rhetoric. · including the formation of the national council of teachers of english, the appearance...

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Berlin, James A.Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in AmericanColleges, 1900-1985. Studies in Writing &Rhetoric.Conference on Coll. Composition and Communication,Urbana, Ill.ISBN-0-8093-1360-X87237p.; Foreword by Donald C. Stewart.Southern Illinois University Press, P.0 Box 3697,Carbondale, IL 62901 ($8.50).Books (010) -- Information Analyses (070)

MF01/PC10 Plus Postage.Classroom Techniques; *College English; *EducationalHistory; Educational Philosophy; *Epistemology;*Expository Writing; Higher Education; *Rhetoric;Theory Practice Relationship; Writing (Composition);Writing Instruction*Rhetorical Theory

ABSTRACTIntended for teachers of college composition, this

history of major and minor developments in the teaching of writing intwentieth-century American colleges employs a taxonomy of theoriesbased on the three epistemological categories (objective, subjective,and transactional) dominating rhetorical theory and practice. Thefirst section of the book provides an overview of the three theories,specifically their assumptions and rhetorics. The main chapters coverthe following topics: (1) the nineteenth-century background, on theformation of the English department and the subsequent relationshipof rhetoric and poetic; (2) the growth of the discipline (1900-1920),including the formation of the National Council of Teachers ofEnglish, the appearance of the major schools of rhetoric, theefficiency movement, graduate education in rhetoric, undergraduatecourses and the Great War; (3) the influence of progressive education(1920-1940), including the writing program and current-traditionalrhetoric, liberal culture, and expressionistic and social rhetoric;(4) the communication emphasis (1940-1960), including thecommunications course, the founding of the Conference on CollegeComposition and Communication, literature and composition,linguistics and composition, and the revival of rhetoric; and (5) therenaissance of rhetoric and major rhetorical approaches (1960-1975),including contemporary theories based on the three epistemiccategories. A final chapter briefly surveys developments through1987. (JG)

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Li

Rhetoric and RealityWriting Instniction in

American Colleges,

1900-1985

James A. Berlin

WITH A FOREWORD BY DONALD C. STEWART

Published for the Conference on CollegeComposition and Communication

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESSCarbondale and Edwardsville

4

Production of works in this series has been partly funded by theConference on (.:ollege Composition and Comilmnicalion of the NationalCouncil (,rTeachers of English.

Copyright © 1987 by the Conference on College (.omposition andCommunication

All rights reserved

Printed in the United Statcs of AmericaEdited by Mari/yr B. DorisDesigned by Cesign for Publishing, inc.. Bob Nam eProduction supervised by Natalia Nadraga

90 89 88 87 4 3 2 /

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataBerlin. James A.

Rhet;irie and reality.

(8Iudies in writing & rhetoric)-Published for the Conference on College

Composition and Connounication.-Bibliography: p.Includes Mdes.1. English languageRhetoricStudy and teaching.

United StatesIlistory. 1. Conference on CollegeComposition and Communication (U.S.) II. Title.III. Series.PE1405.U6B473 1987 808..042071173 86-20428ISBN 0-80V3-1360-X

5

ToSam, Dan the Man, and Captain Christopher

Contents

FOREWORD by Donald C. Stewart ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii

1. An Overview 1

Theories of Rhetoric 6Objective Theories 7

Subjective Tlwories IiTransactional Theories 15

2. The Nineteenth-Century Background 20Rhetoric and Poetic in the English Department 15

3. The Growth of the Discipline: 1900-1920 32The NCTE 33The Major Schools 35

Current-Traditional Rhetoric 36The Rhetoric of Liberal Culture 43A Transactional Rhetoric for a Democracy 46The Ideas Approach 51

The Efficiency Movement 53Graduate Education in Rhetoric 54Undergraduate Writing Courses 55The Great War 56

4. The Influence of Progressive Education: 1920-1940 58The Surveys 61The Writing Program and Current-Traditional Rhetoric 65Liberal Culture 71

Expressionistic Rhetoric 73Social Rhetoric 81Conclusion 90

viii Contents

5. The Communications Emphasis: 1940-1960 92The Communications Course 93The CCCC 104Literature and Composition 107Linguistics and Composition 111The Revival of Rhetoric 115

6. The Renaissance of Rhetoric: 1960-1975 120

7. Major Rhetorical Approaches: 1960-1975 139Objective Rhetoric 140Subjective Rhetoric 145Transactional Rhetoric 155

Classical Rhetoric 155The Rhetoric of Cognitive Psychology 159Episternic Rhetoric 165

8. Conclusion and Postscript on the Present 180

WORKS CrrED 191

INDEX 217

ForewordDonald C. Stewart

BECAUSE I BELIEVE THAT IGNORANCE OF THE HISTORY OF OURprofession, particularly ignorance of the history of writing instruc-tion, is the single greatest deficiency in the majority of this nation'sEnglish teachers, and because I belieNe that we have just comethrough a remarkable period in which we have reexamined and re-evaluated many old assumptions about the teaching of writing andhave thus arrived at a moment of temporary intellectual exhaustion,poised to retreat and retrench once again, James Berlin's Rhetoricand Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985anives at a most opportune time.

In this work, an extension of his earlier monograph, Writing In-struction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges, Berlin identi-fies three epistemological categoriesobjective, subjective, andtransactionalthat have dominated rhetorical theory and practicein the twentieth century. "I have chosen epistemology rather thanideology as the basis for my taxonomy," he says, ". . . because itallows for a closer focus on the rhetorical propertiesas distinctfrom the economic, social, or political propertiesof the systemsconsidered." But he does not neglect ideology and in so doing chal-lenges his readers to examine not only the epistemology that in-forms but the ideology that is served by what they do. day by day, inthe composition classroom. For example, composition teachingwhich places greatest emphasis on copyreading skills and limitedconceptt of usage and organization, whether or not one wishes tocall it current-traditional (recent bantering about the validity of theterms, "current-traditional," should not draw our attention awayfrom the fact that whatever one wishes to call it, it is a pedagogy

9

Foreword

which is deeply rooted still in the American high school and collegeclassroom), is grounded in a positivist epistemology which assumesthat reality is located in an empirically verifiable material worldwhich it is the duty of a writer to represent as accurately as possible.Furthermore, this kind of composition teaching has been popularbecause it serves an upwardly mobile managerial class in our society.

In addition to current traditional rhetoric, Berlin finds threeother objective rhetoricsbehaviorist, semanticist, and linguis-ticappearing in this century. As one would expect, Korzybski,Hayakawa, Fries, Chomsky, Skinner, and Zoe Ilner all receive atten-tion in this section. I might add that his analysis of Zoellner's contro-versial College English monograph (January 1969) is the first reallyintelligent assessment of that work and its place in twentieth cen-tury composition theory and practice that I have seen.

His second category, subjective theories, which "locate truth ei-ther within the individual or within a realm that is accessible onlythrough the individual's internal apprehension," have their roots inPlatonic idealism modified somewhat by Emerson and Thoreau inthe nineteenth century and encouraged by twentieth-century depthpsychology. The best-known recent advocates of the subjective ap-proach are D. Gordon Rohman and Albert 0. Wlecke whose workwith prewriting represented a sharp and distinctive break awayfrom current-traditional rhetoric.

Berlin defines the third of his categories. "transactional theo-ries." as those which "are based on an epistemology that sees truthas a iiig out of the interaction of the elements of the rhetoricalsituation." Included ir this group are classical, cognitive, and epis-temic rhetorics, the last of which is clearly most congenial to him.

The organization of the book is straightforward. After his over-view of the entire work, Berlin summarizes the nineteenth centurybackground and then takes up the various rhetorical theories he de-fines, in twenty-year blocks from 1900 to 1960, and in the fifteen-year period from 1960 to 1975. He concludes with some generaliza-tions about developments from 1975 to 1985.

I find it difficult to express fully my admiration for the work thatJames Berlin has done. The scope cf this project is huge and theauthor's coverage stunning. Ile has had to examine an enormousmass of pedagogical material and, assisted by intellectual histories ofour century, generalize about it in meaningful and significant ways.

1 0

Foreword xi

The sheer effort of assimilating this material occasionally leads theauthor into composing the box,- as Winston Weathers calls it, but itmay well be that the organizational box is the only vehicle in thissituation enabling both writer and reader to keep some sense of di-rection in the entire study.

For several reasons, pedagogical, philosophical, and professional,this is a hugely significant book. Professor Berlin establishes at theoutset the legitimacy of rhetoric and composition as a field of studyand the absurdity of demeaning it as essentially remedial work. (Theknowledgeable reader remembers, with no small degree of irony,the fact that one hundred years ago the classicists demeaned :nod-ern languages and literature as the accomplishments of educatedgentlemen, not as legitimate fields of study in a university, and said,in effect, that work in these areas should be taken care of in the highschools.) Furthermore, Berlin notes that rhetoric (the productiof ofdiscourse) and poetics (the interpretation of it) have historicallybeen linked and that both are pluralistic terms. "Rhetoric" hasreally meant "rhetorics," both over its long history and at particularmoments in that history. And its variety, as great as that of poetics,has come from the fact that different rhetorics are grounded in dif-ferent vistemologies and ideologies.

In essence, Berlin has drawn a map of the territory we call En-glish, particularly the teaching of writing, in the twentieth century.Not everyone will agree with all the details of his mapI do noteven agree with all of them myselfbut those disagreements aresuperficial and must not obscure the significance of what he hasdone. He has told us who we are and why we think the way we (lc;about the field of English.

Parochialism in our field will undoubtedly persist, but because ofthis book, it can no longer be excused. The literary critic, the bibli-ographer, the literary historian, and the editor who continue to in-sist that the primary business of the English department is the ex-amination and interpretation of literary texts; the compositionteacher who is committed to a particular "method" without anyawareness of the historical and intellectual slot that method oc-cupies; these must henceforth he regarded as anachronisms, imped-ing the work of an English department with a broad and deep per-spective on its past and a comprehensiw- view of its structure andmission in the years to come.

Acknowledgments

I WOULD LIKE TO TRANI: THE UNIVERSITY RESEARCII COUNCILof the University of Cincinnati for a summer grant and Fred Milne,my department head, for arranging a term leaveboth of whichcontributed greatly to m completing this manuscript. The NationalEndowment for the Humanities generously provided a year withRichard Young at Carnegie-Mellon University and a summer withSheldon Rothblatt at the University of California, Berkeley. I amalso grateful to the English department of the University of Texas atAustin for inviting me to be a visiting professor during the time thismanuscript was being completed. Lucy Schultz, my associate direc-tor of freshman English at Cinchnati, has also been generous in in:-suming more than her share of the workload during my absences.

I want to thank a number of people who introduced me to rhetoricand in one way or another have contributed to my study of it:Sharon Bassett, Lisa Ede, David Fractenberg, Bob Inkster, CharlesKneupper, Victor Vitanza, Sam Watson, Vickie Winkler, and the lateBill Nelson, a leader whom we all miss. A number of people readand criticized this monograph along the way: Lester Faigley, LockeCarter, John Fracasso, Kay Halasek, David Harvey, Mara Holt, FredKemp, Greg Lyons, and Rick Penticoff. I thank them for their sug-gestions and absolve them of any responsibility for the final text.

I am also grateful to Paal O'Dea of the National Council of Teach-ers of English, to Kenney Withers of Southern Illinois UniversityPress, and to NCTE's Publications Committee for Studies in Writingand Rhetoric for their support and encouragement throughout.

Finally, I want to thank my flung) Sam, my wife, for dociding to

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Rhetoric and Reality

1 1

1

An Overview

LITERACY HAS ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE BEEN THE CENTERof the educational enterprise. No matter what else it expects of itsschools, a culture insists that students learn to read, write, andspeak in the officially sanctioned manner. It is for this reason thatrhetoric, the production of spoken and written texts, and poetic, theinterpretation of texts, have been the indispensable foundation ofschooling, regardless of the age or intellectual level of the student.In this study, I will examine the forms that rhetorical instruction inwriting has taken in the twentieth-century college classroom. in sodoing, however, I will also be glancing at the corresponding devel-opments in poetic. Omsidering both will be necessary for two rea-sons. Writing and reading have from the start been lodged in thesame department in the modern university. More important, asTzvetan Todorov, Kenneth Burke, and Charles Sears Baldwin havedemonstrated, rhetoric and poetic historically have enjoyed a dia-lectical relationship, the one's functions being defined and deter-mined by the other's. I will thus be concerned with the way in whichwriting instruction has been s'ilaped by instruction in literature and,correspondingly, the ways in which approaches to literary inter-pretation have been affected by methods of teaching the productionof rhetorical texts. My main focus, however, will be on rhetoric.

My reading of the rhetorical history of this period tends to vindi-cate the position of writing instruction in the college curriculumparticularly the freshman course, a primary concern of this study.While such vindication is superfluous for anyone knowledgeableabout the history of rhetoric or the history of educationthe twoalways having been closely relatedI am aware that many in English

15

2 Rhetoric and Reality

studies are unfamiliar with this background, especially since histori-cal considerations have been fbr quite some time out of favor in lit-erature classrooms. Even if we forget for the moment that Aristotle,Cicero, Quintilian, and Augustine all considered rhetoric to be thecenter of learning and were themselves specialists in the teaching ofrhetoric, a glance at the Anglo-American experience in universityeducation demonstrates closer to home that rhetoric has continuallybeen an essential feature of college training. In the nineteenth cen-tury, for example, instruction in speaking and writing was a prin-cipal feature of the college curriculum in America, and until about1850 the dominant texts used were three imports from British uni-versitiesthe works of George Campbell, Hugh Blair, and RichardWhately. Campbell wrote his Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) while heserved as professor of divinity and principal of Marischal College,Aberdeen. The work, a theoretical treatise, was designed to estab-lish the philosophical ground for the discipline that served as thecore of the curriculum. Blair was Regius Professor of Rhetoric andBelles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh when he presentedclassroom lectures that were collected in Lectures on Rhetoric andBelles Lettres (1783), a volume that went through 130 editions by1911. And Whately's Elements of Rhetoric (1828), written while hewas principal of St. Alban's Hall, Oxford, was intended for his di-vinity studentsamong whom was John Henry Newman.

This brief sketch underscores the fact that writing instruction wasan integral part of the British and American college systems at atime when only the well-endowed and the well-prepared were inattendance. Instruction in rhetoric was in no way considered re-medial, designed only for those who should have mastered it in thelower schools. It was instead regarded as a necessary concern of thecollege curriculum. To have suggested to Campbell, Blair, Whately,or their American counterpartsSamuel Newman or Henry Day,for examplethat instruction in rhetoric was the exclusive duty ofthe lower schools would have been as outrageous as suggesting tothe chair ofany English department today that students have learnedin high school all that they need to know about interpreting literarytexts, and that they v.-tight better spend their college days pursuingother courses of study. Most college teachers today, within andwithout the English department, would agree that students needadditional experience in interpreting literary texts, both to improve

16

An Overview 3

their ability to read with understanding and to inform their per-sonal, social, and professional lives. This history is intended to dem-onstrate that writing instructi,-.i is no less essential for college stu-dents. As beginning students encounter an overwhelming array ofnew ideas and new ways of thinking, the rhetorical training theybring with them inevitably provesregardless of their intelligenceor trainingunequal to the task of dealing with their new intel-lectual experience. It is for this reason that the freshman writingcourse in college has remained a part of the curriculum throughoutthe century, despite the calls from a small minority for its abolitionand the broadly publicized removals of it as a requirementre-movals that are almost invariably followed by a quiet reinstatementin one form or another. Rhetoric has been a permanent and central

part of the college curriculum throughout the hventieth century,just as it had been for the previous three centuries in American and

B ri t ish universities.A few preliminary theoretical matters must now be considered.

My studies in the history of rhetoricboth Ole standard surveysof George Kennedy, James Murphy, Edward P. J. Corbett, and thelike, and my own examination of primary materialshave con-vinced me that rhetoric is no more a monolithic field than is poetic.In other words, the term rhetoric refers to a diverse discipline thathistorically has included a variety of incompatible systems. Whileone particular rhetorical theory may predominate at any historicalmoment, none remains dominant over time. Each major system isdestined to be replaced eventually. Thus, we ought not to talk about

rhetoric but, as Paolo Valesio has recently suggested, of rhetorics,seeing the field as providing a variety equal to that of poetic. Thisdiachronic diversity in rhetoric is matched by a synchronic one. Atany historical moment, it is common to discover a number of differ-ent rhetorics, each competing for attention and claiming to be theone, true system. The difference in these rhetorics is notas I haveshown in Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Col-legesa matter of the superficial emphasis of one or another featureof the rhetorical act. The difference has to do wiih epistemologywith assumptions about the very nature of the known, the knower,and the discourse community involved m considering the known. Abrief consideration of this matter will be useful.

In opening this discussion, I emphasized that literacy involves a

1 7


particular variety of rhetorica way of speaking and writing withinthe confines of specific social sanctions. This is possible becauseevery rhetorical system is based on epistemological assumptionsabout the nature of reality, the nature of the knower, and the rulesgoverning the discovery and communication of the known. Thesematters, of course, converge with the elements of the rhetorical tri-angle: reality, interlocutor, audience, and language. A particularrhetoric thus instructs students about the nature of genuine knowl-edge, or truthsometimes, for example, located in the materialworld, sometimes in a private perception of a spiritual realm, some-times in group acquiescence, sometimes in language itself, some-times in one or another dialectical permutation of these elements.The nature of truth will in turn determine the roles of the inter-locutor (the writer or speaker) and the audience in discovering andcommunicating it. It is important to keep in mind that as the con-ception of the real altersas a society or class or group moves from,say, a positivistic to a phenomenological orientationthe roles ofinterlocutor, audience, and language itself undergo a correspondingalteration. Furthermore, because societies are constantly changingit is common to find more than one rhetoric at any single momenta simple result of there commonly being more than one epistemol-ogy competing for attention at any given time.

The transformations that occur in a society's rhetorics are alsorelated to larger social and political developments. In taking into .count this relationship, we are in an area of thought commonly des-ignated as ideology. Here the term will be used in its most descrip-tive and neutral sense, in the manner, for example, of the literarycritic Sacvan Bercovitch, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, or theNeo-Marxist political theorist Göran Therbornall three seeking indifferent ways to rid the term of its doctrinaire associations. Ide-ology will simply refer to the pluralistic conceptions of social andpolitical arrangements that are present in a society at any giventime. These conceptions are based on discursive (verbal) and non-discursive (nonverbal) formations designating the snape of socialand political structures, the nature and role of the individual withinthese structures, and the distribution of power in society. It is notdifficult to see the close relationship between these elements andthe elements of the rhetorical contextthe individual interlocutor,material reality, the audience, and language. The plurality of com-

18

An Overview 5

peting rhetorics is always related to the plurality of competing ide-ologies. Ordinarily, one particular rhetoric is dominantthe rheto-ric embodying the ideology of a powerful group or dassbut theexclusion of all other rhetorics is never completely achieved, noteven in a totalitarian state where the effort to do so is common. In ademocracy, those whose power is based on a particular notion ofrhetoric (for example, a rhetoric maintaining that only certified ex-perts may speak or write, or only those who have attained a certainlevel of financial success) will likewise restrict challenges to theirconception of rhetoric because such challenges constitute a threat totheir continued claim to eminence. They too are intolerant of alter-native rhetorics. A democracy, however, ordinarily provides politi-cal and social supports for open discussion, allowing for the free playof possibilities in the rhetorics that appearalthough these possi-bilities are obviously never unlimited.

In examining the variety of rhetorics that have appeared in theEnglish departments of American colleges in the twentieth century,I will be looking simultaneously at several patterns. I will be con-cerned with the rhetorical theories that have appeared, as well aswith the episternological and ideologicL: elements to which they arerelated. But I want also to examine the concrete cla,sroom practicesto which these theories have led. I will thus be as concerned withwhat the authors of articles and textbooks say they are attempting aswith their pedagogical strategies for achieving their aims. Changesin rhetorical theory and practice will be related to changes in thenotion of literacy, as indicated by developments in the college cur-riculum. The curriculum, in turn, is always responsive to the chang-ing economic, social, and political conditions in a society. Obviously,the kind of graduates colleges prepare have a great deal to do withthe conditions in the society for which they are preparing them.This study will demonstrate that the college writing course, a re-quirement for graduation for most students throughout the century,responds quickly to changes in American society as a whole, withliteracy (as variously defiiwd by the college curriculum over theyears) serving as the intermediary between the twobetween thewriting course and larger social developments. Finally, I would hopethat the study of the dynamics of change in writing classes duringthe present century will serve as a guide in charting the course ofcomposition instruction in the future.


Theories of Rhetoric

I would like now to consider in outline the major rhetorical theo-ries found during the century. My reasons for doing so here are nu-merous It will be helpful to have an overview of the approachesthat will later be discussed in greater detail. This history, moreover,will be less concerned with theoretical matters than with offering achronicle of events. But there is an even more compelling justifica-tion for considering theoretical matters here. As I will show, writinginstruction during the century has suffered from the failure of bothits supporters and its detractors to conceive of alternatives to thepositivistic rhetoric that has dominated the teaching field until justrecently. Rhetoric for most English professors has meant one theoryand one theory only, and the fact that past and present have pro-vided alternative models has gone largely unnoticed. I will considerthe reasons for this obtuseness in the next chapter. For now, I offerthe following as an introduction to the rich diversity of thought onrhetoric that has appeared in this century despite an environmentthat has often been unfriendly to innovation.

In considering the rhetorical theories of the period, I have cho-sen epistemology rather than ideology as the ha:As for my taxonomy,doing so because it allows for a closer focus on the rhetorical proper-tiesas distinct ft.( m the economic, social, or political propertiesof the systems considered. (Ideology, however, as already noted,is always present by imbrication.) I have accordingly divided thesetheories into three epistemological categories: the objective, thesubjective, and the transactional. Objective theories locate realityin the external world, in the material objects of experienm Subjec-tive theories place truth within the subject, to be discovered throughan act of internal apprehension. And

transactional theories locatereality at the point of interaction of subject and object, with audi-ence and language as mediating agencies. It should be noted thatnone of the categories is monolithic; each offers a diversity of rhe-torical theories. I should also add that this taxonomy is not meant tobe taken as exhaustive of the entire field of rhetoric, but is simply anattempt to make manageable the discussion of the major rhetorics Ihave encountered in examining this period. In discussing the sepa-rate categories, I will focus on the ways hi which the elements of therhetor;cal situation are defined and related to each otherthat is,

20

n Overview 7

on the ways in which each theory conceives the nature of the real,the interlocutor, the audience, and the function of language. Thisemphasis is not for mere convenience, however. As I have alreadyindicated, in teaching writing we are providing students with guid-ance in seeing and structuring their experience, with a set of tacitrules about distinguishing truth from falsity, reality from illusion. Away of seeing, after all, is a way of not seeing, and as we instructstudents in attending to particular orders of evidencesense im-pression, for example, in the injunction to -be concrete"we aresimultaneously discouraging them from seeing other orders of evi-dencein the present example, the evidence of private vision or ofsocial arrangements. Our decision, then, about the kind of rhetoricwe are to call upon in teaching writing has important implicationsfor the behavior of our studentsbehavior that includes the per-sonal, social, and political. As the present study will show, therehave been teachers in every decade of this century who fortunatelyhave been fully aware of the consequences of their teaching in thelarger experience of their students, writing instructors whose meth-ods deserve close attention.

