that invite students to simultaneously invent and probe their thinking, to shuttle between visual observations and written descriptions. Moving even more significantly from historical research to the writing classroom, chapter four, “An Aesthetic Approach to Teaching Composition” examines what happens when these classical tools are taught as central to an advanced writing pedagogy. This chapter analyzes both interview data and student writing. The study assesses the effectiveness of teaching the figures to improve student writing, and generates activities to invite classical visual rhetorical activities into the current classroom. Ultimately, I find that teaching the figures as tools for revision improves student writing, and teaching visual concepts via writing exercises expands students’ views of what counts as “composition.” Finally, in chapter five, “Implications for Pedagogy and Research,” I discuss the potential of a reintegration of rhetoric and poetics for writing teachers. This chapter calls upon teacher- scholars to not forget our rich, complex history that is so closely entwined with literature and philosophy. To look narrowly at our own recent disciplinary history misses so much. Because our shared history is so vast, I remind us once again of a few powerful tools, strategies, and activities that mend the frayed connection of rhetoric and poetics. This approach is not radical, nor is it anything truly novel. What it does is remind us that what’s old is new again. Scholars and students alike can still successfully deploy these powerful rhetorical tools. Through revised historical readings and classroom findings, I seek to inspire scholars and teachers to reengage with style.

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Chapter Two: Reclaiming the Figures

In this chapter, I reclaim the figures as part of the larger project of historicizing style. The figures are devices of figurative language contained in a word or phrase. The contemporary field of composition studies is conflicted over style, and subsequently, the figures. On one hand, style has roots in classical rhetoric, our domain. On the other hand, style has come to be more closely associated with the literary. Many historians in the field of composition studies have shown that the shift of style into literature was a historical accident. As I argued in my last chapter, this shift resulted from changing economic structures of the 18th and 19th centuries and the democratization of the American university system, which caused rhetoric and writing to become associated with practical work while literature became the realm of style, poetics, and beauty (Berlin; Connors; Graff; S. Miller; T. Miller; Scholes). The historical shift of rhetoric toward the practical, and literature toward the beautiful, created long lasting implications, bestowing upon us a set of inherited assumptions that we would do well to deconstruct. Are the figures firmly in the realm of the beautiful, of literature, not having much to do with rhetoric today? In Rhetorical Style (2011), Jeanne Fahnestock notes that the figures have become “virtual markers of the literary” despite the fact that they were outlined in great detail in rhetorical manuals for over two thousand years (12). It is worth remembering that rhetors discussed the figures as having a persuasive function. “Their telos was their communicative power,” Fahnestock explains (12). By engaging in the work of historicizing the figures, I am part of a lineage of composition historians. In Textual Carnivals, Susan Miller explains as composition emerged as a field of study, composition historians were faced with a choice of which stance to take when authoring histories of the field (36). They could choose to see composition as a weed, wild and untamed, or as a cultivated fruit, developed gradually and artfully over an extended period of time (36). In search of prestige, they chose the latter. As such, composition historians have consistently searched for beginnings in “a buried ancient past” in order to explain “the field’s distinctness and [to] argue for its value” (36). Miller deems these versions of historical accounts “neoclassical,” offering Edward P.J. Corbett’s revival of Aristotle in Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student as a prime example (36-37). She is critical of these accounts. I find them impossible to ignore. Such historical accounts built the foundation of the field, so scholars cannot

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help but engage them. Corbett’s contribution was in many ways nothing new; many rhetoricians have asserted that classical rhetoric should maintain unchanged from thinkers like Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian (37). Rhetoric texts are peppered with references to the classical orators with earnest instructions for readers to follow in their ancient footsteps. Scottish rhetorician Hugh Blair lamented the lost “vehemence” of classic orators, and showed how to imitate them and recover their techniques (37). Of course, classical orators were concerned with delivering speeches, and their techniques were for speech, accordingly. Over time, the ideas in these classical texts became canonized in classroom settings for students to practice in writing (109). From the eighteenth century to the twentieth, rhetoric historians argued that these texts could apply to writing just as well as speech (109). This shift is evident in the writings of Corbett, Blair, and I.A. Richards (Miller). I too am interested in what classical rhetoricians have to offer us. I am especially committed to recovering the figures because I believe they are very valuable rhetorical resources. This chapter focuses on reclaiming the figures. I have observed that current discussions of the figures in the field generally fall into two camps. There are scholars who study the figures for the purposes of enhancing rhetorical analysis of texts; others want to actually teach students to write the figures. Of these two groups, I fall into the latter. But the information set forth by the former proves to be quite helpful and is certainly worth exploring. For two important contributions to the discussion of how the figures can enhance rhetorical analysis, we can look to Jeanne Fahnestock’s 2011 Rhetorical Style and Laura Micciche’s 2004 article “Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar.” Fahnestock’s book is dense, and based on my assessment, not designed to be read in one sitting, or in order, front-to-back, for that matter. Fahnestock compiles so much rhetorical history and theory, and gives extensive examples from published texts and well-known speeches in order to show how rhetoricians may identify various stylistic decisions. The book addresses word choice, sentences, interactive dimensions of language, and passage constructions. While Fahnestock’s work is useful, she draws a problematic distinction, and that is the distinction between rhetorical and literary stylistics. Fahnestock writes, “In contrast to rhetoricians who focus on texts that influence the attitudes and actions of their audiences, those who study literature attend to texts (fiction, poetry, drama) prized ultimately for their aesthetic value and uniqueness” (Fahnestock 12). This distinction is untrue and does not hold up. Rhetoric

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and literature were always closely related; Fahnestock notes that students learned rhetoric by reading literature (12). I want to point out that literary works are not purely aesthetic—they too are addressed to audiences, audiences of readers. Fahnestock admits that for centuries, literary texts were used for rhetorical study, but she claims that the current theoretical aim of rhetorical versus literary stylistics is different. Fahnestock holds the opinion that literary stylistics is concerned with celebrating uniqueness, whereas rhetorical stylistics is about the identification of functional features of language that occur repeatedly in various contexts (12). I think it is a straw man dismissal of the importance of literature to rhetorical study; literature is categorized and set aside too quickly. Fahnestock repeatedly claims her “primary allegiance” to the rhetorical tradition, but as I see it, this comes at the expense of giving due credit to our overlapping histories, rhetoric and literature. I do find aspects of Fahnestock’s book valuable because she shows how rhetors deliberately use the figures in noticeable ways for rhetorical purpose. This can be useful for teachers who want to show students examples of the figures in context. Politicians give us some of the most obvious and frequent examples of the figures in use. For example, Fahnestock cites Joe Biden’s use of the figure correctio in his speech at the 2008 Democratic Convention: You know, folks, that’s the America that George Bush has left us. And that’s the America we’ll continue to get if George—excuse me, if John McCain is elected president of the United States of America. Freudian slip. Freudian slip (139). When using this figure, the rhetor makes a deliberate mistake and then retracts it for emphasis (139-140). Fahnestock notes that Biden’s “mistake” voiced a major argument of the Democratic campaign—that despite electing a new candidate, the overall agenda would be more of the same. This is a compelling example of how a figure can be used for effective communication and emphasis in current contexts. Interestingly, Biden’s use of correctio is a textbook example from Rhetorica ad Herennium, which was compiled in first century B.C.E. (140). Rhetorica ad Herennium identifies correctio as a retraction of what was just said, done on purpose to draw the audience’s attention (319). The manual explains the working of this figure: “if you had at once arrived at this word, the grace neither of the thought nor of the word would have been noticed” (Rhetorica ad Herennium 321). Biden’s example, highlighted by Fahnestock, shows the longstanding and continued influence of the figures when used by rhetors to communicate

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persuasive ideas. When teaching the figures, we must view a complex picture of the figures as devices used by humans for thousands of years. Traditionally, the figures are addressed in rhetorical manuals in a systematic fashion, separated by tropes and schemes. Despite her avowed adherence to the rhetorical tradition, Fahnestock breaks from tradition in this regard. Her text does not put forth the tropes and schemes alone. She addresses these figures as part of a larger discussion of word choice and sentence structure. She does not identify them on their own terms. This is a challenging text to use to understand figures because there is much additional discussion of lexical fields, geographical language variances, grammatical rules, entomological arguments, and so on. I suppose this text serves as an important resource for contemporary rhetorical style analysts. But it is not very helpful for scholars and teachers who want to revive the figures in teaching undergraduate students. Fahnestock explains, “This book has language analysis and not language production as its goal, so it is not a ‘how-to’ manual” (18). Scholars and teachers of writing are still left wondering how to teach and enact style beyond something that is analyzed and studied. Laura Micciche advocates for teaching rhetorical grammar as opposed to style (717). She describes style as the study and practice of “extraordinary” use of language, whereas rhetorical grammar tracks the “ordinary” use of language (195). Therefore, she prefers rhetorical grammar. Micciche does not discuss the figures here, but she does issue a call to analyze small decisions like pronoun use. I agree with Micciche that style invites the extraordinary use of language. My question: why wouldn’t we want to teach students something extraordinary? In seriousness though, I think this comes down to a semantic debate between style and grammar. Ultimately, Micciche tries to make rhetorical grammar sound like something new when it is not. If one doubts whether Micciche’s call for rhetorical grammar is really a continuation of style, simply look at her suggestion for how to practice rhetorical grammar in commonplace books, which have had a significant role in style pedagogy for centuries (195-196). An advantage to this newly named “rhetorical grammar” is it may attract scholars who would otherwise ignore the contribution because they have negative associations with style because it sounds too much like literature (196). Micciche suggests that analyzing word choice and sentence structure can help us understand how we are positioned in relation to others (195). Micciche’s theory of rhetorical grammar might best be seen as the culmination of centuries of style pedagogy; however, she ignores some of the more enjoyable and artistic aspects of the stylistic tradition.

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Chris Holcomb, another style scholar interested in the rhetorical analysis approach to the figures, does discuss the figures in high regard. In the article “Anyone Can Be President,” Holcomb singles out Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence as the richest account of the figures because it identifies over two hundred figures, analyzes them, and describes how they function in social contexts (74). Holcomb writes that, “the figures help define and manage relationships among speaker, listeners, and subject matter” (74). It is true, but what is even more powerful, in my opinion, is that The Garden of Eloquence shows us how to enact figures, as writers in our own right. Several key scholars discuss teaching the figures, and these are most important to the aims of this project, which has pedagogical goals in mind. Surprisingly, while many scholars publish books and articles about style pedagogy, few deal explicitly with the figures. T.R. Johnson and Tom Pace’s book of collected essays, the 2005 Refiguring Prose Style, does not deal with figurative language in any sort of detailed or sustained way. One would think the figures would be addressed as a key aspect of style pedagogy within an edited collection. The authors explain that style means different things to different people. For some people it is individual, but for others it is a broad, collective system or something like a discourse (vii). The authors’ slippery definition of style leads these scholars to define style in different ways at different times, relying too much on the definitions of others, and at times using style as a jumping off point for exploring other timely ideas. The more recent edited collection in the field, Mike Duncan and Star Medzerian Vanguri’s 2013 The Centrality of Style, features three essays that touch on the figures. Nora Bacon claims that teaching the figures is important because it allows students to hear the beauty of sentences (187). When students read examples of other writers having fun with academic writing, then they feel that they can, too (188). Essays by two other writers, Denisa Stodola and William FitzGerald, go into greater depth. In the essay “Using Stylistic Imitation in Freshman Writing Classes,” Stodola draws from her analysis of Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s medieval rhetorical treatises in order to develop current style pedagogy. She wants to teach students in a business and technical writing course to use the figures in writing situations. She describes figures of thought as “building blocks” and “strategies” that help the writer convey ideas as effectively as possible (64). Stodola outlines nine figures of thought on a worksheet and distributes it to students. While she mentions that

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many other figures have been catalogued in rhetorical handbooks, she explains that the worksheet is a conscious selection of those figures that will be most applicable for students who encounter business and technical writing situations (64). These include figures like accumulation, which gathers and restates details that had been previously articulated; exemplum, which refers to citing the words or actions of a person in authority; and portrayal, which is giving relevant description of physical or visual characteristics (65). Like Stodola, I believe that matching figures to the genres and situations that students will encounter is very helpful. It makes the figures immediately applicable. Stodola points out that she does not merely teach the figures and then ask students to insert them into writing (64-65). “[T]he act of writing cannot be distilled into steps,” Stodola emphasizes (65). She cites Nancy Sommers’s claim that revision is recursive, and sums up Sommers’s point that “more experienced writers revise as they compose” (66). Stodola’s goals for teaching students the figures were to see if they could use them, and what effects there would be on students’ drafts (67). She asks students to use the figures assignment when writing their initial drafts because she wants to see if they can simultaneously invent and revise (67). Students reported that they found it a difficult assignment, but the majority said it was useful because it helps them to organize their thoughts (67). Stodola is a great example of a scholar who is well read in classical style pedagogy, specifically the figures, and genuinely works to translate that ancient knowledge into pedagogical practice. FitzGerald contributes an essay that also discusses teaching the figures in great detail, entitled “Stylistic Sandcastles: Rhetorical Figures as Composition’s Bucket and Spade.” FitzGerald discusses “Go Figure,” an elective course he taught on style that focuses on the figures. His chapter begins, “Aposiopesis? Metalepsis? Zeugma? What did my students think when first introduced to these and other terms? I know because they told me. ‘How do you expect us to remember them? They’re all Greek!’” (37). Student reactions and teacher self- reflexivity figure prominently into this insightful essay. FitzGerald confesses to the students that he doesn’t remember the obscure names of all the figures either. But, he is confident that he can convince students there is much to be gained from being able to recognize figures and employ them as useful tools for their own writing (37). FitzGerald describes his course as like traveling via time machine to “scenes of classical rhetorical education” (37). He insists it is “not so very strange” (37). He sees his course as an extension of rhetorical traditions discussed in works like

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Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee’s Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students and Edward P.J. Corbett’s Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (37). I agree with FitzGerald that the figures are an undervalued resource for composition pedagogy. However, I think he holds an overly optimistic view about their current place in writing pedagogy. FitzGerald states that style scholars are constantly seeking to reclaim the figures, but the figures “need not be reclaimed” because they are alive and well and always have been (38). I find that the figures have been all but forgotten and are in great need of reclaiming. If they are alive and well, it is only because they occasionally occur organically. I think we as scholars and teachers have all but lost the ability to name and deliberately employ the figures strategically. FitzGerald thinks scholars and teachers need to understand ornament in order to understand the figures. We have to understand ornament as what it used to mean, not how we think of it now—as an afterthought. To reacquaint us with the history of ornament, he borrows from Fahnestock’s account in Rhetorical Figures in Science. In that work, Fahnestock reminds us that ornament was not merely decorative. It was seen as forceful, and this is because rhetoric was associated with speech more than writing (38). Ornament was like “armament,” the dress a soldier puts on for battle (38). FitzGerald surmises that, in this view of ornament, the figures could assist in the “tactical deployment of arguments” (38). Metaphors of battle may be more relevant to Greek and Roman rhetoricians than today’s composition student. Even so, FitzGerald states that disappearing interest in the figures has resulted in “a significant loss to fluency” with consequently, “a corresponding loss of agency” (39). Luckily, he claims, reintegrating the figures into composition pedagogy is not that hard. FitzGerald suggests professors can integrate the figures into first year writing if they focus on about half a dozen figures (53). He claims that when students learn and practice figures, they begin to see how figures function as “an open-ended, yet not arbitrary, set of linguistic moves” (49). FitzGerald stresses writing about figures, not just writing figures. It is important for students to not only identify the figures, but to understand how they function in discourse. When I mention teaching the figures, colleagues tend to express doubts that these stylistic activities can fit in. Style can seem like a superfluous addition to a writing curriculum already defined by many requirements and outcomes. But I think we can and should make room for style. For those who may be skeptical of why we should teach the figures in today’s digital

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classrooms, FitzGerald has some advice. He thinks that the figures are relevant in a multimodal era because “textual, oral and visual performance have become open to new understanding” (38). Figures haven’t disappeared; they continue to appear across new media. Media like video games, graphic novels, and experimental theater dazzle us with spectacle. At the same time, these are adaptations of writing. New media still showcase interaction within rhetorical situations. Any time we are communicating, the figures come into play, regardless of medium. In addition to pedagogical practice, FitzGerald has more to offer us in understanding the history of teaching the figures. He reminds us that the shift from the production of texts to the critical reception of texts has had lasting consequences (46). The modern focus on textual reception led to the privileging of the tropes over the schemes (46). The tropes, or departures from literal meaning, were essential to literature, and were valued over schemes. Style became stylistics, a separate area of study (46). The schemes were left to the poets, but no longer the rhetoricians. Along with the privileging of the tropes, another consequence of the new importance of the critical reception of texts was that the canon of style narrowed (FitzGerald 46). Hugh Blair witnessed the shift from composition of speeches to critical reading of texts. In his 1783 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Blair limited the number of figures worthy of study to twelve. A second key historical moment in the reduction of the figures is Kenneth Burke’s 1941 essay “Four Master Tropes.” In this essay, Burke outlines what he determines to be the four most important tropes—metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. This essay deals not at all with the figurative uses of language but rather with the interrelations between the four selected tropes, how they “shade into one another” (Burke 421). Of these four, metaphor was designated most important to communicating figurative thought as something distinct from literal expression (FitzGerald 46). Burke implies metaphor is the most important trope since language evolves via metaphorical extension (425). Metaphor is “a device for seeing something in terms of something else” (421). Metaphor reveals “the thisness of a that or a thatness of a this” (421-422). Metaphor selects a point of view, it shapes perspective, it constructs reality. Burke presents the four master tropes again in the 1969 edition of A Grammar of Motives, in the appendix. While Burke theorized the tropes in a novel way, his methodological approach likely played a significant role in reducing the attention of rhetorical scholars to a more select number of tropes.

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This historical insight offers a glimpse into the situation we find ourselves in today. There is a reason why many students know about metaphors but do not know about the schemes. It is because the schemes were slowly phased out over time as rhetorical study became focused on close reading literature. FitzGerald explains that for the current student, “[e]xposure to the figures, if it comes, comes in encounters with a small number of critical terms for the close reading of literature” (46). This impacts which figures students have heard about. “Students typically have heard of metaphor, but not synecdoche, alliteration but not anaphora,” he explains (47). Thus, I am seeking to reclaim the figures, which were lost due to a series of historical accidents. Contemporary rhetorical scholars may have troubling placing the figures in rhetorical history. After all, the figurists are not honored as a distinct group of thinkers in our field’s canonical reference texts, like The Rhetorical Tradition. The majority of scholars in the field will complete rhetoric seminars without ever giving thought to figurists as rhetoricians in their own right. This is because of the way the field coheres around historical information and reifies it over time. Historical reinterpretations and reclamations remain on the fringe. Scholars must consider noted style historian Sister Miriam Joseph’s 1949 book Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language. In this book, Joseph outlines the three major groups of 16th century rhetoricians. She identifies: the traditionalists, who adhered to the canons of rhetoric and the rules of logic; the ramists, who departed from the Aristotelian tradition in terms of pedagogical method; and the figurists, who were interested in the figures (tropes and schemes) (16-18). The influence of the traditionalists and ramists is well documented in our field (Enos; Murphy, Short; Ong; Walpole). We tend to overlook the figurists, despite the fact that the use of the figures is a thoroughly rhetorical undertaking. Joseph draws attention to Henry Peacham as central scholar among the figurists—those rhetoricians who were specifically focused on the workings of the figures. Joseph understands that some readers might be skeptical of putting so much emphasis on the figures, but she claims the figures are the most powerful tools of rhetorical persuasion. She admits that the figurists may appear to be concerned with style at the expense of omitting the four other traditional parts of classical rhetoric (17). However, a closer examination of their work “shows that their concept of figures is so inclusive as to omit little of what has ever been included in a theory of composition” (17-18). How could it be that understanding the figures is tantamount to a whole theory of

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composition? The figures are means of exercising modes of thought. As Joseph explains, “the approximately two hundred figures of speech which they distinguish represent an analysis of practically every aspect of grammar, logic, and rhetoric” (17-18). The figures, those beautiful tools of persuasion, can be reclaimed. Style is sometimes viewed as mere ornamentation or decoration. Do the hard work of composing and then throw in some style afterward. Such a view does not acknowledge that style is central to composing and thought. Joseph explains, “It is difficult for the modern reader to keep in mind the ancient and the Renaissance conception of ornament as something more integral than we conceive it to be” (39). Both Aristotle and Cicero wrote of ornament as integral to crafting rhetorically effective works (40). Style was not an afterthought, or decoration, but rather central to the overall effectiveness of a rhetorical composition. In order to reclaim the figures, I draw our attention to four important texts that span rhetorical history. These include Rhetorica ad Herennium (1st century BCE), The Garden of Eloquence (1593), Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), and The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936). The first three are rhetorical manuals designed to teach the art of rhetoric to those who aim to use it, with special attention given to the figures. The fourth is not a manual, but offers insight into the complexity of metaphor, which is central to our understanding of how the figures function. In each section, I introduce the text, offer my close reading, and critically assess the given text’s contribution and value.