Objective TheoriesObjective rhetorics are based on a positivistic epistemology, as-

serting that the real is located in the material world. From this per-spective, only that which is empirically verifiable or which can begrounded in empirically verifiable phenomena is real. The businessof the writer is to record this reality exactly as it has been experi-enced so that it can be reproduced in the reader. Language here is asign system, a simple transcribing device for recording that whichexists apart from the verbal. The dominant form of this approach inthe twentieth century has been what is called current-traditionalrhetoric. I have traced the development of this rhetoric in myWriting Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges, andC. II. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon in Rhetorical Traditions and theTeaching of Writing have devoted a chapter to its classroom proce-dures. Here I would like briefly to describe its epistemology and itsclassroom concerns in order to demonstrate the features of an objec-tive rhetoric. I will also indicate three other varieties of this genrethat appeared later in the century.

For current-traditional rhetoric, reality is located in the material

21


world. Based on Scottish Common Sense Realism, the most influen-tial philosophy in America during the nineteenth century, this posi-tion argues that the mind is equipped with faculties that enable it toperceive the external object directly through the medium of senseimpression. Truth is determined through the inductive method--through collecting sense data and arriving at generalizations. Therole of the observer is to be as -objective- as possible, necessitatingthe abandonment of social, psychological, and historical preconcep-tions that might interfere with the response of the faculties to theexternal world. The responsibility of the observer, then, is to en-gage in an innocent reaction to sense impression, examining it with-out allowing any distortion to occur. Once the truth is determinedthrough observation, the next task is to find the language to de-scribe one's discoveries. Truth, located first in nature and then in theresponse of the faculties to nature, exists prior to language. Lan-guage is regarded at worst as a distorting medium that alters theoriginal perception, and at best as a transparent device that capturesthe original experience so that it might be reproduced in the fac-ulties of one's audience. The audience is likewise outside of themeaning-making act. It is also assumed to be as objective as thewriter, so that the language presented can stimulate in the readerthe experience that the writer originally had.

It is important to note that the source of current-traditionalrhetoric is to be found in the work ofCampbell, Blair, and Whately,as well as in their nineteenth-century American imitators. In theformer it is saved from being purely mechanistic by concern for therole of emotion in providing motivation for the pursuit of the ethicalin persuasive discourse. In the hands of A. S. Hill and Barrett Wen-dell of Harvard and John F. Genung of Amherst in the late nine-teenth century, however, this rhetoric abandoned concern for theethical as it became completely positivistic in intent. In this ap-proach, truth in written discourse is conceived exclusively in em-pirical and rational terms, with emotion and persuasion relegated tooral discourse. The writing class is to focus on discourse that dealswith the rational faculties: description and narration to be con-cerned with sense impression and imagination (the image-makingfaculty), exposition with -setting forth- the generalized ideas de-rived from sense impression and understanding, and argument withunderstanding leading to conviction. This rhetoric is subservient to

22

An Overview 9

the ends of scielice and is no longer concerned with the probabilisticnature of value in the legal, political, and social spheres. As I willdemonstrate in the next chapter, the fact that current-traditionalrhetoric appeared in response to the new scientific curriculum ofthe modern American university had a great deal to do with thispositivistic east. For now, it should be noted that this rhetoric makesthe patterns of arrangement and superficial correctness the mainends of writing instruction. In ention, the focus of Aristotelianrhetoric, need not be taught since the business of the writer is torecord careful observations or the reports of fellow observers (in theresearch paper, for example). In the world of current-traditionalrhetoric, all truths are regarded as certain, readily available to thecorrect method of investigation. Even the probabilistic realms ofethics and pGlitics are regarded as ultimately amenable to the scien-tific method, as the university-sponsored approaches of the socialand behavioral sciences attempt to demonstrate.

Current-traditional rhetoric thus teaches the modes of discourse,with a special emphasis on exposition and its formsanalysis, clas-sification, cause-effect, and so forth. However, it also pays specialattention to language, doing so for important reasons. Since lan-guage is arbitrary and enters into meaning only aftei the truth is dis-covered, the writer must take pains that language not distort what isto be communicated. Language must thus be precise. Since it is toreproduce in the reader the experience of the original observer,must also possess energy and vivacity. Finally, since langiuge is trdemonstrate the individual's qualifications as a reputable observ( rworthy of attention, it must conform to certain standards of usage,thereby demonstrating the appropriate class affiliation.

Current-traditional rhetoric has been the most pervasive of ob-jective rhetorics in the last hundred years and, in fact, the dominantrhetoric overall. For the majority of English teachers, it has been acompelling paradigm, making it impossible for them to conceive ofthe discipline in any other way. There have been three other varie-ties of objective rhetoric, however, that have attracted a following:behaviorist, semanticist, and linguistic rhetorics.

The use of behavioral psychology in writing instruction appearedin its most detailed and best-known foi.m in Robert Zoellner's 1969College English article entitled "Talk-Write: A Behavioral Pedagogyfor Composition." Zoellner attempted to apply the principles of

23


B. F. Skinner's psychology of learning to writing instruction, arguingthat teaching and learning ought to be conceived of as observable,empirically verifiable behavior. According to this view, writing canbe taught as a variety of operant conditioning in which the student isgiven reinforcement when appropriate writing behavior is demon-strated. The complexity of Zoellner's approach and its effects onwriting instruction will be considered in a later chapter. Here it isimportant only to note that the epistemology underlying this ap-proach is identical to that of current-traditional rhetoric.

Semanticist rhetoric received its initial statement in the GeneralSemantics theory of Alfred Korzybski, but was d,weloped and popu-larized by S. I. Hayakawa. Arising in the thirties when the UnitedStates was concerned about the threat posed by Germany, GeneralSemantics was first offered as a device for propaganda analysis. Dur-ing the ensuing war and afterward, it came to be seen as a usefulapproach to the teaching of reading and writing. Semanticist rheto-ric focuses on the distortions that are introduced in communicationthrough the misuse of language. It is important to note, however,that this rhetoric assumes an objective reality, a fixed and incon-testable notion of truth that language attempts to capture in orderthat it be transferred to the mind of another. In this system languagehas nothing to do with the discovery of meaning; its function is toserve as a transparent medium of communication, with the prin-ciples of General Semantics serving as a guide to avoiding distor-

tion. Semanticist rhetoric was also highly influential in the commu-nications coursethe course that combined instruction in reading,writing, speaking, and listening, occupying a large place in the gen-eral education movement in the thirties, forties, and fifties.Finally, the appearance of structural linguistics in the English de-partment in the fifties and sixties at first promised to create a newrhetoric based on the scientific study of language. The compositionclass, it was thought, would have its own subject matter, the struc-ture of language, and with it an effective method for teaching writ-ing. This faith persisted among many---although there were plentyof detractor; from the startuntil the challenge of transformationalgrammar took over the field in language study, making many dis-trustful of the hope for a new rhetoric growing out of linguistics.Structural linguistics was even more limited than semantics in its

24

An Overview 11

claim to explain the problems that arise in communication. Huw-ever, it shared the same epistemology, a conviction that the em-pirical study of the structure of language would serve as a model forthe empirical investigation that is at the heart of rhetoric. In otherwords, structural linguistics implied a positivistic view of reality andwas thus another type of objective rhetoric.

Pirhaps the best way to characterize the nature of truth in objec-tive rhetorics is to recall Descartes's discussion of rhetoric in hisDiscourse on Method: "Every time that two men speaking of oneand the same thing put forth opposite judgments, it is certain thatone of them is wrong; and, what is more, neither knows the truth,for if one of them had a clear and distinct opinion, he would even-tually force others to agree" ((ltd. in Florescu 195-96). Truth is priorto language, is clearly and distinctly available to the person whoviews it in the proper spirit, and is ultimately communicable in clearand distinct terms. Disagreement has always to do with faulty obser-vation, faulty language, or both, and never is due to the problematicand contingent nature of truth.

Subjective TheoriesSubjective theories of rhetoric locate truth either within the indi-

vidual or within a realm that is accessible only through the individ-ual's internal apprehension, apart from the empirically verifiablesensory world. The most obvious historical precedents for this ap-proach to rhetoric are in Plato and, more recently, in one of thestrands of Emerson's thought on rhetoric (Berlin, Writing Instruc-Him, ch. 5). Thoreau also is often called upon by the proponents ofthis approach. Their influence was the strongest in the rhetoric ofliberal culture, an aristocratic and elitist rhetoric that appeared incertain Eastern colleges during the first two decades of this century.The most immediate sources of subjective theories for college writ-ing courses during the twenties and thirties are found in the depthpsychology of Freud's American disciples. These theories were fur-ther encouraged by the rise of' aesthetic expressionism and by theexperiments in childhood education conducted by the proponentsof progressive education. In the English department, subjectiverhetorics were also supported by schools of literary criticism basedon Crocean idealism and, later, depth psychology. In more recent

25


timethe sixties and seventiessubjective rhetorics were influ-enced by cognitive psychology, by the post-Freudian psychology ofsuch figures as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, and by Englishdepartment interpretations ofromanticism as found, for example, inM. H. Abrams.

Rhetorics that are grounded in philosophical idealism commonlypresent a subjectivist stance. The most frequently cited example isin Plato. Truth here transcends the mutable material world, beinglocated in an unchanging realm of ideas. This supersensory realmcan be discovered by the individual through private vision. Or-dinarily, however, it cannot be expressed. Truth can thus be knownbut not shared, not communicated. The business of rhetoric in sucha scheme is to correct error as one speaker engages in a dialoguewith another, each sharing a dialectical interchauge in which mis-taken notions are exposed. This purging of the false then preparesthem to perceive the true through ao individual act ofvisionary per-ception (Cushman).

This view of rhetoric makes the speaker a Jeremiah, a harsh criticwho reveals to us our wickedness. There is another interpretation ofthe rhetoric of Plato, however that allows for a more comprehensiveconception of rhetoric (Richard Weaver). Here the basic epistemol-ogy is the same: truth transcends the material realm, is attainablethrough a solitary vision, and resists expression. In this interpreta-tion, though, the possibilities of rhetoric are expanded by calling ona different conception of language. While ordinary language refersto the material world and thus cannot express the realm of ultimatetruth, it is possible through the use of original metaphor to suggestthe supersensory. Thus, the speaker or writer can offer positiveknowledge as well as correct error. It is important to add, however,that truth can be passed on from one individual to another only in alimited sense. Truth must still be discovered by the individual ina private act. The suggestions of the permanently valid that areoffered by the gifted speaker or writer must be confirmed in andthrough the individual's personal experience. Thus, an interlocutorcan suggest truths already discovered by her auditor or she can sug-gest truths not yet discovered. In the case of the latter, the truthscan be accepted as authentic only if and when they are confirmedthrough the auditor's personal experience, through her own private

26 ,

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4

14 Rhetoric and licality

similarity ought to lw mentioned. While Freud himself looked uponthe repression of certain unconscious desires as appropriate, nor-mal, and necessarydangerous only when its excessiveness causedpsychic harmmany Americans have interpreted Freud to meanthat unconscious desire, like the Platonic realm of ideal truth, is in-herently good. Attempts at repression are thus interpreted as dan-gerous to normal, healthy development and destructive of authen-ticity and self-realization (Cremin 207-11; Hoffman, ch. 3).

The pedagogy encouraged by this rhetorical theory revolvesaround three central activities, each designed to teach the unteach-able by fostering a learning enviromnent that encourages private vi-sion. These activities are the search for original metaphor, the keep-ing of a journal, and participation in peer editorial groups. Since theunconscious manifests itself through such strategies as condensationand displacement, it is never accessible except through tropical lan-guage. Furthermore, it is only through the unique metaphor thatthe individual can express her unique vision. As a result, metaphoris encouraged in these classes, sometimes through exercises in anal-ogy or in defining terms metaphorically (happiness is

. . . ). Thekeeping of a journal is important because it encourages the individ-ual to record her observations of the world in her own unique way.Studying these observations, however, is designed not to promotelearning about the external world, but to get the student to see theway she perceives and structures her experience. In other words,these observations allow the individual to study the extent to whichher response to experience is unique or imitative, doing so in orderto cultivate an original, creative perspective. This perspective atonce enhances the quality of life and leads to the private perceptionof ultimate truths, truths which the conventions of society preventus from realizing. Finally, peer gro ip editing is used so that stu-dents may discover what is inauthentic in their writing. The editorsobviously cannot tell the student how to arrive at truth or how toexpress it. They serve instead as friendly critics, pointing out whenthe writer has been inauthentic (bureaucratic voice, clichéd lan-guage, and the like), trying in this way to lead the writer to authen-ticity in voice and vision. however, they are never to serve as anaudieuce whom the writer attempts to plcAse or accommodate. Thewriter's only concern is to be true to her personal vision, regardlessof the reservations of others.

28

An Overview 15

Transactional TheoriesTransactional rhetoric is based on an epistemology that sees truth

as arising out of the interaction of the elements of the rhetoricalsituation: an interaction of subject and object or of subject and audi-ence or even of all the elementssubject, object, audience, andlanguageoperating simultaneously. The three major forms of trans-actional rhetoric in the twentieth-century writing class have beenthe classical, the cognitive, and the epistemic. The classical, seenearly in the century in the woi k of Baldwin, underwent a renais-sance in the fifties and sixties. The cognitive did not appear until thesixties and seventies, when it emerged in the work of such figures asJanet Emig, Janice Lauer, and Frank D'Angelo. The epistemic got astart in the speculation of Fred Newton Scott in the first two dec-ades of the century, reappeared in attenuated form in the thirties,and then came into its own in the sixties and seventiesin, for ex-ample, the work of Richard Ohmann, Ann Berthoff, and the team ofRichard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike. Because of the va-riety of transactional rhetorics, it is difficult to discuss them suc-cinctly, their theory and classroom practices being so broad. Here Iwill briefly outline only the general features of each major type.

The most common form of transactional rhetoric is the classical.Truth is here located in a social construct involving the interaction ofinterlocutor and audience (or discourse community). Science andlogic are outside the rhetorical realm since both are concerned withthe indisputable, with certainties that do not ordinarily lead to dis-agreement. The truths of rhetoric, on the other hand, are by theirvery nature uncertain, open to debate, contingent, probable. Theydeal not just with the empirical or rational analysis of experience,but with the emotional, aesthetic, and ethicalin other words,with the total range of human behavior. Arriving at truths regardingthese matters, despite the difficulties, is central to the existence ofindividuals and society. These truths, after all, concern the basicethical and political decisions that affect the safety of all; they con-cern the distribution of power in legislation, the courts, and socialgroups. In arriving at decisions about these matters, science andlogic can be helpful, but ultimately cho:ces are made on the basis ofpublic discourseindividuals working together within a commu-nity of discourse trying to decide what will be in the best interests ofthe group and the individual. The crucial feature of these trans-

29


actional activities is that new knowledge, new truths, emerge fromthe interaction. The rhetorical act discovers meaning in its properrealm, just as the scientific act discovers meaning in its own sphere.

Cognitive approaches to rhetoric grew out of the psychologicalstudies of such figures as Jerome Bruner and Jean Piaget. The epis-temology of these rhetorics assumes a correspondence between thestructures of the mind and the structures of nature. The mind, fur-thermore, passes through a series of stages in achieving maturity.The work of the writing teacher, then, is to understand these basiccognitive structures and the way they develop in order to provideexperiences for students that encourage normal development andprevent structural distortions. The teacher intervenes in the com-posing process of students in order to erasure that their cognitivestructures are functioning normally, thus enhancing their ability toarrive at truth in examining the external world. The emphasis inthis classroom is on the individual, but the individual is conceived ofas inherently transactional, arriving at truth through engaging thesurrounding material and social environment.

Epistemic rhetoric posits a transaction that involves all elementsof the rhetorical situation: interlocutor, audience, material reality,and language. The most significant difference is that language entersinto this transaction and is present in every instance of its manifesta-tion. The reason for this is that interlocutor, audience, and materialworld are all regarded as verbal constructs. Classical transactionalrhetoric conceives of realms of human behavior in which language isnot significantthe areas of science and logicand the same can besaid for the cognitive position. These theories, furthermore, regardlanguage as being representative of nonsymbolic activities and di-vide even the social into the nonverbal and the verbal, the latterserving as mere signs for the former. In epistemic rhetoric there isnever a division between experience and language, whether the ex-perience involves the subject, the subject and other subjects, or thesubject and the material world. All experiences, even the scientificand logical, are grounded in language, and language determinestheir content and structure. And just as language structures ourresponse to social and political issues, language structures our re-sponse to the material world. Rhetoric thus becomes implicated inall human behavior. All truths arise out of dialectic, out of the inter-

30

An Overview 17

action of individuals within discourse communities. Truth is neversimply "out there" in the material world or the social realm, orsimply "in here" in a private and personal world. It emerges only asthe threethe material, the social, and the personalinteract, andthe agent of mediation is language.

Before closing this chapter, I would like to include one morestatement about my method. Robert Connors has recently foundfault with my Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Centunj AmericanColleges for its failure to be impersonal and "objective," charging itwith filtering events "through powerful terministic screens" ("Re-view" 247, 249). His assumption here and in much of his own his-torical research is that it is possible to locate a neutral space, a posi-tion from which one can act as an unbiased observer in order torecord a transcendental object, the historical thing-in-itself. Thosewho write history from this vantage point, he claims, are objectiveand scholarly, providing research especially developed for special-ists, research which is, at 'ts best, definitivemeaning, presum-ably, that its authoritativeness brings discussion to a close. Thosewho do not share this neutral vantage point are subjective and bi-ased, have "an axe to grind," and offer what is, at most, "popularhistory" (247).

This distinction is simply untenable. As Karl Popper has arguedin The Open Society and Its Enemies, in writing history "a point ofview is inevitable; and the naive attempt to avoid it can only lead toself-deception, and to the uncritical application of an unconsciouspoint of view" (261). Furthermore, there are the lessons learnedfrom Kenneth Burke's workespecially his discussion in Languageas Symbolic Action of the ineluctability of "terministic screens"the lessons of recent Marxist theory and of French and Americanpoststructuralist cultural critics, the lessons from the contributionsof American Neo-Pragmatistsparticularly Richard Rortyand,most important here, the lessons garnered from the poststruc-turalist historiography of Hayden White and Michel Foucaultallstrongly arguing that it is impossible to perceive any object exceptthrough a terministic screen. It is thus incumbent upon the histo-rian to make every effort to be aware of the nature of her point ofview and its interpretive strategies, and to be candid about themwith her reader. This has been my purpose in much of this introduc-

31


tory chapter. I might also addalthough by now it is probably notnecessarythat I have been especially influenced by Burke in myunderstanding of rhetoric. In my historical method I have foundsuggestive the work of White, most notably his discussion of therelationship between modes of emplotment, modes of r. ri:anation,and modes of ideological implication. Also valuable to me has beenFoucault's discussion of the relationship between knowledge andpower in discourse communities, and of the role of discursive andnondiscursive practices in shaving consciousness within these com-munities. I should add, however, that I cannot claim to e a discipleof any one of the three.

In this history I have tried to include all major and most minordevelopments in the teaching of writing in American colleges be-tween 1900 and 1985. I have been concerned with both rhetoricaltheory and actual classroom practice and accordingly have examinedhundreds of articles in scholarly journals on literature, writing, andeducation, and numerous theoretical treatises and textbooksat-tempting throughout to follow rigorous scholarly procedures. I havenco., however, written the results of my research exclusively for spe-cialists, and especially not for the kind of specialist who makes end-less distinctions without considering their significance for the livesof those who must observe them. Douglas Ehninger long ago calledfor the end to the mere recording of the facts of rhetorical historyand the beginning of the interpretation of these facts. I have pre-pared my interpretation for that large group of people who teachwriting to college studentsa group ranging from tenured full rro-fessors to overworked and underpaid nontenurable facultyim.,,d-ing to share with them the richness of their heritage and its centcalplace in the life of our society. I do not claim to he definitive. .1great deal more needs to be said about this deriod, and I hopeothers will be encouraged by this study to do sojust as I havebeen encouraged and aided by John Michael Wozniak's EnglishComposition in Eastern Colleges, 1850-1940 and John Ileyda's doe.toral dissertation, Captive Audiences: Composition Pedagogy, theLiberal Arts Curriculum, and the Rise ofMass Higher Education.

The next chapter will provide some background on the formationof the English department and the place that rhetoric and poetichave since occupied relative to each other. The chapters that followwill pursue a chronological development: chapters 3, 4, and 5 cover

32'

An Overview 19

twenty-year periods beginning with 1900, and chapters 6 and 7 con-sider the years between 1960 and 1975. Chapter 8 offers a tentativestatement about the last t,-.m years. The developments of this period,however, have been so numerous, varied, and recent that I offeronly a few speculative comments about their significance.

2

The Nineteenth-Century Background

THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT WAS A CREATION OF THE NEWAmerican university during the last quarter of the nineteenth cen-tury. Its prototype appeared at Harvard, the leader of the timein curricular reform. Its initial purpose, contrary to what WilliamRiley Parker has argued, was to provide instruction in writing. Afterall, the writing course had been firmly established as the staple ofthe curriculum in the last centurya requirement for all studentsduring the sophomore, junior, and senior years. Although the rheto-ric course originally included speaking as its major component, bythe third quarter of the century its main concern was writing in-struction (Halloran; Berlin, Writing Instruction). The study of lit-erature in the vernacular, on the other hand, was a rare phenome-non, occurring at only a few 3chools, and even there considered asecond-class undertaking (Rudolph, Curriculum 140). Charles Wil-liam Eliot, Harvard's president from 1869 to 1909, had in fact consid-ered writing so central to the new elective curriculum he was shapingthat in 1874 the freshman English course at Harvard was estab-lished, by 1894 was the only requirement except for a modern lan-guage, and by 1897 was the only required course in the curriculum,consisting of a two-semester sequence. By the last date, however,the study of English (but not as yet American) literature had becomethe main concern of the department, and the place of a writingcourse in the college curriculum had already been challenged at thefirst meeting of the Modern Language Society (Hart). How in thisshort time could writingthe core of the nineteenth-century cur-riculum in the sophomore, junior, and senior yearshave been re-duced to a single year's offering, and English literaturea study that

34

The Nineteenth-Century Background 91

had no place in the old curriculumhave become the main interestof the department? In this chapter I would like to offer a brief expla-nation for this development and then go on to consider the relationof rhetoric and poetic in the early English department and aftcr.

The devalorizing of the writing course in the curriculum was theresult of the convergence of a remarkably complex set of forces.Raymond Williams has offered a compelling description of the largereconomic, political, and social developments that led to the en-thronement of the poetic text and the denigration of the rhetoricalduring the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ilere I would liketo focus on how these larger developments manifested themselvesin the English departments of American colleges.

The -new- university had arisen to provide an agency for certify-ing the members of the new professions, profestions that an expand-ing economy had created (Wiebe). These college graduates consti-tuted a new middle class, a body claiming and receiving economicprivilege and political power on the basis of its certified, profes-sional status. The old university had been elitist and had preparedstudents of means and sta' us for the three major professions: law,medicine, and the church. The new university encouraged a mer-itocracy, opening its doors to anyone who could meet the entrancerequirements (a growing number, due to the new free high schools),offering upward mobility through certification in such professions asagriculture, engineering, journalism, social work, education, and ahost of other new professional pursuits.

Members of the newly established English department werethemselves a part of this quest for a certifiable, professional desig-nation. They too were struggling to define a specialized discipline,one akin to those of their counterparts in the new science depart-ments, in order to lay claim to the privilege and status accordedother new professions, and to serve as the certifying agency for ad-mission to this select group (Bledstein). But why was rhetoric notmade the basis of this new certifying procedure?

The old college teachers in languagethe rhetoric teachers andthe teachers of Latin, Hebrew, and Greekhad been devoted toundergraduate teaching, and to undergraduate teaching only. Theyhad, furthermore, been overworked and poorly paid. The new com-position teacher was not much better off. In keeping with the scien-tific and practical orientation of the new undergraduate curriculum,

3 5 .


writing was taught as a practical activity, usingas John F. Genungof Amherst explainedthe "laboratory method" (10). This simplymeant extensive writingin some schools, as we will see later, adaily theme. The correcting of papers could become a monumentaltask. At the University of Michigan in 1894, for example, four teach-ers and two graduate assistants were responsible for 1,198 students.The situation at Harvard was little better, with twenty teachers han-dling 2,000 writing students. Furthermore, to have suggested thatthe new English department might also provide instruction in his-torical rhetoricin, for example, the works of Aristotle, Cicero,Quintilian, or Augustinewould have meant becoming identifiedwith the old classical curriculum that was then being discreditedeverywhere. The language of learning in the new university was tobe English, not Greek or Latin. This bias against classical rhetoric infact became a standard feature of the English departmentwith thesingle exception of Charles Sears Baldwin's workthat continueduntil the 1950. s

In order to distinguish the new English department professorfrom the old rhetoric teacher or the new composition teacher, a newdiscipline had to be fornmlated, a discipline based on English as thelanguage of learning and literature as the specialized province ofstudy. This was a radically new development since, as LaurenceVeysey has pointed out, "not even the classics were taught from aliterary standpoint in the mid-nineteenth century" (Emergence ofthe American University 182). English was indeed the new languageof scientific learning, but the study of literature in the vernacularwas counter to the history of higher education in both England andAmerica. As mentioned earlier, Williams offers the best explanationof the global inrces at work in the shift. The most crucial local eventin this curricular innovation was probably the establishment ofJohns Hopkins University in 1876, the first American universitywhose main mission was graduate education. Based on the model ofthe German research university, Johns Hopkins signaled the shift inAmerican higher education from an exclusive concern with under-graduate education to an excessive, if not exclusive, concern forgraduate education and research. Johns Hopkins, like its Germancounterparts, included the study of literature in the vernacular,granting its first doctorate in literature in 1878. Of equal impor-tance, it attempted in 1876 to hire Francis James ChildBoylston

36


Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, editor of Spenser anda well-known edition of Eoglish and Scottish popular ballads, andauthor of philological studies of Gawain and Chaucer. (The canon of'the new English department was at first based on works that couldrival the classics in age and difficulty.) In order to keep Child, Eliotfreed him from all responsibilities for freshman compositionthefirst such exemption to be granted (Rudolph, Curriculum 130). Har-vard had its first specialist in literature who was without responsi-bility for teaching freshmen. Although this arrangement was notcommon until the twentieth centuryChild and George LymanKittredge being the only Harvard faculty so treated until then (SelfI30)the precedent had been established and literature was onits way to becoming the dominant concern of the new Englishdepartment.

The establishment of literature as the basis of the new disciplinedoes not, however, alone explain how a course that had requiredthree years of upper-division work in the nineteenth century was atfirst relegated to the freshman year, and then by many English de-partment members declared to be a job that should be accomplishedin the high school. The most important motive continued to be dis-sociation from the penury and labor of the old curriculum, but justi-fication for the claim was found in a new area. In 1874, Eliot intro-duced a test of the student's ability to write in English as a part ofthe Harvard entrance requirement. This was another radical depar-ture that proved to be very significant, since this new writing re-quirement was the first step in replacing the classical languages andthe curriculum based on them. Since the language of learning at thenew university was to be English, it seemed appropriate that enter-ing students be tested in this language (Kitzhaber, "Rhetoric" 5659). Furthermore, the test in English ensured that the new openuniversity would not become too open, allowing the new nnmi-grants, for example, to earn degrees in science or mathematics with-out demonstrating by their use of language that they belonged inthe middle class. However, establishing the entrance test in com-position suggested that the ability to write was something the col-lege student ought to bring with him from his preparatory school,a place which was more and more likely to be one of the new publichigh schools that were now appearing everywhere. And Eliot prob-ably had this in mind, thereby hoping to cut costs in the English

37


department. The fact that no freshman class had ever been able towrite in the manner thought appropriate for college work and thatadditional writing instruction had always been deemed necessaryfor college students s .ems not to have been noticed by either Eliotor the staff of his English department. A look at the sample essaysfrom the entrance exam of 1894published by the Harvard Boardof Overseers in indignation at the errors it foundreveals that thebest students in the country attending the best university of its timehad difficulties in writing. Rather than conclude that perhaps it wasexpecting too much of these students and their preparatory schools,however, the Board of Overseers excoriated the teachers who hadprepared these students and demanded that something be done(Kitzhaber, "Rhetoric" 71-79). This vilification of high school En-glish teachers has since become a common practice as college En-glish teachers have tried to shift the entire responsibility for writinginstructiona responsibility that throughout Anglo-American his-tory has been shared by the collegeto the lower schools.

The fall from grace of the college rhetoric course was thus the re-sult of the convergence ofa number of elements. The attempt to im-prove the status of English department members, the establishmentof the study of English literature in the college curriculum, the shiftin the language of learning in college, the new entrance exams inEnglish, and even the establishment of the new public high schoolall played a part in changing the nature of writing instruction in col-leges. The notion that rhetoric might be a fit study for the newgraduate schoola commonplace todayquickly became so alienthat a survey conducted at the turn of the century found that nearlyhalf of the college teachers responding could not imagine whatmight be considered in such courses (Mead, "Graduate Study ofRhetoric"). As Frederick Rudolph has commented, by 1900, "En-glish language and literature had replaced the c'assics as the back-bone of the humanities" (Curriculum 140). Eliot meanwhile wassurprised to discover that English, and not one of the new scientificdisciplines, was the most popular major among undergraduates(Morison 347).

It is one thing to say that a course of study that required threeyears in the old college should now be relegated to the high school;it is another thing to do it. Indeed, no amount of protestation on thepart of college teachers since has succeeded in bringing about this

38


shift in responsibility. No group of entering studentsnot Harvard'sor Columbia's or Michigan's or Stanfords--has ever been able tomanage the rhetorical tasks required in college without the collegeproviding instruction in writing. As a result, the English depart-ment has been forced to continue to teach writing to freshmen evenas some of its members simultaneously disavow its responsibility fordoing so. This protest is always loudest, of course, when enrollmentis high, and is conspicuously muted during periods when low enroll-ment makes the freshman writing course a safeguard against unem-ployment. The English department has, moreover, commonly usedthe power and income gained by performing this "service" to rewardthose pursuing the "real" business of the departmentthe study ofliterature. And while this pattern does not hold for every collegeand university, it was until just iecently the dominant one at largepublic institutionsthe schools which are responsible for educatingthe majority of college students in the country.

Rhetoric and Poetic in the English Department

I would now like to consider the nature of the rhetorical and poetictheory that marked the early English department. I wish to dem-onstrate that the two were at first thoroughly compatible, beinggrounded in a common epistemology. In time, however, this rela-tionship changedunfortunately, much to the detriment of fresh-man Englishas rhetoric became petrified in a positivis'ic configu-ration while poetic continued to devdop and grow. Interestinglyenough, however, the two continued to shape each other, althoughin unexpected and singular ways.

A few preliminary remarks about the nature of the rhetoric-poetic relationship are in order, remarks based on a longer discus-sion already in print (Berlin, "Rhetoric and Poetics"). I find com-pelling the arguments of Baldwin in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic andTzvetan Todorov in Theories of the Symbol which demonstrate thatrhetoric and poetic have historically enjoyed a dialectical relation-ship, the two serving as binary opposites, each giving the othersignificance by contrast. A given rhetoric thus always implies acorresponding poetic and a poetic a corresponding rhetoric. Mostimportant, the members of a particular contrasting pair have histori-

39


cally shared a common epistemology, a comnmn notion of the na-ture of the real and how it is known. Their distinguishing featureand here I am relying on Kenneth Burke's -Rhetoric, Poetics, andPhilosophy- as well as on Tcdorovis that rhetoric is concernedwith symbolic action in the material world, with practical conse-quences as an end, while poetic is concerned with symbolic actionfor itself, with contemplation of the text for its own sake. The normfor the relationship can be seen most clearly in Aristotle's creation ofa treatise on rhetoric and a treatise on poetic, the one concernedwith action, the other with contemplation, but both grounded in acommon epistemology.

The early English department maintained this normal pattern forthe rhetoric-poetic relationship. In the ensuing years, however,the two disciplines diverr ' so far that the contrastive feature of agiven rhetoric-poetic cont,2ration is now likely to be the very ele-ment which historically the two invariably sharedthe concept ofepistemology.

The rhetoric that appearei in the English department in the latenineteenth century has come to be called current-traditional rhoo-ric. Grounded in a positivistic epistemology, it provided a counter-part to the scientific logic that distinguished the methodology of thecourses in the new elective university from those in the old college,with its required curriculum based on classical studies. In chapter 1I described this rhetoric's most important features. The scholasticworld viewthe view that sees deduction as the only method forarriving at truthis replaced in current-traditional rhetoric by theNewtonian, inductive scheme. According to this view, nature is anorderly mechanism and the key to unlocking its meaning is sense im-pression. The mind is made up of a set of faculties that correspondperfectly to the data of sense, enabling the individual to use the in-ductive method in arriving at the immediate perception of self-evident truthstruths that are always external to the individual, lo-cated in an exterior object. The task of the writer in this scheme isto reproduce in the mind of' the reader the particular experience asit took place in the mind of the writer. Thus, language is a sign sys-tem that transcribes nonverbal sense experience so that the effectsof this sense experience can be reproduced in the reader. The workof the writing teacher is to teach the transcription process, provid-ing instruction in arrangement and stylearrangement so that the

4 0

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criticism has changed and developed because successive schools ofliterary criticism have found it necessary to point to a positivisticrhetoric in order to establish their own distinguishing and superiorcharacteristics. To demonstrate the unique and privileged nature ofpoetic texts, it has been necessary to insist on a contrasting set ofdevalorized texts, the kind of texts described in current-traditionalrhetoric. By repeatedly characterizing poetic and rhetoric in thisway, these academic approaches to literary criticism have ensuredthat current-traditional rhetorical instruction will remain in the col-lege writing classroom. There is obviously also a power relationshipimplied in this arrangement. In tacitly supporting the impoverishednotion of rhetoric found in the freshman writing course, academicliterary critics have provided a constant reminder of their own claimto superiority and privilege, setting the range and versatility of theirdiscipline against the barrenness of current-traditional rhetoric, thestaple of the freshman course.

Successive schools of academic literary critics have insisted ondistinctions between poetic and rhetoric that support this contrast.In 1910, Joel Spingarn at Columbia proposed the "New Criticism,"an approach that denies to criticism all the extrinsic concerns of his-tory and genrespecifically, theories of metaphor and simile fromGreco-Roman rhetoric. Instead, the critic is to ask of the work ofart: "What has the poet tried to do, and how has he fulfilled his in-tention? . . What impression does his work make on me, and howcan I best express this impression?" (18). Here the art object andthe response of the critic to it are placed in a privileged realm. Thecritic is herself a creator: "That is to say, taste must reproduce thework of art within itself in order to understand and judge it; and atthat moment aesthetic judgment becomes nothing more nor lessthan creative art itself" (34). The creativity available to artist andcritic is set up against the criticism that relies on objective, verifi-able criteria, the kind found in historical and philological study andcurrent-traditional rhetoric. Similarly, the Greek-inspired New Hu-manisni of Irving Babbitt at Harvard and his student Paul Elmorelore, while opposing the expressionism of Spingarn, also saw in

sciviicc the antithesis of art and literary criticism. In Rousseau andRomanticism (1919), for example, Babbitt attacked the mechanismof literary naturalism, and in Literature and the American College(19)8) he wrote of the danger Spencer's views posed to education

4 2


and literary criticism. The expressionist and the humanist were al-

lied in their insistence on trusting inner laws of human nature thatare more compelling than external laws of science.

In 1938, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren publishedUnderstanding Poetny An Anthology for College Students, presen t-ing still another "new criticism." In their introduction, they too setup poetry in opposition to science: "Science gives us a certain kindof description of the worlda description which is within its ownterms verifiableand gives us a basis for more effective practicalachievement. Science is, as Bertrand Russell has called it, 'power-knowledge." Poetry, on the other hand, satisfies a "non-practical in-terest," dealing with experience that "eludes the statements sciencecan make" and appealing to "a basic and healthy human interest"(lv). Brooks and Warren are especially appropriate to this contextsince their composition textbook, Modern Rhetoric, demonstratedexplicitly their relegation of rhetoric to the scientific (see Berlin andInkster). It should alsa be noted that Brooks and Warren tried toclaim for poetry a realm separate from rhetoric and superior to it,

yet sharing with it a concern for a text existing independent of cre-ator and reader. In their view the formal properties of the text takeprecedence in both rhetoric and poetic.

Finally, in; Gerald Graff has noted, Northrop Frye in the sixtiesbased his critical approach on a distinction between mythical andlogical uses of language, seeing the first as poetic and the second aspositivistic (182-83). Graff finds the same disjunction in the morerecent work of Paul de Man, who, Graff explains, divides all dis-

course "into language that deconstructs itself by calling attention to

its own fictiveness and undecidability and language that presumes anaive confidence in its ontological authority" (178). Once again, thedivision between poetic and scientific statements is insisted upon.

This thumbnail sketch shows that a number of powerful graups ofacademic literary critics have divided discourse into two separateand unequal categories: the privileged poetic statement and the im-poverished rhetorical statement, the one art and the other "mere"science. R. S. Crane's description of the New Critics might be ap-plied to a variety of literary critics who came before and after them.The New Critic, he wrote, "knows what the nature of 'poetic lan-guage' must be because he has begun by dividing all language into

two opposing and incommensurable kindsthe language of 'logic'

4 3


and the language of 'symbolism'and then has deduced from thisinitial assumption that the 'symbolic' language of poetry must nec-essarily possess the contraries of all qualities commonly assertedof 'logical discourse (34). As a result, literary critics within theEnglish department have appropriated as their domain all uses oflanguage except for the narrowly referential and logical. What re-mainsa trivial and barren concern at bestis given to rhetoric,to the writing course. Thus, current-traditional rhetoric, with itspositivistic epistemology and its emphasis on superficial matters ofarrangement and style, continues to be the officially sanctionedrhetoric of the English department. Attempts to alter this notionof rhetoricin the direction of an Aristotelian or Emersonian orBurkeian conception, for exampleare usually seen as inappropri-ate encroachments into the realm of the literary critic. Of course,this system further consolidates the powers and privileges of aca-demic life in the hands of those who deal with the valorized literarytexts, while it relegates those who teach writing to an area of mar-ginal value, dealing as they do with a limited and relatively unim-portant variety of discourse. What is more discouraging, however, isthat it impoverishes the rhetorical training for citizenship that ourstudents receivebut more of this later.

Fortunately, this relegation ofrhetoric to a narrowly scientific andrational discourse did not exhaust the field of rhetorical developmentin the English department. The following chapters will show thatthere have been numerous challenges to the dominance ofcurrent-traditional rhetoric. As I stated earlier, historically rhetoric and po-etic have shared a common epistemology and have defined eachother by contrast, resting on the action-contemplation distinction astheir distinguishing characteristic. The appearance of a complemen-tary rhetoric and poetic distinguished by differing epistemologieswaf; a historicai anomaly. The new rhetorics that have challengedthe current-traditional approach fit the historical norm and have re-ceived a hearing because they share with one or another school ofliterary criticism a common epistemology. Thus, subjective rheto-ries, for example, have been tolerated in the English departmentbecause they share with expressionistic literary theories as well aswith New Criticism certain conceptions of writer, reality, audience,and languagemaking claims for rhetoric that were previouslymade exclusively for poetic. Similarly, transactional rhetorics have

4 4


appeared in tandem with transactional literary approachesVernonLouis Parrington's and Granville Hicks's, for example. In short,richly diverse classroom rhetories have appeared in the twentiethcentury as epistemological counterparts to theories of literary criti-cism, and noting these relationships will be a passing concern of thefollowing chapters.

4 5

3

The Growth of the Discipline:1900-1920

THE MOST IMPORTANT SINGLE EVENT MARKING ENGLISH STUD-ies as secure in the college curriculum of the new university wasthe establishment of the Modern Language Association in 1883. Themost important event for maintaining the discipline's commitment tostudents was the appearance of the National Council of Teachers ofEnglish in 1911. The MLA had by 1920 decided that its main inter-est was to be scholarship and scholarship only (Armstrong; Fisher).It then publicly acknowledged what had been obvious to any atten-tive member for at least fifteen years: teaching was no longer to bea concern of the only professional association of college Englishteachers in America. The NCTE attempted to respond to this defi-ciency, although it at first focused on the interests of high schoolteachers. Its attention to college teaching, however, led to a collegeedition of English Journal in 1928, a publication that became Col-lege English in 1939. The commitment of English Journal to theundergraduate curriculum makes it the most reliable source of in-formation on the thought guiding the teaching of Englishbothliterature and compositionin American colleges in the early yearsof the century.

In this chapter, I would like to consider the formation of theNCTE. I will also examine the three dominant approaches to writ-ing instruction from 1900 to 1920 and the ideology of each thatNCTE journal artides and organization reports recorded and en-couraged. Next , look at the approaches to preparing collegeteachers for instr students in writing and literature, as well as

4 6,

The Growth of the Discipline: 1900-1920 33

the kinds of undergraduate courses in writing offered during thisperiod. Finally, I will turn to the effects of World War I on the disci-pline of English studies in the high school and college.

The NCTE

The National Council of Teachers of English was founded in pro-test against college domination of the high school English curricu-lum exercised through the agency of the Uniform Reading Lists(Applebee; Hook). The Uniform Lists consisted of titles of books onwhich students were tested for admission to college. In 1874 Har-vard, under the presidency of Charles William Eliot, was the first toinstitute such a procedure, requiring -a short English composition,correct in spelling, punctuation, grammar, and expression, the sub-ject to be taken from such works of standard authors as shall be an-nounced from time to time" (qtd. in Wozniak 70). Very soon, othercolleges began to require a similar essay. Unfortunately, the collegesrefused to agree on the works to E included in their lists. Sincehigh school English teachers were beginning to base their courseson these works in order to prepare their students for college, thelack of uniformity caused a problem. The demand for a single set oftitles resulted in two regional lists in 1879 and 1893 and finally inthe formation of the National Conference on Uniform Entrance Re-quirements in English (NCU ER) in 1894, an organization that even-tually included the North Central Association of Colleges and Sec-ondary Schools mnd the College Entrance Examination Board amongits subscribers. The NCUER provided high school English teacherswith a list of works that included a number intended for -deep"study and a number for -wide" study.

The Uniform Lists gave the high school teacher a sense of secu-rity, but another problem soon emerged. The colleges were deter-mining the high school English curriculum at a time when only asmall percentage of high school students went on to collegeonlyfour percent of those from eighteen to twenty-one years old (Ru-dolph, Curriculum 155). Moreover, because of immigration pat-terns an increasing number of students were coming from homes inwhich English was not spoken. Many of the works recommended bythe lists did not seem appropriate for these students, a complaint


voiced especially by teachers in New York City. A protest movementdeveloped, one that was encouraged by the example of the Michi-gan plan for college admissions, used by a number of Midwesternand Western states. Here state colleges accredited high schools thatmet a certain number of curricular standards, and accepted gradu-ates of these schools without entrance exams. Educators in thesestates, led by Fred Newton Scott of the University of Michigan,wanted the lists abolished so that their English teachers did notneed to be concerned about those of their students who wanted togo to Eastern schools for college work. Most high school Englishteachers in the East did not support abolishing the Uniform Lists,but they were interested in a greater variety of literary materials forstudy in the curriculum. The New York State English Teachers Asso-ciation, on the other hand, was militantly opposed to the lists, andin 1911 it demanded their elimination, along with a revision of col-lege entrance exams so that such tests would henceforth be based onabilities developed, not information acjuired. The New York teach-ers took their protest to the National Education Association (NEA),asking that a formal protest be lodged with the College EntranceExamination Board, the leading administrator of the English exam.The NEA referred the matter to its English Round Table of the Sec-ondary Division, a loosely formed, temporary committee in exis-tence at the time. This group put together another committee con-sisting of Scott, James F. Hosic of Chicago '!'irmal College, Edwin L.Miller of Detroit Central High School, and John M. Clapp of LakeForest College. It was this group that f en( ,lltraged by theNEA, called the first meeting of what w.,s to become the NationalCouncil of Teachers of English for Decemoer 1 and 2, 1911, in Chi-cago. The NCTE's fight against the Uniform Lists was successfullycompleted when in 1916 there appeared Ay a brief list for inten-sive study and no list at all for the comp chensive test in litera-tureand the brief list was itself dropped in 1931. This was to bethe first of many similar victories for the NCTE.