Rhetorica ad Herennium Rhetorica ad Herennium (1st century BCE) is a Roman text written in Latin, a technical manual presented in a systematic formal arrangement (Caplan vii). Like many ancient rhetorical treatises, it is not a book, but rather a collection of lecture notes (xxiii). The work is attributed to an unknown author because scholars have no evidence to determine the real author (xiv). Authorship had previously been attributed to Cicero, but scholars are in consensus that that attribution was incorrect (ix). The work is organized into four books. The first two books discuss invention in judicial causes (Caplan xix). The third considers invention in deliberative and epideictic speaking (xix). Book 4 is about style. The translator, Harry Caplan, describes Book 4 as “the oldest systematic treatment of Style in Latin” as well as the oldest inquiry into the subject after Aristotle (xx). The

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author of the ad Herennium gives more attention to style than to any other aspect of rhetoric, and discusses the figures in great detail (xx). Caplan notes that this extensive explication of the figures is more in line with Isocrates than Aristotle (xx). While the descriptions are presented in a somewhat dry style, the examples are vivid and engaging (xxxii-xxxiii). Caplan admits that Rhetorica ad Herennium does not offer the philosophical insight of Aristotle's Rhetoric, but that does not take away from its excellence as a “practical treatise” used by “countless Roman orators” (xxxiv). Caplan sees the text as being useful to the modern student of the art of rhetoric (xxxiv). It is important to remember that these ancient manuals were pedagogical resources. I think scholars and historians have a tendency to canonize hallmarks of Western philosophical thought—large, dense, influential books—which are important but there is something to be said for the importance of the rhetorical manual as well. Caplan states that we should assign value especially to Book 4, the book on style, which exercised influence over the art of rhetoric for hundreds of years (xxxiv). The German rhetoric historian Spengel called Book 4 "a book more precious than gold” (Caplan xxxiv). Book 4 opens by discussing how to achieve mastery of style. To achieve mastery of style, one must first study it. The ad Herennium explains one must be able to “discern what has been skillfully written by others” (241). However, that will only get one so far. Mastery cannot come from recognition alone. A person needs to demonstrate ability beyond recognition of examples. Nothing proves mastery more than writing with style yourself: “a far better proof of this mastery is to write artistically yourself” (241). The manual cautions against merely reproducing the models of others. Rhetors must be more than good choosers of models; they must write well themselves: “the facile chooser of examples will not necessarily write with skill himself” (241). Writers must strive to earn respect. They can do this by becoming worthy of being chosen as models (243). In fact, Book 4 begins by thoroughly explicating the absurdity of relying upon others’ examples. Though it was a common practice, the ad Herennium points out its obvious critique. The author of the ad Herennium writes, “Now what do you mean? You are writing a treatise of your own; you are creating new precepts for us; you cannot confirm these yourself; so you borrow examples from others” (237). If one gathered the texts of ancient rhetoricians and removed the examples from others, the author would have nothing left to claim as his own (237). In further critique, he notes that rhetorical manuals claim to teach the art, but often set forth

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examples from those who are ignorant of the art (239). The reliance on others’ examples delegitimizes the argument, this author claims. This is because “they appear to say that they have themselves invented what they are teaching to others, but when they actually write, they show us what others have invented” (239). These critiques stem not merely from the personal qualms of the author of the ad Herennium, but from the author’s deep concern for pedagogical application. He thinks that borrowing examples from exemplary poets and historians will lead the learner to believe that these impressive demonstrations can only result from combining examples from multiple sources. As he explains, the student’s belief will likely be that “the totality could have been taken only from them all, and that barely a few examples could have been taken from only one” (245). The student will distrust his ability to produce “the sum total of qualities” possessed by the many authors presented (245). All in all, the ad Herennium esteems the Greek rhetoricians but refuses to follow their method of providing preexisting examples (251-253). In the discussion on style, the ad Herennium identifies three kinds: grand, middle, and simple (253). The grand type involves the most ornate patterns of language. The middle is lower, but not quite colloquial. The simple is the idiom of standard speech (253). Figures are used in the grand style. The manual provides lengthy compositions to show the characteristics of each style. The examples are strikingly different and therefore effective. Yet our author claims the examples alone are not enough to guide orators. He cautions, “there is a style to be avoided” and that is the “Swollen style” (263). The swollen style involves using “turgid and inflated language” relying upon “clumsy metaphors” (265). In this style, diction is elevated beyond what the situation demands (265). On the opposite end of the style spectrum, students must not lapse into the “Meagre” style. In this misstep, the author aims for Simple style (“careful and well-chosen words”) but falls short (267). This style is boring, or as the ad Herennium describes it, “mean and trifling” (267). The figures help us distinguish between the styles. Figures are used most notably in the grand style, with fewer in the middle, and hardly any in the simple (255, 267-268). The purpose of the figures is to render language ornate, “embellishing it by variety” (275). This text differentiates figures of diction and figures of thought. Figures of diction means the embellishment comes from the fine enhancement of language itself. For figures of thought, the distinction comes from the idea, not the words (275). Rhetorica ad Herennium represents the first effort to differentiate between figures of diction and figures of thought (FitzGerald 44).

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The manual lists 45 figures of diction and 19 figures of thought. In my reading of this text, I find myself much more familiar with the latter category, having learned many of them in school, and then taught them in the classroom myself. Figures of thought include contentio (antithesis), imago (simile), and conformatio (personification) to name a few. The figures of thought include literary techniques such as notatio (character delineation), sermocinatio (dialogue), and effictio (portrayal). These are figures that one would practice in a creative writing course today, or else use in the analysis of literature. The figures of diction may appear less familiar because they are less often identified in contemporary educational settings and the larger public realm. One must not let the separation of figures of diction and figures of thought imply that these figures of diction are simple. Though the ad Herennium describes figures of diction as dealing with the enhancement of language, they are intricate thought patterns. A careful reading reveals some basic principles of rhetorical theory can be found in these figures of diction. For instance, the ad Herennium details “reasoning by contraries,” a contracted syllogism that is central to classical rhetorical theory. Two opposing statements are presented together neatly in a way that is brief and forceful, forming a statement “which is not open to question” (293). The manual provides several examples. Here is one: “When they outnumbered us, they were no match for us; now that we outnumber them, do we fear they will conquer us?” (293). The inference cannot easily be refuted without extensive effort. It is effective because it is “agreeable to the ear” in the brief and complete way it is composed. Also, it “forcibly proves” what the speaker asserts (293). Other figures of diction may seem more familiar to us from ordinary speech and writing situations. Paralipsis is a figure that draws attention to some quality while simultaneously stating that one is passing over it. It brings indirect attention to an idea, because “the direct reference would be tedious or undignified, or cannot be made clear, or can easily be refuted” (321). The ad Herennium reminds us that in some cases it is more effective to create suspicion than to “insist directly on a statement that is refutable” (321). I won’t discuss how this dissertation will be read by few, as it isn’t relevant to current matters. Paralipsis. It’s reminiscent of gossip. One could see it being useful in political situations. Antithesis appears in both categories—figures of diction and figures of thought. This reveals the contested placement of figures within rhetorical manuals. The ancient rhetoricians never reached consensus on how to classify antithesis. It was sometimes labeled a figure of

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diction, other times as a figure of thought, and in some cases belonging to both classes (376). The author of the ad Herennium mentions “two kinds of antithesis,” thus revealing the workings of the figures on the level of stylistic choice and larger thought. Of these two kinds, “the first consists in a rapid opposition of words: in the other opposing thoughts ought to meet in comparison” (377). Antithesis as a figure of diction would be: “When all is calm, you are confused; when all is in confusion, you are calm” (283). Antithesis as a figure of thought is more complex and less easy to identify. The thoughts are in contradiction but are not balanced and compact the way they would be in a figure of diction. Rhetorica ad Herennium provides examples of figures for all but one. “Dwelling on the point” is a figure that proves to be too contextually dependent to parse an example from. This figure is one in which the speaker repeatedly returns to the strongest topic on which s/he rests the case. By returning to the idea so frequently, the speaker does not allow the hearer to shift attention away from the subject (375). Consequently, the use of dwelling on the point can be highly effective. However, this figure defies concise example. The manual explains how this figure works within a larger discourse via a compelling metaphor. “I have been unable to subjoin a quite appropriate example of the figure,” the ad Herennium explains, “because this topic is not isolated from the whole cause like some limb, but like blood is spread through the whole body of the discourse” (375). The figures were classically considered in terms of how they would function in, and enhance, the overall discourse. The ad Herennium repeatedly discusses the impact of a figure upon the hearer. A figure “makes a deep impression upon the hearer,” “the hearer cannot but be impressed,” “we also stir the hearer,” “no opportunity is given the hearer to remove his strongest attention” (325, 369, 375). Repeated emphasis on how the figures will be heard by an audience demonstrates their rhetorical use. The purpose of using figures is to make an impression on the hearer and hold the hearer’s attention. Once a student understands what figures are and how to use them, the next consideration is how often to use them. The manual encourages occasional, not incessant use of the figures. The goal is not to embellish everything, but to brighten the style with striking ornaments. “If, then, we crowd these figures together, we shall seem to be taking delight in a childish style,” the ad Herennium warns, “but if we insert them infrequently and scatter them with variations throughout the whole discourse, we shall brighten our style agreeably with striking ornaments”

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(309). Reference to style as ornament will appear again in Renaissance rhetoric, notably in the book The Garden of Eloquence, which I explore in the next section. While Rhetorica ad Herennium is the grail for style historians, it is not the ideal text to use when seeking fast and immediate application for writing situations because it requires significant work to read and assess. Since this text was compiled in 1st century BCE, it is not designed for the contemporary reader, and requires a patient and diligent mind. Seeking to reclaim a text that might be more pedagogically useful today, I turn next to The Garden of Eloquence.

The Garden of Eloquence In 1593 Peacham published The Garden of Eloquence, an influential rhetoric handbook that was written in the vernacular of the time. The handbook focuses solely on the rhetorical figures and outlines 184 of them. It features two sections: tropes and schemes. Tropes refer to the alteration of words or phrases in ways that differ from their supposed significations (2). Schemes pertain to word orders or patterns. Peacham organizes schemes into three categories: the first includes those that bring clarity and beauty; the second grouping utilizes passions to affect the mind; and the third consists of tools of amplification (40, 62, 120). For each figure, Peacham explains what it is, how to use it, and offers a caution. For example, Peacham writes that hyperbole is a sentence or saying that surmounts the truth, either for the purposes of amplifying or diminishing (31). By “diminishing,” he does not mean that the use of the figure diminishes the idea. Rather, he means that hyperbole may emphasize extreme smallness as well as greatness. The purpose of using hyperbole is not to deceive “by speaking untruly” (31). Rather it expresses the writer’s desire “to amplifie the greatnesse or smalnesse of things by the exceeding similitude” (31). An example would be a description of a thing as “sweeter then hony, whiter then snow, lighter then smoke, heavier then lead” (32). These descriptions do not all apply to the same thing. They merely serve as a list of examples. Peacham warns writers that using exaggeration with no bounds in either direction is not a wise decision. Accordingly, Peacham offers two cautions: do not use hyperbole to overemphasize trivial things (“amplifie trifles”) nor to diminish a good thing (“defacing of good things”) (33). He urges the writer to be discreet and moderate when using hyperbole, because overreaching can be deemed

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offensive. This figure, like each of the other figures Peacham details, is carefully considered in terms of rhetorical and contextual sensitivity. For another example of Peacham’s rhetorical awareness, we may consider his caution for metaphors. When using metaphors, he instructs readers to consider the audience’s knowledge. He writes, “the similitude be not farre fetcht, as from strange things unknowne to the hearer, as if one should take Metaphors from the parts of a ship, and apply them among husbandmen which never came at the sea” (14). He instructs readers to select metaphors that will be understandable to their audiences. When reading Peacham today, scholars will inevitably note certain points that strike us as remarkably outdated, and in need of contemporary intervention. The Garden of Eloquence has some limitations as a roughly 500-year-old text. For instance, Peacham writes that irony has two functions: criticism and humor (he specifically says “derision” and “jest”). The caution he offers for irony is that it is “unseemly for an inferiour” (36). He advises writers not to employ irony to deride someone who occupies a higher rank than they do. This advice is obviously not true in all cases. To accept it unflinchingly would be undemocratic. However, I believe we can value The Garden of Eloquence for its important contribution while also keeping in mind its historical context. Peacham was keenly aware of the need for rhetoricians to be skilled and politically savvy. In the dedication, he celebrates Cicero for being “a most excellent Orator and prudent politick” (“Epistle”). Overall, Peacham’s text is important because he offers us a theory of the figures. He shows us that writers simultaneously theorize and enact styles. Also, he reveals that persuasion and beauty work in tandem. Beauty is defined as eloquence, which is unleashed by using the figures. His motivation for writing the manual is to uncover the “secret and mightie powers of perswasion” (“Epistle”). This should put to rest any lingering fears that Peacham was not truly a rhetorician. He believes these powers of persuasion work by “those figures and formes of speech conteined in this booke . . . the mightie streams of eloquence” (“Epistle”). Persuasion is the goal. The figures are the means in achieving it. For Peacham, the figures are “The principal instruments of mans help in this wonderfull effect” (“Epistle”). Style and persuasion work in harmony through the use of the figures. Theory and practice are simultaneous, as the figures are both thoughtfully considered and strategically enacted. This insight is highly relevant for us as writers today. If one aims to persuade, she must have style.

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Close analysis of The Garden of Eloquence reveals Peacham’s historical context. The introduction is dedicated to Sir John Puckering Knight. Dedicating the manual to a political figure rather than a church leader is a deliberate decision. In the dedication, Peacham humbles himself before the addressee while also noting that Sir John Puckering heads the commonwealth during “these daies of danger” (Colclough 55). When Peacham speaks of dangers, he refers to dangers of war as well as dangers of rhetorical abuse (56). At the time of publication of the second edition in 1593, England was at war with Spain (55). Peacham is aware of criticisms of rhetoric. A scholar of Renaissance studies has noted that Peacham is defensive throughout the epistle while maintaining and advancing his claims set forth in the first edition that was published in 1577 (Colclough 55). In the introduction, Peacham explains what prompts him to write the manual. He is concerned that there exists “a divorce betweene nature and art, and a seperation betweene pollicie and humanitie” and aims to mend this problem (“Epistle”). Peacham sings the praises of wit as “mans worship” and wisedom as “man’s honor” (“Epistle”). To speak or write with eloquence, one must possess wisdom, for eloquence is “the light and brightnesse of wisedome” (“Epistle”). Peacham reads Cicero as one who praised both virtues, wit and wisdom, and demonstrated the necessity and utility “of their excellent conjunction” (“Epistle”). This reference reveals that ideas about style continually evolve from classical traditions. Like the ad Herennium, Peacham considers the effects of the figures on the hearers. He writes, “wisedome appeareth in her beautie, sheweth her majestie, and exerciseth her power, working in the minde of the hearer” (“Epistle”). And the means by which this wisdom works? “[P]artly by a pleasant proportion, & as it were by a sweet & musicall harmonie, and partly by the secret and mightie power of perswasion” (“Epistle”). The figures function by arrangement and compelling idea. Peacham believes in the power of eloquence as an antidote to political problems. He refers to the figures as “martiall instruments both of defence & invasion” (“Epistle”). These instruments are a preferable option “then to hold those weapons alwaies readie in our handes” (“Epistle”). He names the sword (functioning metonymically) as synonymous with war, violence, bloodshed, and death. On the contrary, the figures enable persuasion, piercing the affections, and giving special regard for life (“Epistle”). When introducing the figures, Peacham

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references Cicero’s description of “Concinnitie,” or harmony and aptness (1). The figures include two groupings: schemes and tropes (1). According to Peacham, schemes are forms and figures of speech that enhance ordinary communication. Schemes “do take away the wearisomnesse of our common speech,” he explains, and they sharpen expression by bringing art and clarity (40). The schemes “fashion a pleasant, sharpe, and evident kind of expressing our meaning,” he writes (40). Peacham claims the schemes enhance expression with “great strength, perspicuitie and grace” (40). These occur in words and sentences. Peacham uses some outdated gender stereotypes to describe the difference between figures of words and figures of sentences, stating that figures of words are “effeminate, and musicall,” while figures of sentences are “manly, and martiall” (52). Ever the pedagogue, Peacham explains each scheme in vivid language, often employing numerous metaphors. One of the schemes he teaches readers about is polysindeton. This is a figure that combines conjunctions together, and I believe it is still an important one to know. Polysindeton enumerates on something in a condensed way, which fuses the given thing with significance and intrigue. Peacham’s example of polysindeton is: “He was both an enemie to his country, and a traitor to his Prince, and a contemner of lawes, and a subverter of cities” (186). This figure brings multiple associations of a thing together; at the same time it articulates distinctly separate points. As Peacham explains, “This figure hath the most speciall respect to knit many things of like nature together, and to distinguish and separate contrary matters asunder” (186). He likens polysindeton to a “chaine of speech,” “a distinction of linkes” (186). This evidence shows the importance of example and application for a reader who is learning the figures. It also shows that when learning the figures, one is firmly in the realm of metaphor, and may expect being exposed to metaphors upon one another in order to grasp the function of these figures as elaborate language devices. As always, Peacham offers a caution. For polysindeton, the caution is to not be excessive by using too many conjuctions, since doing so would “bringeth a deformitie to this figure” (186). Use figures well, but in moderation. Another scheme Peacham outlines that I would like to remind scholars and teachers of is an ordinary yet attention grabbing one. This is epizeuxis, a complex term for a simple technique. Part of the larger category of schemes of repetition, this is a figure in which a word is repeated with nothing in between. An example is repeating someone’s name: “A Coridon, Coridon, what

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madness hath thee moved?” (47). It also works by repeating a pronoun such as I or you. “I, I must say this” or “You, you musn’t know.” Furthermore, it can be employed by repeating a verbal command: “Awake, awake and stand up…” (47). I am compelled to reintroduce this figure because it is an example of how the most miniscule repetition can be purposeful and have effect. Peacham notes that the figure expresses vehemence, or passion. He feels strongly for this little figure, explaining, “in respect of pleasant affections it may be compared to the quaver in Musicke, in respect of sorrow, to a double sigh of the heart, & in respect of anger, to a double stabbe with a weapons point” (47). A small decision may be capable of great reverberations. The caution he extends for epizeuxis is to not use it for words that have many syllables, because it would sound “ilfavouredly” and too lengthy (48). When using epizeuxis, aim for “brevitie and beautie,” not “prolixity and deformitie” (48). When analyzing Peacham’s work on schemes, I am repeatedly reminded of how contextually dependent they are. Figures such as paronesis, in which the speaker admonishes or warns the audience; eulogia, in which the speaker pronounces a blessing upon another person for his or her good quality; and categoria, in which the speaker detects and exposes some wickedness of his adversary—all deal with rhetorical situations, communication, and strategy (78-79, 65, 80). It is worthwhile for scholars today to remember that the figures were not always textbooks for literary study in schools. They were employed as tools for political engagement. When introducing the tropes, Peacham describes the figures generally as “lights, colours, and ornaments,” noting that these metaphors are borrowed from Latin rhetorical thought (11). Of tropes specifically, he explains that they are alterations from the supposed signification. Tropes are “an artificall alteration of a word, or a sentence, from the proper and natural signification to another not proper, but yet nigh, and likely” (7). He claims that tropes are motivated by three causes: necessity, will, and art (7). Tropes emerged out of necessity because people wanted to enhance their ability to share observations of the world. As Peacham explains, people wanted words “to expresse the nature and propertie of diverse things” and so they were urged to seek methods (2). By using the tropes as techniques, the speaker learned to offer new insight. And so, secondly, the tropes were willfully employed. Peacham notes that wise people learned how to “borow ye name of one thing, to signifie another” because they recognized that doing this could create powerful effects (2). And thirdly, tropes function by art, through rules of proportion that can be learned (2). In The Garden of Eloquence, he aims to give “excellent rules and certaine

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directions” for how tropes should be “most aptly and properly applied” (2). But let it be known that Peacham could hardly be described as prescriptive. His instructions aim to encourage the imagination. He reminds readers that the places from which tropes may be drawn are “infinite,” like plentiful fields, and the tropes are like “such proffitable and pleasant flowers” (2). As was the case with the schemes, the tropes can also be words or sentences (3). Their sources can be anything, and their effects are the result of studied craft.

Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres is a collection of public lectures given by 18th century Scottish rhetorician Hugh Blair during the winter of 1759-1760 at the University of Edinburgh (Lewis 117-118). The lectures and subsequent textbook are pedagogical in content and method, aiming to teach students about belles lettres and composition (118). Stephen Harding, editor of Blair’s Lectures, concedes that these works have been “alternately praised and scorned” (vii). Blair rejects Aristotle for presenting a system that is too technical. Instead, he prefers Quintilian’s Institutio, especially Book 6 (xvi). Harding suggests that Blair’s reverence for Quintilian’s practical wisdom ultimately saved Blair from lapsing into absurdity like some of his contemporaries (xxvi-xxvii). The field of composition studies is historically wary Blair. We are at best cautious and at worst dismissive of this thinker’s contributions to rhetoric. The reason for this skepticism is because Blair downplays the role of invention in the process of composing speeches. Since Blair downplays invention, he has come to be seen as “not rhetoric” (Crowley, “Composition”). It is true that Blair downplays invention. However, I contend that fact alone should not negate the rest of what he has to say. One need not look far to find scholars in the field who are critical of Blair. In The Formation of College English, Thomas P. Miller blames Blair for institutionalizing an “arhetorical” perspective on language use. He asserts that Blair treated style as “a matter of personal voice that should be as natural and unlabored as conversation” (229). He describes Blair’s ideas as colonizing and having lasting negative impacts on the study of rhetoric. “Invention became unteachable and correctness became an end in itself” (229). While I do not doubt that Blair’s ideas were used and reified in specific detrimental ways over time, it strikes me as a bit extreme to peg the downfall of modern rhetoric on one figure. It was not Blair

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himself that solely issued ideas about style; he was, like we all are, the product of a time. His era marked the shift “from composition to reception” Miller notes (231). Blair was preparing students to be members of a reading public, not just orators. Rhetoric and composition were becoming literary criticism (14). The context of time and technological circumstances are inseparable from the ideas. W. Ross Winterowd slanders Blair in relation to one of his contemporaries, writing, “Whereas Campbell’s Philosophy is the result of an interesting mind; Blair’s Lectures mirror complete banality; their worth is purely historical” (22). For this scholar, Blair has nothing to offer other than lasting bad influence, and it is the work of the composition historian to document it. What more might we find if we try to look for what might still be useful and relevant in Blair’s work despite its flaws? I believe composition scholars are too quick to associate Blair with the literary, and then distinguish useful theories of rhetoric as those that do not have anything to do with him. Blair is closely associated with the beginnings of literary analysis methods. This effect, coupled with the minimizing of invention, may seem like enough historical baggage to make us turn away. However, we’ve overlooked what Blair has to say about style, and what may be useful. Plus, Blair may have had positive impacts on bringing literary scholars to the field of composition when it was new and still forming. In the essay “How I became a Teacher of Composition,” Corbett writes that he became interested in rhetorical history through discovering Blair, noting how Blair traces the history of rhetoric through the Greeks and Romans, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, making his own contribution clear, which is “the analysis and creation of belletristic texts” (Corbett). Corbett was so engaged with Blair’s review of rhetorical history that it inspired him to go back and read the classical texts that were mentioned. Because of this, he developed a lifelong passion for rhetorical study and believes he improved immensely as a teacher of writing. What I have discovered by researching Blair’s yext is it all depends on the lens one brings to his work. Many passages from Blair can at once be read as helpful or harmful, depending upon one’s perspective. Consider this passage in which Blair discusses “the flexibility of Language”: The flexibility of a Language, or its power of accommodation to different styles and manners, so as to be either grave and strong, or easy and flowing, or tender

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and gentle, or pompous and magnificent, as occasions require, or as an author’s genius prompts … [is] a quality of great importance in speaking and writing (Blair 175). If one is reading Blair to critique him, she can hone in on the “author’s genius” portion of the statement and use it to debunk the rest. Conversely, if one aims to give Blair a fair, or even generous reading, she may choose to emphasize Blair’s insight on the flexibility of language, and the need to suit it “as occasions require,” which suggests great consideration for context. Another way scholars may misread Blair is if we do not understand his use of the term eloquence in context. To the contemporary reader, eloquence may bring about immediate connotations of class and taste. And to be fair, Blair does, at points, make some troubling claims about taste. But when Blair discusses eloquence, he refers to the art of persuasion, working from Quintilian and Cicero as models (xiv). Blair is interested in how a rhetorical work operates as a whole, to the point that he refuses to classify different kinds of oratory like his rhetorical predecessors. Editor Harold F. Harding posits that for Blair, eloquence is founded on “reputation” and “acumen” (xv). Blair instructs readers that all orators create an impression, and we must remember that “the impression made by fine and artful speaking is momentary; that made of argument and good sense, is solid and lasting” (xv). Beautiful ornament is lovely in the moment, but fleeting. Solid argumentation and wisdom is what matters. Volume One contains several lectures dealing with figurative language. Blair describes figurative language as “a great branch of the ornament of Style” (272). He describes the figures themselves as both ornament and deviation from the normally recognized patterns of speech (273). Blair sees the figures as techniques for making speech especially memorable. “Simple expression just makes our idea known to others,” he writes, “but Figurative Language, over and above, bestows a particular dress upon that idea” (276-275). He does not see much difference in specifying distinctions between a trope or a figure, as long as we remember that all are in the realm of figurative language (276). Figurative language can always be trusted to assist in “colouring of the imagination” or inciting passion (276). He is indifferent toward “the doctrine of tropes and figures” which has been present in “systems of rhetoric” and describes classical systems as the result of “over-anxious care” when really what matters is the sentiment or passion (277). The figure, for Blair, is only the dress. The sentiment is the body (277). In his view, figures are vehicles or garments, not the essence of the thing expressed, which is feeling.