Although the NCTE was formed around issue of college dom-ination of the English cu k ilum, it incl. ed among its early lead-ers a number of college I -achers, ,ist tbly Scottpresident ofthe MLA in 1907, president of [he N.,rth Central Association of Col-leges and Secondary Schools in 1913, president of the American As-sociation of Teachers of Jornalism in 1917, and first president of the

48


NCTEand Hosicfounder, owner, and first editor (1912-21) ofEnglish Journal. It at first appears anomalous that two college En-glish teachers should be so actively involved in a group that wasstimulated by the protest of high school English teachers againsttheir collegiate counterparts. As will later become apparent, how-ever, the NCTE was from the start an agency for improving theteaching of English at all educational levels, even if its main focusinitially was secondary school instruction. Moreover, college teach-ers such as Scott looked to English Journal as the most importantforum for considering developments in college writing instruction.

The Major Schools

Three major approaches to the teaching of writing appeared be-tween 1900 and 1920. The oldest was what is now known as current-traditional rhetoric. It was most conspicuously in force at Harvardand Columbia, but it also found a home in a number of the state uni-versitiesIllinois, Wisconsin, and Texas, for example. This rheto-ric, positivistic and practical in spirit, was designed to provide thenew middle-class professionals with the tools to avoid embarrassingthemselves in print. In short, this was the rhetoric of the mer-itocracy. Its principal rival in the East was the rhetoric of liberal cul-ture, advanced at such schools as Yale, Princeton, and Williams.This rhetoric was elitist and aristocratic, contending that the aims ofwriting instruction in the English department ought to be to encour-age those few students who possessed genius. For the rest, coursesin literature should provide lessons in taste, emphasizing apprecia-tion, contemplation, and self-expression. Proponents of this rheto-ric denied that writing courses had an important place in the col-lege, arguing that geniuses were few and that writing instruction forthe rest ought to be handled in high school. The result was not,however, the abandonment of writing instruction, but the use of abelletristic approachcourses in writing about literature. Finally,tL third major approach to writing instruction emphasized writingas training for participation in the democratic processa rhetoric(,1 public discourse. This view, a part of the progressive educationmo.ement, was uniquely American. Its most conspicuous spokes-pc, sons were Scott at Michigan, Joseph Villiers Denney at Ohio


State, and Gertrude Buck, a former student of Scott's, at Vassar. Atthe college level, this democratic rhetoric was primarily a Mid-western phenomenon, but it was found in the West and Southwestas well. It was also extremely influential in the high schools of theperiod. This rhetoric wl--s a well-articulated precursor of epistemicrhetoric.

Current-Traditional RhetoricAs I have said repeatedly, current-traditional rhetoric has been

the dominant form of college writing instruction in the twenti-eth century. Its original home was Harvard, and it represented aparticular conception of literacy, a view shaped by the elective cur-riculum of Eliot. At the start of the century, American universitieswere divided into three groups: those emphasizing utility, thoseemphasizing liberal culture, and those emphasizing research andgraduate study (Veysey, Emergence of the American University).Harvard, despite its growing graduate school, was devotcd to theundergraduate program, to providing for the meritocracy of middle-class professionalism.

The fact that current-traditional rhetoric was a product of the new,elective university is crucial. This university, a uniquely Americanphenomenon at the time, was at once committed to the scientificmethod and to the creation of a professional meritocracy consistingof an emerging middle class (Veysey, Emergence of the AmericanUniversity 173; Bledstein 123-24). The old American college hadbeen aristocratic in its clientele and classical in its curriculum. Thenew university invested its graduates with the authority of scienceand through this authority gave them an economically comfortableposition in a new, prosperous middle-class culture. It is not surpris-ing, then, that the rhetoric that A. S. Hill and Barrett Wendellforged at Harvard and that John F. Genung shaped at Amherst wasdesigned to emulate the scientific method. As I have shown, theircolleagues in literary criticism were doing the same. The result forwriting instruction was unfortunate: creation of a rhetoric that de-nied the role of the writer, reader, and language in arriving at mean-ing, that instead placed truth in the external world, existing prior tothe individual's perception of it.

This attempt to be scientific in rhetoric was based on the assump-tion that knowledge in all areas of human behavior could be readily

5 0

The Growth of the Disdphne: 1900-1920 37

discovered and validated through the scientific method. In otherwords, it was assumed that ethical and political questions, as well asaesthetic ones, could be as efficiently and decisively resolved as thescientific and technical questions of the late nineteenth eel, .ury hadbeenand resolved in the same way. (Today we are not this con-fident even of the power of the scientific method to answer thequestions of its own province.) The result f this naive faith was thatthe ,conomical and political interests of the new professional middleclass were perceived as being inherent features of the universe.Validation for the social and political arrannre.neni that contributedto the welfare of the new meritocracy was thought to be rationallyand empirically derived through an objective examination of thematerial world. Unable to conceive of observer, audience, or lan-guage as integral to the process of discovering knowledge, the mem-bers of the new middle class found the elements they brought to theexternal world within the external world itself. Since all truth wasconsidered to be external to the individual, to be discovered throughcorrect perception, the doctors or lawyers or engineers or businessmanagershaving been certified as experts, as trained observers,in their disciplines- -felt they were surely correct in discoveringthat economic and political arrangements that benefited them wereindeed in the nature of things. And the fact that all of the membersof this new class tended to agreetended to discover the sametruthswhen they turned to decision-making in political and socialmatters only confirmed their sense of being objective and accurate.Thus, acting in the name of science, the new professionals usedcurrent-traditional rhetoric to justify their privileged status insociety.

A look at the way current-traditional rhetoric was taught at Har-vard at the turn of the century is instructive (Wozniak 125-27). Stu-dents used Hill's Fi-inciples of Rhetoric as their text. This work wasdivided into two parts, the first dealing with superficial correctness(barbarisms, solecisms, and improprieties) and the second with theforms of discourse. Students wrote a theme for each class dayatotal of six per weekusing uniform theme paper. The choice ofsubjects for four of these was limited to descriptions of surround-ing scenes, while the other two required a translation from Latin,Greek, French, or German (ordinarily done on Saturdays) and asummary or comment upon the lecture of the period when all

51


sections met together. All themes were read and corrected with theuse of a set of abbreviated marks of correction. The emphasis inthis method was on superficial correctnessspelling, punctuation,usage, syntaxand on paragraph structure. Students were oftenasked to rewrite themes with a view to correcting their errors.There was some varietyfor example, an occasional Imitation of anEnglish writer. The forms of discourse emphasized were descrip-tion, narration, and exposition, with argument omitted because itwas considered too complex for the short essay. Students also wrotelonger fortnightly themes, and these included all the forms of dis-coursesix expository,themes in the first semester and two themesin each of the other forms in the second. In addition, the studentswere asked to do outside reading in English literature, were givenexaminations, and engaged in conferences with their teacher. Therequirement of the daily theme was dropped shortly after the turnof the century, but the kind of writing attempted and the instructionin arrangement and style remained.

The freshman writing course early became the center of contro-versy. A criticism of it that appeared in Centunj MGgazine promptedW. E. Mead (Wesleyan University) of the pedagogical sectioo of theMLA to conduct a survey on its value (Mead, "Undergraduate Studyof Composition"). The Centunj article had claimed that an experi-ment involving two groups of freshman studentsone studyingShakespeare with no training in rhetoric or practice in writing andthe other pursuing a course similar to Harvard'sindicated thatthere was no difference in the technical merits of the themes writtenby the two groups of students in the sophomore year. Mead's surveyasked for comments on the questions raised by the experiment de-scribed, information about similar experiments, and comments onthe possibility of conducting such an experiment in the future. Inreporting the results, Mead explained that the responses consti-tuted a representative sample of colleges and universities through-out the country, and although no evidence of this was given, there isno reason to doubt him.

Mead considered the questions regarding similar experimentsfirst, reporting that while many had been planned, no results wereavailable. He did indicate, however, that the experiment alluded toin the Century essay was probably one conducted at Harvard in-volving the comparison of Harvard's daily theme writing and Yale's

5 2.


literary approach to writing instruction. The results there, however,were just the opposite of those reported, with Harvard's studentsjudged to he clearly superior. Indeed, most of Mead's respondentswere skeptical of the results reported in Century, arguing that prac-tice would be more valuable than reading in improving writing.Mead summarized the responses on the questions raised by theexperiment:

They generally emphasize the fact that composition is an art rather than ascience, and therefore can be mastered only by practice; and this prefer-ably under competent instruction. They point out important aspects ofwork in composition that may or may not co-exist along with technicalcorrectness, such as unity of conception, logical development of a theme,proportion of parts. These and many other matters . . . are, they urge,the very things that trouble us most, even when we have read widely andcarefully for years, and have given anxious thought to the task of express-ing ourselves with clearness and precision. ("Undergraduate Study ofComposition- xvii)

This survey on the relative merits of writing and reading in theteaching of composition pointed to a larger issue involving not onlyrhetorical instruction but the entire undergraduate curriculum.The debate between those who would teach writing through prac-tice and those who would teach it through the reading of literaturerepresented a conflict between those who saw literacy as utilitarianand those who saw it as self-fulfillment. The first group wanted col-leges to provide students with the expertise that would enable themto serve society and to enjoy the professional success of the newmiddle class. The supporters of this stance tended to become closelyallied with those who saw research as a major concern of colleges.The second group, the proponents of education as liberal culture,saw colleges as cultivating character by providing aesthetic and ethi-cal experiences through the traditional humanistic studies (Veysey,Emergence of the American University, ch. 4). The result would bea kind of aristocrat who denionstrated his education through living acertain kind of liferather than through doing, through serving so-ciety in one's chosen career. The aim of liberal culture was self-cultivation and self-refinement. The major institutions promotingthe service ideal at this time were Harvard and Columbia in the

53

40 Rhetoric: and Reality

East and the large state universities in the Midwest and West. Theideal of liberal culture was dominant primarily along the Atlanticseaboard, with Yale and Princeton leading the way. The kind ofrhetoric encouraged in this latter group will be discussed later inthis chapter.

The conflict between these two positions was taken up again in asomewhat different forni in another survey conducted by the peda-gogical section of the MLA in the following year. Here the respon-dents were to choose between two conceptions of composition in-structionone described in a citation from an English reviewer andthe other encapsulated in a passage from Genung. (This passage, in-cidentally, was not in fact representative of Genung's position.)Mead, again the reporter of the survey, summarized the two posi-tions on teaching composition: "(a) the art of writing clearly andcorrectly about ordinary matters; (b) the production of literature"("Conflicting Ideals" viii). The two represented the opposing viewsof the service ideal and the ideal of liberal culture in education.Harvard and Columbia held that ifwriting instruction were offeredit ought to be open to everyone and ought to emphasize practicalcompetence. Yale and Princeton held that if writing instructionwere offered it ougat to be creative writing and be reserved only forthose who demonstrated genius. What is especially significant aboutMead's surveyand again we have only his word for its being repre-sentativeis that it was inconclusive. The respondents fell intothree camps: those who favored writing as preparation for practicalliving, those who favored writing as preparation for creating litera-ture, and those who favored a combination of the two. Mead wasforced to conclude, "There can be little doubt that conflicting ideals,both in aims and methods, are firmly held by many leading teachersof English throughout the cGuntry" ("Conflicting Ideals" xxii). Still,as Mead suggested and as this chapter will demonstrate, teachingcomposition as creative writing exclusively will always represent aminority position.

Current-traditional rhetoric frequently appeared at large stateuniversities, which adapted Harvard's plan to a much different set-ting. The University of Illinois was in many ways typical of theseefforts. In 1914 it enrolled 1,450 students in Rhetoric 1, organizingthem into fifty-five sections taught by twenty-five instructors. Stu-

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were highly successful after 1902. Although Baldwin was an author-ity on ancient rhetoric, his composition texts displayed little of theinfluence of the dominant tradition of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quin-tilian. In his College Composition (1917), for example, he paid onlypassMg attention to invention, defining rhetoric instead as primarilyan art of "composition," meaning by this arrangement and style.This capitulation to current-traditional rhetoric was further demon-strated in Baldwin's use of the four modes of discourse, which hedrew along classical lines only insofar as he divided them into therhetoricalexposition and argumentand the poeticdescriptionand narration. Baldwin regarded rhetoric as a managerial artsimply arranging what is discovered outside the rhetorical actandhe accordingly emphasized the inartistic proofs, the modes, and sty-listic abstractions.

This is not to say, however, that Baldwin regarded college writinginstruction as unimportant. On the contrary, he considered it thecenter of the curricnIum. As a member of the MLA pedagogical sec-tion committee that had conducted the survey reported by Mead in1902, he appended a comment on the results. He divided composi-tion into the "logical" and the "artistic." The first "proceeds fromproposition to proposition" while the second is "the sort whoseprogress is not measured by propositions" (Mead, "UndergraduateStudy of Composition" xxiii). In the essay the two overlap, but theartistic or literary as an exclusive concern is a province for only asmall minority of students. Courses in this area may be offered, butteaching is less important in these cases since the students enrolledin such courses ought to be the gifted few who do not rely on theinstruction of others. The freshman writing course, however, is de-signed for all students because it provides what can and must betaught: the use of logical writing. This instruction must include ar-gumentation, persuasion, and exposition for writing and speaking.Reading will of course contribute to this learning, but competencecan be attained only by practice. The ability to use language logi-cally "is one of the most valuable parts of a college education" since"rhetoric may then be made to serve in particular each course onwhich it depends fin- material and in general the great object of allthe courses together" (xxiv). Baldwin concluded by asserting thatrhetoric has thus come to serve fin- us the function that logic served

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Th Growth of the Discipline: 1900-1920 43

for the ancients. It is our "organ in,- the organizing discipline of oureducational system.

The Rhetoric of Lberal CultureAs indicated earlier, t.he rhetoric of liberal culture was aristocratic

and humanistic, set up in intentional opposition to the democraticand practical tendenei,.s of current-traditional rhetoric. This opposi-tion was described in 1912 by Glenn E. Palmer of the University ofKansas in an article entitle 'r3ulture and Efficienry through Com-position." Palmer was responding in part to Thomas Lounsbury'stack on the compulsory composition course in the November 1911issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine. Palmer explained that the dif-ferences between the two rh .orics were easily summarized. TheYale model held that if writing were to be taught in college it oughtto be taught to the few who were gifted, and then in order to en-courage the creation of art. The Harvard plan, on the other hand,insisted that writing instruction should be required for all andshould simply cultivate -good language habits." Yale was concernedwith providing all of its students "the inspiration of literature, re-cognizing that there can be .to literary production without culture"but aiming toward the et.couragement of a "few geniuses." Harvardstressed instead "painstaking drill in the writing of short themes" inorder to -train a class of Philistines prepared for the everyday needsof democracy, by enforcing good language habits, and increasing ex-pressiveness." In short, Palmer concluded, Yale and Harvard repre-sented "the old distinction between culture and efficiency" (488).

Palmer wished the two camps to learn from each other and to ar-rive at a higher synthesis. Charles G. Osgood of Princeton dis-agreed with him in a 1915 essay entitled "No Set Requirement ofEnglish Composition in the Freshman Year." Osgood argued againstrequiring any writing course for anyone at any level of the curricu-lum, and he provided an alternative. For Osgood, the requiredcourseand he certainly had Harvard's in mindwas only con-cerned with "visible correctness and propriety." But errors on thesuperficial level, he believed, were symptoms of a deeper disorder,a disorder in -the very springs of the student's nature Lnd action andexpression- (232). Teachers therefore had to go to the source of thesymptoms, not treat the symptoms themselves. The way to do this

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44 Rhetoric and heality

was by teaching literature, thereby "making young men more sen-sitive, more observant, more just. more consistent, inure spiritual."Osgood explained that the preceptorial methodat Princeton was de-signed to do just this, directing small groups of students"three toseven men"in discussing literature, the teacher "becomingsome-thing of an artist" as he guided the development of his charges. Thestudent was ready to write only after he had discussed his subjectwith his teacherdiscussion that was to continue as the studentwrote, since "more of the art of composition can be taught while theact of composing is going on." The purpose of all of this was "to re-form the intellectual and spiritual health of the student." Some stu-dents would not respond to this method since it was "peculiarlyadapted to the training of the better men," such men being thenation's greatest need at a time "of the worship of 'the Average(234-35). Finally, Osgood felt that any courses devoted exclusivelyto writing instruction should be held during the senior year, whenstudents had arrived at intellectual and spiritual maturity.

The statements of Osgood were representative of the rhetoric ofliberal culture and were echoed in the published positions of HiramCorson and Lane Cooper at Cornell, William Lyon Phelps as well asLounsbury at Yale, and Frank Aydeiotte of Indiana (later presidentof Swarthmore and founder of the nation's first honors program). Asmentioned earlier, this rhetoric emerged as part of a larger reactionto the scientific and professional concept of literacy encouragedat Harvard and at most large state universities. Grounded in aBrahminical romanticism, it found its home in departments of lan-guage, art, and philosophy in the new university. The rhetoric wasbased on an epistemology that grew out of philosophical idealism(Veysey, Emergence of the American University, ch. 4). It held thatall material reality has a spiritual foundation and that the business ofeducation was to enable students to see beyond the material to theideal. The study of art was thought to be uniquely designed to dojust this. As Corson, a professor of English, explained, the aim of aneducation in liberal culture was "to induce soul states or conditions,soul attitudes, t. .ttune the inward forces to the idealized forms ofnature and of In? Ilan life produced by art, and not to make the heada cockloft for stom ing away the trumpery of barren knowledge" (qtd.in Veysey, Emergence of the American University 185). The purposeof education was to cultivate the individual so that he would be in


touch with the permanent and the true. This involved encourage-ment of a wisely passive response to experience, rather than the ag-gressively active response of the new professional. The aim of thiseducation was preeminently self-realization, the self arriving at itsfulfillment through the perception of the spiritual qualities inherentin experience. Learning to see these qualities was considered to bethe primary purpose of a literary education.

The rhetoric of liberal culture was aristocratic and openly dis-trustful of democracy. The perception of the ideal beyond the realwas possible only through study and then was finally attained onlyby the gifted few. The colleges that embraced this educationalstance were a very small but conspicuously vocal minority. They in-cluded those schools that were the last to abandon the prescribedclassical curriculum of the Yale Report of 1828, a document reaction-ary even when first presented; among them were Yale, Princeton,Williams, Amherst, Bowdoin, and Hamilton (Rudolph, Curriculum190). Liberal culture was an ideal based on a tacit social and moralcode as well as on an aesthetic creed. Most proponents were Anglo-philes who favored class distinctions and aspired to the status of aneducated aristocracy of leadership and privilege, a right that wasclaimed on the basis of their spiritual visionpartly a matter ofbirth and partly a product of having attended the right schools. Inmaking their claims, the supporter; of liberal culture often calledupon Matthew Arnold's definition of culture as the best that hasbeen thought and said, supporting his contenticn that the propo-nents of culture will address and resolve moral nd social problemsby virtue of their sensitivity to the aesthetic.

The rhetoric of liberal culture defined writing as the embodi-ment of spiritual vision, a manifestation of the true significance ofthe material world. The writer, however, had first to arrive at thisspiritual vision before attempting to record it; as we have seen, thiswas accomplished by years of literary study, by the close reading ofpredecessors who had attained this vision. The writing cultivated inthis rhetoric thus valued the individual voice, the unique expres-sion that indicated a gifted and original personality at work. Ofcourse, this personality cu3ld not be allowed to violate the stric-tures of a certain notion of cultivation and class. Still, unique self-expression within these bounds was encouraged. There was also aninsistence on organic form, on the inextricable relation of form and

5


content. Indeed, it was considered to be this organic relationshipthat enabled the personality to express itself in its own unique way,finally making the text it produced intranslatable. As Veysey has ex-plained, -Advocates of culture liked to believe in an ultimate andrather titillating mystery of things; therefore they did not want evento admit that the dimensions of their study might be neatly pinneddown" (Emergence of the American University 185). And it was thebusiness of the student-writer to strive to capture this -mystery ofthings" in prose, suggesting through a unique style the otherwiseinexpressible.

The rhetoric of liberal culture had its literary antecedents inAmerican Critical Idealism (sometimes called the "Genteel Tradi-tion"), a system represented by the likes of James Russell Lowell andCharles Eliot Norton of Harvard, George Woodberry of Nebraskaand then Columbia, and Brander Matthews of Columbia. It in-cluded as its successor the elitist New Humanism of Irving Babbittat Columbia. The educational ideal of liberal culture did not surviveas a major force, despite its outspoken proponents at some of themost prestigious schools in the nation. It is worth noting, though,that it kept alive in the university a notion of art and literary criti-cism that was for a time eclipsed by the scientistic historical andphilological criticism of the early English department. It also main-tained the academic tie with romantic thoughthowever Brah-minical the versionand this had its effects on an egalitarian con-ception of expressionistic rhetoric that appeared in the twenties. Itshould not be forgotten, however, that the proponents of the rheto-ric of liberal culture discouraged writing instruction even as theycontinued to provide it to students in freshman literature coursesthat required writing about literature. In other words, they wereengaging in the very activity they decried in others, meanwhiledenying that their students needed this instruction or that theywere providing it.

A Transactional Rhetoric for a DemocracyA third variety of classroom rhetoric arose in America during this

time. It had originated in the 1890s iii the work of Scott, Denney,and Buck, but it was widely disseminated during the next two dec-ades, especially in the high schools. This rhetoric was the most com-plete embodiment of John Dewey's notion of progressive education,

GO


reflecting his conviction that the aim of all education is to com-bine self-development, social harmony, and economic integration(Bowles and Gintis 20-22). (Scott had known Dewey at the Univer-sity of Michigan and had even taught a course in aesthetics for himin the philosophy department.) Scott's rhetoric in fact represented auniquely American development, a rhetoric for a modern demo-cratic state. It was, in addition, an early approximation of an epis-temic position.

Scott took all of his degrees at the University of Michigan and be-gan teaching there in 1899. In 1903 he became head of the Depart-ment of Rhetoric and served in that capacity until his retirement in1926. During his career he was at various times preAdent of theMLA, the first and second president of the NCTE, president of theNorth Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, andpresident of the American Association of Colleges and SecondarySchools. He wrote in collaboration with others fifteen books oncomposition, aesthetics, and literary criticism, and independentlyapproximately one hundred articles on rhetoric, literary criticism,linguistics, and pedagogy. At Michigan he created the Departmentof Rhetoric, which eventually separated from the Department ofEnglish. It handled beginning writing courses as well as advancedcourses in rhetoric, journalism, and literary criticism. His distin-guished students included Sterling Andrus Leonard, Ruth Weeks,Karl Young, Avery Hopwood, Marjorie Nicolson, Fletcher Harris,and Charles Fries. After Scott's retirement, his Department ofRhetoric was rejoined with the English department and then wasquietly and efficiently dismantled (Stewart, "Rediscovering FredNewton Scott").

Scott's rhetoric was consciously formulated as an alternative tocurrent-traditional rhetoric, especially to the latter's emphasis onthe scientific and the practical in rhetorical discourse. Scott saw re-ality as a social construction, a communal creation emerging fromthe dialectical interplay of individuals. While this social reality isbound by the material, it is everywhere immersed in language. Re-ality is thns neither objective and external, as current-traditionalistsbelieved, nor subjective and internal, as the proponents of liberalculture held. It is instead the result of the interaction between theexperience of the external world and what the perceiver brings tothis experience. The transactional relationship that defines reality

61


also includes the social, the interaction of humans. The medium ofcontact between perceiver and perceived is language. Language isnot, however, conceived of as a simple sign system in which symboland referent are perfectly matched. It is instead constitutive of real-ity, language being the very condition that makes thought possible.Language does not exist apart from thought, and thought does notexist apart from language; they are one and the same, Reality is theproduct of the interplay of observer (writer or speaker), other ob-servers (audience), the material world, and, implicated in each,language.

Scott's rhetoric was throughout intent on providing for public dis-course in a democratic and heterogeneous society. In "EnglishComposition as a Mode of Behavior," he insisted on the student'sright to her own language, arguing that the student's desire to com-municate is destroyed by the teacher's insistence on abstraction andcorrectness. To take away a student's language is to deny her experi-ence, forcing her to talk and write about what she does not know. In"The Standard of American Speech" Scott had similarly argued for amultiplicity of dialects, maintaining that differences in dialect donot impede communication: "Whence the speech comes does notmatter. . . . If it is the voice of high wisdom, of moderation, of hu-man nature at its best, the words will take on that power and charmwhich is the test of a great national speech" (9). Language is experi-ence; to deny the validity of a person's dialect is to deny the realityof that person's experience and, finally, the reality of the personherself.

Perhaps the most succinct statement of Scott's rhetoric is found inan essay entitled 'Rhetoric Rediviva," first delivered at the MLAmeeting of December 1909. Here Scott traced the roots of a modernrhetoric to Plato, arguing that the tradition which sees the Greekphilosopher as antirhetorical is "one of the most curious perver-sities in the history of scholarship." Scott found the other great tra-dition, the Aristotelian, too narrowly concerned with persuasion,with winning the dayand here intended an oblique reference tocurrent-traditional rhetoric and its practical orientation. Accord-ing to Scott, Plato includes in his rhetoric "every use of speech,whether spoken or written; not only speeches, but history, fiction,laws, and even conversation." What is of permanent value in Pla-tonic rhetoric, however, is found in two areas: its social orientation

62


and its notion of organic form. Plato, Scott explained, "takes whatwe should now call the social or sociological point of view. The valueof any piece of discourse, or mode of communication, is to be mea-sured by its effect upon the welfare of the community." Against theextreme individualism and class bias of current-traditional rhetoricand the rhetoric of liberal culture, Scott posed a rhetoric of publicservice, a system distinguished by its ethical commitment to thepublic good: "Good discourse is that which by disseminating truthcreates a healthy public opinion and thus effects, in Plato's words, 'atraining and improvement in the souls of the citizens (415). Thewriter or speaker must thus be committed to truth conceived of as asocial phenomenon, with implications for the entire community. Fi-nally, 5,!ott held that Plato, in his conception of organic structureof the inextricable relation of form and contenthas given us theguiding principle for the production of discourse. Thus, in his ex-pansion of subject matter, in his notion of the social function of dis-course, and in his insistence on organic unity, Plato has provided aprogram for a modern theory of discourse. And while it must be ad-mitted that Scott's interpretation of Plato, as well as of Aristotle, wascertainly unique, flying in the f:kce of the tralitions called upon inmost historical accounts, it nevertheless resulted in a rich body ofrhetorical thought.

When we turn to Scott's textbooks on rhetoric, done in collabora-tion with others, we find him less innovative than might be ex-pected. Still, despite his inclusion of such current-traditional con-cerns as the forms of discourse, the structure of the paragraph, andthe matter of usage, Scott diminished the impact of these mattersby his emphasis on the rhetorical context, a context that is alwayssocial and transactional in nature. Thus, in Elementary EnglishComposition, Scott and Denney underscored the public and dia-h.ctical nature of composing: "The forces which urge young personsto express themselves with tongue or pen are partly individual,partly socialpartly impulses from within, partly solicitations fromwithout. Pupils compose most naturally and most successfully whenthe two forces are in equilibrium" (iii). Subject and audience areboth involved in determining the rhetorical purpose. In this frame-work, even superficial correctness can be regarded differently: "Pre-sented as a means of meeting definite social needs more or lesseffectively, of winning attention and consideration, the various de-

63


vices of grammar and rhetoric make an appeal to self-interest whichpupils can understand." Students learn to avoid errors in correct-ness because they come to "appreciate the value of these things tothemselves as members of society" (iv).

This concern for the complete rhetorical context is also seen inScott and Denney's design of composition assignments. In the thirdnumber of Contributions to Rhetorical Theonj, edited by Scott,Denney described the principles the two used in devising writingtopics:

If our object is to train thc power of seeing and expressing relations, ofgrasping in imagination the meaning and total significance of a number ofdetails, the statement of the topics should, if possible, suggest a typicalsituation in real life. And if we wish to enlist the personal interest of thewriter in his work, the statement of the topics should suggest a personalrelationship to the situation, of the one who is to write. Moreover itshould suggest a particular reader or set of readers who are to be broughtinto vital relationship with the situation. . . . The composition that sug-gests a problem or solution calls into activity all of the resources of diepupil. (173)

Here is seen the insistence on the dialectical interplay of ele-ments in arriving at decisions about meaning while composing. Scottand Denney offered students a complete rhetorical situation arisingout of their experience, including the purpose of' the writer, herrole, and the audience to be addressed.

There were others who promoted a democratic rhetori ,.. of publicdiscourse between 1900 and 1920. The most important was Buck,one of Scott's students and a prolific source of textbooks and theo-retical statements on rhetoric and poetic during her twenty -twoyears of teaching at Vassar College. Two recent essays have surveyedher accomplishmentsone by Rebecca Burke and the other byGerald Mulderig. Other members of this democratic group wereGeorge Pattee of Pennsylvania State, Katherine Stewart Worthing-ton of Columbia, Samuel Chandler Earle of Tufts, Homer A. Watt ofNew York University, and Harold G. Merriam of Reed College. Thelast two are noteworthy for having emphasized teaching the entireprocess" of writing rather than simply responding to the "product,

a result probably attributable to Dewey's insistence on learning as a

6 4


process. Sterling Andrus Leonard, who was another of Scott's stu-dents and a teacher at Wisconsin, had also during this time begunhis campaign against the insistence on distorting the student's lan-guage and life to conform to the biases of a narrow class interest (seeMyers, "Reality, Consensus, and Reform"; Brereton). While neverdominant, this democratic rhetoric remained a force, especially inhigh scilools, throughout the period and reemerged with consider-able energy during the economically troubled thirties.

The Ideas ApproachA related transactional approach to writing that also grew out

of progressive education's interest in connecting learning to socialand political life was found in the "ideas course," also called the"thought course" or "co n ten t course." Its origin was attributed toHarrison Ross Steeves of Columbia, who described the course in a1912 article. In this approach, the student wrote essays about thetraditional issues of rhetoriclegal, political, and soeiql ..iuestionsof a controversial natureafter reading essays :hat consideredthem. This course signaled the beginnings of the anllologies on po-litical and social issues as well as those on the purpc se of a collegeeducation, the latter attempting to address the questiims arising outof the student's immediate experience. These essay collections com-monly were designed to involve the student in controversy by pre-senting more than one viewpoint on a given issue, as in Represen-tative Essays in Modern Thought: A Basis for Composition, editedby Steeves and Frank Humphrey Ristine of Hamilton College, thefirst of many such collections.

The ideas approach was an attempt to restore to rhetoric its con-cern with the probable, with arguing opposites in the reahn of po-litical action, and Steeves was clearly aware of this. As he explainedin his article, "Ideas in the College Writing Course,- the benefit ofsuch a course was that it regarded the college student as "one of therepublic of thought.- Rather than encouraging self-expression in es-says about the student's personal experience, the teacher placed thestudent within an intellectual and social context: "What is he withrelation to himself, and to society. and to all that has been and isdefined in the name of God, and to that, for him, mystic culture,which he knows he has come to college to partake of?'' (49-50).Steeves felt that the English department had concerned itself too

65


narrowly with "the esthetic aspects of both literature and composi-tion" (54). By becoming a separate discipline. English had "lost itsrelationship to the general domain of ideas and affairs, and con-cerned itself with itselfas, indeed, sister-subjects were doing in aday of intense specializatior" (53). The ideas approach was thus putforth in the interests of both poetic and rhetoric, restoring to eachits appropriate sphere. Steeves argued that combining liter-.:.y studywith composition is wrong because it "abuses literature by subject-ing it to al rpose for which it does not exist, and, possibly. . . . up-holds an unpractical and discouraging esthetic ideal in coir position"(48). In contrast, the ideas course preserved the distinction be-tween Aretoric as the domain of action and poetic as the domain ofcontemplation.

This approach was applauded and coademned from a variety ofperspectives. Norman Foerster, a conservatiw proponent of NewHumanism, praised it because it was especially useful for the excep-tionally talented leaderthe person he thought higher educationought to serve. He did, however, wish to limit its use since heagreed with the proponents of liberal culture that learning to writeprimarily involved self-cultivation and self-expression, both basedon literary experience. Joseph M. Thomas of the University of Min-nesota, a professor sympathetic to progressive education, had reser-vations about it. Thomas thought that students should write abouttheir immediate personal experiences, not about ideas, and the rea-sons he gave have been repeated throughout the century in criticiz-ing the ideas approach. The university is a place of experts, he ex-plained, and the English teacher cannot possibly be an expert in allof the disciplines involved in complicated social and political prob-lems. These issues must be left to authorities "in the theoriesof economics, politics, sociology, philosophy, and religion" ("DoThought-Courses Produce Thinking?" 84). Therefore, any ideascourse that is to be offered should be held in the senior year, afterstudents have taken courses in these disciplines. Thomas did notcarry his argument to its logical conclusion, a (.:onclusion that othershave increasingly put forth: since the expertise of members of theEnglish department is in literary criticism, and since the universityexists to provide expert instruction, writing courses should dealwith matters the English faculty knows hestliterary texts. Lost indepartments where such arguments pre,,ail, I would add, is the his-

66


torical concern of rhetoric for practical action in areas of public con-cern affecting all citizens. Where this concern is lost, rhetoric be-comes subsumed by poetic and becomes a reflective disciplinerather than an active discipline.

The Efficiency Movement

During the first two decades of this century, education at everylevel underwent a transformation thai was the result of an uncriticalapplication of the principles of scientific management to all areas ofhuman behavior. Raymond E. Callahan's Education and the Cult ofEfficiency has documented this development. Objectives and ac-counting procedures characteristic of the business community be-gan to appear in discussions of academic matters. This is seen mostclearly in the first formal study undertaken by the NCTE, an inves-tigation of the efficiency of college composition teaching. In thelead article of the first issue of English Journal, Edwin M. Hopkinsof Kansas asked "Can Good Composition Teaching Be Done underPresent Conditions?" and he answered with an unqualified "No." Asubsequrnt study was conducted by a joint committee of the MLAand the NCTE (Wozniak 169-70). The committee found that writingteachers in high schools and colleges were overworked, and its re-port demonstrated the point vividly with hard numbers. It indicatedthat the average number of words written per week by a high schcolstudent was about 400, and for a college freshman about 650. Ateacher could read and correct manuscripts at an average rate of2,000 words per hour fo1 high school students and 2,200 words perhour for college students. Because of the energy required in cor-recting student manuscripts, a teacher could not reasonably be ex-pected to spend more than 2 hours per day or 10 hours per week onthis task. "Much more than this," the report stated, "results sooneror later in the physical collapse of the teacher." The study revealedthat, on the average, high school teachers had 130 pupils assigned tothem and college teachers in freshman composition classes had 105.This teaching load would thus have required 26 hours of manuscriptreading per week for high school teachers and 31 hours for collegeteachersnot including other teaching responsibilities. The reportaccordingly recommended that numbers of pupils, not numbers of

6 7


teaching hours, be the standard of measuring work load. A singlecomposition teacher should never have more than 50 writing stu-dents per term in high school or 35 in college. Furthermore, thereport continued, English composition in college should be taughtby the best teachers in the department, not the newest, and teach-ers should never teach composition exclusively. Finally, it would bebetter to use theme readers rather than leave themes unread, butthis would not be very "efficient."

A similar attempt to introduce efficiency into the teaching of com-position was the use of quantitative evaluation scales, such as thosedevised by Edward L. Thorndike and Milo Burdette Hillegas of Co-lumbia. Used primarily in high schools, these consisted of a series ofpassages arranged according to a seal(' of graduated value. In evaL-ating a student's writing, the teacher was to compare the studentsample with those presented in the scale to find the one it mostclosely matched. The student would then receive the score of thesample closest to her own. The samples used were pieces written bystudents that had been given their numerical scores by a large num-ber of English teachers. Elaborate statistical procedures were usedto ensure reliability and validity. While the tests enjoyed currencyfor a time, many English teachers opposed them because they en-couraged mechanistic, formulaic behavior in teacher and studentand because they were commonly proposed for use in evaluatingteaching effectiveness (Fred Newton Scott, -Our Problems").

Graduate Education in Rhetoric

In 1900, the MLA pedagogical section undertook a survey askingif rhetoric was a proper study for graduate work; if so, what colistf-tuted its scope and leading problems; and if not, what the reasonswere fOr excluding it (Mead. "Graduate Study of Rhetoric"). Sixty-seven of one hundred circulars were returned, almost all or themfrom the North. The notable feature of the responses is that, while amajority favored such study, a sizable minority could not imaginewhat would be considered in graduate rhetoric courses. Clearly theeflOrt to rid English departments of the vestiges of their roots inrhetoric had been so effective that Ole whole twenty-five-hundred-year history of time discipline no longer existed for a large number of

68

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for example, offered a course in short-story writing, and Harvardand Mount Holyoke offered one in playwriting. Columbia, Union,Mount Holyoke, Brown, Bucknell, Hobart, Middlebury, and NewYork University gave courses in rhetorical theory. Mount Holyokeeven offered an undergraduate major in rhetoric. A course in teach-ing dietoric was provided at Yale, Brown, Colby, and Mount Ho-lyoke. Courses in journalism and newspaper writing were offered atPennsylvania, Bucknell, and Washington and Jefferson. Instructionin business writing and writing for engineers was found at New YorkUniversity and Lafayette (ft a history of the latter, see Connors,-The Rise of Technical Writing"). And, as mentioned earlier, Har-vard and Pennsylvania offered course in remedial writing (Wozniak122-34). In the Midwest, Michigan was the leader with a programthat included all of these areas. As these examples indicate, writingcourses increased in number and variety from 1900 to 1920, an espe-cially interesting development since literature courses were duringthe same period coming to dominate the department.

The Great War

One effect of World War I was to complete a development thathad been taking shape since law in the nineteenth century: Englishstudies became the center of public school education in the UnitedStates. An Arnoldian view of the value of cultural education had be-gun in the East, demonstrated in the work of Ilorace Scudder in the1870s and 1880s. Scudder had pointed to the ethical value of litera-ture as an alternative to the religion-led educAtion no longer pos-sible in America (Applehee 24). The war showed the power ()Chasingeducation on the study of language and literature as public schoolteachers throughout the country made their subject -a way to instilla sense of national heritage and to encourage patriotism" (Adplebee68). The acceptance of American literature in the high school andcollege curriculmn can be traced directly to this concern fin- encour-aging loyalty in time of war. College English departments furtherbenefited from the upward valuation of their discipline as moneybecame available after the war lOr travel, research, and sueli proj-ects as dictionaries (Armstrong, Manly). The concern for the En-glish language and its study as the common bond of the nation also

70


increased wDh the appearanre of immigl nts and the children of im-migrants in the schools ..fter the war. But the fervor for Englishstudies would lot have been nearly as intense had it not been forthe national threat posA from abroad. English cot,. sesfrom ele-mentary school to universi' were seen as central to the ellbrt tomake the world safe for democracy and America safe for Americans.

71

The Influence of ProgressiveEducation: 1920-1940

THE YEARS BETWEEN 1920 AND 1940 ENCOMPASSED THE BESTand the worst of the American experience. The dramatic increase inprosperity of the twenties was followed by the worst depression inmodern history. Despite the economic catastropheindeed, partlybecause of itcollege enrollments continued to grow steadily dur-ing the period, undergoing a decline only between 1932 and 1934.hi the 1919-20 school year, enrollments totaled 597,880. By 1929this number had increased to 1,100,737, and by 1939 to 1,494,203.The varieties of writing instruction in use during these years cor-responded in a curious way to developments in the economy. Al-though current-traditional rhetoric continued to he the most com-mon approach in the college classroom, it was rivaled during theprosperous twenties by the appearance of a subjective rhetoric thatcelebrated the individual. This rhetoric persisted through the thir-ties but was itself challenged by transactional approaches that em-phasized the social nature of human experience. The single mostsignificant force behind these new rhetorics, however, was that ofprogressive education, at this time making a strong impression inthe public schools and influencing activities in the college classroom.

It is difficult to define progressive education. Lawrence Cremin'sdescription is probably the most useful: -the educational phase ofA inerican Progressivism writ large- (viii). Progressive educationwas an extension of political progressivism, the Optimistic faith inthe possibility that all institutions could be reshaped to better servesociety, making it healthier, more prosperous, and happier. The pro-

7 2

The Influence of Progressive Education: 1920-1940 59

ponents of this effort aspired to disinterestedness, although they ul-timately served middle-class political concerns. Progressive edu-cation attempted to emulate this larger political movement byapplying science to the education of young people, even as it simul-taneously insisted on the inevitability of students' individual dif-ferences. It was likewise concerned with the school serving thewell-being of society, especially in ensuring the continuance of ademocratic state that would make opportunities available to allwithout compromising excellence. The complexity of this programled progressive education to distinctive and, at times, contradictoryturns between 1920 and 1940 that must here be taken into account.

Progiessive education wished to apply the findings of science tohuman behavior. This meant that the social and behavioral scienceswere strongly endorsed and constantly consulted as guides to under-standing students. The findings of psychologists and sociologistswere immediately applied to the school, shaping the curriculum andschool policy in a number of ways. The shift from a subject-centeredto a child-centered school was implemented by calling upon suchpsychologists as G. Sumley Ilan, William James, and Edward L.Thorndike. Meanwhile, the sociological treatises of Lester FrankWard, Albion Small, and George S. Counts were affecting the waythe behavior of groups was perceived. At the center of these twodivergent approaches to human behaviorthe one focusing on theindividual, the other on the groupwas John Dewey, the student ofHegel who was attempting to accomplish a dialectical synthesis.Most educators were not in fact kllowers of Dewey in this efkrtor, stated more accurately, they called upon Dewey only kr thatpart of his thought which supported their own partial views. Thus,the respect for science led not only to a commitment to individualdifferences, but to a faith in Thorndike's contention that any featureof human behavior could be quantified, measured, and controlled.The application of the empirical method to the study of writ:ng be-havior was widespread, and attempts were even made to apply it toliterary study. It resulted in the use of' intelligence tests andgrammar-usage tests and organizational tests to determine one'splace in the college composition programa program now con-cerned with providing for the individual differences of' students. Itled to attempts to develop objective scales to measure the value ofstudent essays. And it produced survey after survey of classroom

73


practices and composition programs, each attempting to find the"solution" to the "composition problem."

There was another area in which progressive education had astrong impact on composition instruction. As mentioned earlier,progressivism contained within it two opposed conceptions of edu-cationone psychological and individualistic and the other socialand communalwhich Dewey attempted to reconcile. The influ-ences of these two orientations correspond approximately ta a his-torical sequence. As Cremin and Clarence Karier have indicated,before World War 1 the emphasis of the progressives was on socialreform, on bringing the school closer to serving the needs of society.After the war, there was a shift to a child-centered pedagogymorespecifically, to an interest in depth psychology and the creative arts,both intended to foster the development of the individual withow:regard for social or practical ends. The focus of this effort was thecultivation of the aesthetic capabilities of the student in the interestof bringing about health and sanity. Within this context, 'ill writingcame to be seen as inherently creative. After the economic collaps2of 1929, the social reformism that had been the main concern of pro-gressives before the war again became dominant. Many educatorsnow saw writing as a social act with public consequences, and new in-structional approaches were introduced compatible with this view.In examining writing instruction during these two decades, one findsthe two orientations everywhere, the difference between the twen-ties and thirties being one ohnarkedly contrasting emphasis.

In this chapter, I would like first to consider the effects of the pas-sion for quantification on the teaching of writing (a practice re-inforced by the drive for efficiency mentioned in the last chapter),looking at key surveys of composition programs. This discussion willalso provide an overview of the general developments in the admin-istration of writing programs from 19:'.0 to 1940. 1 will next considerthe writing programs themselves, examining in some detail theways they were conducted. Finally, the chapter will turn to theapproaches to composition instruction found during these twodecades.

74


The Surveys

In 1926, II. Robinson Shipherd published a survey of requiredfreshman composition courses at 75 colleges and universities in theUnited States. Of the schools included, 47% were Eastern, 24%Southern, 21% Midwestern, and 8% Western. Coeducational in-stitutions constituted 53% of the sample, 32% were for women only,and 14% were for men only. (Where percentages do not total 100,the investigators have rounded off numbers.) In enrollment, 44%had fewer than 1,000 students, 33% had more than 2,000, andthe remaining 23% kIl in between. Of the total, 26% were stateuniversities.

The patterns Shipherd discovered are remarkably familiar. Theaverage section size was 27.6 students, with 22% of the sectionshaving more than 30 students and 22% having fewer than 25. Theaverage number of class meetings was three per week. On the aver-age, students completed four pages of writing per week, or justunder two short themes, and were also required to write two longerthemes per semester. Reflecting the interest in providing for indi-vidual differences, conkrences were required for all students in82% of the schools. Conkrcnces were held two or three times persemester at 35% of those schools, fortnightly at 18%, monthly at18%, and weekly at 6%. Shipherd was dismayed to discover thatonly 25% of his respondents required rewriting, despite the testi-mony of professional writers to its necessity.

Shipherd discovered other features of the freshman compositioncourse that surprised him. As a Harvard Ph.D. and student ofLeBaron Briggs, he considered the -conventional arrangement" ofthe course to be exposition and argument during the first semesterand description and narration during the second. lie discovere:!,howzwer, that only 28% of the schools used this sequence and that38% omitted argumentation. I le also discovered a wide use of litera-ture in the freshman writing course, with 55% of the schools requiling one thousand or more pages of reading per semestera practicethat Shipherd saw as -relatively young." This reflected, of coursethe growth of literature offerings in the English department, thc ustof fiiculty whose only training had been in literature, and the suc-cess of those who advocated the ide-0 liberal Attire (the last a

75


reflection of the Eastern bias in Shipherds sample). It also repre-sented the desire of many English departments to make literaturetheir sole concern. The use of literature was likewise apparent ina decrease in the reliance on rhetoric textbooks and handbooks.While all departments used "pure literature" to some extent, only56% used a rhetoric textbook and only 53% used a handboek (FineArt of Writing 323-30).