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Language comes up short for expressing our passions, so we modify it with metaphors. We might speak of feeling “inflamed by anger, warmed by love, swelled with pride, melted into grief,” and so on (280). Blair offers some insight into the figures and how they function. His downfall is that he sees the figures reductively as ornament and dress. Blair notes that the figures “enrich language” and “give us the pleasure of enjoying two objects presented together to our view” (285). Blair writes that the figures help us amplify and draw attention to important ideas. The figures give us “a much clearer and more striking view of the principal object than we could have if it were expressed in simple terms” (285). Blair focuses on a relatively small number of figures, emphasizing metaphor, hyperbole, personification, apostrophe, comparison, and antithesis as the most important (xiii). This is a more select list than what one finds in Peacham, for example. This trimmed down guide to the figures leaves out many important ones. All tropes, Blair claims, are dependent upon expressing the relations between objects. He explains, “[A]ll Tropes . . . are founded on the relation which on object bears to another” (291). This comparison offers the basis for substitution of one object (metonymy), the relation of what goes before and what immediately follows (metalepsis), and using the name of an object to describe another one like it (metaphor) (294). For Blair, metaphor is about “the resemblance one object bears to another” and is simply a comparison—not the most rhetorical description of language use (295). Furthermore, in his discussion of metaphor, Blair suggests strong correlation to standards of taste in ways that open him to critique by the modern reader. For instance, he suggests that metaphors should be drawn from “objects of some dignity” and should be clear and “not difficult to discover” (303). This view suggests metaphors are the comparison of two discrete objects, chosen in good taste, and expressed clearly. It is not the most accurate view of language because it fails to explore the ways terms impact each other, an idea I will explore later. Blair enforces a limited view of metaphor and sets bounds on its use. He gives examples of mixed metaphors from Shakespeare and deems them too complex. “So many ill-forted things are here joined, that the mind can see nothing clearly,” he claims regarding an excerpt from The Tempest (309). He goes so far as to say that metaphors “ought never to be mixed” because it just presents confusion (311). He warns readers not to be tempted to use mixed metaphors, which can seem poetic but in truth is crowded, “harsh and obscure” (312).

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Blair celebrates allegory as a method for communicating morals that has persisted since ancient times (317). The meaning should be obvious, he writes, but this is very difficult (317). Rhetors are challenged to find the balance between making the meaning “too bare and open” versus concealing it too much (317). Ultimately, with practice, it is a figure that can be employed well. In terms of hyperbole, Blair is skeptical. He suspects authors rely upon these “exaggerated expressions” to describe strong passions, but it is very important not to overstretch it (320-321). Sharing one example from poetry, he writes, “This is mere bombast”—critiquing its use of inconsistent tone, which hyperbole only exacerbates (321). Hyperbole can be effective only when it is used with “good sense and just taste” (322). When the figure is employed under these rules, hyperboles may “dazzle and impose by their boldness” (323). One finds in this passage, and many others, that Blair is quite prescriptive in method. There is nothing revolutionary in the discussions of personification and apostrophe. Many figures are lost in Blair’s lectures compared to something like Peacham’s manual. Furthermore, much of Blair’s statements on the figures have less to do with the figures as rhetorical tools and more to do with his own taste. A prime example of how Blair’s personal preference shapes his interpretations is found in the discussion of antithesis. Blair argues that the frequent use of antithesis will likely make style disagreeable (353). On the whole, antithesis is “of a cool nature” because it originates from imagination, not passion (355). Cool or warm, passion or imagination – what distinct lines are to be drawn here, other than arbitrary ones? Blair prefers a certain use of antithesis that makes a turn at the end, offering Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” as evidence (355). It is a very limited view of the uses of antithesis—limited to the kind that Blair likes. Blair speaks highly of the figures interrogation and exclamation, because these are “the native language of passion” and can bring about “the most sublime oratory” (355). These figures can evoke sympathy, and when used by the writer, can make others “feel as they feel” (357). Evidencing the shifting of ideas from speech to writing, Blair critiques a “Typographical Figure of Speech”—that is, the frequent italicization of words in sentences. Blair strongly cautions against using this style, because when “every page is crowded with Italicks” it can “produce no effct whatever, but to hurt the eye, and create confusion” (359). He does not like the inauthentic

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use of typography to try to rouse the sentiments (359). It’s an interesting historical example brought about by the shifting focus from speech to print. Blair is a bit freeform in his description of the two “other” figures. The first of these is “Vision,” which he describes as relating something to one’s past (359). This requires the imagination, he explains, to make us “see before our eyes the scene that is described” (360). Blair describes some figures as “feeble attempts” toward moving the passions, and thus not worth learning. These include repetition, suspension, and correction (360). Though described as “Beauties of Eloquence,” in Blair’s opinion these are responsible for “leaving the reader more cool and uninterested than he was before” (360). The rationale Blair presents for which figures matter seems to result from personal preference. The second “other” figure Blair mentions is amplification, or “artful exaggeration” (360- 362). It works by climax, or the gradual rise of one situation above another, until the idea expressed is raised to being of high importance (361). While this figure “never fails to amplify strongly,” Blair has mixed feelings over whether climax can be successfully employed for the purposes of persuasion (361-362). He thinks the sequence of ideas may seem artificial, causing wariness in the minds of the hearers. As Blair explains, “when much art appears, we are always put on our guard against the deceits of eloquence” (362). However, if the reasoning is strong, this figure may be useful. It is possible, with practice and skill, to “make use of such artificial figures to confirm our belief, and to warm our minds” (362). I admit that Blair’s text is not without problems. The Renaissance conception of the figures as persuasive and contextual is largely lost in Blair’s work. As a consequence, Blair’s presentation of the figures mirrors the statement of his contemporary Samuel Johnson, who describes language as a dress that thought puts on (“language is the dress of thought”) (S. Johnson). Even so, I believe Blair has something to contribute to us. His main contributions are that, for each figure he considers, he assesses the effects on the reader. For this reason, I don’t think his work can be accurately described as “arhetorical” though scholars in the field have used the term and degraded the overall contribution in excessive ways.

The Philosophy of Rhetoric During the 20th century, the New Rhetoricians sought to reclaim and continue investigating ideas from classical rhetoric. As I.A. Richards writes in his 1936 work The

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Philosophy of Rhetoric, “These lectures are an attempt to revive an old subject” (3). The figures are among the ideas that New Rhetoricians consider important (Berthoff, Reclaiming 129). Richards in particular is fascinated by metaphor, so much that he delivers a two-part lecture on it. For Richards, language use is more complex than the current theories and practices would lead one to believe. He is particularly interested in reviving Coleridge’s thought on metaphor, which will be central to our understanding of what value he has for us today when thinking about the figures. Richards writes only of metaphor—so why bring him into a chapter on the figures? Metaphor is an important figure and he offers sophisticated insights into the workings of metaphor that differ from other thinkers. The interest in metaphor was not Richards’ alone; FitzGerald notes that during the time of the New Rhetoricians, the canon of style narrowed into four master tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony). Of these, metaphor was given priority as being the most distinct from literal expression (46). Strangely enough, the four master tropes appear in rhetorical history with Peter Ramus’s 1549 Arguments in Rhetoric Against Quintilian. In 1969, landmark rhetorician Kenneth Burke outlined the four master tropes in the appendix to A Grammar of Motives, and I wonder if this may have led some scholars to assume these master tropes were his idea. Richards takes a philosophical approach to rhetoric, but ultimately aims to understand how words are used in discourse. A general theory of language is not enough. The scholar of rhetoric must demonstrate how words work. “We have to go beyond these theories” he writes, “we must not forget that they are beginnings, first steps in a great and novel venture, the attempt to explain in detail how language works and with it to improve communication” (17-18). He also asserts, “[f]or this study is theoretical only that it may become practical” (19). This is in part a response to the discrediting of rhetoric that was unfolding during his time. The project of the New Rhetoricians was to reinvigorate current rhetorical study by reviving it with classical theories and practices. Richards describes his study of rhetoric as interested in “how words mean” and a “study of verbal understanding and misunderstanding”—their interconnectedness, and how they create and communicate meaning (23-24). In his lectures on metaphor, Richards voices frustration over the opposition of form and content. He claims this view presents “language as a dress that thought puts on” (12). Instead of focusing on form and content as separate parts, he urges for more exploration of how language

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works. Richards explains that metaphor is so much a part of organic thought processes that we use metaphors and hardly notice them. For example, when we say or write the leg of the table— we borrow from a human or animalistic concept and slide it onto an inanimate object. He notes, “[a] metaphor may work admirably without our being able with any confidence to say how it works or what is the ground of that shift” (117). By considering mundane occurrences of metaphor, Richards surmises, “most sentences in free or fluid discourse turn out to be metaphoric” (120). Metaphor functions by comparison and reveals how the mind works by connecting. The mind can connect any two concepts in an infinite number of ways (125). Richards’s exploration helps us see that words are not just a means of copying life. Rather, they help humans live, express, and navigate life (123). In Philosophy of Rhetoric, Richards repeatedly stresses seeing language as fluid and shifting, not static and uniform. Drawing upon a powerful metaphor, he claims meaning should be thought of as a plant that grows, not as clay that is molded (12). The reference to organic growth has roots in Romanticism. In both of his lectures on metaphor, Richards cites Coleridge’s question, “Are not words parts and germinations of a plant?” (112). Here it becomes necessary to map the connection between Coleridge and Richards. Richards’s lectures are filled with references to Coleridge—why is this? What does Coleridge offer to Richards’s theoretical exploration of metaphor? Well, Richards finds errors in thinking during the 18th century in regard to the function of metaphor. He cites Samuel Johnson who celebrated metaphor because “it gives you two ideas for one” (93). At first glance, we may accept this as the definition of metaphor that many of us learned at some point in our educational journeys. It is a succinct way of explaining how the figure, metaphor, works. But Richards is not satisfied with this “two ideas for one” description, and offers his critique of Johnson’s definition. “He is keeping, you see, to the limited traditional view of metaphor,” Richards states. Ultimately it does not hold up because meaning depends upon on how the two ideas in the metaphor affect each other, and how that relationship affects their use (93). The traditional theory of metaphor is reductive. It “made metaphor seem to be a verbal matter, a shifting and displacement of words” (94). This is where Coleridge comes in. Richards speaks of Coleridge’s concept of “imaginative growth” as a more complex view of language than Johnson’s “two for one” (112). In his discussion of metaphor, Coleridge writes, “‘it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a

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living part of that unity of which it is the representative’” (109). Thus, no thing exists as a discrete idea that one simply connects onto another discrete idea. Coleridge meditated on the interrelatedness of things. He took any plant as “an object of meditation through and in which to see the universal mode of imagination” (109). He was always noting the place of a thing within a large and complex system. He even implies that metaphors have the power to reshape the existing environment. Through metaphoric changes, “the individual life and its world grow together” (109). So when Coleridge asks, “are not words parts and germinations of the plant?” he means that words are part of the entire systems of discourse, as new plants are part of the whole system of vegetation in the natural world. In his second lecture on metaphor, Richards continues to deconstruct Johnson’s claim that metaphor is about getting two ideas for one. Richards explains that the claim does not hold because “the boundary between literal and metaphoric uses is not quite fixed or constant” (118). Always preoccupied with the sliding and guessing of meaning, Richards offers multiple examples. In this case, he considers the “legs” of humans and various animals, eventually arriving at this example: And when a man has a wooden leg, is it a metaphoric or a literal leg? The answer to this last is that it is both. It is literal in one set of respects, metaphoric in another. A word may be simultaneously both literal and metaphoric, just as it may simultaneously support many different metaphors, may serve to focus into one meaning many different meanings (119). This example relates to Richards’s overall theory of rhetoric because he debunks the common yet false assumption that words work in one way and not another—that words are not either literal or metaphorical. To believe this leads to gross misunderstandings (119). Because meaning shifts, and the boundaries between literal and metaphorical are hazy, it is not always easy to know if a word is being used literally or metaphorically (119). This all hearkens back to an earlier claim Richards makes about interpreting meaning in language situations. We have to guess meanings, he claims. And it’s better if we accept this fact: “We have to guess them [meanings] and we guess much better when we realize we are guessing, and watch out for indications, than when we think we know” (55). My take on this is that writers need to be open to the dynamic interplay and shifting meanings of words, rather than trying to merely link two terms together like two steadfast blocks.

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It may seem I’ve diverged into philosophical debate, away from relevant application for teachers. But like Richards, I see the philosophical and practical as linked. I think the way scholars and teachers talk about language use matters a lot. Richards was concerned that “insufficient analysis” of language use led to “false doctrine” and “crude reading” (127). He observed that scholars lacked methodologies and larger frameworks for explaining what we do with words. For this reason, he urged us to continue to probe how words work and discuss our findings with precision. “We must translate more of our skill into discussable science,” Richards states. “Reflect better upon what we do already so cleverly. Raise our implicit recognitions into explicit distinctions” (95). Our study of rhetoric must be both philosophical and practical (137). A “command of metaphor” is of utmost important because it offers us “control of the world that we make for ourselves to live in” (135). Richards reminds us that words, and specifically metaphors, are how we get around. Scholars can be harsh on Richards because he is closely linked with New Criticism, which became associated with the current-traditional paradigm in composition studies (Winterowd 69). Berthoff claims Richards was unjustly blamed for some “extreme stands” adopted by the New Critics (Mysterious 80). My intervention is to assert that Richards must be remembered for articulating a thoughtful and complex view of metaphor that reinterpreted the reductive view that held dominance during the prior two centuries. Richards shows that the analysis of a figure reveals complex theories of language use. In fact, he describes rhetoric as “the study of how words work” (Richards 3-4). Ann Berthoff studies Richards’s contributions closely and finds he believes in the power of metaphor as a speculative instrument. “In naming we identify and differentiate simultaneously,” Berthoff explains. Metaphor reveals that we constantly assess something in relation to something else. The mind works by connecting ideas, and any two concepts can connect in an infinite number of ways (“Reclaiming” 125). All learning depends on relating the novel to the familiar (125). Metaphorical relationships are powerful, yet somewhat arbitrary, illuminating the relationship of imagination and language (125).

Teaching the Figures Scholars are often content to historicize terms and leave the pedagogical implications for someone else to figure out. This has always bothered me. I think composition studies as a field is

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designed so that the philosophical and the pedagogical are mutually informing. I see theory and pedagogy as very closely connected—after all, the history of style is a pedagogical history of rhetors and writers. And like Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald, I think composition scholars need reasons to believe in both “the larger purposes and immediate usefulness of the work of teaching writing” (1). I believe the figures are useful, which is why I recover them in a philosophical, historical fashion and also offer practices for composition instructors to try out in chapter four and five. I am hardly the first scholar-teacher who is interested in the figures. T.R. Johnson writes about teaching style, and advocates for specific ways of teaching the figures. His approach involves multiple drafts and analysis of how figures play a powerful role in drafting and revising (25). He asks, ”Why not teach these stylistic devices explicitly as tools for invention and revision, as a means to create and craft sentences and paragraphs…?” (32). In my experience teaching advanced writing, I find this approach very useful. I find that matching the figures to the genre that I am teaching works especially well. When students write journalistic essays, I teach the figures distinctio, exemplum, and metanoia because these figures aim for precision in language, which the genre of journalistic writing demands. Distintio is a figure wherein the writer makes reference to a word and then stops to explain it (Rhetorica ad Herennium 169): the most important aspect is x. By x I mean . . . and so on. Exemplum is another figure that helps to clarify and explain. It means using an example once you’ve made a statement or point (Rhetorica ad Herennium): Congress is ineffective. By way of example, a study out of Princeton University showed that public opinion has a “near-zero” impact on whether Congress will make it law. Metanoia is a device used to retract a statement one has just made. It’s a self-aware act of correction (Peacham). The rhetor can use the correction to make the first term appear weak, shifting audience attention onto the new term, or vice versa: “A good use of your time—no, scratch that—the best use of your time, is doing work that benefits others.” Whether or not one agrees with the statement, the use of the figure emphasizes the rhetor’s argument. These figures are used for precision in language in a genre of writing that demands accuracy. If teachers are willing to take this pedagogical approach, teaching the figures is no longer seen as something extra, but rather as part of teaching the genre. Truly, teaching the figures can be central to preparing students for workplace, technical, and business writing situations.

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I encourage teachers to match figures to genres that students are currently writing. At the same time, teachers and students must be aware that figures transcend generic boundaries. It is possible to find metonymy in a news story or a personal essay or even a science article. Wall Street. Hollywood. Oil and Gas. As Richards pointed out, metaphorical language is inseparable from how we think and navigate the world (117). We use figures and hardly notice them (117). To make the figures topical, teachers can draw from politicians, who supply endless examples. As I write this chapter, the primary election cycle for the 2016 United States presidential race is well underway. While watching the Democratic debates, I hear Bernie Sanders’ frequent references to Wall Street. The term functions metonymically to refer to corporate greed and a system of inequity. Politicians remind us that the sounds of words matter, too. Sanders’ repeated emphasis on the “millionaires and billionaires” resonates as rhyme, as assonance. Such repetition of sound enforces meaning and sets the mood. Hillary Clinton delivered a speech after faring well in several important primaries on March 15, 2016. “You voted. You voted for our tomorrow to be better than our yesterday,” she said (Golshan). This is epizeuxis, from Peacham’s manual. A simple figure of repetition, employed to commend and motivate the audience. And of course, metaphor. Throughout this chapter, I identified the prominence of the figures in rhetorical history, specifically as they are presented in manuals and lectures. From this analysis, I have discerned two important implications. First, as scholars and teachers, we must not reduce the number of figures from which we select. The ad Herennium and The Garden of Eloquence showcase 64 and 184 figures, respectively. These manuals offer a wide range of figures that can suit us in different contexts, depending on which techniques we most desire to employ. We must look beyond the four master tropes to see a bigger picture with a greater number of resources. Secondly, this research reminds us that language is unstable. While the figures have historically been outlined in systematic ways, they are by no means prescriptive. By continuing to enact the figures and theorize how we use them, we reshape and reinterpret theories of language use. Viewed this way, the figures have an important place in writing classrooms and are central to rhetorical writing pedagogy. I believe the figures can and should be taught. The figures have had lasting influence over time; the figures improve compositions and make them more memorable. While instructors may feel overwhelmed by already crowded plans for the semester, it does not take much time to focus

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on a few relevant figures and incorporate them into class discussions and activities. As I demonstrate in chapter five, the figures serve as powerful tools for revision. When students are presented with a few key figures to learn and practice, and then are given space to try them out with preexisting compositions, the stylistic experiment proves to be useful. I’ve found that students benefit most when they are offered the freedom to incorporate figures organically into a piece. Interestingly, students are often surprised to find many figures already present in their writing. It is helpful to name and identify figures. One becomes a botanist walking through a forest of identifiable trees. When we note the organic use of figures that already exist in our writing, we “reflect better upon what we do already so cleverly,” as Richards observed (95). Then we can take our investigation further and learn and apply more. If we follow this sequence, the figures become workable tools for future writing situations.

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Chapter Three: Reclaiming Theories of the Visual

Over the past decade, scholars in composition studies have made great progress historicizing style, but they have not adequately accounted for how visual theories inform the teaching of style. The history of style is rich with inspiring visual theories that are now nearly forgotten in our discussions. In current conversations, scholars often discuss style in terms of written discourse alone. For example, Paul Butler defines style as “the deployment of rhetorical resources, in written discourse, to create and express meaning” (3). This definition is a useful one in that it makes style a deliberate act, a meaning-making activity. However, the focus on written discourse undoubtedly poses limitations. Butler marks some boundaries with this definition, explaining just what it is he will deal with in his historical recovery project. In truth, the definition suits his purposes well, and holds together a coherent and important argument. Even so, I find his definition a limited one, and the restrictions posed by it reveal a larger trend in the field. Scholars who research style are positioned as historians, reanimating lost classical information, and sometimes offering suggestions for classroom practice. In a separate realm, other scholars discuss the visual. These scholars analyze the connections between composition, technical writing, multimodality, and visual design (Brooke; Fleckenstein; Knight; McNely and Rivers; Shipka; Yancey). This chapter reclaims classical terms for thinking beyond writing to the visual. These terms include the imagination, the sublime, ekphrasis, and enargeia. First, I examine these terms and offer my interpretations. Next, I describe formal analysis and ekphrasis as two modes of writing that engage the visual. I place special emphasis on how formal analysis functions as a heuristic of close looking that can lead to ekphrasis. Lastly, I discuss how teachers can foreground these concepts so that students can draw upon them when writing about visual objects and making their own creative projects.

Style Pedagogy and the Visual While style historians work on theoretical questions about language use, and digital rhetoric scholars analyze visual aspects of texts, a few scholars mediate between these two conversations, style and the visual. I find that the relationship between style and the visual is most provocatively explored in conversations about pedagogical theory. Geoffrey Sirc is an

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important visual theorist in composition studies. In his view, composition is a poetic, performative, and radical art. He is unimpressed by composition courses that are designed to only teach students to write for the academy and the workplace (13). Sirc claims that the field is ignorant of “the compositional avant-garde,” or lines of inquiry that fall outside the disciplinary mainstream (13). He calls attention to innovative visual artists who can inspire our work. When we think of composition theorists, he claims, we can think of people like “Pollock, Duchamp, the situationists, the Happenings artists, punks” (13). Sirc diverges from other scholars not just in terms of historical figures and sites of interest, but also in terms of method. His 2002 book, Composition as a Happening, aims to forge avenues of inquiry that are “untouched or abandoned” by the disciplinary mainstream (12). In order to explore these new realms, Sirc analyzes work by artists that most scholars would never consider. His methodology is not dialectical, but rather embraces allegorical criticism—telling one story through another (13). It is a book unlike any other in the field. Sirc has a distinctly personal style. Sirc’s book is an explicit argument for the centrality of aesthetics in composition theory (32). He rereads art history to show how artists can help composition scholars invite visual, experimental elements into their theory and practice. Sirc expresses frustration because he believes composition studies had a chance to embrace the visual, but let the opportunity pass by. He claims, “As the visual arts struggled over the notion of what can count as beauty, Composition Studies shrunk from the task, falling back on the attempt to establish ‘what makes writing good’ along very conventional lines” (14). His favorite composition studies scholars are “those now out of fashion” like Macrorie and Coles, or those who were only minor figures, like Deemer (13). Sirc calls for a return to expressivist process pedagogy and argues for the value of informal writings (282). Informal writings are valuable because students can learn about their personal style in “those open forms,” he explains (282). For readers wondering what this pedagogy would look like, he offers, “[c]ool journals full of seemingly worthless blobs” (283). Sirc wants composition pedagogy to embrace “pop and the everyday,” to be current, personal, creative (283). A pedagogy that encourages this level of free-form writing may not be viable in composition courses that need to achieve multiple outcomes. Even so, I think embracing a creative, anti-mainstream spirit here and there can do a great deal in showing students that writing involves risk and experimentation, and that writing has value even when it does not result

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in a finished, polished, graded piece. In terms of scholarly impact, Sirc’s book stands out to me for diverging beyond the normative bounds of what the discipline usually examines. Most importantly, he analyzes visual artists as compositionists, mapping connections between writing and the visual arts. Ann Berthoff is another important theorist who draws from artists to invite new theories and practices of teaching writing. I analyze her contributions in the next section of this chapter. Anne Frances Wysocki also expresses special concern for the visual. This scholar comes from a background in visual design and is particularly attuned to these matters when shaping writing pedagogy, leading her to critique many current approaches to teaching visual aspects of texts in composition classrooms. Wysocki finds these approaches are limited because they are guided by universally accepted principles that we repeat uncritically. She is concerned that current methods of teaching visual aspects of texts are so limited in fact that they may hinder students in acquiring “critical and thoughtful agency” with the visual (151). This concern leads her to revisit Kant’s eighteenth century definitions of beauty and aesthetic judgment. She believes understanding this dominant, classical conception of beauty can make us better aware of our current “shortcomings” (151). These shortcomings are namely that universal standards of beauty limit our expectations for visual design and discourage us from making new creative attempts (151). Wysocki observes that visual composition pedagogies repeatedly adhere to traditionally accepted standards (171). To counter these standards, she urges teachers and students to try new and different formal relations in their layouts. Such commonly accepted visual relations often generalize representations, and consequently dehumanize people (171). To give an example, Wysocki analyzes how a woman is portrayed in an ad in The New Yorker. The woman is nude except for stockings, gloves, and heels (152). Wysocki experiences both pleasure and anger upon viewing the image (155, 160-161). She is unsure why she experiences anger, so she turns to trusted visual design books, such as The Non-Designer’s Design Book, which offers principles of visual design (153). She thinks that perhaps there is an analytical explanation. After examining several visual design books, she determines that the objectification of women’s bodies is inherent to visual design principles and reproduced unconsciously. This is dangerous, but it can be changed. Ultimately, she asks composition teachers to teach visual composition as “rhetorical, as a series of choices” (175). She wants us to be aware that form reproduces values, and we have

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the agency to create different forms and forge new relations in design—and consequently, in how we comprehend each other (175). There is a minor critique I need to get out of the way. The ad Wysocki analyzes is an ad for a collection of photographs from The Kinsey Institute. Taking into account that the ad is for a book of photos from an organization that does sex research, I wonder if it’s that unreasonable for the ad to include a sexually provocative image. I don’t know who the woman in the photo is or what her role was in regard to The Kinsey Institute. Could she have seen that sexual representation as empowering? Did she give consent for her image to be used in that way? These are questions we do not know the answers to, but my point is, choosing this particular example to discuss sexual objectification in ads is a perplexing one that opens up questions Wysocki does not touch. I think if she had analyzed an ad for a ubiquitous product that does not directly relate to a sex research institute, but was still unnecessarily objectifying, her analysis would have been more persuasive. Reflecting on Wysocki’s work as a whole, I admire her use of philosophical argument to advance current practices. It is rare to find a composition studies scholar who engages with Kant, and more appropriately, the third critique, Critique of Judgment, which deals specifically with aesthetic matters. I also find inspiration and value in Wysocki’s suggested classroom activities. At the end of the chapter, she details a series of activities that guide students through a process of learning rhetorical visual design. This process asks students to pursue various modes of inquiry. Students collect visual designs, develop their own design principles, and then write a 500-word response to a peer’s design principles. Later in the course, students analyze visual compositions, make an ugly webpage, and then make a good webpage. These classroom practices encourage just what Wysocki lays out earlier, philosophically—experimentation, play, breaking the prescriptive molds in an effort to forge new relations. Mark Garrett Longaker and Jeffrey Walker bring attention to the power of the visual in the 2010 book Rhetorical Analysis: A Brief Guide for Writers. They point out that the visual affects us in ways that words alone cannot. For example, if a person reads about a devastating disaster, she will feel sympathy. However, if she views an image, it is even more jarring. Longaker and Walker claim that a video has even more impact than a still image. Technologies of the visual have evolved immensely during our lifetime, perhaps most notably since the early

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1990s when the Internet was primarily text (215). Does the evolution of technology render previous theories of the visual obsolete? I think not. While classical rhetors could not envision the technology we have today, they did theorize the visual extensively. Longaker and Walker note that the ancient Greek term for vivid language is enargeia, which means, “making things move as if they were alive” (215). Classical rhetoricians did not make videos, but they did instruct each other on how to create the effect by using visually provocative language. They understood that words are employed to recreate the visual experience of seeing. Longaker and Walker remind us that descriptions communicated in vivid language can account for aural and bodily experience as well (215). Powerful language makes an experience feel immediate. As a consequence, it can perform a persuasive function. Longaker and Walker encourage me to look more closely into classical rhetoric to identify more important ideas about the visual I may recover for scholars and teachers today. Specifically, I want to know, how can scholar-teachers repurpose these visual concepts for style pedagogies? And, how can students can use these visual concepts when writing about objects and creating their own images? Before attempting to answer these pedagogical questions, I first reclaim four important concepts: the imagination, the sublime, ekphrasis, and enargeia.

The Imagination The imagination is an important concept for writing teachers. Though it may sound a little vague and undefined, we can easily be reminded of its power from one of the field’s greatest theorists, Ann Berthoff. She analyzed the concept extensively, especially as it relates to the teaching of writing. Berthoff draws her theories from Coleridge, so it is necessary for us to reacquaint ourselves with his contributions. Literary scholar M. H. Abrams cites Coleridge’s many powerful metaphors for the imagination. Coleridge described the imagination as the “associative power” which acts “by a sort of juxtaposition; the “synthetic,” “permeative,” “blending, fusing power” (169). This means that the imagination does not refer to some sudden flash of inspiration, but rather to a process of shaping and creating ideas. In composition studies, Berthoff is a strong advocate for reclaiming the imagination. She repurposes Coleridge’s language to make relevant observations about the relationship between writing and the imagination, and between theory and practice (28). In The Making of Meaning, Berthoff refers to Coleridge as “our best guide in developing a philosophy of rhetoric” and calls

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the imagination “the form-finding and form-creating power” (28). She further analyzes the imagination as a speculative instrument (4-5). By this she means that the imagination is that process by which we form and shape ideas. Berthoff explains, “The most powerful speculative instrument English teachers have is imagination … it is our means of giving shape to content” (Berthoff, The Making 4-5). What’s the point of all this shaping of content and ideas? Well, by shaping ideas, we make knowledge. When we think about how we do this, it becomes possible to “know our knowledge” (The Making 57). Berthoff is concerned that writing teachers are forgetting about the imagination and are too quick to accept more concrete, easily discernable practices. She laments that writing teachers seem to “accept almost anything if it is packaged; if it has a memorable name; if it sounds scientific; if it shows promise of lending prestige to our profession” (96). The language she uses to refer to the imagination is at once glib and astute. When Berthoff writes that the imagination needs to be “rescued from the creativity corner” she is a bit deprecating, but also brings attention to the real problem that the imagination has been cast aside and needs to be brought back (The Making 28). To ground this claim about the importance of the imagination in sufficient theory, Berthoff continually references Coleridge. To make it applicable to teaching college students, she references Whitehead’s claim: “Thus the proper function of a university is the imaginative acquisition of knowledge . . . A university is imaginative or it is nothing—at least nothing useful” (133). How does one make the imagination useful? By creating a classroom environment that invites the forming and shaping of ideas. By recognizing that “the search for limits is itself heuristic, that form emerges from chaos” (103-104). By seeing the classroom as a “philosophical laboratory” (128). It is an unconventional approach that leaves a lot of room for experimentation and ambiguity. In the later book Reclaiming the Imagination, Berthoff once again works to reestablish the Romantics as writing theorists. She asserts that writing theorists and teachers need to reclaim the imagination, which means “to help bring it back alive, from captivity” (Preface). This book collects writings of artists, philosophers, and scientists to offer philosophical ideas for writing teachers. Berthoff explains, “learning to write and learning to teach writing are, I think, unspeakably boring activities unless they are thought about philosophically” (Preface). She believes artists have much to teach us about how to think, and how to embrace chaos and ambiguity (262). While academia explicitly and implicitly tells us to abide by the rules of our

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disciplines, Berthoff counters that by embracing ideas from a range of creative thinkers and fields, and refusing to accept prescribed limits. The imagination is a possible concept if we choose to make it one. Scholars draw inspiration from Berthoff as they continue to address problems of theory, practice, and disciplinarity. Roskelly and Ronald analyze an important essay written by Berthoff. The essay is titled with a question: “Is Teaching Still Possible?” While this may seem like a purely rhetorical question, Roskelly and Ronald note that it may also be read as a warning about what happens when teachers have trouble connecting theory to their lived experiences in the classroom (3). Teachers need a large historical and philosophical framework to draw upon (3). That is how we continually recover, deconstruct, and reshape practice (3). Of course, this is not easy. Borrowing from Berthoff, Roskelly and Ronald observe, “Looking and looking again, examining your suppositions, theorizing about practice, and practicing your theory are activities that too often seem unusual or out of place in schools and universities” (15). These ideas are radically opposed to the systematic structure of these institutions in which we work. But in response to the question—is teaching still possible?—Roskelly and Ronald respond, yes—but only when theory and practice connect (2). The authors present romantic/pragmatic rhetoric as a philosophical position of questioning practices and beliefs in order to find theoretical support for those ideas that one continues to hold (3). I imagine telling a group of colleagues that I want to bring back the imagination to writing pedagogy. I imagine they might look at me like I was a bit idealistic or odd. But by designing a course on composition and aesthetics, reclaiming the imagination is just what I was trying to do. Giving students space to form, shape, and test ideas; to experiment, to test limits— this is what the imagination looks like in the composition course. It is not standard and it is not very measurable. But, it does offer a great opportunity for reflection and reshaping of pedagogical theory and practice. I discuss my theories and methods in chapter four. I should note that composition scholars discuss the imagination from perspectives other than Coleridge alone. In the essay “Philosophies of Style and their Implications for Composition,” John T. Gage asserts the importance of the imagination by reading Montaigne. Gage interprets a perplexing passage in which Montaigne writes, “We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn” (621). Gage interprets this passage as one that informs us if we choose from multiple

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styles, we will discover that language is “no more than half-truths” (621). This conclusion is fine because it permits us to view the imagination as capable of play and exploration (621).

The Sublime I am compelled to bring attention to this term because of its primacy in the history of the visual and close ties to the history of rhetoric and writing. The sublime originated as a rhetorical concept, but over time, the meaning shifted due to historical circumstances. I believe our current research and teaching can benefit from the classical definition of the sublime, which comes from rhetorician Longinus. When reading Hugh Blair, rhetoricians may get the sense that the sublime is simply an innate quality of certain things. However, this view forgets that the sublime is a rhetorical effect. The sublime is often associated with literary studies, but the concept stems from rhetoric. The first emergence of the term is in On the Sublime (1st century B.C.E.?), a compilation of Longinus’ notes. In this work, Longinus praises the sublime. Explaining the effects of sublime language, he writes, “the true sublime naturally elevates us: uplifted with a sense of proud exaltation, we are filled with joy and pride, as if we ourselves had produced the very thing we heard” (179). The sublime results when the speaker describes something so effectively that the audience understands the thought as well as if it had been their own. It is safe to say that for Longinus, the sublime is an effect, a relation between speaker and audience. In other words, the sublime is beautifully satisfying communication. This beauty is not for its own sake, but is meant to serve other purposes. Longinus hopes the pleasures of style will be “useful to public men” (Longinus 154). In rhetoric history, the sublime emerges as a means of describing beautifully effective communication which may in turn be quite persuasive. Longinus gives us more than just a description of the sublime. He discusses techniques for employing visual descriptions to enhance speeches. Longinus urges rhetoricians to embrace the power of language to render scenes in striking visual details. Specifically, he encourages orators to use language to create visualizations (phantasiai) or “image productions” (215). By employing this technique of detailed visual language, rhetoricians can bring scenes vividly before their audience (215). This serves the larger goal of the sublime, which is beautifully satisfying communication, and politically effective speeches. So how do we draw upon the sublime to create such effects?

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According to Jeanne Fahnestock, Longinus shows how “words, syntax, text, and constructed situation all work together in persuasion” (415). In the 2011 book Rhetorical Style, Fahnestock reads Longinus and discerns his contribution for today’s rhetorical analysts and researchers. This is a modern rhetorical analyst’s interpretation of Longinus. She continues by stating that when all of these aspects “combine to the point that no further improvement seems possible, the result is sublime amplification” (415). For Fahnestock, the sublime comes from a perfectly constructed persuasive argument. This serves as a notable example of a current scholar reclaiming a visual technique from classical rhetoric. I appreciate Fahnestock’s reading of Longinus, but I disagree with one aspect. She finds Longinus’s phantasia too great of a creative risk for the modern orator. Longinus encourages “phantasia to the point of hallucination” she notes (337). Speakers now have “a more difficult time invoking imaginary sights through phantasia, and few orators since the nineteenth century have been bold enough to try this strategy” (337). I am not convinced this is true. I find that descriptive language in speaking remains a very effective strategy and it is still used today. Just listen to NPR while driving. Imaginary sights are frequently evoked, in the interests of storytelling and informing the public. Viewed this way, Longinus’s suggestions are still very much in use. If my example of fantastic visualizations via car radio sounds extreme, I don’t mind. Rhetoric scholar Ned O’Gorman reads On the Sublime and claims that Longinus advocates for a technique that goes far beyond “the Aristotelian art-of-the-available-means-of-persuasion” (O’Gorman, “Longinus’s” 73). Longinus was after a different experience, a road (methodos) to ecstasy (ekstasis) by way of height (hypsos) (75). “Height” is a kind of style that could achieve ecstasy (75). O’Gorman asserts that Longinus created a new language for rhetoric by using these words to describe rhetorical effects (75). Longinus’s description of what a rhetorical work can do “rises above the audience, above the human, and above a coherent critical vocabulary” (75). Taking this into account, Fahnestock’s definition is too tame. If this discussion of the sublime sounds vague and strange, I think it should. Throughout history, thinkers have studied the sublime as that which might free aesthetic works from established criteria of judgment (O’Gorman, “Longinus’s” 72). Kenneth Holmqvist and Jaroslaw Pluciennik note that the most basic way to represent the sublime is by locating it in objects. Yet, there is also a linguistic means of representing the sublime—“for instance, ‘Aa!,’ which

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conventionally signals a desire to represent something and an avowal of a failure of language” (725). The sublime is hard to pin down. It is not an object, and it is not a genre, but it is a theory. Holmqvist and Pluciennik state it might be thought of as “an extended mode, related in turn to other modes” (726). We do know that the sublime is rhetorical, because it generates feelings and effects that can persuade and change attitudes (726). The sublime is hard to explain beyond stating that it is so powerful that it’s nearly unexplainable. This is likely why Fahnestock tones it down into a simplified definition of audience. Throughout rhetoric history, the definition of the sublime has evolved. While Longinus defines the sublime as a rhetor-audience relationship, Scottish rhetorician Hugh Blair does not. For Blair, the sublime refers to “intense experiences” (56). Blair gives examples that are almost sublime, such as seeing a “boundless plain,” looking upwards at “a high mountain,” or gazing downward from “an awful precipice or tower” (56). These experiences “are marked by grandeur” but they are not necessarily sublime (56). In terms of the sublime, Blair explains, “[i]t is not easy to describe, in words, the precise impression” that it creates (58). What he can say is that experiences become sublime when they go beyond being vast or expansive to the point that they have no bounds. He writes, “[r]emove all bounds from any object, and you presently render it sublime” (56). Things like “infinite space, endless numbers, and eternal duration” are examples of the sublime, and the experience of these things “fill[s] the mind with great ideas” (56). In terms of aesthetic theory, this definition of the sublime is inspiring—it encourages the imagination and the breaking of limits. But what happens to Blair’s theory of the sublime when it is set in relation to writing? For Blair, sublime writing results from accurately describing sublime objects. Blair writes that the sublime is expressed by “a description of objects, or exhibition of sentiments, which are in themselves of a Sublime nature” (69). He claims that by describing sublime objects, the writer can create strong impressions. This definition is not as useful as Longinus’s version of the sublime as a rhetor-audience relationship. By presenting the sublime as a description of objects that are in their essence sublime, the prior connection with audience is lost. For examples of sublime writing, Blair cites “the Sacred Scriptures” and the epic poets Homer and Ossian (73- 75). When offering advice to students, Blair asserts that sublime writing requires “conciseness and simplicity” (78). He finds excessive ornament to be a detriment; he thinks expression should

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be direct (78). For this reason, Blair discourages rhyme, calling it “inconsistent with the sublime” (80). He thinks rhyme imposes form onto writing that can lead to superfluous language (80). Rhyme is “merely expletive, and introduced for no other reason but to fill up the rhyme; for it interrupts the description and clogs the image,” he writes (81). Instead of rhyme, he promotes blank verse for sublime writing, citing examples from epic poetry (82). The sublime is sometimes simplified as a feeling. How did this happen? In the 18th century, there was a sudden renewed interest in Longinus among literary scholars. This was the result of Samuel Johnson publishing A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755. In this dictionary, Johnson attributed the term sublime to Longinus, which created “something of a cult status among the literary” (E. Burke, “Introduction” x). Prominent literary thinkers and philosophers took interest in the term and revived its relevance for their own cultural contexts. Philosopher Edmund Burke, a figure often cited in literary studies, set forth a new interpretation of the sublime, which caused a shift in public perception of the term. In Burke’s view, the sublime refers to an overwhelming emotion that is triggered by observation of the natural world. Burke claims that the sublime excites ideas of pain and danger, analogous to terror, and “productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (36). This is different from Longinus’s original conception of the sublime, which is much more concerned with audience. During Burke’s time, the concept of the sublime collided with the cultural fascination with landscape painting (Kriz 54). This further pulled the term away from its original meaning as a rhetorical technique. So what is one to do with this powerful, yet oft misunderstood concept? O’Gorman notes that the sublime is a particularly confusing term because of its multiple iterations and uses in different contexts. To put it simply, the sublime is not easily defined (47). Scholars discuss “the technological sublime, the apocalyptic sublime, the Romantic sublime, the democratic sublime, and so on” (O’Gorman, “Eisenhower” 47). I contend that composition studies needs a theory of the rhetorical sublime, and one that works for today’s technological contexts. This would be an ambitious undertaking and only possible if theorists of style history join in conversation with those in technical rhetoric and new media studies. For now, I assert that Longinus’s concept of the sublime as audience-oriented and socially useful is worth remembering for our work today. It’s not enough to remember the sublime as something Hugh Blair talked about as a quality inherent to a beautiful vase or speech.

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We close off a whole theoretical realm if we reduce the term this way. I believe that as scholars and teachers, we can connect the sublime to visual composition and not just alphabetic text. Longinus feared that rhetors would be complacent with presenting clearly demonstrated arguments (O’Gorman, “Longinus’s” 73). He believed rhetors could dazzle the audience, and in doing so, reveal the practical truths underneath (73). He believed it was possible to engage audiences by astounding them with image (73). One can only imagine what Longinus would think about the vast resources we now have for making stylistic arguments with visual images. In my view, Longinus’s theories are nothing short of an imperative to engage with the visual as part of style pedagogy.

Ekphrasis Ekphrasis is the next rhetorical concept I reclaim. Although this term refers to an act of writing, it has been reduced to a genre. I want to remind scholars of its powerful rhetorical origins. From the Greek ekphrazein, ekphrasis means to “speak out” upon seeing a work of art (Webb 35). Classical Greek rhetoricians practiced this exercise from 1-5 C.E. (Fahnestock 337). This practice of “speaking out” about art through writing evolved into a genre of its own, ekphrastic poetry. The Keats poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is among the most famous examples (337). Literary scholar Bernhard F. Scholz has some concerns about how ekphrasis morphed from a rhetorical term to a literary genre (3). Literary scholarship has historically turned to texts from classical times in order to rediscover and rearticulate present theoretical concerns (3). While the intent is good, Scholz fears much is lost from the original methods and descriptions. He notes evidence of the shift of meaning in the term ekphrasis in a passage from literary critic Leo Spitzer (3). In his discussion of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Spitzer asserts the poem “belongs to the genre … of the ekphrasis, the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art” (4). Spitzer’s usage gained wide acceptance in literary scholarship; however, in Scholz’s view, the generic distinction was not warranted (5). By defining ekphrasis as a genre, literary scholars lost the rhetorical power of the concept. Scholz points out that ekphrasis was originally a rhetorical term, like metastasis or apostrophe (5). Like a rhetorical figure, it should be understood “in terms of its affectual nature, i.e. in terms of its disposition to create a particular

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effect in the mind of the listener/reader . . .” (5). The shift of ekphrasis from a rhetorical figure to a genre reduced its power. Rhetoric historian Frank D’Angelo recovers ekphrasis as a rhetorical term through analysis of the progymnasmata (440). The progymnasmata are rhetorical manuals used by Greek educators during the 1st -5th centuries C.E. to prepare students to present speeches (439). D’Angelo observes that ekphrasis has been defined in different ways. It has been called “a rhetorical strategy, a rhetorical prose description of a work of art, and a poetic or literary genre” (440). He notes that, when defined as a rhetorical strategy, ekphrasis “is not described as if it were a genre, complete in itself” (440). Rather, ekphrasis is “a technique of persuasion” (440). As a rhetorical technique, ekphrasis was intended to generate compelling description to be placed into a larger speech (440). It could be used in any of the three kinds of speeches: deliberative, judicial, or ceremonial (440). The purpose of doing ekphrastic description was to make speeches “more vivid and hence more persuasive” (Clark 203). The point of ekphrasis is not the render an exact description, but to include “the judgments and emotions of the describer” (Becker 11). Ekphrasis demands subjectivity and interpretation. It would not be fair to assert that ekphrasis is only a genre. Scholars also use the term to mean the act of writing about a work of art (D’Angelo 441). But, in the classical era, writing about art was not the function of ekphrastic practice. It was a technique used to render descriptions of persons, places, times, and events (441). Only one classical rhetorician of the progymnasmatic tradition, Nicolaus of Myra, mentions writing about art objects as possible subjects (441). For this reason, even the most culturally significant, standard-bearing definitions must be subject to critique and do come up short. For instance, art theorist W. J. T. Mitchell’s definition of ekphrasis is “a rhetorical description of a work of art” (Mitchell 153). D’Angelo points out that this truncated definition neglects to account for the full historical definition of the term, which “combines description, narration, and praising and blaming” (D’Angelo 442). Once again the original term has been tempered over time, which results in so much meaning getting lost—how did this happen? Ekphrasis broke off into two parallel trajectories during the second and third centuries (D’Angelo 446). Put simply, there is ekphrasis as a reaction to art. Then, there is also ekphrasis as outlined in the progymnasmata as a description of people, places, times, and events (D’Angelo 443). The former, the art-centric ekphrasis, was used to teach students to interpret art,

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to praise artists, to recreate the emotion of a painting and subsequently to emotionally move the listener (443). Much of the paintings depicted familiar scenes from “literature, myth, and history” (443). By analyzing classical manuals, rhetoric historians discerned that students attempted to re-present the subject of the painting and reanimate the work via strategic use of language (443). While the ekphrastic art tradition evolved, so too did the progymnasmatic tradition. The latter evolved as a means of narrating events to make it seem like they were happening in real time. However, the progymnasmatic tradition did not deal with static objects, art or otherwise (D’Angelo 443). Over time, ekphrasis evolved into a literary genre (445). Eventually, it came to mean poems about recognizable artworks (445). At its origin, though, ekphrasis was a rhetorical strategy, and one that D’Angelo finds was “essential to all the major genres” including “epic, lyric poetry, pastoral, drama, history, and romance” (446). It seems a shame that this challenging rhetorical practice is now cordoned to such a specialized area of study—probably the art history course. Ekphrastic writing reemerged as a rhetorical practice in composition studies for a brief flash in the 20th century. Notably, George Kennedy, a rhetoric historian, translated classical Greek textbooks that outline ekphrastic writing practices. By referencing these translations, Kennedy shows how a writer crafts her style to match the art object in question. Kennedy offers an explanation: “[one] should make sure the style reflect[s] the subject, so that if what it described is colorful, the word choice should be colorful” (47). In this sense, the gloom and doom of Scholz (ekphrasis has been reduced to a genre) is not completely true; the New Rhetoric saw a reemergence of a more classical version of ekphrasis as a rhetorical practice, not a prescribed genre. Scholar-teachers should continue to recover a practice of ekphrasis as a sophisticated interpretive mode. It offers a theory for engaging writers by rendering visual objects into text descriptions. This careful study is an important first step before students go on to create visual projects of their own. But it’s not easy to understand the power of ekphrasis without its paired concept, enargeia, so this is what I analyze next.