A more extensive study was conducted by Warner Taylor of theUniversity of Wisconsin in 1927 and 1928. Taylor's findings werebased on 225 institutions across the nation, with a combined enroll-ment of more than 100,000 freshmen. He also took great pains toarrive at a more representative sample, and he accordingly reportedsomewhat different, although not greatly inconsistent, findings. (Hefound, for example, tint Eastern colleges diverged from the normfor other parts of the country, a fact he traced to the higher stan-dards and the better students of these schools.)

Taylor discovered that Eastern schools were using a rhetoric text-book less and less, with only 40% of those in the survey still doingso. This compared to a usage rate of 73% in the Midwest, 60% in theSouth, and 65% in the West. H::ndbooks and collections of essayswere used more frequently, but again the usage rate was lowest inthe East. lIamll'ooks werc used by 96% of Midwestern schools,90% oi Southern schools, and 87 of Western schools, but only 58%of Eastern schools. Similarly, es_.ay collections were used by 84% ofMidwestern schools, 88% ofSouthern schools, and 87% of Wester!)schools, but only 67% of Eastern schools (still, ofcourse, a substai.tial number). These essay collections, unlike those of the ideas ap-proach of the previous decade, tended to rely on contemporary es,says, frequently from very recent periodicals. Their purpose, Taylorexplaine(:, was to provide "essays that offer challenges to the stu-dent mind, that start his thinking apparatus" (8). Taylor discoveredthat combined use of all three textsrhetoric, handbook, andcollection was again least common in the East (20%), but ( .11 ihother regions constituted less than 50% of the total: Midwest, ,South, 38%: and West, 43%.

Taylor alco examined a category he labeled the "frilditional con-formity" freshman compwitio I course. This yew -long course wasrequired for all first-year stud, 'nts. It used a rhetoric text, a hand-book, and an essay collection; it emphasi7r.ed the study t! :hetoric

7 6


rather than literature; and it consisted of three hour-long weeklyrecitatic as. Once again, he found that the less exclusive the admis-sions procedures of the school, the more likely its freshman com-position course was to correspond to this pattern. Of the state uni-versities, 27% had courses that fit the traditional conformity model.Of the private schools, 7% of those in the East, 37% of those in theMidwest, 31% ci those in the South, and 41% of those in the Westhad this type of composition course.

When Taylor turned to the matter of literature in the freshmancourse, his findings were a bit confusing. They seemed to indicatethat Eastern and Southern schools more often combined rhetoricand literature (the latter studied for its own sake and not as stimulusfor thought or to provide models), whereas Midwestern and West-ern schools tended to restrict the course primarily to the study ofrhetoric (73% of these schools followed this practice, as compared toonly 39% of the schools in the East and South).

Taylor's information on the modes of discourse being emphasizedin the freshman class supported and elaborated upon Shipherd'sfindings. Ile discovered that both argumentation and narrationwere on the decline. Most schools seemed to favor exposition as thefocus of the course, with description serving as a part of exposi-tiontrends that were predictable given the theoretical develop-ments of the nineteenth century (Berlin, Writing Instruction; Con-nors, "Rhetoric of Explanation").

Taylor's examination of staffing patterns in the freshman Englishclass yielded remarkable findings. Throughout the nation the coursewas taught largely by instructors and graduate students, with onlythe Eastern and Western schools staffing the course with less than50% of thi,: rank. The Midwest averaged only 17% of the pro-fssria staid. ii !he course and the South 38%, compared to 52% inthe West anci the East. Taylor also indicated parentheticallythat Wisconsin, Ohio State, Minnesota, and Iowa averaged only6.7% of the professorial staff in freshman English, most of theseclasses being taught by graduate students. Taylor discovered a cor-..,soonding reliance on graduate students throughout his sample oflarge schools: nationwide, 47% of the large institutions used gradu-ate students as teachers and readers, whereas only 18% of the smallschools did. By region, graduate students were relied on at 48% ofthe large Midwestern schools, 43% of the Southern schools, 59% of

7.?


the Western schools, and 37% of the Eastern schools. Clearly, at thelarger universities the graduate student had become a significantforce in the freshman English course.

Taylor also compiled data on teaching loads, teacher-student rela-tionships, and course requirements. He found that, among the 90insitutions that provided solid data, the average number of studentsfor which an instructor was responsible was 93 for three sections. Asfor the individual attention these teachers gave to their students,66% of the schools surveyed customarily scheduled two to threeconferences of fifteen to twenty minutes' duration per term. Theaverage number of words per week required of students was 470,with the most commonly appearing number being 500.

Finally, one of the newest features of the freshman compositionprogram revealed by th ! survey was the use of placement tests andthe grouping of students according to ability. Taylor found that mostschools used standard placement tests, a grammar test and themewriting, or a combination of the two. He learned that many schoolsalso followed the Wisconsin pattern in including both advanced sec-tions and -sub-freshman composition sections, the latter carryingno credit. Of the total sample, 26% of the schools provided both ad-vanced and remedial courses, 14% offered the remedial but not theadvanced, 11% offered the advanced but not the remedial, 15% clas-sified the students in other ways, and 35% did not classify them atall. Taylor also noted that only 9% of all schoo's included provisionsfor waiving freshman composition altogether.

Taylor summarized the trends that he had identified in the sur-vey. Placement tests were multiplying and ability sectioning wasbecoming widespread. At the same time, rhetoric textbooks werebeing abandoned while literature was increasingly being introducedinto the course. Finally, English clinics were being establishedplaces where students who had completed the freshman composi-tion requirement could go for assistance with their college writingassigninents.

The surveys of Shipherd and Taylor identified trends in freshmancomposition that eventually became permanent features of thecourse. This can be seen in a study undertaken in 1940 and pub-lished in College English in 1942 under the heading -NationalCouncil of Teachers of English College Section." This survey cov-ered 292 institutions: 132 liberal arts colleges, 103 universities, 21

78


engineering colleges, and 36 teachers colleges. It found that 80% ofthese schools required freshman composition. There were more fre-quent exemptions of able students, however: 49 of the institutionswaived the requirement for this group of students, and 37 waivedpart of it. The composition course varied from two to twelve se-mester hours, with 79% of the schools requiring six hours over aone-year period. The median enrollment was 25 students, except forthe teachers college::, where it was 30. Ability sectioning was usedat 67% of the schools, and the most common section levels werefast, average, and slow (the last sometimes being a noncredit course).The conference, on the other hand, was on the decline; only 61schools reported requiring conferences and only 125 in all renori.-Iusing them in any form. The median writing load consisted oftwelve shorter themes and one longer theme. The writing -labora-tory," the counterpart of the earlier English clinic, existed at 34schools, providing assistance in course work and at some schoolseven being offered as a course itself A number of schools also re-ported offering remedial work for upperclassmen with 37% provid-ing systematic instruction.

The Writing Program and Current-Traditional Rhetoric

I would now like to turn to a consideration of the organized fresh-man writing programs that appeared from 1920 to 1940. Since allof these were structured according to the principles of current-traditional rhetoric, the discussion will move from developments inthese programs to developments in this variety of rhetoric.

Organized freshman composition programs headed by directorsand providing for elaborate adininistrative procedures for dealingwith students were commonplace in the twenties and thirties.These most often appeared in Midwestern and Western state uni-versities, but occasionally were found at private universitiesatHarvard and Bradley, for example. Their minimal essentials were aplacement test, grouping students by ability, and some sort of proce-dure for verifying the success of the program, such as exit tests orfollow-up programs for students who later displayed shortcomings.Syracuse University in the early twenties displayed a typical fresh-man program. Its twelve hundred freshman students were given a

7


placement test called a "Minimum EssentialsTest" that consisted ofa grammar section and a writing sample (Whitney, "Ability Group-ing at Syracuse"). The samples were read by the most experiencedfaculty membe . On the basis of the combined grammar and writ-ing scores, the students were divided into three groups: the top121/2% into group A, the bottom 25% into Group C, and the remain-ing 621/2% into Group B. (Students could be reclassified on the basisof their performance during the first month of class.) Group A stu-dents completed the English requirement in one semester, Group Bin two, and Group C in three. Since the composition requirementfor all students was nine hours, Groups A and B were given ad-ditional credit for the work they did. There was thus no "sub-freshman" English since all courses carried credit.

The content of the Syracuse courses was representative of anemerging pattern. English A was a course in writing about litera-ture; it required fifteen weekly themes of two pages and a long re-view of a novel. Eik.,,lish B was a course in expository writing thatincluded a weekly out-of-class theme, a weekly in-class theme, and aesearcli paper of two thousand words on a subject selected from anapproved list (the paper was written after a unit in using the li-brary). The first half of this course covered note-taking, bibliogra-phy preparation, research for writing a long paper, the compositionas a whole (sources of material, purpose, arrangement, outlines, andmanuscript form), and the paragraph (kinds, uses, and methods ofdevelopment). No rhetoric textbook was used in the course; the in-structor lectured in its place. The second half of the course coveredthe study of languageits history, the dictionary, styleand thecorrect form of social and business correspondence. All themeswere written and corrected, with errors indicated by the correctionsymbols of the Century Ilandbook. Students were expected to cor-rect the errors in each theme returned and to keep the themes in afolder to be examined by the teacher during one of the three sched-uled conferences. An elaborate grading procedure was provided,with 25% of the grade decided by the research paper, 25% by theout-of-class theme, 25% by the in-class theme, and 25% by the finalexam. The English C course dealt with sentence analysis and sen-tence structure. Grammar was reviewed, and a grade of at least 90%in spelling was required for passing the course. Students wrote no

'L.3 0

The Influence of Progressive Education: 1920-1940 E7

thmes. Class workdone only twice weeklyconsisted of instrtion and drills in correctness.

The Syracuse plan tried to ensure uniform subject matter anduniform grading standards in all courses, although it did make allow-ances for "the personality of the instructor" (Whitney, "AbilityGrouping at Syracuse" 487). The final examination in each coursewas also meant as a check of performance for teacher as well as stu-dent. Those students who failed the final exam were allowed to takeit once more before being told to repeat the course. Teachers wererequired to submit their final grades to the departmental committeeon grading, a committee that had the authority to "recommend suchchanges as . . necessary for a reasonable distribution of grades forthe whole group" (488). The grade distribution set up as the modelconsisted of 25% A's and B's, 50% C's, and 25% D's, E's, and F's(1) was a passing grade), although perfect compliance was notmandatory.

Syracuse published another essay on its program four years later,in 1928, and it is instructive to see the changes made that attemptedto move it even further in the direction of ;1 scientific precision inplacement and grading (Whitney, "Ability Grouping Plus"). Theplacement theme had been omitted due to the "subjective ele-ments" caused by nervous students. To provide "more objectivemeasures," a vocabulary test was used. The department now was"convinced that there is a direct relation between vocabulary testscores and specific aptitude for writing" (562). The literature course(Group A) had been assigned to the "best and most experienced in-structors" and its emphasis was on the survey of the types of con-temporary literature, not on writing, although writnig about litera-ture was undertaken. The forms of discourse in the Group B coursehad been abandoned and longer monthly themes had been added,but the course remained essentially the same. The Group C coursewas unchanged, but the department was now able to report that Ali-tistics on grade distributiot idicated that the failure rate overallhad declined, and that "Gn,ap C students do increasingly betterwork as they progress, never equalling their more fortunate com-panions, but constantly improving on their own records" (564).

Despite its forbidding e,rulation of a technological model, Syra-cnse's effbrt was an attempt to provide for the needs and abilities of


students and to increase the chances of success for those who mightotherwise fail. Theirs was an effort to democratize college, making itavailable to a new group of students, even students whose parents

.

had not benefited from higher education. And in undertaking thiseffort, Syracuse and schools like it were simply emulating the ex-ample of Harvard.

During the twenties Harvaid :lad instituted an "anticipatory ex-amination" for the purpose of exempting some students from thefreshman writing requirement. Later it exempted from the requiredEnglish A-1 course (a year-long sequence) only those who had re-ceived a grade of 75% or better on the College Entrance Examina-tion Board English section. Students who received a C or betterduring the first term were allowed to choose their second-term sec-tion from "Types of Literature," "Narration and Description," "Ar-gunentation," and "Exposition." This system, however, did not pro-vide enough "individual attention" ("English A-1 at Harvard" 388),and by 1932 it was decided to use a tutorial method. During the firstterm, students met weekly with their regular sections and also metbimonthly for one-half hour in individual conference with their in-structors. During the second term, those students who had re-ceived a grade of A, B, or C+ for the first term were grouped to-gether by fours for conferences. Those who had received a grade ofC, D, or E continued the individual conferences. While this was, onthe face of it, a move in the direction of the avowedly elitist precep-torial method of Princeton, the required course continued to be or-ganized around writing, not literature, although literature was apart of the course. Students wrote approxim4tcly four papers a weekwith occasional longer themes and were vequir.'d to read in ProseMasterpieces (an essay collection) and &cm sdected hterary list,the latter assignment being five hundred pages ca(41 month.

The rigorously orgamized programs at Syracuse and Harvard weremirrored in varying degrees in the Midwest at Illinois, Purdue,Wisconsin, and Minnesota; in the West at UCLA; in the South atWest Virginia, North Carolina, and Nortl: Carolina State; and in theEast at Cornell. All of these, however, offerer! interesting variationson the pattern.

Bernard L. Jefferson, chair of the freshman rhetoric course at Illi-nois, described a program for three thousand students at his schoolthat in 1930 was very close to that at Syracuse, although it included

82

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Ithetork and Reality

with ,o II p itivistic epistemology. Objective tests wen . stron0yemphasizcd oudents and in evaluating student perfor-mance. lin. .tbillty grouping aid of the student-teacher con-ference was, furthermore, a clear response to progressive educa-tnni's concern for individual differences. It is important to note thatall of these features were compatible with the scientistic orientatimiof the course ofti.rings. These freshman composition chisses re-mained Iiicused On problems of arrangement and style, with thecontent of discinirse relegated to activity outside the composingprocess.

Current-traditionial rhetoric did undergo a number of changesduring this period, even though none of them were substantive.One new addition to the classroom was the use of ;h t. researchpaper. Requiring students to engage in library research was a pre-dictable outcome of a course taught by teachers whose major sourceof profrssional rewards was the accumulation of research publica-tions. Furthermore, the research paper represented tile insistencein current-traditional rhetoric on finding meaning outside the com-posing act, with writing itself serving as a simple transcription pro-cess. The first article in English Jcurnal to discuss the teaching ofthe research paper appeared in 1930 (Chalfant), but use of the re-search paper was commindy mentioned in program descriptions inthe twenties. l'extbooks that included discussion of the ...esearchpaper began to appear in significant immbers in 1931. After this, noyear of English Journal passed without a number of articles on ap-proaches to teaching the research essay. It should also be noted thatthe widespread use of this assignment was influenced by the im-provements in library collections during the twenties, as well as bynew ways of indeving these materials for easy accessthe periodi-cal guides, inr example.

Another important development in the current-traditional classwas in the kind of rhetoric textbooks and readers appearing at thetnne. In response to progressive education's emphasis on life experi-enceas found, for example, in the NCTE-sponsored An Experi-ence Ctirrklii.tm in English (1935)textbooks began to replace themodes of discourse with the -types" approach. A notable examplewas 'Writing by Types: A Manual of Composition, by Albert C.Baugh, Paul C. kitchen, and Matti], \N NV. Black. This text containeddiscussions and illustrations of the critical essay, the frature article,

84

The Influence of Progressive Education: 1920-194() 71

the editorial, the after-dinner speech, and other practical writingtasks.

Still another significant development was the appearance of the,2ollege omnibus. Warren Bower, a teacher at New York Universityand a former associate editor of Scribner's Magazine, reported in1938 that sales of rhetoric texts in the East and Midwest had almostceased. Teachers were instead using a grammar handbook and one ofseveral omnibus volumes, each a collection of essays, poems, shortstories, plays, and (usually) a short novel. These collections hadoriginated during the worst part of the Depression and were beingtouted by publishers as a way to save students money. Their effect,Bower explained, had !;een to make of freshman composition acourse in reading rathc. than writing: -More and more emphasis hasfallen on reading as a desirable end in itself, with an implied faiththat if only a student will read enough good prose he will also beable to write itthe 'go thou and do likewise' theory of teaching-(848). This shift from rhetoric to literature as the basis of study inthe writing course (Bower contended it had become a course in liter-ary genres) had already been noted by Warner Taylor ten years ear-lier: given the literary training of all writing teachers, its appearancewas inevitable. There was another force at work, however.

Liberal Culture

It has already been noted that those educators who supportedcurrent-traditional rhetoric looked upon the college as the trainingground for a middle-class, prokssionally certified meritocracy. Intheir view, writing courses were to provide students with the skillsnecessary to write effectively within their professions; literaturecourses were to put students in touch with the civilizing influencesof culture, thereby providing a basis fOr ethical behavior. As Ber-nard Jefferson explained, literature helped the student acquire a hu-mane social sense that led to high ideals of citizenship (-EnglishLiterature").

The proponents of liberal culture, on the other hand, lookedupon the university as the preparatory school kr an elite, aristo-cratic group of individualists. Rather than being trained in the waysof a prolessio,i, students were to be immersed in the traditional

85


learning of literature. language, and art. For the proponents of lib-eral culture, the purpose of the English teaclwr was to cultivate theexceptional students, the geniuses, and, at the most, to tolerate allothers. It is no coincidence that Yale and Princeton, the last hold-outs against the replacement of the tiaditional classical course ofstudy by the new elective system, were the primary centers of thisnotion of education. And although Etern colleges continued to bethe home of this appreadi, it be:-4...1 to spread throughout the nationas graduates of Eastern schou: ,vcre given teaching positions inother parts of the country. For :,x:opple, George Shelton Hubbell, aPrinceton Ph.D. at thc University of California, deplored the medi-ocrity of his students and doubted that he could make them "goodcitizens." Ile was further concerned that "even the aristocratic ten-dency of lectures to leave all the good things with able students iscounteracted by the democratic cheapnes of filhng the ears of fivehondred at one sitting" (826).

Two outspoken proponents of liberal culture who argued againstteaching rhetoric, insisting that writing is taught through cultivatingthe individual in literary study, where Charles G. Osgood of Prince-ton and Oscar James Campbell of Michigan and later Columbia. Inaddition, a dramatic attempt to compensate for the loss of the aristo-cratic ideal of hberal culture in the meritocratic university was theinauguration of the honors program. Started at Swarthmore byPresident Frank Aydelotte, a former English professor at Indiana,its purpose was to provide for the elite and to avoid the worst conse-quences of the democratization of opportunity in higher education(Rudolph, Curriculum 230-31; Phillip Hicks; Spiller).

The proponents of liberal culture, for all their aristocratic airs,performed a valuable service for the university. Their continued op-position to the narrow specialization of the prokssional curriculakept the liberal arts a vital force in higher education. While theirideal was sometimes extremeat times implying that the true endof education should be a Paterian retirement from active lifeitwas perhaps occasionally necessary given the fervor of their oppo-nents for the practical. Those English department members who ad-vocated a rhetoric based on the ideal of liberal culture also played animportant part in the development of a new rhetorica part theyv mild not, however, point to with satisfaction.

8 6.

The Influence of Progressive Education: 1920 IWO 73

Expressionistic Rhetoric

The ideal of liberal culture indirectly encouraged develop-men_ of expressionistic rhetoric through its philosophical idealismand its emphasis on the cultivation of the self, both derived from itsties to a Brahminieal romanticism. We saw in the last chapter thatOsgood in 1915 had pointed to the inability to write as a spiritualmalady. In a 1922 essay he sounded the same note, asserting,"Clearness, force, correetnessthe:;e threecome not by processtreatment, but only out of 'the abysmal depths of personality'." Cit-ing Plato's Phaedrus, Osgood argued that good writing arises fromthe "energies of the spirit." Although the good teacher can reachthese energies, "he or she cannot tell how, any more than Burns cantell us how to write an immortal song" (162). Writing involves theself and is an art. Learning and teaching it can be accomplished butnot explained. Of course, the best approach is through literature,"literature employed as the revealer of nature and of life. literatureas a. personal matter, of the ear, the eye, the mind, the spirit" (164).Once again, Osgood was emphasizing the persona: and private rture of knowledge and of composing. If we democratize bis state-ments, holding that what is true for the composing of geniuses fBurns or Platois true fo. all iudividuals (as d I, for example,Emerson), we tro in the realm of expressionistic rhetoric.

Liberal culture helped create a climate in which expressionisticrhetoric could develop, but the sources of expressionism are farfrom a nineteenth-century mandarin romanticism. The origin ofthis rhetoric can instead be found in the postwar, Freudian-inspired,expressionistic notions of childhot,d education that the progressivesattempted to propagate. A s Cremin explained, the earlier radical-ism orthe artists !ind literati who flocked to the Greenwich Villagesof New York, Chicago, and San Francisco" before World War I hadbeen abandoned. In its place was established "a polyglot system ofideas that combined Ow doctrine of sell-exoression, liberty, andpsychological adjustment into a confident, iconoclastic individual-ism that fought the constraints of Babbitry and the discipline of so-cial reform as well" (201). This tendency in turn "developed its owncharacteristic pedagogical argument: the notion that each individualhas uniquely creative potentialities and that a school in wI''eh chil-dren are encouraged freely to develop their potenhalities is the best

87

74 Rhetork and Reality

guarantee of a larger society truly devoted to human worth and ex-cellence" (202). In the experimental schools of Caroline Pratt,Hughes Mearns and Satis Coleman, ond Lucy Sprague Mitchell andWilly Levin was found an extension of the aesthetic expressionismof the music of Charles Ives, the dance of Isadm a Duncan and Mar-tha Graham, and thu painting of Max Weber.

Expressionistic rhetoric was further encouraged by a pordarizedFreudianism. -Teachers were urged," Cremin explained, "to recog-nize the unconscious as the real source of motivation and behaviorin themselves and their students. The ,_ssential task of educationwas seen as one of' sublimating the child's repressed ,:motion intosocially useful channels" (209). In practice, this too often became apermissiveness that located the basis of education in the abandon-ment of repression: "Preoccupation with repn ssion became a denialof authority, preoccupation with the emotions, a denial of ration-ality" (210). The aim of education fbr both aesthetic expression-ists and Freudians became individual transfOrmationnot socialchangeas the key to both social and personal well-being. And forboth groups art became the agency that brougl,t about the transfor-mation. Thus, an unlikely union of patrician romanticism, aestheticexpressionism, and a domesticated Freudianism brought about inAmerican schools and colleges a view of writing as art that encour-aged an expressionist rhetoric and a new emphaLis on the value ofcreativity in the writing classroom.