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Enargeia Enargeia is a classical concept that is closely related to ekphrasis (Webb 193). Enargeia means “vividness” (Kennedy 86).6 The vividness is what makes ekphrasistic descriptions compelling (Webb 193). Ruth Webb understands enargeia as “the vividness that makes absent things seems [sic] present by its appeal to the imagination” (193). This term connects to the related concept of the imagination because of the process by which it appeals. Also, enargeia is the power behind ekphrastic writing. I turn to Quintilian’s description of enargeia to discern more. Enargeia is part of Quintilian’s larger description on varieties of style. This is found in Book 8 Chapter 3 of Institutio Oratoria (The Orator’s Education). In this section, he cautions orators that it is not adequate for the speaker to merely arrange a speech in brilliant and vivid manner. There are additional methods for improving style. The techniques he describes are: • deinosis, an elevated expression of feelings • phantasia, or the ability to form imaginative visions • exergasia, which means “bringing a plan (as it were) to completion” by means of repetition and accumulated arguments • enargeia, the name of which implies action, and its “peculiar virtue is that nothing that we say is otiose” (389-390). These terms are all compelling because they offer a breakdown of how style energizes and animates a speech. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m most interested in enargeia because of its connection to the ekphrastic tradition. The way Quintilian discusses enargeia is at once humorous and elusive. Taken at surface level, he claims that enargeia prevents the speech from being dull or boring. How so? The spelling of the term (enargeia, not energeia—its sometimes confused spelling that carries a different meaning) and placement at the end of the sequence within the paragraph suggests to me that Quintilian means enargeia is what brings energy and activity to the speech. This energy is what animates the speech for the audience and prevents them from being bored. Editor and translator Donald A. Russell is left unsure, and writes “Q’s use of it [enargeia] here to denote economical terseness seems unexampled” (390). I don’t read it

6 Not all scholars define enargeia as vividness. Kennedy explains that the term also means “clarity of style” and functioned as a stylistic term for Greco-Roman rhetoricians (86). And yet, Kennedy notes, in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the term for clarity is a different one, saphenia (86).

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that way. By warning us not to be “otiose,” I think Quintilian is urging not for economy, but simply for energy. Scholars continue to study how enargeia can assist us in understanding ekphrasis. Scholz claims that enargeia is the term that characterizes the rhetorical power of ekphrasis (Scholz 7). While ekphrasis is the act of verbally describing, enargeia is the impression that is created (7). As classical rhetorician Nicolaus of Myra explains, enargeia is the “distinctive feature of ekphrasis” (7). Ekphrasis alone is “mere reporting,” whereas enargeia “tries to turn readers into spectators” (7). It is no surprise that this passage from Nicolaus of Myra is so often quoted by rhetoricians. It addresses how texts are designed to affect an audience (7). Webb grounds much of her analysis of enargeia in Quintilan’s work. Webb explains that for Quintilian, enargeia was a skill that could be developed with practice (95). It was “the result of a controlled and conscious process of visualization” (95). Students were encouraged to think of others’ speeches as the product of visualization, and it was an important technique for reading, listening, and creating one’s own speeches (96). In a larger sense, as Webb puts it, the study of ekphrasis and enargeia are useful because these terms provide “important information about ancient habits of reading and deeply rooted attitudes towards texts, which are seen as inviting imaginative and emotional involvement” (195). Such involvement is key to the art of persuasion.

Teaching Formal Analysis and Ekphrasis In this section, I think beyond these terms to more specific practices in which students engage with the visual. During fall semester 2015, I taught two writing activities—formal analysis and ekphrasis—to students in two sections of English 112. At the time, English 112 was the second course in a two-part composition requirement under the liberal arts curriculum termed the Miami Plan. Since then, the requirements have changed and the course has been reinvented as various upper-level writing courses. English 112 was officially titled Composition and Literature, but I subtitled my course The Art of Everyday Life. This course asked students to engage in creative analysis and author their own creative writing. For the major assignments, students wrote a style analysis paper, a critical essay on the film Boyhood [2014], and a creative writing piece (nonfiction, fiction, or a collection of flash pieces or prose poems). The final consisted of a substantive essay in which students reflected on creative risk-taking while citing

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examples from their own work. The majority of the students in these two courses were international students from China. These two writing exercises, formal analysis and ekphrasis, require an analytical eye and the imagination. The first mode that students wrote was formal analysis, followed by ekphrasis. The sequence of first noting details, and then inventing based upon them is a logical progression. Specifically, I claim that formal analysis functions as a heuristic of close looking that can lead to ekphrasis. Since Miami University is home to a public art museum with five galleries, it made sense to visit and do these writing activities there. I held one class meeting at the museum. There, each student began the writing activity. They started by wandering around until something caught their eye, and then they selected a painting or art object. This object would serve as the subject of the activity. When introducing the assignment, I reminded students of the previous class. During that class, they learned about ekphrastic writing, including the entomology of the term and also that it is an ancient writing practice that writers still use today. I discussed formal analysis as an activity that would lead to more detailed and engaging ekphrastic writing.

Formal Analysis Formal analysis is the assignment the students did first. My assignment borrows from Writing About Art by Marjorie Munsterberg. This is a pedagogical text designed “to help students improve their ability to write about visual things” (Munsterberg). The text was used at The City College of New York in a course entitled Writing About Art. Munsterberg designed writing activities for her art students to do at The Met. In recent years, advances in technology and a move toward online museum collections has greatly increased access for people who do not live near art museums. It is possible to do these writing activities simply by having Internet access.7 I want to be clear that teaching these modes of writing is not my own idea. But, the ways in which I repurposed these ideas and set them in the context of a specific writing course is my own doing. Formal analysis is concerned with descriptions of formal visual aspects of the artwork. These include qualities such as colors, lines, dimensionality, and so on (Munsterberg). The

7 Students can try out these activities even if they do not have access to a physical art museum. The Met offers an online collection with free access: http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online.

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analysis is concerned with identifying these individual aspects as well as assessing how well they work together as a whole composition (Munsterberg). This practice demands close observation and results in a written account of what is there. Art scholars use this method to discern details and construct categories of style, which they then use to classify works by historical period and genre (Munsterberg). I chose this activity in order for students to practice close observation and maintaining a formal style in writing. I explained that, for this activity, it is important to look at the art object with an analytical eye. The goal is not to create a story, but to explain the formal elements of the work. I share my assignment prompt here:

Activity # 1: Formal Analysis For this activity, you will look at the art object with an analytical eye. The goal is not to create a story, but to explain the formal elements of the work.

For Activity 1, compose a formal analysis of your chosen object. Use the questions below as a guide. Depending on which object you choose, some of the questions might not be relevant. If you deem a question irrelevant, skip it and go on the next question. Compose your response in a substantial paragraph of 250+ words.

Questions for Formal Analysis: 1. What are the approximate size dimensions of the work? 2. How is the work displayed (suspended from ceiling, mounted on pedestal, etc.)? 3. Who/what is depicted in the object? Describe the figures depicted. 4. If figures are depicted, are they proportionate to real life? Does the scene appear realistic, or not? 5. Describe the color. Are there warm colors (red, yellow, orange, brown) or cool colors (blue, green, light purple)? 6. What medium is the work (oil, acrylic, jade, clay, etc.)? 7. When was the work made (approximate date / era)? 8. Who made the work? (If artist is unknown, make note of that).

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9. What’s the first thing you notice when you look at the work? Is there a central subject or point of focus? 10. Is this art work functional/useful? Is it simply an aesthetic creation to be looked at? Is it both? 11. Interpretation. What is the significance of this artwork? In your opinion, what is to be gained by looking at it? Why is it worthy of inclusion in the museum?

I presented students with a list of formal qualities to assess. These qualities were outlined as heuristic questions that students used as a guide. Depending on which object they chose, some of the questions were not relevant; in that case, students could simply skip over them and go on the next question. I asked students to compose their response in a substantial, stylistically consistent paragraph of at least 250 words. The questions for formal analysis deal with many elements. Students begin by observing the work and discerning the subject. They consider proportion, color, medium, date of creation, name of artist, and other observable details of the work. Questions then progress from mere observations to more analytical notes. For example, students consider questions about the function of the art object. Finally, they arrive at an interpretation. Asking final questions about the function and significance of the artwork requires students to move from observing details to thinking contextually. Because students may not know what a formal analysis looks like, I shared one that I had written as an undergraduate. Students reviewed the sample essay as a model and used it to formulate their own questions about the assignment. Models are necessary because some students have never read this kind of writing before.

Ekphrasis Once students write the formal analysis, they are primed to write a compelling ekphrastic piece. An ekphrastic piece is compelling when the writer uses vivid language in order to render an immediate scene. Since formal analysis requires close observation, it reveals details and engages the writer as viewer. To put it simply: formal analysis is the heuristic that inspires the later creative piece. The ekphrastic composition will be more powerful if it results from a disciplined study.

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Since there is no one formula for an ekphrastic writing practice, teachers can frame it in different ways depending on what they want students to gain from the exercise. I did not require students to write poems, though they were welcome to if inspired. I simply asked students to compose a creative piece in reaction to the art object. The response should be 250 words or more. It was also acceptable to compose a poem of at least ten lines, if they preferred. Before beginning, we considered various perspectives from which one can write. These might include: as a viewer in the museum, as a person or creature depicted in the artwork, or as a fictional viewer looking at the scene. I encouraged students to feel free to “think outside the frame” and imagine beyond what is shown. Students were encouraged to experiment with memory and time. The speaker could be reflecting on the past, anticipating the future, etc. This sort of imaginative activity was a familiar idea to students since their first major assignment for the course was a personal / memoir essay that required a similar mode of thought. My assignment is as follows:

Activity # 2: Ekphrasis Last class, you learned about ekphrastic writing. It is an ancient writing practice that writers still use today. It refers to a short work of writing that “speaks out” about an art object.

“ekphrasis” – from the Greek ek, “out of”, and phrasis, “speech” or “expression”

For Activity 2, compose a work of ekphrastic writing about your chosen object. The response should be 250+ words.

ekphrasis – guide for writing 1. Look at the art object. 2. Choose a point of view—who will be the narrator, speaking about the art—a subject depicted in the art? A random bystander looking at it? Yourself? 3. Feel free to “think outside the frame” and imagine beyond what is shown. 4. Feel free to experiment with memory and time (like in memoir writing). The speaker could be reflecting on the past, anticipating the future, etc.

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When sharing completed ekphrasis pieces, students can analyze the perspective from which the story is told, analyze the style, and consider how the language and description works to render the scene and tell a story. Because this is a quiet, individual activity, it is important to generate conversation about the writing. Sharing the work is refreshing because it reveals a wide range of styles. Students can also reflect upon their process of making the decisions that they did. Overall, students responded well to the ekphrasis writing activity. The few American college students in the course quickly noted similarities between this activity and ideas they encountered in related course areas such as art history.8 Of course, the majority of students in these particular sections were international students from China. Chinese students tended to express greater surprise toward the activity. This is likely because creative writing is still very new within in the context of the Chinese educational system. In China, writing courses in English departments tend to focus on “non-creative genres” and teach academic writing (Dai 547-548). In China, creative writing is rarely a topic at professional academic conferences of English teachers (Dai 547-548). The idea of having no bounds placed on the ekphrasis activity left some Chinese students feeling confused about the expectations. Some students explained that they simply had not been asked to do something like this in a formal educational setting before. In this case, I reminded students that they produce various kinds of informal writing on their own. For this activity, they might set aside expectations for what is supposed to happen in class and try to create something that originates from their own approach. One student from China commented that it was the first time he had ever written something for a sense of the aesthetic rather than composing a work of writing for a purely functional purpose. In course reflections, students from both cultural backgrounds described ekphrasis as exciting, enjoyable, and unexpected. On the other hand, formal analysis brings a different sort of analytical rigor. I found that students tend to perform the analysis well by following the guided questions I provide. The most challenging aspect of formal analysis for students is maintaining a formal, disinterested style. I

8 Why not make connections between different course areas? In Reclaiming the Imagination, Berthoff recalls her favorite college course, called “Related Arts” but affectionately referred to as “Related Everything” (261). Berthoff asserts that writing students have much to learn from studying the arts, including “the uses of chaos; the foolishness of depending on inspiration; the wisdom of depending on inspiration; the role of practice; the ambiguities of ‘the audience’; the dialectic of creativity and criticism” (262).

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think it is an important challenge of the assignment. Asking students to not only analyze in new modes but also to be conscious of style adds another layer of productive complication. After teaching this, I received a majority of positive responses. When I ask students to reflect on memorable and useful aspects of the course at the end of the semester, these two writing exercises are what they recall most vividly. Students were surprised by what resulted from the exercises. Specifically, many students were intrigued that one writer could compose two very different pieces of writing based on the same object. I think these exercises are helpful in terms of inviting students to exercise two different modes of thought. I enjoy teaching these modes of writing about visual objects because it is a very different kind of analytical exercise. I think formal analysis and ekphrasis can and should have a stronger place in college writing courses. My hope is that other writing teachers will find the assignments helpful for their own goals and purposes—whether those purposes are to practice style, to invite questions of the visual, or some other potential directions I have not yet imagined. When I reflect on my teaching of ekphrasis, I see ways to enhance the activity. In retrospect, I wish I had asked students to reflect more on the style employed in their ekphrastic responses, and to discern how well this style suited their chosen piece and their emotional reaction to it. In the future, I could also improve the activity by asking students to view their art object again at a later point in the course and compose a new work of writing. Both of these adjustments would further Berthoff’s call to engage students in “observing their observations” (The Making 24). I also think that composition as a field has become so focused on teaching persuasive discourse that we often overlook the utility of expository writing. I. A. Richards reminds us that rhetoric is concerned with exposition, not only persuasion. In The Philosophy of Rhetoric, he explains, “[p]ersuasion is only one among the aims of discourse. It poaches on the others— especially on that of exposition, which is concerned to state a view, not to persuade people to agree or to do anything more than examine it” (24). We must not forget about exposition, a vital mode of writing and central to learning. Building skills in expository writing will lead to more thoughtful persuasive writing. We must be careful observers first.

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Conclusion This work creates space for further theoretical inquiry and pedagogical methods. I began this chapter with the question, how can visual theories inform style pedagogy? Students can use these concepts, not only when writing about objects, but also when making their own projects. In future teaching situations, I will teach more complex theoretical terms beyond simply performing formal analysis and ekphrasis as writing exercises. I think students can work through terms like the imagination, the sublime, and enargeia to better express the rhetorical power of visual objects. In the future, I will also use these visual concepts to inform discussions of style beyond written projects. When students make photo essays, they can think about the imagination in terms of how they shape a narrative. They can think about enargeia in terms of the energy they want to convey, to turn the audience into spectators (Scholz 7). Style matters so much in the creation of digital projects. We are still finding ways to talk about it. When students compose video projects they need to make so many creative decisions, such as whether to narrate a story using voiceovers, or simply montage a bunch of scenes together. These questions are important, and they are stylistic ones—though something very different from the classical methods of studying the figures. By analyzing visual concepts as a style historian, I have only begun to uncover a large unchartered territory. Like Coleridge and Berthoff, I believe the imagination is how we form and shape ideas. We need to continually reclaim this concept. It will always seem idealistic and intangible, but we have to do it. We can do this by, as Roskelly and Ronald explain, “demonstrating how reflection and action interact” (26). We can reclaim the imagination in small ways if we redesign pedagogy and assessment to let in chaos, and then report on what we learn. I do this work in chapter four. The sublime invites a similar theoretical problem because it is elusive. For now, writing teachers can reclaim the sublime as Longinus articulated it, as a relationship between rhetor and audience—a communicative relationship of understanding. I find students are often unfamiliar with the concept of the sublime. Those who do know something about it often encountered the term by way of literary studies and know only Edmund Burke’s view of the sublime as an overpowering emotion. Presenting the sublime as a classical rhetorical concept concerned with communication and audience makes it a useable term and something worth aspiring for in verbal and written communication. I believe rhetoricians create sublime effects by using the figures,

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which I outlined in chapter two. Of course, the sublime adds a bit of chaos to writing pedagogy (badly needed, in my opinion). Aesthetic creations often defy clear interpretations. These works have the capacity to move us. This is sometimes referred to as the “je ne sais quoi” of a work of art (“I don’t know what”) (Abrams 195). As writing teachers, we might need to be more upfront about the fact that not everything can be directly explained. When looking at images, we might reference Roland Barthes’s concept of the punctum—what pierces or pricks the viewer upon viewing a certain image, an uncoded, subjective feeling (51-73). This sort of reaction to an aesthetic work is not clear or measurable, but it is real. Theory gives us ways to talk about it. Enargeia is another key concept for rhetoric teachers to know. It is not mere description that matters when rendering visual depictions into words. It is the vividness and subsequent engagement with the audience. It’s not just the act of writing, it’s the effects that the writer creates. Enargeia reignites rhetorical study with imagination and activity. It is an antidote to boredom. Formal analysis and ekphrasis are writing exercises that allow students to begin to probe the relations between visual images, writing, and the imagination. Overall, I think scholars and teachers of composition must be open to the dynamic interplay of language and the visual. Berthoff was concerned that students would aim for “closure” because they feared ambiguity and tentativeness (“Recognition” 24). Instead, teachers can encourage students to “generate chaos” and test their formulations. This approach embraces Keats’ theory of “negative capability,” or “the capacity to remain in doubt” (“Recognition” 24). Berthoff viewed this theory as essential for thinking about the process of writing. As university writing programs become increasingly focused on measurable outcomes, and students face enormous pressure to obtain directly marketable skills, it is more important than ever that teachers encourage this mode of thought. Our ideas have long histories and we must not forget our roots in classical rhetoric and Romanticism. I believe we can continue to extend them, adapting them along with changes in technologies.

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Chapter Four: An Aesthetic Approach to Teaching Composition

In the fall of 2014, I taught a course on the aesthetic uses of language. Students composed four genres of essays and practiced using the figures. Although the course is officially titled ENG 225: Advanced Composition, I subtitled it Composition and Aesthetics. I asked students to explore style by engaging in the study and writing of various essay genres, along with writing exercises that encouraged experimentation. I aspired to create an open class atmosphere in which students were not afraid to try new techniques. I saw this as vital to my endeavor. I wanted students to ask not, “What do I need to do?” but “What might I do?” The information I collected from the study leads me to the following claims: first, the figures serve as effective tools for invention and revision. Second, opening a composition course to aesthetic questions allows for risk and experimentation. And third, portfolio assessment makes students more comfortable with creative risk. In order to unpack these claims, I offer qualitative data. By analyzing interviews in which students reflect on using the figures and share their thoughts on alternative assessment practices, I offer perspectives not yet showcased in the existing literature on style pedagogy. While scholars like Bill FitzGerald and Denise Stodola have recently published essays about teaching the figures, I have not encountered recent work on the figures and pedagogy that includes student interview data. This study examines the value of an aesthetic approach to teaching writing and demonstrates how teaching creative nonfiction writing can play a role in style pedagogy. I am not the first scholar to envision the teaching of writing as an aesthetic endeavor. Jason Palmeri notes that composition studies is closely related to the allied arts fields of music, film, and design (50). He encourages composition teachers to collaborate with those fields and redesign pedagogies so that students may see arts fields as interrelated (50). Geoffrey Sirc urges for new aesthetic criteria in composition, claiming that composition lost its radical, avant-garde elements in the 1980s (12-13). Since then, the field has turned firmly toward teaching students to write for the academy and the workplace (32). Sirc claims that teachers need to continually invent new processes, discover new materials, and desire radically new products (107). Otherwise, is composition even worth teaching? (107). Central to an aesthetic pedagogy, in my mind, is the valuing of student work as legitimate creation. When designing this study, I thought of Joseph Harris’s idea that “student writings

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could be read as a kind of literature” (27). I decided to create as radically free of a classroom atmosphere as was possible, and then to see what would happen. Feeling uncertain of what that would yield, I took solace in T.R. Johnson’s observation that when we hand over much of the power to students, the art of teaching becomes “the art of asking questions that are not readily answerable” (96). I thought of Sirc’s wariness toward the assumption that students can be taught to compose successful writing. Sirc counters that assumption with the somewhat unsettling question, “Who knows what’s successful?” (228). I thought of Ann E. Berthoff, who encouraged teachers to become philosophers, and referred to the imagination as “the form-finding and form- creating power” (v-vi, 28). I considered that asking students to exercise their imagination and take creative risks might even be a way to discover and name new methods and values. To ground these thoughts in tangible activities, I turned to scholarship on style. Style is the link to aesthetics via the poetic tradition. It makes sense that these ancient writing practices could serve my current preoccupation. Recent literature on style is lacking in terms of featuring substantial classroom studies, which I found disappointing and sought to amend. However, recent work does include a few insightful and compelling contributions to the discussion of teaching style. For example, FitzGerald recently published a study on teaching an entire elective course on the figures. He found that when students learned and practiced figures, they began to see how figures function as “an open-ended, yet not arbitrary, set of linguistic moves” (49). In the course, students practiced exercises in copia, wrote varied sentences using figurative language, and composed individual projects of 6-8 pages that focused on analyzing figurative language in a particular context (52). This is a useful piece that includes student voices. In another recent study, Stodola locates rhetorical strategies in 13th century treatises to show how style can be taught in a business communication course at the undergraduate level. Stodola articulates how Geoffrey Vinsauf’s medieval treatises demonstrate that imitation and transition can serve to express and connect ideas (61). This meta-rhetorical potential is useful for teaching students to become increasingly self-reflexive about their own rhetorical choices (67). FitzGerald and Stodola’s work is inspiring and appealing because they work out of a similar tradition that I do—recovering ancient ideas about style and retooling them for the contemporary writing course. Where we differ, though, is that I believe an aesthetic framework serves as a different and more challenging way to teach style. I imagined the framework of the course as one that would bring in philosophical readings and encourage artistic experimentation

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across all assignments. Teaching stylistic tools—like the figures and copia exercises—could easily be incorporated under the broader vision of the course. I hadn’t read about anyone who chose to teach style exactly this way so I decided to try it.

Methods I taught my English 225 course to a group of 24 students. Of these 24, six students majored in professional writing, three majored in language arts education, and the remaining 15 came from a variety of majors including history, political science, biochemistry, and finance. I conducted this study in accordance with IRB standards. While the course was in progress, a colleague visited the class to recruit students for the study. The colleague held the signed consent forms in a sealed enveloped in a secure place and I did not receive them until after I had submitted final course grades. After the course ended, I discerned which of the students were willing to participate in the study. I also selected five students to meet with me for interviews that lasted approximately 30-40 minutes. Of these five interviews, four were substantive, and consequently I have incorporated them into this chapter. At various points in the study, I reminded students that their participation was voluntary. Students were able to retract any statements they had made if they later decided they did not want these statements to be included. Students were free to withdraw from the study at any time, and I made certain this was understood by clearly explaining it to each student at least twice. By signing the consent forms, students granted me permission to quote pseudonymously from their writing. A second consent form was used to obtain permission to quote from interviews. I designed interview questions to yield helpful responses. Each interview ultimately diverged off course and became a more organic conversation, but the questions below reference my starting points, and the sorts of ideas discussed. • What did you write about for your personal, lyric, and journalistic essays? Why did you choose these topics? • Can you describe your process of composing these essays? • Did your essays emerge from in-class writing exercises, or did you write the essays on your own? • What story or issue does your digital essay address? How did you come up with this idea?

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• How would you describe your digital essay? • Which mode did you choose to work in for the digital essay, and what were your reasons for choosing this mode? • When you began the digital essay, how familiar were you with the technology you used? • Can you describe your process of making the digital essay? • As you designed your digital essay, what did you want a viewer/listener to experience/learn from it? • In what ways does your project succeed? In what ways could it be improved? • How was ENG 225 similar to or different from other English/writing courses you have taken? • Do you think the course readings (such as Hampl, Steinberg, Sontag) influenced how you thought about your project? How and why? I designed these questions to discover students’ composing processes, their motivations for creating the projects that they did, and their reflections on the successes or shortcomings of what I tried to accomplish. I was interested in learning about specific moments, as well as their general attitude toward the course. The interviews were a highly rewarding experience. Often, teachers ask for written reflections at the end of the course to learn about what students thought. But, at the end of the semester, students are not in a prime position to give these insights. The experiences are still too near to them, and they are stressed over other final projects and competing demands. Final reflections are often graded assignments, so how honest will they be? It is incredibly fruitful to sit down after some time has gone by, when students have distance from the projects and can talk about them more substantively and objectively, and the course grade is long since on the record. In terms of my teaching methods, for this course I embraced an ethos that favored exploration, imagination, and the unknown. At the same time, I aimed to balance that exploration with careful and diligent study. In addition to composing four major essays, students practiced in-class activities and homework dealing with genre study. Students read samples of the essay genre and ascertained shared qualities and characteristics. Students conversed with each other to speculate about which techniques would be most effective for writing the genre. In retrospect, I sought to engage genre, style, and invention all at once. The course relied upon interplay of the study of models and invention. To give an example of a specific class activity in this course, I

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asked students to analyze the varying styles of articles published in The New Yorker, Wired, and Jezebel. I wanted students to analyze the larger genre and audience questions that shape the style of a published essay. At the same time, genre study was balanced with other activities, like freewriting and practice with the figures, to ensure that students had plenty of space to generate raw material for their own writing.

Assessment I chose to use a portfolio assessment system for the course. I have always felt strange about grading creative nonfiction assignments. Assigning a grade to a highly subjective work often seems arbitrary or invented. In a best case scenario, a grade serves as a signal to the student, or perhaps a means of motivation, but I knew I’d personally feel more comfortable creating an alternate system of assessment that relied less on subjective assessment and more on the work the writers did. Scholars have made the case for these types of assessments in writing classrooms (Broad; Danielewicz and Elbow; Elbow). Taking these ideas into account, I designed an alterative assessment system for the course. My assessment is in line with the portfolio tradition classically employed by teacher- scholars like Bob Broad. Students did not receive letter grades on any drafts or final essays. Instead, I wrote long narrative evaluations that commented on each student’s overall performance in the course, encompassing all aspects of writing and participation, with a letter grade at the end. My system involved two rules up front. Students must submit all major assignments and must not miss more than four classes in order to pass the course. Beyond that, I provided a meta-rubric for student performance in the course, with each grade detailed on the scale of A-F. As the instructor, I reserved the right to make qualitative judgments for students whose performance fell between two grade criteria, using + or -, for example A-, B+. I assessed student work from a holistic perspective. My assessment took into account student performance across various assignments, including the four essays, a commonplace book, peer response, and class participation. Prior to the midterm point in the semester, I wrote a personalized narrative evaluation for each student. Throughout the course, I advised students through individual meetings, email, and Google chat, and I commented on their essays, both in terms of substantive feedback and copy edits on the final versions. For the final course assignment, students selected their strongest essay, revised it,

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and submitted it for publication in a literary journal or magazine. By asking students to submit for publication, I was mainly interested in teaching the process of identifying a relevant magazine and querying the publication effectively. Publishing a piece in a magazine was an additional outcome a few students experienced. Several students successfully placed their work in the campus lit magazine, Inklings, as well as a few online literary magazines. I’m not the only scholar to think carefully about writing assessment. Peter Elbow has long been an advocate for alternative assessment systems that invite students to focus on writing and not grades. Elbow is wary of too much evaluation in the writing classroom because it makes students worry about what the teacher wants rather than focusing on their own writing (197). To counteract this problem, he encourages teachers to design “small but important evaluation-free zones” in which students can freewrite without the expectation of assessment (197). In recent work, Jane Danielewicz and Elbow discuss using contract grading. This is an alternative to portfolio grading that aims to further the potential for students to thoughtfully and critically assess teacher feedback (255). The contract grading system the authors propose is different from a portfolio system in that it selects “B” as the baseline grade for students who do the required amount of work (250). Ultimately, Danielewicz and Elbow believe that this style of assessment “fosters a deep commitment to process” and enables teachers to “more directly acknowledge our institutional power” (281). We can use our power to refocus students’ effort and attention on writing, not grades (261). In What we Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing (2003), Bob Broad theorizes alternative writing assessment practices. Broad claims that “[T]he age of the rubric has passed” (2). He analyzes portfolio assessments and finds that they better support best practices of teaching (18). In the 2009 book Organic Writing Assessment, Broad urges writing teachers to continually rethink which assessment practices work most effectively and ethically. He calls for an intense focus on the local, and distinctly contextual needs. He explains, “we need to recall and listen to other voices urging us to re-capture, re-coup, and harness organic, localized assessment to nourish productive teaching and learning” (2). And so I thought about this, and I reflected on the academic institution where I was teaching, and I thought it would be better to create an alternative assessment for my study. I believed alternative assessment would invite more creative projects. What students created—a lyric essay in fragmented segments, a digital essay that paired war photography with atonal music, and a coming-of-age story composed

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entirely as a list—suggest that students are eager to take creative risks when given the chance in an evaluative system that enables risk taking.

Course Assignments An aesthetic frame of mind was essential for nearly all of the work I asked students to do in this course. In this chapter, I focus on findings from the pedagogical study. Specifically, I show how students reacted to my teaching of the figures, and how they used knowledge of the figures to better understand and improve their writing. I also explore pertinent matters of the aesthetics of writing, and assessment, which undoubtedly come into play when embracing a rather free-form style of teaching as I did. I taught four genres of essays: personal/memoir, lyric, journalistic, and digital. I wanted these genres to invite distinct questions. At the same time, I imagined students would be able to track the development of their thinking and style across genres. I anticipated students would arrive at the end of the course with a set of essays in some ways distinct, yet in other ways thoroughly connected to and borrowed from other bits of informal writing, rough drafts, and conversations with peers. For each assignment, I stressed studying genre conventions. At the same time, I encouraged experimentation and breaking the rules for effect. I wanted students to own their writing, and to invent stories and scenes. I wanted students to be writers, not simply students. I wanted the class to explore writing beyond correctness and following the rules. I wanted to open up aesthetic dimensions of language that are not implicitly stated in outcomes statements but have nonetheless always been central to rhetorical education. In the description of the course that I distributed to students, I explained that throughout history, writing has been a source of pleasure, imagination, elegance, and delight. The first essay genre we explored was the personal essay. This genre is frequently attributed to Michel de Montaigne, who composed freeform pieces. Montaigne identified his written works by using the term essais, from the French word meaning “a trial, an attempt” (Hardison 612). And yet, the term also translates from the French assaier, “to assay,” which means to try or test (Hardison 612). These two origins are equally compelling, making the essay an existing attempt as well as the act of trying to write. Composition scholars have read Montaigne’s work to uncover histories and theories of essay writing. Thomas Newkirk observes

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that for Montaigne, the essay was “a formless form, open enough to allow for the explorations of a reality which was fundamentally unstable” (12). Rhetoric scholar William Covino reads Montaigne as a sophisticated rhetorical thinker who wrote so that style was never separate from invention and imagination (46). Notably, philosopher Julia Kristeva writes that Montaigne was the first writer to express “this major fact that we each have our own self” (118). However, this self perceives no singularity and often questions, “What do I know?” [“Que sçay-je?”] (120). There’s much more that can be said about Montaigne, but for the purposes of this chapter, I’ll stop at this. Mainly, Montaigne is important because he defined the essay in a way that emphasized creativity in an open form. As a genre that has evolved over more than four centuries, the personal essay is still marked by definitive techniques. Michael Steinberg, a leading figure in the conversation on creative nonfiction in recent decades, explains that the personal essay can have more than one voice, and often it does—a surface story, as well as a reflective voice that mediates between memory and the present (“Finding” 187). To craft a narrative voice in the personal essay, Steinberg identifies strategies: reflection, speculation, self-interrogation, digression, and projection (“Finding” 188). As a whole, the personal essay is a method by which the writer interprets the story of her own experience (“Finding” 187). Sample essays I taught for this genre include “Memory and Imagination” by Patricia Hampl (a famous example), “The Wishbone” by Francis Scott Key (a very recent piece) and an essay entitled “Dating in College is Weird” by Claire CasaSanta, a student from the previous semester who had published the essay in an online lit mag. Students also read “Finding the Inner Story in Memoirs and Personal Essays” by Michael Steinberg for the narrative techniques it offers. The next essay assignment, the lyric essay, defies a singular definition. What we can say is that it refers broadly to “experimental nonfiction and hybrid-genre work” (Gannon 8). Though it is often understood as falling under the large category of creative nonfiction, that identification alone is too vague, so I turn to the Seneca Review, a literary magazine that is a serious proponent of the genre. In the fall 1997 issue of the Seneca Review, the editors defined the lyric essay as one that “partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language” (8). Contention exists over where exactly the line is between a lyric essay and a poem. Seneca Review editor and poet Deborah Tall noted, “We’re very interested in that boundary line and what it is, and we’re interested in trying to find work that complicates that

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definition” (8). John D’Agata, another editor, approached the lyric a bit differently. When D’Agata thinks of the lyric, he is interested in writers who experiment with more traditional structures for nonfiction narratives (8). This may include innovations with travel writing, nature writing, journal entries, or even scientific information (8). D’Agata stressed the freedom of experimental nonfiction to “combine research and journalistic impulses in very hyperpersonal narratives” and encouraged contributors to use genre fluidity to their advantage, as “a grab bag to try to create literature” (8). While the lyric can sometimes seem like a catchall for experiments in nonfiction writing, a few techniques have caught on and been reproduced successfully by many writers. One example is “braiding” or the braided essay, in which multiple story lines are woven together (Bascom). Overall though, the lyric is “devoted more to image than idea, more to mood than concept” (Bascom). Like poems, the lyric achieves this effect by “layering images without regard to narrative order” (Bascom). When teaching the lyric, I asked students to read “The White Album” by Joan Didion, “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, and “Ticket to the Fair” by David Foster Wallace.9 These essays range in style and setting, in length and observation. I thought they would be a wonderfully perplexing sample. The next assignment, the journalistic essay, asked students to write literary journalism. With origins in the New Journalism of the 1960s, literary journalism is now frequently categorized under the larger category of creative nonfiction (Root 147). The journalistic essay assignment invited ideas of observation and thick description (Geertz). For one homework assignment, student went to a public space to observe behavior and take notes, and later rewrote the notes into a mini story. We talked about interviewing and how to shape effective questions. Students practiced interviewing and recording. I encouraged students to experiment with various journalistic techniques, including narrative description and research. Students could select whatever combination was most appropriate for their project. We read and analyzed samples from The New Yorker, Jezebel, and Wired to get a sense of different styles of journalistic pieces. The digital essay invited the most radical experiments. For the fourth assignment, students could choose from a variety of modes beyond written alphabetic text. To begin, students analyzed Susan Sontag’s essay “In Plato’s Cave,” which explores theories of photography. Students studied photo essays from Mother Jones and then made their own mini photo essays for

9 In subsequent classes, I also found it useful to assign excerpts from Toolbox by Fabrizio Morábitu and The Body by Jenny Boully to teach the lyric genre. Toolbox is a set of highly experimental prose poems; The Body is a “missing” text composed entirely of footnotes.

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homework. They then downloaded Audacity, which is free audio software, and practiced making audio recordings. They listened to audio stories from The Moth Radio Hour, This American Life, and short pieces from the user-generated content storytelling site Cowbird. Students then explored comics, looking at samples online from xkcd, Dinosaur Comics, A Softer World, and Hark! A Vagrant. This gave students a sense of a variety of styles and levels of complexity. They read Chapter 6 from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and each student drew or created a comic of their own. It is important to give writers low-stakes opportunities to try creating in a mode with which they may not be familiar. When proposing their digital essay project, students were free to select whatever concept and medium, as long as they explained how the medium suited the purpose and audience for the piece. Students also outlined a plan for creating their digital essay. Frequent peer response and sharing of technological resources gave support to students during this process. Students’ final digital essays ultimately varied in mode, with some students combining visual and audio, depending upon what effects the student wanted to create. When students handed in the final project, they also composed a four-page analytical essay in which they described the completed project, discussed the modalities they selected and why, outlined their process, analyzed their decisions, detailed the successes and potential improvements, weighed the possibility of making a similar style of project in the future, and reflected on how the creation of the project fit in with the larger class goals, as they interpreted them.

The Figures Throughout the course, I presented the figures as viable tools to employ across genres. The figures I taught include: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, epistrophe, anaphora, hyperbole, antithesis, distinctio, exemplum, amplification, and metanoia. I also taught the cumulative and periodic sentences, and copia exercises.10 As I mentioned in Chapter Two, I selected figures that were relevant to the genre that students were currently writing. For example, I taught metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and antithesis for the memoir/personal essay. These figures occur very often in creative writing. I taught distinctio, exemplum, and metanoia alongside the journalistic essay assignment, because these figures are designed for

10 These are discussed in great detail in Francis Christensen’s Notes Toward a New Rhetoric.

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communicating in precise language. Students practiced writing the figures in sentences, identified existing figures in their writing, and then revised pieces to incorporate more figures. After teaching the course, I was excited to gather student responses in interviews. I wanted to know what they thought of my approach, and how I might improve my pedagogy to be more effective in the future. Jill was familiar with some of the figures taught in the class, but not all. She emphasizes that the voluntary aspect of using the figures was helpful:

I was familiar with some of the terms. Others I was not … I liked including it [figures] in the writing because it allowed me to develop more of a connection than simply memorizing what it meant. It allowed me to see how to actually execute it. … I liked the opportunity to put it in writing during in-class activities. I liked that we weren’t necessarily forced to, but we were encouraged to, so that was good.

This excerpt suggests that Jill benefited from practicing the figures in ungraded assignments during class. She appreciated that the pedagogy of the figures went beyond “simply memorizing” to “how to actually execute it.” And lastly, she appreciated that she could exercise her own decisions as a writer when deciding how to incorporate the figures into her writing assignments. Ultimately, as the writer, she chose which figures to use, and with what degree of frequency. Chris also reflected on learning the figures during class activities. He stated that practicing the figures was helpful for bringing variety to his writing. He explains:

The exercises where it was like, go write a metaphor, go write anaphora, go write one of these. I think that is critical to the composition aspect of these types of pieces. You’re sitting there and sometimes you get bogged down in the same sentence structure over and over and the same types of constructs … using those types of exercises you open your mind to different sentence structures and a better sentence variety.

For Chris, the figures are not just isolated tools to be learned. Rather, they operate within the whole structure of sentences, paragraphs, and story. By altering the kinds of sentences he wrote, he composed and revised more complex essays marked by a variety of syntactical constructs.

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Dan explained that the figures were familiar to him, but it was helpful to be reminded. He said,

Most of it [the figures] I had learned before, but I really needed the refresher. It was a refresher that really helped. I was glad you tried to get us to use them so much. Because I did find myself as I was writing this stuff, using it, and consciously thinking about it.

I observed that even if students have learned the figures before, they likely have not have discussed them explicitly in the context of rhetoric, style, and creative writing. Larger theories that inform the use of the figures is often new and asks students to think in complex ways about how the figures function. Students read a selection from I.A. Richards on metaphor to theorize how it works. Dan further describes the figures as an enjoyable aspect of writing. Though it may seem frivolous to talk about writing as fun, scholars have claimed that we really can care about pleasure in writing, especially when practicing the figures. Nora Bacon asserts that the figures are important because these techniques allow students to hear the beauty of sentences (187). When students read examples of other writers having fun, then they feel that they can, too (188). Dan remarked:

That’s what’s really fun for me … when you go back to the first draft and you’re trying to come up with a turn of phrase … [revising] three sentences down to one really clever sentence. That’s a lot of fun.

In this excerpt, Dan isn’t just discussing writing in general terms. He is describing how writing happens, and why the work is rewarding. His comment reminds me of Sondra Perl’s description of how a writer feels when writing is going well. Perl explains that we can tell by how we feel: “This is not a purely mental or logical knowing, but a bodily one. . . It’s a knowing that says, ‘Yes, for me, these words are the ones that are right. They work. They get me closer to where I’m trying to go’” (81). Dan’s quote suggests the figures can aid in that feeling of discovery, pleasure, and reward.

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Not all students thought that learning the figures was inspiring or new. Scott expressed that the figures were simply a review of information he had already learned. He didn’t think that learning the figures in this course offered anything novel. He explains:

Honestly, we did a lot of that in my high school AP language and composition class, so I already knew all those rhetorical terms like the back of my hand because they were just drilled into me. I enjoyed it because it wasn’t difficult for me, but it also wasn’t new to me, so I can’t really speak on that…. I already knew those.

I gleaned an important piece of information through these interviews, regarding how to approach teaching the figures to students who think they already learned them. The way to frame this is to say, you may have learned these figures as static definitions, but now we need to actually apply them in writing and revision. The figures can be part of continued rhetorical study if teachers clearly communicate this to students, and the activities are challenging and relevant. In the future, I would teach more obscure figures to prevent students from deeming the instruction repetitive. I would also bolster theoretical readings to ask for more meta-level thinking about writing. Teaching the figures requires a balance of asking students to practice the figures while they also read substantial theoretical essays about language use.

The Figures Case Study 1: Annie Each student maintained a GoogleDoc where they practiced writing the figures. This offered a low-stakes place for students to familiarize themselves with the figures through in-class activities. Annie is an effervescent person and self-described writer who always wrote prolifically and wanted to share. Annie’s writing was engaging because it was always highly descriptive, and she went all in, unafraid to use details from her own life. She seemed to really use writing to engage with the world and herself, not just to learn and complete assignments. I excerpt from her practice with the figures to show an example of what this kind of student writing can look like.

Annie Writing (Figures) 9/23

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Metaphors: The baby’s skin was a soft piece of silk, one that had never been touched or worn down before.

His voice was a massive bulldozer, destroying everything in its path and leaving nothing untouched.

The experience of writing a scientific essay was a dead-end, leading absolutely nowhere.

Her heart smiled when she thought about his shaggy brown hair and his almond eyes, she was full of love.

Synecdoche: The helping hands volunteered at the food shelf yesterday.

Metonymy: The hordes of sorority girls crowded Brick Street to hang out with the pastel shorts and the preppy polos.

“If you like it, then you should have put a ring on it”. -Queen Bey does figures too!

Antithesis (example from lyric essay): I’m full. I’m full of gratitude, new knowledge. Skepticism, optimism. Love, jealousy. Fear, hope. Stress, aspirations.

I feel free and liberated, but I also feel so very stuck.

Annie’s practice with the figures is infused with observations from her life and even a pop culture reference. Her entries read kind of like a freewrite in that they are relatively informal. Yet, at the same time, these are careful, conscious practicing of rhetorical tools. When I read these practice entries from Annie, I see her developing themes she later explored in essays. Annie wrote about transitions and conflicting feelings. By drawing from her own experiences in this exercise, this writer is beginning to shape thoughts into what will later become more substantial essays. Annie uses the figures to do this. When students begin from

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where they are, drawing examples from their own lives and memory, they find that the figures are tools for organizing thoughts and experiences. Annie’s GoogleDoc writing was very effortless, prolific, and real sounding, not forced and artificial. In her lyric essay, she explores shifting feelings toward college as time goes by. The essay is written in segments that are numbered, featuring different snapshots and scenes. In the middle of the essay, Annie writes:

The future is terrifying. What if I chose the wrong major? Should I have gone into business? How do you really know what you want to do at this young of an age? I have so many questions and unfortunately I know that I can’t get concrete answers to them. It’s like trying to sum up the meaning of life in one sentence; you just can’t do it.

Taken on its own, this excerpt may seem like a standard creative nonfiction essay. However, it’s intertwined with an experimental narrative, and therefore . . . risky. For the workshop draft, Annie had a very figures-based ending. She excerpted from her practice with the figures in the GoogleDoc and pasted it into her essay draft to make the ending:

But, I’m not empty anymore. I’m full. I’m full of gratitude, new knowledge. Skepticism, optimism. … Love, jealousy. Fear, hope. Stress, aspirations. Music, spirit. And most of all, experience and life.

I recall thinking that this ending was not quite right. It is difficult to close a creative piece, and all so tempting to snag a pre-written ending. We discussed this in peer response. Ultimately, in her final draft, Annie cut this part and chose a more simple, concrete ending:

The windmills are still spinning in the never-ending Ohio cornfields.

I’m still confused about what I want to do after school.

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I glance at the countdown app on my phone and check to see how many days it has been since I became a Miami student. 838 days. I smile to myself before packing up my book bag and heading to my upper-level French course. Oh how so much has changed…

This is an interesting moment. My default setting as teacher-researcher is to teach something—in this case, the figures—and then see evidence of that in student writing. But in this case, I think Annie made a better decision to not use the first ending with all those successive antithetical statements. It seems forced; one might even say cliché. By not using those figures, she concluded the essay more gracefully. Annie learned the figures by practicing them in the GoogleDoc and giving feedback to others. But, not many figures ended up in her final essay draft because she may not have been sure of how to make them fit, or how to use them in a way that did not impede her voice.

The Figures Case Study 2: Amanda Amanda is an intense student—the kind of person who is quiet for weeks and then volunteers incredibly compelling ideas. Amanda revealed in an essay that she experiences depression. At the same time, she is so full of passion for learning and writing. Like all students included in this study, I refer to Amanda using a pseudonym for confidentiality. Amanda’s practice with the figures reveals using these tools to organize and express emotions:

9/23 Figures: Metaphors, Synecdoches, Metonymies, & Antithesis metaphor: a comparison conceit: a metaphor that likens two vastly different objects; metaphor that stretches your thinking more

My depression is like the late night shift; alone and lonely, nothing to do, and bleak hours with no purpose lay stretched out before me. synecdoche: representing a whole thing by naming one of its parts; renaming

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I will always admire the mysterious hand (who/that?) wrote that letter.

Faces surround me on all sides, yet I am still alone. metonymy: referencing something, not by naming that thing, but instead by naming one of its attributes; substitution, not renaming

They clicked and typed away on the countless number of Apples in the library. antithesis: “opposition” in Greek; contrast of ideas presented in balanced phrases or clauses

We had everything together, and we had nothing alone.