For expressionistic rhetoric, we recall. writingall writiu.4isart. This means that writing can be learned but not taught. Thework of the teacher is to provide an environment in which studentscan learn what cannot be directly imparted in instruction. Thatwhich the writer is trying to expressthe content of knowledgeisthe product of a private and personal vision that cannot be ex-pressed in normal, everyday language. This language, after all, re-fers to the public world ofsensory data. Instead, the wrqer. like thepatient underoing psychoanalysis, must learn to use inorder to express this private realm. For the romantit. ;lawn!had meaning because it pointed meiaphorically to a hign.A, spiritualreality. For the Freudian, nature has significance beelose ic can beused to express in metaphor the truths of the unconscious, truthsthat come to us only in metaphorthrough displacement or con-densation, for example. The writing teacher must therefore encour-

88


age the student to call on metaphor, to seek in sensory experientmaterials that can lw used in suggesting the truths of the uncon-sciousthe private, personal, visionary world of u:Zimate truth.Through writing, the student is thus getting in touch with thesource of all human experience and shaping a new and better milThe product of this creative process is organic, representing themerger of form and content. Each grows out of the other; to changeone is to change both.

It is from expressionistic rhetoric in the twenties, and just before,that we get the first extensive discussions emphasizing the "pro-cess" of composing over the "product." In 1919, for example, Ray-mond Weavir of Columbia complained that the "process by whichsuccessful writers have brought their work to its final form has notbeen the interest of the pedagogue. Rather has he dissected thefinished productand front such analysis he has delivered to in-arti,:ulate students counsels of literary perfection" (63-64). Weaverfelt that what was needed in teaching descriptive writing was a psy-hologica! approach in which the student must use all the senses in

uescrilnng, "must catch the passing phenomenon in all its noveltyand idiosyncracy, must dive bodily into the stream of sensation, mo-mentarily escape from tlw inertia and momentum of practical life"(68-69). Writing is art, is divorced from the world of affairs, and thestudent must be persuaded that -Shakespearian gifts of intellect andimagination lic well hidden in some corner of his organism" (71).Weaver accordingly praised Vassar's course in descriptive writing be-cause of its "emphasis on the creative side" and its effort "to en-large, actually, the perceptive faculties" (74). It.cognizing the liter-ar ,. nature of all writing, Vassar provided "analyses of the methods ofgreat writers, together with constant survey of one another's work"(75). The editorial group, a commonplace of the expressionist class-room, was likewise enumraged. Weaver insisted that sensory detailsbe used to suggest states of emotion, thereby achieving originalityandas he quoted from George Santayanaexpressing the "quali-ties we may call tertiary, such as pain, kar, joy, malice, feebleness,expectancy" (78).

A similar approach to freshman composition was advocated in anumber of essays appearing in the 1922 volume of English Journal.For example, Allan II. Gillwrt of Trinity Colkge, North Carolina,argued that "all lumest writing--and no other sort is worth correct-

8;1


ing is th, expression of the nature of the student." The teachere011id ..nta'cc wht)lesale changes in the sentences of many stu-dents without pretty general substitutes of his own personality fOrtheirs" (394). Indeed, Gilbert asserted that as far as writing abilityw.- s conlerned, half of the students were equal to the instructor andsome were clearly superior. lie felt that students must write to

ase themselves, not the teacher, because "the teacher's power tobring ;11.out a change in the writing of students is limited by theirminds, and only what springs from within them counts in makinggood writing." Each student should therefore be encouraged to de-vt lop her -own genius," the teacher meanwhile celebrating the di-versity of the wwks produced since this would indicate that "pupils

developing their own natures" (396). Literature should be wedfor subject matter because, "as poetry is in contact with life, it is incontact with the experience of the student: hence everyone has anopportunity to use the fruits of his own observation" (399). From thisperspective the work of art is simply a point of departure for stu-dents to record their own responses, not to attempt literary criti-cism. Gilbert used a workshop approach (called "laboratory work")that encouraged a nondirective method in the teacher: "In the labo-ratory work the teacher makes every AO to adjust himself tothe individual student, considering that his duty is not to correctpapers, but to bring the student to correct and improve them forhimself" (403). The product displaying a small improvement thatcame from a student's own effort was to be preferred to the outstand-ing piece resulting from the teacher having recomposed a student'sv ork: "The instructor is gadfly rather than dictator" (403).

Oakley Calvin Johnson of the University of Michigan argued in a1928 English Journal essay that, since writing is an art, all writingteachers must themselves be writers. Freshman composition teach-ers are the counterparts of painters, poets, and musicians, and mustnot allow "practical" people to reduce them to theme correctors.The remedy is simple: "There must be less dogmatism, less ped-antry, less arbitrary formalism, and more freedom, more up-to-dateness in language and in theme material, more emphasis on irdi-viduality." The student must, like artists in other areas, master toolsand techniques, but the ultimate aim is to "express his personality"(413). There is something in all great artists that is beyond teach-ing, but much can still be taught in the freshman classroom, particu-

9 0


larly the reports of artists on their learning of "the complete pro-cess" (414).

Adele Bildersee, associate professor of English at Hunter Collegeof the City University of' New York, published one of the most popu-lar expressionist textbooks of the twenties and thirties. EntitledImaginative Writing, the text was designed to deal with descriptiveand narrative writing in discursive prose as well as in creative writ-ing. It blurred the distinction between rhetoric and poetic, how-ever, with both being considered as art. In her preface. Bilo.Tseeexplained: "The aim of the book is to guide students in learning howto write. During twenty years, more or less, of experience, theteacher who writes the book has learned this: that the art of writingcannot be taught; it can only be learned. The part the teacher canplay in this process is that of guide and advisercollaborator, ifneed be" (ix). As a result, the subject matter of the book is not writ-ing, but the student. The young writer, like the painter, can learnfrom the work accomplished by the mastersin Bildersee's text, al-most always artists rather than rhetoriciansbut even from themonly a little can be gathered. At the basis of writing is a "mystery"that can never be simply formulated.

Bildersee did not mean to discourage the student with her com-mentary. She felt that while writing is indeed an art, it is one that allcan learn. It is within the reach of every student, with the necessarycaveat that the student be prepared to work. I ler text thus incorpo-rated excerpts in \ 'Nich writers discussed the pains involved in theircomposing, including both essayists, such as Lafcadio !learn andIrvin S. Cobb, and artists, such as Amy Lowell, Keats, and Robert.ouis Stevenson. And although Bildersee attempted to justify in-

chiding pure sensory description for its own sake in a writing text,she explicitly called on Car!yle, Browning, and Sheiley commentingon the ways in which sensory detail ought to be used metaphoricallyto suggest what lies beyond the material. The same emphasis onmetaphor may be found in the chapter entitled "Feeling for Words,"where she underscored the inherently metaphoric nature of lan-guage: "Indeed the greatest number of figures are those ''iat we usequite unconsciously, without being aware that we have left prosaicliteralness behind and that we are using figurative language" (85). Itis this inherent metaphoric nature of language that the writer is tocultivatestriving, of course, for the fresh and original.


Proponents of expressionistic writing continued to appear in printin the late twenties and throughout the thirties. In 1928, RichardReeve's "A Study in Dreams and Freshman Composition" recom-mended that students use their dreams as points of departure forwriting personal experience essays. His application of psychoana-lytical thought was innocent and simplistic, but it indicates the at-tempts being made to apply this mode of thought in the writingclass. In 1930, Howard Francis Seeley's "Composition as a Liberat-ing Activity" offered a more rigorous statement. Seeley, an educa-tion professor at Ohio State, saw writing as the use of language inorder to create the self and believed students must be told that-originality means nothing more terrifying than being themselves inwhat they say and how they say it" (113). Writing itself will generatethis original thought, he maintained, since imagination is shared byall. In a 1937 article, John C. McCloskey of the University of Ore-gon deplored the emphasis on the forms of discourse, arguing thatthis distorts "the actual process of writing" (12). His position wasthat writing is the "personal expression of ideas" (116), especiallyideas that arise out of personal observation or reaction and that arecouched in figures of speech. Finally, Edith Christina Johnson ofWelles' College, in a 1938 English Journal article, began by deny-ing that the essay should be taught as self-expression, but soon afterdescribed it in these terms: -The essay, like poetryit has beencalled the prose lyriclifts the scales from the inner eye of mindand spirit as it awakens insight into truth revealed in familiar expres-$ion and scene" (762-63). She saw the essay as leading to "self-hood," "personal itkntity," and knowledge of the self, and providing-for the expression of thoughts, images, sudden visions of truth"(76.5) that are a part of everyone's experience.

Filially, J. McBride Dabbs in 1932 ()tiered a full picture of the ex-pressionistic writing class. Ile included the concept of organic form:1 low we say a thing depends on what we have to say." Ile advised

that students assutae the attitude of tlw would-be artist, and he con-ducted his class as an extended editorial group, -reading, chiefly forimpiration, the writings of the class" (745). Ilk students kept jour-nals, "first, to give practice in writing; second, to remind [them] ofthe need of keeping alive to impressions and ideas; and, third, toserve as a storehouse for this material, some of which would later bedeveloped and completed" (746). Writing in the class consisted of

92


subjects and forms chosen by the students themselveswhetherrhetorical or poeticnot discourse dictated by the teacher. And atthe end of the course, each student submitted a portfolio consistingof the work completedcommonly a greater number of pages thanwhen assignments were given, even though there "were no mini-mum or maximum requirements" (748). Students were evaluated onthe quantity and quality of this work, but the real benefit of thecourse was "a more continuous sense of creation" (749).

The influence of expressionism in art and of Freudian psychologyalso encouraged the rise of creative writing courses in high schoolsand colleges. Alice Bidwell Wesenberg of Butler College com-mented in 1927 that the census of 1930 ought to include a tabulationof the poets in the nation since it seemed to her that everybody waswriting poetry. She pointed to a number of reasons for this creativeoutburst. Foremost was -a changed attitude both toward poetry andtoward the poetic faculty. Of poetry we think now as not more spe-cial than prose; the poetic faculty is now considered universal"(213). This breakdown of the distinction between rhetoric and po-etic and the attendant democratization of the ability to create was,for Wesenberg, a part of the romanticism that led to expressionismand Freudianism and to the resultant flowering of creativity:

It is the generaluniversaldesire for sdf-expression, a direct result ofall our modern thinking, that is the fertile soil for all their seeds. . .

The young people now leaving the colleges have been encouraged sincekindergarten days in creating; nothing at the family dinner table has beenso interesting as the child's untrammeled talk. Repression has been ta-boo, expression canonized Blame Rousseau for it, or praise him; butremember he is largely responsible for the present flood of poetry inAmerica. (215)

There was everywhere, Wesenberg added, an interest in poetryin college classes offered, in the books available at corner book-stores, and in the periodical press, both popular and specialized.

Further evidence of this outburst of creati re writing in the schoolsand colleges of the twenties and thirties is .ibundant. In 1929, En-glish Journal devoted two separate editorials to the phenomenon,making a call in the second for articles on the subject. The reviewpages of this journal also frequently mentioned collections of the

93

So Rhetoric and Reality

creative work of' high school students, as well as collections of dis-cussions by creative writers about their work. In addition, therewere numerous articles on teaching creative writing in English Jour-nal, including an engaging survey in 1931. Snow Long ley Houshstudied sixty-three college catalogs and received replies to ques-tionnaires from a number of these schools. Unfortunately, althoughher sample was regionally representative, her statistical tn .atmentis highly suspect. Still, her raw data are suggestive. She found thatforty-one of the schools considered had "some form of creative writ-ing as part of the curriculum" (672), but that all schools encourAgedit as an extracurricular activity. Most creative writing courses pro-vided for the selection of students on the basis of writing sampksand stressed the development of critical standards rather than, asin the high school, personality enrichment. Indeed, a number ofcollegesAmherst, Michigan, Columbia, Iowa, Northwestern,Smithhad hired famous poets. English departments, in Housh'sopinion, were becoming like art departments, counting creativework as the equal of scholarship in awarding prizes. Finally, shelimnd that colleges tended to go through predictable, evolutionarystages in arriving at creative writing courses. Schools first offeredcourses focusing on rhetorical principles, then combined rhetoricand composition, then offered composition alone, and, at last, de-veloped distinctive creative writing courses.

One other development contributed to the flowering of expres-sionistic rhetoric and creative writing courses during this period.Throughout the twenties, attempts were made to replace the his-torical and philological method in academic literary criticism withan approach that emphasized the aesthetic qualities of the work ofart. As we have seen, the lwst-known spokesperson for one branchof this reform movement was Joel Spingarn, who relied extensivelyon the work of Benedetto Croce. Spingarn opposed all existing aca-demic approaches to literary criticismclassical and modern viewsol' genre and figures, social approaches in the manner of Spencerand Taint!, the moral approaches of the Genteel Traditionand pro-posed in their stead "The New Criticism," the title of a lecture de-livered at Columbia in 1910. He wished the critic to examine thework of art without preconceptions, looking to discover in it the au-thor's intention and the degree to which this intention had been re-alized. This method demanded an act of creation on the part of flu!

Q A't


critic, a meeting of one creative spirit with another. In Spingarn'sterms, "taste must reproduce the work of art within itself in order tounderstand and judge it; and at that moment aesthetic judgment be-comes nothing more nor less than creative art itself" (34). Thus,criticism and creativity are both ultimately based on intuition sinceall truth is finally the result of an original and private vision, or theoriginal and private verification of an act of original and private vi-sion. Articles using Spingarn's approach in teaching literature ap-peared in professional journals throughout the twenties, providing acounterpart in poetic to the expressionistic rhetoric of the period(see Jones, Bennett, Gilman, Priestley, Solve).

Social Rhetoric

The tendency to view writing as a social activity, growing within asocial context and carrying social consequences, increased after theonset of the Depression. In some ways this was a return to the socialreform :mpulse found among the proponents of progressive educa-tion before World War I. There can be no mistaking in these ap-proaches a return to collectivist alternatives to solving the nation'sproblems and an increasing opposition to individualism in both theeconomic and social reahns. As Arthur N. Applebee has pointedout policy statements by the American Historical Society, the Pro-gre.,ive Education Association, and the NCTE during the thirtiesall underscored a reawakened sense of communal responsibilityboth at home and internationally and a rejection of the ideal of ex-treme individualism (116).

The effects of this turn to the social and collective in the writing,lassroom were varied. At one extreme, the concern for the socialimplications of the composition class led to an exclusion of all writ-ing tasks except those found at the time to be needed by adults. Thisvery program for public schools was in fact reemme lided by anNCTE committee in 1926 after conducting a survey ot the kind efwriting most adults ordinarily undertook in their pr: fessipnal andprivate lives ("Report of the Committee en Place"). Ai its best, how-ever, the recognition of the social nature c.,* writing led to a fullyblown rhetoric of public discour3e, a transactional rhetoric that wasclose to an Aristotelian model. Here was an attempt to prepare stu-

95


dents for a comprehensive response to varied rhetorical situations,involving a consideration of the writer's and audience's roles and thedefinition of issues and exigencies. This rhetoric appeared mostfully articulated at the end of the thirties, but a number of note-worthy proposals led up to it.

Even before 1930, attempts had been made to shift the attentionof the writing classroom away from expressionism on the one handand current-traditional rhetoric on the other. Roy T. Thompson of'the University of Southern California, while admitting that super-ficial correctness was more important than subjeq matter in fresh-man composition, argued that the course ought to yepare individu-als for citizenship by asking them to write about political subjects.The purpose of doing so would be to train the individual to assumethe responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy, "to stand alonein the sense that he can reach his own conc.' ions by processes ofhis own independent thinking" (578). E. C. ,:ock at Central StateTeachers College in Michigan indicated a similar shift in emphasis.She assured the readers of English Journal that her experimentshowing that individual conferences improved student performancewould not result in the "loss ofany social contacts, fiu. the class reci-tation still retains the social situation" (596). And in a survey of 109colleges published in 1929, Raymond P. Currier deplored the dis-covery that writim; courses emphasized practical ability at the ex-pense of "ethicA, social, and philosophical attitudes" (848). liecalled for more courses dealing with these attitudes as well as a shiftin writing classes toward closer attention to them. Finally, in "SocialIdeals in Freshman English," Frank Earl Ward of Macalester Col-lege reported a current-traditional approach to writing instructionemphasizing arrangement and superficial correctness; yet at thesame time he was trying to make the course serve the "social arts,"emphasizing small-group work with teacher and peers in order tomake freshman composition "a course in the art of social life" (297).

As the thirties brought its increasing store of human misery, theattention of composition teachers became more clearly fmused onwriting as a response to social contexts. II . W. Davis at Kansas Stateargued for writing as a social act in which the teacher must focus on"the writing process rather than the finished product" (802). Ac-cording to her view, which was close to the epistemic, language is anactivity that is a part of the entire range of the student's behavior.

9 6


The English teacher thus can play only a small role in the stu-dent's total development, but she must take this role seriously. Theteacher's first duty is to be a writer herself, since only in this way canshe come to understand the complexities of the writing process.This will also make the teacher realize an important fact: themes'or 'compositions are rarely encountered in the world of literature,journalism, society, or business" (800); English department "themes"lack not only a compelling purpose but also the complex audiencefound in actual writing situations. In addition, Davis noted that col-lege writing courses focused on correctness to the neglect of effec-tiveness, largely because the latter is the more difficult and themore important in learning to write and in evaluating performance.Writers, Davis insisted, "learn to write by writingand correctingand revising" (802), and the teacher should feel free to use class timefor this purpose.

Burges Johnson of Union College and Helene Hartley of SyracuseUniversity received a large Carnegie Corporation grant during thethirties to conduct an extensive study of college writing. Johnsonpublished pamphlets on the freshman course, creative writingcourses, and journalism courses, and in 1936 he and Hartley re-ported the results of a research study they had conducted on theeffects of three different approaches to teaching composition. Thelast offers a useful summary of the entire work of the two inves-tigators. The methodology of this study is suspect, but its assump-tions about rhetoric are worth considering.

Although Johnson and Hartley compared three approaches toteaching writing, only two were finally considered. The experi-mental approach used a seminar method based upon practices increative writing and journalism courses. Student essays were drawnfrom personal experience, with early assignments being journal-isticrequiring reporting and eventually editorializingand withlater assignments focusing on the infUrmal essay. Also included wereoccasional short pieces of dramatic and literary criticism and brieffictional efforts. Reader interest and the use of authoritative citationwhen appropriate were considered important in these assignments.Most important was that students read all papers aloud to the entireclass and were given immediate responses, with each student pre-senting one paper per week. No textbook or drill in mechanics wasused, and the teacher did not lecture but acted instead as an ad-

9 7


ditional respondent. 1 he contrasting method was the current-traditional approach, which relied on the imitation of models, theforms of discourse, and the study of sentences, paragraphs, andlarger structural units. A handbook was also used to help in markingerrors in punctuation and gra. imar. After one year, this method wasdropped from the experiment because of its obvious inferiority. Fi-nally, a control group wrote about essays it had read, with classesfocusing on using the reading to improve the thinking of the stu-dents, -on the theory that once the thoughts are clear, well orga-nized and precise, the writing tht.n will be clear, well organized andprecise also. (20).

Not surprif:ngly, Johnson and Hartley concluded that the experi-mental metho 1. was superior to the control method when studentessays were con ,i(lered for -effectiveness," mechanical correctness,and -individuality )f expression" (36), and when the results ofan ob-jective grammar an 'sage test and the responses of students to thetwo methods were cc.:, pared. The researchers admitted, however,that no statistically significant differences between the two groupswere found. Still, the study is important because it shows an at-tempt to break down the distinctions between different kinds ofwriting, especially the strictures separating creative writing, jour-nalism, business and technical writing, and academic writing. John-son and Hartley saw all of these as responses to particular rhetoricalconstraints and exigenciesrhetorical matters that should be con-sidered in freshman composition. They also emphasized writing as aprocess of discovery, viewing writing not as transcription but as in-vention, the writer working out meaning in the process of writing.And they were interested in the relation of differing personalitytypes and the composing process, sponsoring research by Floyd A.Allport, Lynette Walker, and Eleanor Lathers in this area. Theyeven used a device called an oeulophotometric instrument to mea-sure eye movements of readers in an effort to arrive at a physiologi-cal measure of writing effectiveness. Johnson and Hartley were in-novative and energetic examiners of the composing process whoattempted to place writing within a larger context that included thephysiological, the cognitive, and, especially, the social.

Another attempt to create a rhetoric of public discourse wasundertaken by Herbert Ellsworth Childs of Oregon State Agricul-tural College, who wished to return a rhetoric of political and social

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actioo to the center of the curriculum. DU:outing the view thatfreshman composition should be a course in tcAnieal fiindaaientals,he insisted that it "must Provide the Freshman w,th an appvoach tohis educational life." By this he meant that it ought to be a course inthinking about thinking, the student learning "why he should learnbefore he attempts lea:ning itself" (232). Childs believed that thewriting course should perform the duties it historically had servedin the curriculum, in:roducing students to the many-sided intellec-tual life," acting as a central, cohesive unit, "fixing together all thecentrifugally inclined bodies of knowledge that constitute the typi-cal curriculum in liberal arts and sciences." And it should Jo this byencouraging "the development of . . . students' opinions on scien-tific, religious, economic, and educational problems" (234), the tra-ditional realms of rhetoric. Even technical and vocational studentsneeded to understand that their specialties were related to "a socialand industrial system based in the last analysis on a series of intel-lectual premises. Even the Tri-borough Bridge is intellectually re-lated to the modern theory of the state" (235). In Childs's view, thefreshman course offered "a mode of thinking, namely, the spirit offree inquiry" (256), and the teacher had to be aware of this if shewere to fulfill her duty, participating "in the Freshman's whole edu-cation instead of the techniques of writing only" (237).