The prospect of marriage gave me wonderful hope and disabling fear.

Family brings me the most love and laughter and the most hatred and anxiety.

Amanda wrote about her struggle with depression in her lyric essay. It seems she was trying out the figures as a way to organize complex emotions, which later manifested in a gripping, complete work that was sent out for potential publication. Amanda’s first draft was rough and I found that the situations and scenes were overly described. But, through peer response, she pared them down. After she revised, I was struck by the vividness of the situations she described, and also her clever ways of incorporating strong influences from course readings. Amanda’s lyric essay begins with an excerpt of diagnostic criteria for depression from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). Here, she was taking a cue from “The White Album” by Joan Didion, in which Didion famously includes her own psychiatric evaluation. In the final essay, Amanda incorporated a completely new scene using anaphora, or a figure of beginning repetition. This was undoubtedly inspired by the book I Remember by Joe Brainard, a memoir written entirely with “I remember” statements, which we read in class and used as a writing prompt. Amanda’s anaphora section is as follows:

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I remember live blues music coming out of every building and open space. I remember the crowded, lit up street that smelled of alcohol and was full of motorcycles. I remember the vinegar-y barbeque sauce that drenched the piles of meat we stuffed in our mouths. I remember sitting in my bunk and having the glorious revelation that I wasn’t hopeless or useless. I remember Memphis.

This figure is very noticeable. Used in a forced way, it could make the language seem artificial, or the writer self-conscious or trying too hard. But in this essay, anaphora is employed well. This is a breakthrough or turning point in the essay—a happy and hopeful time—and the figure emphasizes the immediacy of events and how they stick in the writer’s memory. Amanda’s essay suggests the power of teaching published essays as models for using the figures. While students can benefit from learning figures and practicing them line-by-line during in-class writing, Amanda’s work shows that the figures make more sense in context of an entire composition. This seems to be what transferred for her.

The Figures Case Study 3: Katie An effective way to introduce students to the figures is to ask them to identify the figures in an essay they have already written. Students are often delightfully surprised to discover that they are already doing the figures. Katie, a music performance major, wrote a personal essay about falling in love with opera. After composing the draft, she identified uses of the figures that were already present. These include anaphora:

We were on a field trip, and it was my first time in New York City, my first time at the Metropolitan Opera Company [anaphora].

Here, Katie uses the figure of anaphora, or beginning repetition, to compel the reader to take interest in her story. She could have just plainly stated the location she visited, but instead she repeats the beginning of the subsequent clause to be more specific. She conveys her excitement about getting closer to this desired source of intrigue.

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Prior to going to the opera, she stops at the store Bergdorf Goodman with her friends. Here, Katie uses simile to describe the scene she encountered:

If you’ve never been to Bergdorf Goodman, let me tell you it is an experience. There’s a floor for everything. One floor just has perfumes. One has just makeup, one has women’s dress clothes, one has shoes. My favorite was the one for jewelry. That whole floor shone like some hidden grotto of undiscovered gemstones [simile]. Necklaces were laced with diamonds, and rings shone with opals and sapphires. Everything cost more than I made in the past year.

Katie’s simile dazzles; it illuminates the scene. Describing the floor of the store as a “hidden grotto” brings to mind ideas of discovery and treasure. This added storytelling element is filtered through her perception and conveyed via the figure. Katie did ambitious work throughout the course. Locating the figures in her essay just made her want to find more. As the course unfolded, she continued to explore the figures. In her later digital project, she further probed her interest in music and composed a project that combined atonal music with images of war photography.

The Figures Case Study 4: Lauren Beyond locating figures in their writing, students can use the figures as tools for revision. Lauren wrote a personal essay about two nuns that she and her sister vacationed with at a cabin, and the friendship they shared. Lauren’s first draft began to set the scene. She writes:

The floors creaked something awful. But then again so did the log-and-pitch walls, the doors on their hinges, and the sink when I turned the hot knob. Everything creaked at me, reminding me it was there.

Not a bad start—however, in revision, Lauren incorporated repetition to describe the creaky cabin. The use of that figure combined with short, choppy sentences creates a description of scene that confronts the reader and conveys an assured narrator’s voice. The revised beginning reads like this:

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The floors there creaked something awful. And the log-and-pitch walls. And the doors as they fought against their hinges. And the hot water knob in the downstairs bathroom. The majority of that cabin creaked, spoke up, and talked out. Just to grab your attention for a moment. To say hey. To remind you it was there. The creak and the cabin were really one-and-the-same- inseparable. I like to imagine the creak came to the cabin some time ago…

This example is refreshing because it demonstrates the storytelling capabilities that a student arrives at through revision. It also shows how figures can hone a story into a more purposefully crafted one. Further along in the essay, Lauren works in repetition once more to characterize the nuns:

They were opposites. And like all opposites, I don’t believe that one could truly exist without the other. But even though they were opposites they were similar, They had joined the monastery at the same time, chosen the same name, traveled independently out west to the same state, and taught together at the same school for years {repetition}. They wore glasses and permed their white hair into tight curls close to their heads. They wore glasses that took up the majority of their faces. They came from farmland and big families . . .

Lauren effectively employs the figures to create characters for the narrative. Her use of repetition is labeled simply as repetition. In the course, I taught two figures of repetition: anaphora, which is repetition at the beginning of successive clauses or sentences; and epistrophe, which is repetition at the ends of successive clauses or sentences. What Lauren did here would be categorized specifically as mesodiplosis, or repetition of words in the middle of successive clauses or sentences. If I taught this course again, I would teach a larger set of figures of repetition, and ask students to learn the specific names of these variations. I did not know how well it would go over, teaching the figures, and was reticent to make the whole course focus on them. One thing I learned from conducting this study is that the figures did improve student writing. In the future, I would teach the figures even more—more challenging figures, and more often.

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An Aesthetic Approach: Student Interviews Beyond exploration of writing the figures, the course opened up larger aesthetic questions. What counts as writing? What effects are possible to create in writing? Or as Ann Berthoff asks, “How does it change your meaning if you put it this way?” (71-72). Inviting questions of the aesthetic allows instructors to see what happens when the presupposed “right” approach is thrown out the window, and experimentation is the goal as much as the finished product. Scott explains that the ability to try something new in writing was what made this course distinct. He says,

… [T]his was the first time I was in a course where I didn’t feel like if I didn’t do it the right way I’m not going to do well. My main takeaway from this class was, don’t be afraid to try new things with your writing. They might suck. … But, what if it’s really great? What if it’s something you never would have considered “finished” before? … I never would have thought of this [lyric essay] as its own piece of composition. I would have thought of this as notes or as things I just jotted down in my journal. But now I feel like I can own this as a completed work. This is composition. It really reshaped my ideas of what qualifies as writing.

These kinds of conclusions are very interesting to me and reveal aspects of writing pedagogy that I did not implicitly know I was communicating. As the instructor, I endeavored to create a situation in which students could try new approaches to writing without fear of failure. How students would react to that environment was something I could not anticipate. After the class, when I heard responses like this one, I realized that the openness of the course allowed students to challenge their assumptions about what composition means. It invited students to claim ownership of their ideas and fragments that were en route to becoming more finished writing. It is the best possible outcome I could imagine. I cannot teach this explicitly. Students can only arrive here on their own terms. My pedagogical approach requires communicating with students as legitimate writers. It requires inviting students to make their own choices and reflect on what they do, as opposed to presenting guidelines and assessing how closely these guidelines are achieved. Scott explains that he sensed risks “would be appreciated and understood as not just, this is some kid . . . it was

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viewed as a legitimate choice and an artistic choice.” To create this dynamic, instructors need to build trust with students. I found it was useful to ask larger questions of style and genre and let these play out across assignments throughout the semester. Studying examples of the genre while practicing relevant figures gives students points to reference as well as the room to create. I also designed small assignments that asked students to reflect on their work as a whole and to synthesize their own findings about what they learned. When asked to comment on what the class taught, Chris explained:

The different styles of writing that I use and can have. My lyric essay writing is very different from my personal essay, which is very different from my … journalistic essay. It helped open doors for different genres of writing that I could potentially pursue. The lyric being one that I hadn’t really delved into too much that I really, really enjoyed doing in class.

By creating something of an open ecology, the course invited students to see themselves as highly adaptable across multiple genres of writing. By “ecology,” I mean that the work of the course was not dependent solely upon the individual writer and his or her context (Cooper 368). Rather, the work was created within the dynamics of already social constituted systems (Cooper 368). The course, the university, the Internet, the social world in which the students live—all shape what students are doing, thinking, and creating.11 There is a sort of ecology to this research as well. I’ve looked at student writing, analyzed interview responses, reread all of my course materials, and forged some salient connections between so many moving parts. Chris’s lyric essay is a fascinating marker of these intersecting and overlapping elements. He was able to draw upon instruction in the figures and apply that to a larger guiding philosophy of writing. This is evident in his interview response about his lyric essay. Chris wrote a fairly straightforward essay draft, and then realized it could be separated into parts and presented out of order, like a puzzle. The protagonist of the essay is walking on a

11 Mention writing ecologies, and one gestures to an entire conversation in the field. Sidney Dobrin, Christian Weisser, and many others have contributed important works in this area.

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beach, and experiences tension between a loud party and a dolphin swimming nearby. The full effect is not easy to render into words, but Chris describes the theme as:

… [W]hat it means to be human versus … alone … with reference to nature and things like that … how they interact with each other… I’m writing about something that’s very different from what I explicitly mention. So it’s definitely meta-level …

When I asked Chris about his decision to write the essay out of order, he gave an interesting response. He explains his process as shaped by conversation with peers:

This happened with some of the peer review. I realized that I could cut it up into sections. After I cut it up into sections, I loved the idea of messing with time … because it seemed like too basic of a story. It seemed a little boring or just not as intriguing. It was predictable and you knew how it was going to end, and you knew how it functioned, and the themes, and everything that was going to happen with it. So I started moving them around. I numbered them chronologically first and then moved them around.

This is just the sort of experimentation I hoped the lyric essay assignment would invite. Segmenting writing into different parts and presenting them in a structure that goes out of order is a big risk—will the essay still be understood? It’s hard to say, but it was a risk Chris was willing to take rather than presenting a story that he felt was “too basic” and “a little boring.” Chris uses knowledge of the figures to describe the structural reorganization of his essay. He uses the term “figurative antithesis” to describe the impetus for revision. He said:

The very ending scene that I had originally was me surrounded by a bunch of people who made me feel lonely as opposed to the dolphins who made me feel at home. I saw that as a figurative antithesis. I wanted to put them next to each other. And after that, I made the whole story progress from there.

This answer is revealing. Chris shows that figures can offer guiding metaphors and inspiration for large-scale revisions. Practicing the figures can invite changes beyond sentence-level

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revision. I expressed to Chris that his essay makes readers do a bit of work to piece it together. The fragmented narrative interrupts the reading experience. He was well aware and had this to say:

I think that’s part of the lyric essay. You’re not done reading a lyric essay when you read the last words [laughs]. You’re really not. That’s the beginning of figuring out what it means. It’s much more expansive. Read it again. Pick apart the subtle words that give little hints to what it’s about. And talk with someone.

This response shows the rewards of combining genre study with a hands-off approach to essay topics. At the beginning of the course, Chris had not heard of a lyric essay. By the end, he had composed and revised a polished one. He knowingly flouts conventions, and laughs at any suggestion that this genre should be predictable or easy.

Reflections on Assessment: Student Interviews I asked students to offer their perspectives on the portfolio assessment system. Responses were varied. Jill expressed a feeling of respect based on the freeform structure of the course and the corresponding open assessment mechanism:

I did not feel overwhelmed at all. I actually really appreciated the fact that letter grades weren’t assigned to anything, especially during the initial drafts. I preferred having concrete feedback as opposed to everything being reduced to a letter. I thought that that was more helpful in terms of improving my writing. It made me feel like there was always room for improvement but that I didn’t need to worry about making a mistake. I also really appreciated the lack of constraint because throughout most of my writing—my academic writing career—it’s been very structured. “This is exactly what you have to do.” But I prefer to do my own thing and I guess I really appreciated the opportunity to add the personal touches and do things how I imagined them in my head.

Jill viewed the lack of letter-grade assessments as freeing and validating of her potential as a writer. She did not want “everything being reduced to a letter” because receiving narrative

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feedback was more helpful for her writing. At the same time, Jill references “concrete feedback.” When teachers do assessment outside the traditional expectation of letter grades on assignments, it becomes even more important to give meaningful, substantial feedback so students know how the work was received. In my view, narrative comments not directly linked to a specific grade are more authentic. In previous courses, when I used letter grades, I would sometimes find myself writing the comments in a way that would justify the grade. However, in this course, I wrote comments without any intention of assigning a grade at the end. That meant I was able to react to the essay as its own piece of work, and speak directly about what it was doing and ask questions of the writer. I believe ignoring grades, a least for a short spell before reporting at midterm and then again for the final assessment, gave us room to talk about writing and revision. Chris also expressed a positive reaction to the lack of letter grades. He spoke well of the substantial comments I wrote, especially the long comment at the end of each draft:

In terms of the feedback we got, I thought it was great. I thought a paragraph at the end of an essay summating your feelings about the entire thing and what came across clearly and what didn’t and what places need work and what don’t—I think that’s probably the best way to give feedback.

Composition teachers are always wondering how comments will be received and whether students will find them helpful and effective. Commenting on student work is the most tedious aspect of teaching writing, but it might also be the most important. Nancy Sommers reminds us that if our comments help writers, it’s because “such comments resonate with some aspect of their writing that our students are already thinking about” (250). I tried to always write personally to the student about their work, to reference recurring patterns and techniques I saw in their writing, to forge those connections for them. I want to coach them. I want to take notice. Despite my attempts at writing inspiring comments, not everyone found it to be quite enough assurance. Dan admitted that he did desire letter grades more often, because these would serve as clear indicators of progress. When I asked him if he thought it would have been better if I graded the work, his response was:

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Sometimes yeah, sometimes I do like that concrete feedback. I have a big problem with the invention part of writing, coming up with things to write about. But I didn’t really feel that way too much in your class. And so it’s kind of hard for me to pinpoint why I didn’t feel that way, but I did. I felt like we talked about the genre enough that as we were talking about it, I was thinking about what might work, and I came up with something each time. Some other classes you just feel like you’re out in the water, you know what I mean? You don’t know what you’re supposed to do. I never doubted what I was supposed to do. … And I felt like your feedback was strong enough that I knew I was on the right track. … I guess a grade probably would have strengthened that. And I strive to keep my GPA up too.

I expressed that I understand grading is definitely a reality, and that grades transfer into concrete measurements that are used to apply for future opportunities. Yet I could sense Dan was wrestling with the desire to earn a high grade versus the competing desire to experiment, create, and learn. He continued:

It is [a reality]. But in a class like yours I was trying really hard not to [care about grades] so much. I just wanted to produce quality work.

Dan’s response highlights the tension present when asking students to work as writers. Students want to do well, and regardless of the instructor’s goals, the realities of the classroom and the need to assign a final grade are present. Even so, I found that when instructors purposefully position students as writers in their own right, they are invited to engage in greater risk and experimentation. The invitation to write a new creative genre often brings fear or uncertainty of whether the risks will pay off. Dan had a hunch that he was doing well, but more frequent use of letter grades on assessments would have translated that more clearly. Scott’s response to the assessment question sums it up well. The assessment style was friendly to him, a self-identified writer, but may have been frustrating to students who are less comfortable with lack of structure. Scott explains:

I personally really enjoyed that [letter grades were not given to assignments], because it gave me a lot of freedom to do what I wanted. And I do think they [assignments] were assessed fairly,

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and I think nobody ever went into a project feeling like, I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing. I thought that you did a really good job of discussing expectations and setting expectations as a class and you also had a very open class style. I feel that if someone didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing, they would not be afraid to ask, either you or a peer. But I also think that… if you aren’t someone who is sort of this, writer-type or very creative and into just writing because you enjoy it, it could have been frustrating to feel like, I have been given no structure for what I’m supposed to do. She just said, I don’t care, take some pictures! Record your voice! Make a video! And I never viewed it that way, but I could definitely see how some individuals in that class may have found it frustrating to not be given a concrete, “This is what you should be turning in.”

Reflecting on the course now, I think my decision to employ portfolio grading yielded mainly positive results. Students may have been initially confused by the different approach, but overall, I think it was worth it because the promise that they could not fail freed students to try new things. In the future, I wouldn’t necessarily change the portfolio system itself, but I would change how I talk about it. I made it clear that I had personal reservations against using a traditional letter-grade system in which assignments would be picked apart and itemized and added up. I expressed my belief that traditional grades were antithetical to the goals of the course, which put aesthetic exploration at the forefront. In retrospect, I see that I presented the “big ideas” of assessment, but it would have also been helpful to check in with students on what they thought about the assessment more often. Generally, I try to avoid talking about “grades” because it kills the feel of the course as a place where students are creating ideas and projects, as opposed to merely doing the work and getting through it. However, I now think that asking students to reflect on the assessment system periodically throughout the class would help them feel more comfortable with it, and could invite some challenging questions worth talking through. If I’m being honest, I think I didn’t want the assessment system too thoroughly critiqued because it was my first attempt at it. Now that I have taught two courses using it, I see the assessment system as intrinsically tied to student learning, and a valuable topic of discussion and debate. I’m left thinking about the role of assessment in style pedagogy. I think portfolios and guidelines served better than the more traditional options of letter grades and rubrics. Star

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Medzerian Vanguri claims that rubrics alone are not the best measures of performance when teaching style (366). She writes, “A rubric’s confining structure has the potential to impede how teachers and students alike understand style” (366). Assessing style in a manner that is productive for students requires something more, a way of expressing values and designing assessments that make it possible to achieve them (367). Teachers need to constantly rethink assessments, and make sure they are serving instructional purposes, not judgmental ones (367). When designing this study, I decided I would rather err on the side of giving students a little too much power than not enough. I would err on the side of an assessment system that is a bit vague over one that felt too controlled. Designing effective assessment practices is an ongoing process. I’ll constantly hone, read, analyze, and strive to make assessment work better.

Conclusion This study explored the value of an aesthetic approach to teaching writing. I see a great need for a larger aesthetic frame of mind when teaching composition. It invites more creative and ambitious projects. I believe style can be taught well within this aesthetic frame. Embracing an aesthetic mindset does not mean ignoring examples and guides—it is very important to reference models. At the same time, that must not limit what a student can do. Analyzing essay genres is a key part of stylistic exploration. By noting the characteristics of genres, students developed comprehension and comfort and thus were more willing to experiment with their own genre attempts. In many ways, this course showed the importance of connecting style to genre. I did that by matching activities with specific genre models, and encouraging the study and analysis of examples. This study also resulted in a profound realization of the ways that alternative assessments can serve creative goals. The importance of the grade is lessened when students receive extensive narrative feedback, when the alternative assessment system is clearly explained, and when many “evaluation-free zones” are incorporated (Elbow). It was worth it to put the time and energy into designing an alternative assessment system. I entertained many more questions about creativity and far fewer questions about grades. Also, students wrote and created projects I never would have imagined to ask for or assign. By inviting students to dream up what sort of project they aspired to create, and then assemble course resources to make it reality, I was surprised and pleased by the compositions they made. The lyric essay especially invited innovation because of

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how it gestures at genre but refuses to by limited by it. Not every essay was a “success” (however defined), but on the whole, students interacted with style across genres, activities, and modalities, which generated a great deal of learning, energy, and—dare I say it?—fun. There is much more to learn about aesthetic exploration in the writing classroom, and how it helps students learn and engage with complex techniques and ideas.

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Chapter Five: Implications for Pedagogy and Research

In the previous chapters, I have addressed the problem of the separation of rhetoric and poetics. I have argued that this separation limits our work as scholars and teachers because when we forget the poetic tradition, we close off important aesthetic dimensions of rhetorical study. In order to amend the problem of the rhetoric-poetic split, I turned to recent work on style. Over the past decade, Paul Butler, Brian Ray, Mike Duncan and Star Medzerian Vanguri and others have taken renewed interest in historicizing style. I urge the field to continue to historicize style and to mend the disconnect between rhetoric and poetics, because this work provides a mechanism for exploring aesthetic questions. For the purposes of this project, I have found it useful to historicize style by reclaiming important ideas from rhetorical history. Many of these ideas have faded from recent conversations. The poetic tradition continues to wane in the contemporary field of composition studies. Of course, the art of rhetoric has always been theorized as a practice that combines the power of rhetoric and poetics (Aristotle 33, Quintilian 107, Peacham). Throughout this project, I’ve reclaimed key terms about style from classical rhetoric history that we must not forget, as theorists and teachers alike. Specifically, I’ve turned our attention to the figures, to visual concepts like ekphrasis and enargeia, and to specific classroom practices. By doing this, I’ve carved out some new territory for scholars who aim to historicize style by nontraditional methodologies. I believe it is necessary to look beyond older, more standard research methodologies like historical dialectic. As a teacher with a research specialty on style, I’ve inspired students to draw upon classical rhetorical theories in order to entertain aesthetic questions, exercise their imagination, and become more skilled writers. By “aesthetic questions,” I mean, questions like, what counts as composition? What effects are possible to create in writing? Or as Ann Berthoff asks, “How does it change your meaning if you put it this way?” (71-72). The claims I assert here build on and extend those in the previous chapters by making five central and interrelated arguments about rhetoric and poetics. First, I reaffirm the theoretical project of reclaiming the poetic tradition. By examining important ideas from philosophers and rhetoricians across historical times, I’ve charted some key thinkers and texts that shaped the current field as it exists today. Longinus theorized the sublime as a rhetor-audience relationship;

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Sister Miriam Joseph outlined the use of the figures as encompassing nearly all aspects of logic and thinking; and I.A. Richards reminds us that all language is metaphorical (Longinus 154, Joseph 17-18, Richards 117). It is paramount that we scholars understand our history. When we do not know our history, how can we know where we are going? There’s no escape from the past. We simply use it and reshape it. To overlook our poetic traditions misses so much. The literature on style makes entire dimensions of language, meaning, and persuasion available to us. We merely need to decide these ideas are worth relearning and teaching. Secondly, I argue that scholars and teachers can and should reclaim the figures. Historically, the figures have been taught as contextual tools and as techniques of persuasion. Why wouldn’t we reclaim such useful tools that help us make arguments more beautiful and persuasive? This argument can extend to scholars and teachers alike. My concern is that, as scholars, we’re in a rush to get published and care very little for the style of our articles. Joseph Harris so pointedly asserts, “[a]n article on the teaching of writing should itself be well written” (55). I couldn’t agree more. Harris plainly observes, “I have long been intrigued by how many people working in composition manage to be at once remarkably attuned to nuances of phrasing and structure in the writings of others and remarkably unconcerned with the shape and sound of their own sentences” (55). When we forget about style, it’s a bit hypocritical, isn’t it? It’s important to note that Harris is not advocating for scholars to adopt a personal, distinct, confessional style. Rather, he wants us to think of style as “what we hear of each other in our turns of thought and phrasing” (55). As teachers of writing, shouldn’t we always strive to write more beautifully ourselves? In regard to teaching the figures, I drew upon previous pedagogical work. I was inspired by T. R. Johnson’s question, “[w]hy not teach these stylistic devices explicitly as tools for invention and revision, as a means to create and craft sentences and paragraphs…?” (32). To take this further, I also emphasized the importance of matching figures to specific genres. I did this because that way the figures are immediately useful and make sense in context. I presented the figures as complex tools, as both innate and learned, both spontaneous and deliberate. Overall, my approach differed from those outlined in the existing literature because I pursued teaching the figures within a larger aesthetic framework that also explored questions of the visual. Most importantly, in chapter four I showed how students use the figures to improve their writing.

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As a third intervention, I argued for an aesthetic approach to the teaching of writing. I did this by drawing from historical research and applying it to pedagogical goals and methods. Let’s bring back the poetic tradition that may now be underdeveloped or unfamiliar to us. We can do this in effective ways that invite new questions and experimental methods. Sirc critiques composition studies for defining what makes writing good along traditional lines when it could have radically re-envisioned what composition means (14). While there’s something disappointing about this historical fact, it’s also engaging. There is still potential to alter our course, to imagine composition in new ways, under new terms. As a fourth point, I make the case for alternative writing assessments. It’s important for teachers to create mechanisms of evaluation that invite students to take risks, as opposed to stringent guidelines that may very well alienate them from doing so. Jane Danielewicz, Peter Elbow, and Bob Broad have mapped out new theories and practices of assessment that deemphasize grades for the purpose of putting attention where it matters—on writing and creation (Danielewicz and Elbow, Broad). It may be an unpopular view, but I’m still convinced students have more to teach me than I them, and the composition course should constantly evolve based on the students themselves and the changing world they inhabit. I referenced Marilyn Cooper’s work on ecology which points out that students never act alone as individual writers (368). Rather, students write within already constituted social systems (368). These are always in flux, and thus we teachers must be highly agile and adaptable. More specifically, I believe we can and should develop assessment systems that can withstand high degrees of experimentation and change. Lastly, I return to the central term: style. I ask, what would it look like if our field took style seriously? How could paying more attention to style affect the work we do at multiple levels, from teaching the first-year writing course to teaching the advanced writing course, from designing the writing major, to mapping larger programmatic goals? How could style reshape graduate study in rhetoric? What would it mean for the field to accept style as part of our rhetorical history, and to actively reference this history in order to generate and guide future work? I give my best answers to these questions, while knowing that they are in process and yet to be determined, and they extend far beyond the pages of this project. In the remainder of this chapter, I outline my four interventions in greater detail, and explain why scholars and teachers would do well to heed my call. I’m not naïve in this venture; I

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know style is not as trendy as some other recent conversations in the field. And yet, I reaffirm its value and extend my contributions across multiple sites. Furthermore, I show how conversations on style pedagogy interact with other timely philosophical explorations in the field.

Guideline One: Reclaim the Poetic Tradition In chapter one, I examined how the rhetorical tradition has always been inseparable from the poetic tradition. The two concepts, rhetoric and poetics, are mutually informing. In the classical era, rhetoricians theorized rhetoric and poetics as serving the same goals—to engage the audience, and to communicate effectively and persuasively (Aristotle, Quintilian, Longinus). Berlin has documented how the separation was the result of economic situations and the formation of English departments within the academic system (Berlin). Style, poetics, and beauty moved into the realm of literature (Connors; Graff; S. Miller; T. Miller; Scholes). Rhetoric was left to deal with more “practical” matters (Berlin 7). In a purely theoretical sense, there is no reason for rhetoric and poetics to be thought of as separate at all. In this project, I’ve identified style as a useful concept for connecting rhetoric and poetics. The origins of style are deeply rhetorical. To demonstrate this, I’ve referenced numerous classical rhetoricians who theorized style as a rhetor-audience relationship. For example, Aristotle outlined poetic genres, but also asserted that these could not be fully defined without taking into account their effect on the audience (Aristotle 33). Quintilian encouraged students to identify “the beauties of authors” so that they could become effective public orators (Quintilian 107). Longinus believed the pleasures of style would be “useful to public men” (Longinus 154). Each of these thinkers sees a connection between style and audience, between beauty and persuasion, between rhetoric and poetics. When we take these classical ideas into account, it does not make much sense to ignore the role of style in crafting persuasive or otherwise engaging compositions. After all, in The Orator, Cicero identifies three duties of the rhetorician: to teach, to delight, and to move (367). Have we forgotten about delight? The poetic tradition is a way to reintroduce style, beauty, and delight to writing again. It’s worth extending this theoretical argument to teaching. In classrooms, we can teach students that rhetoric is about the poetic, beautiful dimensions of language in addition to persuasion. In fact, the beautiful is often highly persuasive. In chapter two, I discussed how the figures have been theorized as techniques for animating beautiful language into persuasive

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rhetorical works. I did this historical research to intervene in the conversation of those scholars who historicize style, and also to make the theoretical case for teaching the figures once again in writing classrooms. In chapter three, I examined visual concepts that enhance the teaching of style. One example is ekphrasis, a technique of rhetorical persuasion (D’Angelo 440). Ekphrasis is the act of visual observations into language by crafting strategic description (443). Also, enargeia, the power behind ekphrasis—it is a technique that attempts to “turn readers into spectators” (Scholz 7). These ancient terms deal explicitly with the connections between rhetoric and poetics, and go so far as to outline methods and techniques. In chapter four, I shared evidence of students using these theories in their own compositions. Methodologically, I am committed to not just doing theory, but also testing it in practice. I believe the connections between theory and pedagogy in the chapters I’ve presented here serve as evidence of that commitment, and I hope it makes my arguments all the more provocative. In future research, scholars can continue to reclaim classical visual theories for theoretical and pedagogical purposes. Our field has a long-standing tradition of reinterpreting classical theories in order to hone our understanding of rhetorical practices. I advocate for more work that looks back to classical visual theories in order to revision these ideas for current work. While some ideas may seem ancient and so far removed from the hyper-technological world we now inhabit, these concepts offer nuance and grasp at ideas we do not want to lose. Quintilian’s definition of enargeia is about engaging the audience through energy and activity. There’s a reason to talk specifically about enargeia. Rhetorical compositions are compelling because . . . why? We need terms to talk about how we experience their effects. A work is compelling because of its ideas, its style, and how it sends a message to the audience with urgency and energy. In I continue to be intrigued by the role of the visual in the writing classroom. In this project, I’ve outlined some pedagogical practices like formal analysis and ekphrasis. These activities invite students to practice close observation and creative storytelling by analyzing art objects. The roots of these practices are ancient, and yet there is still untapped potential to reread classical theories and redesign pedagogies to extend in different directions and raise new questions. Another promising aspect of more visually based pedagogies is that they generate connections between writing and the arts by asking students to exercise synthesis and creativity. As a field, we need to know more about how students compose, about how technologies change

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us, and about how our history informs where we go from here. I believe that analyzing stylistic concepts closely related to the visual offer us a means of exploring these avenues. In addition to writing about art objects, I’ve asked students to generate stories from more mundane, general objects. For a short activity, I would often bring a selection of random physical objects to the room, arrange them, and ask students to choose three and create a narrative on the spot. This invites a different way of thinking about things, how they are related, and what they can do. Asking for a spontaneous burst of writing is always fun; students are often surprised by their style when they’re caught off guard and given few parameters. Currently, many conversations in the field examine objects from an ontological perspective (Barnett; Hawk; Lynch and Rivers; Rutherford and Palmeri). Teacher-researchers who are interested in theorizing the agency of objects can continue to develop new practices and analyze pedagogical findings. It’s still a largely untapped area of study. Our pedagogical efforts, whether from the realm of style, or ontology, may meet and overlap in rich and unexpected ways.

Guideline Two: Reclaim the Figures Much of my intervention in the conversation on style centers on reclaiming the figures. In chapter two, I turned attention to several important texts that examine the figures. These include Rhetorica ad Herennium (1st century BCE), The Garden of Eloquence (1593), Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), and The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936). By analyzing how rhetoricians have theorized the figures across time, I showed how the figures are highly contextual and occupy a prominent place in rhetorical study. From the earliest records of orators using the figures in speeches, to governing officials employing the figures in political letters, to teachers showcasing the figures in rhetorical education, to theorists analyzing the figures for philosophical insights on the function of language, these ancient tools are not to be overlooked. As scholars, we can continue to examine what role the figures have in our current work. Even though we are constantly experiencing rapid technological advancements, including new modes of delivering messages to audiences, the figures persist in relaying messages. Despite these new means of technological delivery, messages often originate as text or speech. As such, rhetorical theories of how to craft that text or speech remain highly relevant. Also, the figures have a longstanding place in political discourse. Political speeches and debates remain prime fodder for rhetoricians looking to analyze the persuasive use of the figures in context. And for

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those still not sold on the argument, I believe the figures can serve as working metaphors themselves. You may recall the student, Chris, in chapter four, who explained his lyric essay revision as an exercise in “figurative antithesis.” Figures like antithesis and juxtaposition easily transcend into visual and auditory realms. If I taught a course on composition and aesthetics again, I’d ask students to find ways to represent the figures in modes other than alphabetic text alone. For instance, students could first compose a written paragraph that features juxtaposition. Now, do that same technique with images. Now, do that same technique with sound. As scholars, it’s important for us to keep in mind the history of the figures. Sister Miriam Joseph identifies three groups of thinkers who analyzed the figures during the Renaissance. These include: the traditionalists, who respected the canons of rhetoric and the rules of logic; the ramists, who diverged from the Aristotelian tradition in terms of method; and the figurists, who were primarily interested in the figures (tropes and schemes) (16-18). The influence of the traditionalists and ramists is well documented in our field. The conflict between those two groups is frequently taught and discussed in rhetoric history seminars. But the field tends to overlook the figurists. At the beginning of this project, I mentioned that I wondered why Aristotle’s Rhetoric was taught in rhetoric history seminar, but not Poetics. I could easily raise the same question: why are the traditionalists and ramists taught, but not the figurists? Again, the answer is: because rhetoric and poetics were separated, but there is no real need to think of them that way. Based on the work I’ve contributed here, I find that the figures are viable tools of invention and revision. In chapter four, I demonstrated how students use the figures spontaneously during the process of invention as well as deliberately in revision. In particular, I made it clear that students are already using the figures. Helping them become aware of this provides a solid basis for additional instruction. Encouraging students to identify and incorporate the figures into their writing is a productive endeavor because discernable improvements are evident in student writing. Future research can continue to examine how students use the figures to compose and revise. The figures are not bound to one course alone. Stodola’s study on using stylistic techniques from medieval rhetoric to enhance a business and technical communications course is promising (Stodola). The fluidity of these rhetorical devices makes them applicable to a variety

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of contexts. WAC programs can find them useful in terms of generating specialized knowledge about writing that we share with other disciplines across the wider campus community.

Guideline Three: An Aesthetic Approach Throughout the entirety of this project, I’ve made the case for an aesthetic approach to the teaching of writing. Luckily, composition scholars have already paved the way for aesthetic theories in the field. Renegade thinker Sirc sketches out aesthetic theories in Composition as a Happening (2002). Sirc encourages composition theorists to turn to the work of artists so that we can see beyond our own disciplinary limitations (12). When we look to other theorists for inspiration, that undoubtedly reshapes pedagogical decisions, but Sirc does not see that as a bad thing. In contrast, it may be just what we need—radically new paths of inquiry. Wysocki, another important visual thinker in the field, narrates aesthetic classroom practices. But the existence of detailed pedagogical studies that specifically reanimate the poetic traditions of style in the composition classroom are few and far between. It is not an overstatement to say that recent scholarship on style is significantly lacking in terms of detailed pedagogical studies. A few recent contributions stand out. Bill FitzGerald’s chapter on teaching the figures is detailed and exemplary. Denisa Stodola analyzes classical rhetorical treatises to inform a business and technical writing course, which provides another timely example of reclaiming historical contributions and retooling them for today. But on the whole, style occupies a small area of the field, and pedagogical work on style occupies an even smaller realm. Thus, my contributions in this project begin to address that gap. Specifically, I did this by showcasing student writing and demonstrating how students interact with stylistic concepts and use them to improve writing assignments. Secondly, I intervened in the conversation by including interview transcripts. Incorporating student voices made my study even more student-centered and pedagogically invested. I have never felt entirely comfortable interpreting student writing and student opinion toward a course. I believe asking students themselves and listening to their responses is more ethical. My research on style pedagogy within an aesthetic framework poses some limitations for current scholars and teachers. Namely, is there room in already-crowded outcomes statements for such aesthetic risk and experimentation? I reaffirm that, yes, it is not difficult to do. One merely needs to incorporate some basic principles from my work into classroom situations. Bill

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FitzGerald’s claim that instructors can teach half a dozen figures to students in a first-year composition course is refreshing. My interventions are not aimed at bringing about massive overhauls; rather, in small ways teachers can reclaim poetic traditions by giving these kinds of techniques and activities some time and space in the course. Teaching a dozen or so of the figures; introducing students to terms like the imagination, the sublime, ekphrasis, and enargeia; inviting students to experiment with the visual via assignments like photo essays—all of these invite aesthetic dimensions into the classroom. Concepts and practices like the ones I’ve outlined in this project expand our view of writing and meaning-making by emphasizing the visual and the beautiful as being inherently part of persuasion, effective delivery, and compelling composition. I want to reiterate that it is important to make aesthetic interventions, even in a small way. The teacher sets the agenda, and what’s on the agenda is seen as important. So I encourage teachers to find ways to reclaim the poetic traditions that are firmly part of rhetorical history. Doing so can create moments and situations for aesthetic thought and exploration. There’s a huge difference between making a small intervention and not making one at all. In a higher education setting ever increasingly focused on teaching marketable, applicable skills, it may be eccentric or even radical to make composition poetic. But in my view, that’s all the more reason to do so. I’d like to see more pedagogical attention in current composition research. As the field of composition studies continues to morph and become ever more professionalized, I hope we do not forget our strong connection to pedagogy. Some scholars continue to claim that pedagogy is the heart of composition studies. In the introduction to Teaching with Student Texts (2010), Joseph Harris, John D. Miles, and Charles Paine assert that “our field does center around pedagogy” (Teaching 1). This is directly observable by the kinds of texts that we work with— writing textbooks, handbooks, and rhetorical manuals (1). The editors also firmly advocate for learning from students. They claim that “as a field, we need to think more about how we value student writing . . . and how we support the work students do as intellectuals” (6). I believe this is true. It may seem like I am suddenly claiming that pedagogy is the only thing we should do. Of course, our pedagogy cannot be understood without theory. In Reason to Believe, Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald caution that without a philosophical framework, teachers can grow

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“weary, cynical, or naïve about theory’s connection to their lived experiences in the classroom” (3). Teachers are always pulled between the practical and the theoretical, so there must be some means of conceptualizing and mediating this conflict. That is why Roskelly and Ronald assert a romantic/pragmatic stance, otherwise known as “the questioning of theory through experience and action” (26). We can and must be teachers and theorists at once. Jason Palmeri’s work makes it clear that composition studies has always been home to experimental tinkerers, those who map creative connections between theory and practice, and between different fields of study. He is particularly observant of connections between writing and the arts (50). Palmeri shows how, in composition studies, these connections are decades in the making, and cites early moments of experimental teaching in the field that we must not forget (123). For example, Palmeri references Jack Klingerman’s 1977 CCC article entitled “Photography, Perception, and Composition.” This article describes an activity in which students make a viewfinder out of notecard (123) Students look through this makeshift aperture and write a scene that locates themselves in space (123). Palmeri was inspired by this rhetorical act of composing a scene within a frame, and reflects on how he asked students to go outside and capture photographic images of the campus (117). After taking images, students reflected upon how they had “strategically employed framing, camera angle, camera distance, lighting, and contrast” in order to make visual arguments (117). This kind of visual activity, studied and then repurposed again, is inspiring. When we know our rich history, we can model pedagogies off those that came before in order to create something new. When we map a lineage of artistic thinkers in the field, new possibilities open up.

Guideline Four: Alternative Writing Assessments The pedagogical study described in chapter four raises important questions about writing assessment in an aesthetically minded course. I found that alternative writing assessments were successful in creating an atmosphere that invited creative exploration and risk. Specifically, I utilized a portfolio system in which students were assessed on their performance as a whole, not marked on each individual assignment. I used substantive narrative feedback to speak directly to students about their work and illustrate connections between various pieces they had written. I found that students responded positively to this personalized approach. I believe it allowed me to build rapport and trust with students so that they were willing to take more risks as writers.

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Several scholars have contributed important work on designing alternate assessments. Peter Elbow believes alternate forms of assessment deemphasize grades and help students focus on writing (197). Bob Broad urges for a focus on the local, and urges teachers to shape assessment practices based on contextual needs (2). The point these scholars make is that teachers have the agency to reshape and redesign assessment practices for the betterment of our classrooms and pedagogy. Portfolio assessment and contract grading are two viable systems (Broad 18, Danielewicz and Elbow 255). Of course, the theoretical underpinnings of the need for alternate forms of assessment were outlined long before. In The Making of Meaning, Berthoff writes that we have to find ways to teach students “to tolerate ambiguity” (39). A big part of this requires helping students “to be patient with their beginnings—which should never be graded: identifying mistakes is irrelevant when we are teaching how to begin the process of making meanings” (39). To create something, to make new meanings—requires room to experiment without fear of making mistakes. So when Elbow calls on teachers to design “small but important evaluation-free zones” in which students can write without any expectation of assessment, I read that as the pedagogical method to match Berthoff’s theory (197). When I reflect now on my decision to design an alternate form of assessment for the course, I believe it was a risk that paid off. When I look back at the student interviews where I asked about the alternate style of assessment, I think about Jill’s response: It made me feel like there was always room for improvement but that I didn’t need to worry about making a mistake. It’s the exact balance I hoped to achieve. I’m glad it resonated with that student. I hope it did for many others. I continue to be very preoccupied with alternative writing assessments and hope to see continued scholarly explorations in this area. My findings suggest that alternative writing assessments establish rapport between teacher and student through personalized feedback. Assessments like the one I created and implemented made students more comfortable with creative risk. At the same time, there’s a balance between studied methods and creative expression. I’m not advocating for a free-form expression absent of guidelines. Rather, aesthetic pedagogy works best when students and teacher create guidelines together. Expectations need to be phrased in ways that students understand. That way, assessment is part of the ongoing conversation about learning and exploration in the course—not just a punitive measure that happens at the end of the composing

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process. Future research in this area can continue to examine how to assess student work in ways that are productive, fair, and beneficial to student learning. Riskier, more provocative aesthetic projects can only come about if assessment systems are flexible enough to invite them.

Guideline Five: Return to Style Because style is a concept, not located anywhere, I was wary of creating an undergraduate course on style alone. It seemed too vague. I subtitled an advanced writing course “Composition and Aesthetics” because I wanted to explore the connection between writing and beauty, literature and art, persuasion and delight. I thought students could analyze and think about style if I centered our conversations on certain tangible things like published essays, audio recordings, and art objects. Basically, style is a concept and an instructor can select which cultural artifacts are most applicable for analyzing and exploring it. Because creative nonfiction occupies a strong history in the field, I found it the most natural way to analyze style in writing. To think beyond text alone, I brought in multimodal compositions as well. These also served as important models for the digital essay assignment. At the end of this project, I reflect on the wealth of information I’ve learned about style. I believe an entire undergraduate course on style would work well. In the future, I’d like to teach a course just on style, and really focus on stylistic techniques. When I think about what it might look like, I have some ideas. A course on style should definitely include historical, theoretical, and pedagogical readings. Students can analyze how these are all intertwined. It’s impossible to talk about style without using examples of words or phrases in context. At the same time, it’s a fruitless endeavor to examine words or phrases alone and attempt to discern what they are doing without some working theory and knowledge of specific stylistic terms. A course in style works best when students wrestle with complex theory, read and analyze models, learn and practice the figures and aesthetic techniques, and then try this on their own by creating compositions and reflecting on the choices they made. Writing program administrators can take style into account when designing writing majors. WPAs can find ways to integrate style into multiple courses depending on objectives. In this work, I discussed matching specific figures to certain genres. This is one way to make style immediately applicable. A course on creative writing could include more obscure, artistic figures like polysindeton, and specific figures of repetition, like epizeuxis, and so on. A course in

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business or technical writing could include a selected set of figures specifically designed for clarity and connection of ideas, like distinctio, exemplum, and metanoia. The number of figures that are taught is far less important then how they are taught. It depends on what works best in context. Overall, I hope that teachers will remember the tropes and the schemes, instead of just a few tropes that are relegated to literature courses only. Style is important when it comes to graduate education. By accepting and reifying the rhetoric-poetic split, we do a disservice to future scholars. It is important to know our history, which existed long before the genesis of the field of composition studies. The graduate seminar in rhetoric history should assign Poetics, discuss the figurists as important rhetoricians, and entertain questions about what happens to style in these digital times. I’m troubled by the tendency to highlight the negative historical aspects of style, like Hugh Blair’s treatment of style as ornament and dress. Certain historical moments about style have become hardened by the repeated use of our canonical reference text The Rhetorical Tradition. It’s important to remember that this book is not the rhetorical tradition, and is only a selected history. Reconnecting rhetoric and poetics requires a skeptical look at some “facts” about rhetorical history that may not be true. For example, as I showed in Chapter Two, Blair was not just the scapegoat some scholars make him out to be (T. Miller 229, Winterowd 22). Blair was deeply concerned with theorizing how the figures would affect the reader. The Lectures were designed to teach students how to tailor style to different occasions in order to communicate beautifully and persuasively. Blair discussed “the flexibility of Language” and sought to understand how rhetorical works operate (Blair 175). This is a stylistic thinker. Of course, he is not without problems. But when we do not fully engage with the complexity of this historical moment, it’s easy for it to get brushed aside, get lost. We need to stay curious and question the history we’re taught. It’s what thoughtful historians do. It makes our work more engaging, complex, and interesting. Style can reshape the curriculum at a higher level beyond individual courses. WPAs can design first-year writing programs differently to accommodate stylistic study. It may work best to introduce the figures in the first-year composition course, and then again in subsequent courses. Stylistic study has to be part of the overall program goals, a part within a larger, coherent whole. To achieve this, WPAs need to explicitly mention style in programmatic goals and outcomes. Without larger administrative support and design, style can seem like a niche interest, as opposed to what it really is—a rich historical tradition with practical application.

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Conclusion In this chapter, I’ve made some steps toward reclaiming lost poetic ideas in the field and reshaping them for today’s scholars and teachers. Of course, this is a huge undertaking, and the contributions I make here are relatively small. Still, I aim to inspire continued work in reclaiming poetic traditions and historicizing style. Since style was “out of style” for quite some time over recent decades, those scholars who are reinvigorating this conversation are bold and passionate about what these lost concepts mean for our work, and for the identity of the field as a whole. I firmly maintain that these stylistic tools and concepts are worth reclaiming. We can begin that work now by incorporating the ideas and practices I’ve outlined here in small but very meaningful ways. How can we write and design the most compelling, persuasive compositions imaginable? Certainly not by forgetting the specific techniques that make these creations so lasting and memorable. As teachers and theorists, we’ve got to pay more attention to the words and phrases we use. This is what style is about—purposeful craft, studied methods, aesthetic exploration, and passion to communicate and express ideas well. I.A. Richards reminds us that words don’t just copy reality. They are how we express ourselves and navigate life (123). So let’s communicate with each other in style. And let’s continue to research and report on what we learn, since an idea “is only known by what it does” (Richards 5). This is the work of a rhetoric theorist and teacher—to continually test and imagine, to mediate between idea and application. To exist in a space that is, as Roskelly and Ronald put it, restless and unsettled, yet at the same time, active and hopeful (26, 139).

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