There were also a number of attempts in the thirties to build thefreshman writing courses around addressing the social problemscaused by the country's economic failure. Ralph L. Henry of Car-leton College found that his students preferred a course based on "aprocess of stimulation growing out of vigorous class discussion ofpresent-day controversial literature." Using essays, sometimes fromcurrent periodicals, Henry discovered that students' responseswere -interested and intelligent" (395) and that by this process theyproduced writing superior to that elicited by the reading of litera-ture. Karl W. Dykema of Ironwood Junior College in Michigan de-voted an entire term to student essays on the topic of "multiplyingfunctions of government in the domain of economy, health, safety,education, and cultural development" (763), focusing on the rele-vance of this issue to the local community. The most ambitious re-port of a course based on a rhetoric of public discourse was offeredby Earl L. Vance of Florida State College for Women. Vance wished"to build the student's writing solidly on his life-backgroundits

9 9


scene, people, ideology, social structure, and total character." Thecourse centered for an entire semester on the student's writingabout her hometown. Its procedure was to have the student presentat the beginning of the course a plan for twelve short papers thatwould in sum present an accurate view of the community. The stu-dent was asked to emphasize in this plan "first, the individual char-acteristics of his particular town and, second, its paramount 'prob-lems'," with the emphasis on being critical of "its shortcomings, itsinherent conflicts, difficulties. possibilities, and danger spots" (319).Vance provided a set of questions for st, idents to use in discoveringthe potential trouble areas in their hometown, focusing on geo-graphical, economic, political, and social topics. These concernsranged from "natural obstacles of climate, soils, water sources, andlocation" to "educational limitations, distorted moral values, un-sound class distinctions" (321). As students dealt repeatedly withthe same topic, their understanding grew, encouraging them to "re-vise and re-write and amplif% their material." Most important, thecomposition course further( 1 the students' "educational progress"by relating writing to their studies in "history, economics, govern-ment, sociology, geography, religion, and ethics" (322). The writingcourse thus became the center of each student's "total education, ex-perience, and self" (323).

Perhaps the most eloquent plea for a freshman course based on arhetoric of public discourse was Warren Taylor's 1938 essay entitled"Rhetoric in a I, olocracv." Ins statement seems especially com-pelling when it is considered that he was one of the few instructorsof prokssorial rank teaching the freshman course at Wisconsin, aschool which at one point used teaching assistants for 80% of itsfreshman offerings. Taykr argued for the teaching of writing in away that would serve the political role of the individual in a demo-cratic state. lie deplored the mechanical view of language found intwo kinds of writing courses, the one emphasizing superficial cor-rect], :wd the other focusing on wisdom as the exclusive provinceof the kw. Taylor saw language as symbolic action carrying conse-quences in the material and social worlds. The student who is giventhis noti(m of language is offered genuine knowledge: "Ile knowsthat behind advertisement, editorial, newsreel, radio speech, ar-ticle, or book there are motives which language may obscure or hideiiltogether. Ile knows what language in the process of expressing and

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comprehending motives. may do to them: and what motives, givenform in language, way do to it- (853). Most important, Thy ;or wascoucerned that the uses of language in a democratic st ite be under-stood by teachers and students alike. Denuwratic conceptions ;Ilan-guage and rhetoric establish an open ctmimunity for free discourse, acommunity where the rights oldie people to express themselves areprotected. This makes knowledge available to all, whereas its op-posite makes ignorance the normal state of th.! majority.

Taylor's concern was with defining a i iwtorie that .vould providefor a democratic state. lie Nils troubled that America lacked a coo-ception (,f rhetoric to serve thi.: end, and he wished to fill the need:"bi this paper rhetoric is viewed as the art of making reasonedevaluations of public utterances, of discovering the worth of themeans used to communicate instrnctive knowledge and to affectopinion. As such, it requires of Its users a knowledge of the neansby which lines of action designed to solve socia problems may bepresented to the people and of the ways in whi'211 tbey may respondto them' (854). Taylo7 insisted that this view of rhetoric should lw atthe heart of education, preparing individuals for their social respon-sibilitiesresponsibilities that must be fulfilled if they are to sur-vive as free citizens. Universities must accordingly further threeends: "discovering truths, communicating truths, and, trainingan enlightened citizenry, making it possible for political action to bebrought in line with tested principles ;rad not merely per.:onal orparty advantage." Universities not only must search for truth, theymust come to understand its equitable dissemination, "the means ofcommunicating knowledge that would enable the body pontic toshare the rewards of learning" (855).

Taylor felt that the classroom rhetorics of the time did not do this.Ile saw handbooks as useless: "Who we really are when we speakand to whom we speak when we speak and what we say when wespeak and why we speak at all are factors not in the grouping ofrules." Nor did the country need a rhetoric of "artifice and ostenta-tion" (855) that woi Id make the worst case appear the best. Signifi-cantly, Taylor did nc. want a rhetoric of persuasion, but calledinstead for a rhetom of elucidation. As he explained, rhetoric con-siders "the ways in which ideas and misapprehensions take form inlanguage and in action. the end of the use of the methods of rheto-ric as a practical art of elucidation would be realized, not in results

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obtained, but in making unmistakably clear possible lines of actionand their respective consequences. In a democracy, action shouldbe the result of understanding, not of persuasion. Citizens shouldargue collectively on a course to be followed for the common good.If rhetoric marked all open roads clearly, the body politic, not rheto-ric, could rightly be blamed for wrong choice" (856). There is a bittoo much innocent faith in rational discourse in Taylor's argumentand too little confidence in the power of dialogue in an open com-munity to reveal the false and the inadvisable, but it clearly repre-sents an enlightened conception of the role of a social rhetoric ofpublic discourse in a democratic state. And for Taylor the keepers ofthis rhetoric were writing teachers: -Formulating the principles of arhetoric for democracy and stating the criteria for the evaluation ofthe use of these principles in public utterances is rightly the job ofcomposition teachers" (857). They must ensure that colleges producestudents who can -realize the value of education in political action"(858). Rhetoric will then serve for u, the same function as it did inancient Greece: it will expose error, supply evidence, elucidatecourses of action, and defend us from our enemies.

Taylor's statement offers a remarkably expanded role for the placeof composition in the college curriculum. A number of factors in thethirties made for an environment in which such a statement was pos-sible. The most pressing larger concerns were the Depression athome and the threat of fascism from abroad. More locally, the influ-ence of progressive politics in defining the service mission of theUniversity of Wisconsin was undoubtedly important. Still anotheriniportant contribution to Taylor's position was the work of lin-guists who in the twenties and thirties were redefining the natureof language.

A number of landmark studies in current English usage implicitlysupported the social basis of rhetorical discourse. The most impor-tant of these were Sterling Andrus Leonard's The Doctrine of Cor-rectness in English Usage, 1700-1800 (1929) and Current EnglishUsage (1932), Robert C. Pooley's Grammar and Usage in Textbookson English (1933), A. Marckwardt and Fred G. Walcott's Factsabout Current English Usage (1938), and Charles Fries's AmericanEnglish Grammar (1940). While these individuals were committedto scientific and descriptive views of usage and grammar, their workinsisted on the social basis of lanpage and the need for English

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teachers to consider the importance of class and political contexts inteaching writing. The kind of view they encouraged can be seen in a1937 essay by Walter Barnes, education professor at New York Uni-versity, entitled "American Youth and Their Language."

Barnes began by setting forth his creed, "namely, that language issocial activity" (283), meaning by this that it "is primarily a mode ofsocial conduct, a type of group behavior" (285). It is not learned bystudying thought processes (logical skills) or grammar and vocabu-lary (linguistics). It is learned by "adaptation to person; to time,place and circumstances" (286)in other words, through using it ingroup activity. Language for -clear, calm reflection" and for "forceful,charming self-expression" is important, but for the most part thestudent's use of language and his learning of it -will depend upon hisbehavior as a member of a group, upon his agility and resilience,upon his adaptation to circumstances, his co-operativenessinshort, upon his social intelligence" (287). This means that the stu-dent must not subscribe to a single standard in the way language isused. Correctness or incorrectness in thought and usage is deter-mined by the social context in which language is used, not by pre-determined and fixed standards: -Words are often not as useful asgestures or facial expression; style is a matter of attitude, voice,physical behavior; unity and coherence, so necessary in structuraldiscourse, yield place to appropriateness and adjustment, natu-ralism and sincerity" (287). Language education must thus providestudents with a wide repertoire of strategies for using language in awide variety of social contexts. Students need to be prepared for theformal "Emily-Postish situation in life" (289)as well as for the infor-mal demands of the colloquial, and the only way to accomplish thisis for students to he allowed to try varied uses of language in theclassroom.

Barnes's comments show a somewhat excessive reliance on theNCTE's Experience Curriculum in English (1935) in its tendency tobase classroom activities on the actual social situations that studentswould later encounter. Still, Barnes simultaneously refused to re-strict writing and speaking (the latter was also at the ('enter of theExperience Curriculum) to formal patterns of arrangement andusage, as did the current-traditionalists, or to expressive uses, asdid the expressionists. It is notable that he wished to include allthree emphases so that students would learn to write and speak


effectively in the entire range of discourse communities they wouldlater encounter.

Finally, support for the social basis of rhetorical discourse alsocame from academic literary criticism. In the work of Vernon LouisParrington is found a counterpart to Warren Taylor's reaction to themeritocratic rhetoric of the current-traditional approach and the in-dividualism of expressionism. As Robert Weimann has commented:"The work of radical Jeffersonian democrat Vernon Louis Parringlim,Main Currents in American Thought (1927-30), reflects both thetriumph and the debacle of the progressive resolution of the crisisof bourgeois liberalism. This crisis led him to question the idea ofthe economic freedom of the individual and resulted in a break withthe philosophy Of individualism and the principle of laissez-faire"(1(6). The work of such Marxist critics as Granville Hickswhosearticles appeared frequently in the pages of English JournalV. F.Calverton, and Bernard Smith also provided social approaches to lit-erary criticism. And of course Kenneth Burke's method in Counter-Statement (1931) and Attitudes toward Ilistory (1937) provided amodel for a social and dialectical approach to both rhetoric andpoetic.

Conclusion

The thirties witnessed two notable calls for the abolishment of therequired freshman writing course. In 1932, Alvin C. Enrich com-pared the objective test scores of students who had taken the fresh-man course with those who had not. Discovering no significantdifferences, he called for a type of writing-across-the-curriculum ap-proach in which essays written in a content course would be evalu-ated for correctness by an English teacher. In 1939, Oscar JamesCampbell declared that the freshman writing course should be abol-ished because it was harmItil to students and teacher. According toCampbell, students could not write because they had nothing to say,and the only solution was to fill this void. Ile recommended that thisbe done by a subject-matter teachera geology professor, for ex-ampleassigning essays in his or her area of expertise and evalu-ating them. In Campbell's view the present system had created apermanent underclassan "academic proletariat" (181)of com-

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position teachers who were prevented from promotion and fromteaching the area of their expertise: literature, the real business ofthe English department. Ile felt that English departments existedto provide the humanizing influence of literature, and compositionwas an "alien intruder" (183) that destroyed the faculty's credibility.

These two attacks on the freshman writing course represent twoimportant rhetorical schools of the periodthe skills approach ofcurrent-traditionalism and the humanistic approach of liberal cul-ture. E .ch's and Campbell's pleas for abandoning the course werein vain. Most students could simply not be expected to meet thecomplex demands of' the rhetorical situations presented in collegewithout additional writing instruction. And this was true not only ofthe large, democratic s.:te universities but also of the more exclusiveschools of the Atlantic seaboard. Yale, for example, in the late twen-ties introduced a noncredit course called the "Awkward Squad" toprovide remedial instruction for those students whose writing in thefreshman literature course showed deficiencies (Towle), and a simi-lar plan was installed at the same thne at Colunthia airi Rutgers(Wozniak 185). In his report to the Board olOverseers in 1939, liar-vard's President James B. Conant admitted, -From an sides, aca-demic and nonacademic, we hear complaints of the inability of theaverage graduate to write either correctly or fluently" (qtd. inWozniak 197). Conant's solution was "prescribed work" in t:le fresh-man composition class, and in this remedy he was followed by thevast majority af college presidents throughout the country.

5

The Communications Emphasis:1940-1960

"11E MOST SIGNIFICANT CURRICULAR DEVELOPMENT IN AMERI-can colleges between 1940 and 1960 was the mushrooming of thegeneral education movement. This effort had first made an impactafter World War I as an attempt to provide a group of courses thatwould compensate for the specialintion encouraged by the new em-phasis on training for the professions. It recommended that all stu-dents enroll in classes that provided a sense of cultural inheritanceand citizenship (Rudolph, Curriculum 237), such as the humanitiescourse offered at Reed, Chicago, and Columbia. Many schools alsoprovided broad courses in college adjustment and guidance, in themethodology of learning, or in contemporary civilization. Most ofthese efforts in general education fell to the fetish for specializationamong faculty as interdisciplinary courses were labeled as counterto the spirit of specialized academic research. The push for generaleducation requirements again emerged just before World War II inresponse to the Depression and the threats to democracy posed byfascism from abroad. After the war, these programs increased dra-matically, colleges again trying to combine the breadth of liberallearning with professional specialization. Their motivation was tosafeguard the American way of lifethe i:ocial stability provided bythe democratic method. This return to gen.eral education was led byHarvard, which, in the words of Frederick Rudolph, -proposed todemocratize what had once been the education of a gentleman andan aristocrat awl make it the education essential to the responsibili-ties of every citizen- (Curriculum 259). A number of state insti-

The Communications Emphasis: 1940-1960 93

tutions had preceded Harvard in alis effort, but Harvard's en-dorsement of the concept led to its widespread appearance. Whilegeneral education had always been an attempt to encompass thebroad educational base of the curriculum of liberal culture, its ap-pearance after the war included the commitment of progressiveeducation to the individual student, to social values, and to democ-racyeven though, as shall be seen, sometimes one or another ofthese ends worked against or even excluded its partners.

The most conspicuous feature of most general education pro-gramswith Flarvard here serving as an exceptionwas the com-munications course. This course, commonly interdepartmental,combined writing instruction with lessons in speaking, in reading,and sometimes even in listening. Its appearance profoundly influ-enced the nature of college writing instruction during the years tocome. In this chapter, I would like to trace the intellectual and socialforces shaping the communications course, examine its typical mani-festations, and consider its role in the formation of the Conferenceon College Composition and Commbnication (CCCC). I will thenturn to the dominant concerns of the profession as manifested inthe efforts of the fledgling CCCC, paying special attention to therelation of composition instruction to literature, linguistics, andrhetoricall three areas being central to the organization's ongoingefforts.

The Communications Course

The most powerful intellectual force influencing the commuyica-tions course was the General Semantics movement, founded in thethirties by Alfred Korzybski, a Polish-born mathematician and engi-neer. Korzybski was attempting to apply the techniques of scientificempiricism to the study of language. He was followed in this effortby such figures as Anatole Rapaport, a mathematical biologist;Stuart Chase, an economist; Wendell Johnson, professor of speechpathology and psychology; and Irving J. Lee, professor of speech.The most important disciple as far as communications courses wereconcerned was S. I. Hayakawaauthor of Language in Action(1941), an attempt to apply General Semantics to the compositioncourse, and of an expanded sequel entitled Language in Thought

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and Action (1949). Before World War II, General Semantics hadbeen considered a valuable tool in the analysis of propaganda com-ing from fascist states abroad. After the war, it came to be regardedas useful in the teaching of language in speech and compositionclasses as well as in the communications course.

The major concepts of General Semantics that found their wayinto the communications course are discussed in Daniel Fogarty'sRoots for a N ,c Rhetoric. The first of these has to do with theorganism-as-q, hole- principle. This simply argues that in respond-

ing to a stimulus the individual organism acts as a wholewith feel-ings, thoughts. and physiological responses. This holistic response,moreover, can be evoked even by a partial stimulusby a wordrath,T than the thing itself, for example. This mak.2s language andits structure important, since language alone can evoke responseswithout any actual physical stimulus being present. We must there-fore study language and purify it so that it does not evoke inappro-priate responses. We must also be careful about abstractions be-cause these always include fewer details than the actual event. Sinceall words are abstractions, language can never rept esent wholly thething-in-itself, but it can in its structure represent the relationshipof things to each other. These structeres in language and experiencemust be considered, a relatively easy task since Korzybski identifiesonly a few relations: cause and effect, spatial, geometrical, numer-ical, and qualitative and quantitative. Furthermore, we never knowthe objects of experience themselves but only the structural rela-tions among them. Finally, 'n responding to experience, the indi-vidual should take care to count the physical as being more impor-tant than the symbolic, preferring always the inductions of sensedata to the deductions of language.

flayakawa called on these basic ideas of General Semantics, rely-ing on three cognate conceptsthe ladder of abstraction, con-sciousness of abstraction, and figures of speechand on an epis-temological statement about the relation of language to object. Anabstraction lacIder refers to a set of terms tIlat become progressivelygeneral, moving farther and l'arther from sense experience, thuscoming to include more objects and fewer details for each object.(An example is the progressive generalization from an actual cow, tothe concept -cow," to livestock, to farm asset, to asset, to wealth.)We must constantly remain aware that we are abstracting in using

108

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with the number of veterans returning to school. In the 1939-40school year, enrollment in American colleges and universities was1,500,000. After shrinking to 800,000 in 1944-45, it jumped to1,676,800 in 1945-46 and to a peak of 2,444,900 in 1949-50. Thecommunications course was obviously an effective way to deal withthe special problems of many of these students, including as it didthe use of writing clinics. It also, ofcourse, was a way to deal with theincreased number of students, since the use of an interdepartmentalstaff could result in a more economical use of faculty. The other partthe war played in encouraging the development of the communica-tions course involveil the courses the army had set up for recruits oncollege campuses as part of the Army Specialized Training Personnel(ASTP) effort. The ASTP program dealing with English emphasizedthe coordination of reading, writing, and speaking, and many ofthese courses were taught by college English teachers, who wereavailable because of diminished wartime enrollments. After the war,the continuation of this coordinated course with returning vetel ansseemed a routine matter (see Buckley and Wiley; Malmstrom;Wykoff, "Army English").

The communications course appeared in a variety of settings.Sometimes it was housed in a general education program intendedfor students who would probably not continue in college beyond twoyearsas at Minnesota's General College, designed for the poorlyprepared and those lacking confidence. More often it was a part of aseparate General College for students in regular programc, as atMichigan State. And occasionally it was simply an informal arrange-ment of instructors from speech and English departments (as well asan occasional member of the education department) who combinedforces--as found, for instance, at the University of Southern Cali-forniv in the late forties. The important common element in thesevariations was the commitment to teaching writing, speaking, read-ing, and, often, listening as a unified set of activities. By 1948, evertwo hundred colleges and universities had established these courses;more followed in the fifties. And before these courses declined, fall-ing victim to academic specialization and departmental loyalty, theyprofoundly affected the nature of writing instruction.

While, as mentioned earlier, a number of communications coursesappeared before World War IImost notably at Minnesota, Flor-ida, Hiram, and Stephenstheir position was not secure until after

1 1 0


the war ended. I would now like to take a close look at two pro-grams: the first at Iowa, representative of the more conservativevariety, and the second at Denver, displaying some of the extremepossibilities of the basic plan.

The State University of Iowa began the course it called "Commu-nication Skills" in 1945. The purpose of the course was to help stu-dents develop study skills for college success, to help them developwriting ability in "expository, argumentative, and critical tech-niques" (McGrath 18), and to lead them to recognize bad argumentsand bias in discourse (especially propaganda). Students were giveninstruction in "reading, writing, speaking, and to a lesser extent, lis-tening" as well as "a knowledge of the nature of words and theirusage." And the emphasis was on teaching these things in a way thatwould enable students to continue to grow in these areas after theend of formal schooling. The course's objectives were clearly influ-enced by General Semantics. In the operating principle of thecourse, however, the influence of progressive education was also ap-parent: instruction was to be individualized, geared to "find outwhat the individual student needs and then [to] adjust his progressaccordingly." The instruction in reading, writing, speaking, and lis-tening was to be integrated, with all "studied as facets of a singleprocess: communication" (19). It was also to be practical, providinglessons in "exposition, argument, and criticismthe everyday andpractical modes" (20), not in belles lettres, the proper concern ofliterature and creative writing courses. Finally, the instruction wasto be "skills-centered rather than content-cente-.-ed" (19), meaningthat it was not to be integrated with either literature or the socialsciences but was to focus on "language and effective communica-tion" (20).

These last two principles, emphasizing skills and the practicalmodes, were as closely related to current-traditional rhetoric as toprogressive education and underscore the conservative bent of theIowa program. There were other features of the program designedalong these well-established lines. A battery of objective diagnostictests was given, covering correctness and effectiveness of expres-sion, reading ability, general vocabulary, something called "organiz-ing, generalizing, and slanting" (22), and a few principles of "effec-tive communication" and library use. The other component of theplacement testing required that the student write an expository


theme of at least 450 words in two hours and deliver an argumen-tative speech after an hour of preparatiun. Topics were assigned inboth cases. Students were then grouped according to their perfor-mance, with 5% exempted from the communications course and theremaining 95% put in one of three tracks: a five-hour, one-semesteraccelerated course; a four-hour, two-semester main course; or a four-hour course in fundamentals to be followed later by the main course.Each of the first two courses em9hasized either speech or writing,and students were assigned according to their weaknesses. The fun-damentals course sought to instill confidence in the "deficient stu-dents." Students who were found to need more assistance than wasprovided by any of these courses were sent for additional help toone of three -clinics" in reading, speech, or writing.

The communication skills course at: Iowa attempted a variety ofgoals and activities. The subject matter of essays and speeches wastaken from the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sci-ences so as to further intPgrate the curriculum. This program didnot agree with -those who hlld that the student should always beallowed to express what is within him without the inhibitions result-ing from special demands upon form or content" (25), arguing that ifthe student could express what was in him, he would not be in thecourse. Classroom activities were also supplemented by biweeklylectures falling into four divisions: -(1) an introductory group of lec-tures on the nature of communication, (2) a group on college tech-niques (reading textbooks, listening to lectures, reciting and takingpart in discussion, writing examinations, and using the library), (3) agroup on language (words and their form, words and meanings,words and connotation, words and usage, the 'art of plain talk'), (4) agroup on the mass media of communication (propaganda and adver-tising, the press and radio, motion pictures)" (25-26). There werealso specific assignments for reading, speaking, and writingthelast including -at leas 5,000 words distributed among five single-paragraph pape:s, three longe.7 themes, one library paper, two classthemes, two sets of examination-answer papers" (26). The units ofstudy progressed from reading and discussion to preparing speechesand then to writing papers.

The faculty involved in the class were concerned with motivatingstudents. They accordingly provided for special collections of booksin the -skills library," a sixteen-page course magazine consisting of

112


student essays published by students each semester, and a courseradio program based on panel discussions featuring and producedby students. Other practices included exchanging instructors forspecial activities and inviting educational psychologists to facultymeetings to discuss pedagogical strategies. Pains were also taken toensure the uniform evaluation of students and to determine theeffectiveness of the program and its staff. The communication skillscourse did not form a separate department (as it did at MichiganState, for example), and teachers taking part also taught courses intheir home departments. But there was minimal reliance on gradu-ate students, and instructors were expected to be concerned withteaching. New faculty accordingly underwent training in evaluatingstudent performance in speaking and writing during an orientationsession, as well as during weekly meetings.

The general features of the communication skills course at Iowawere repeated in programs throughout the country. All ten,'"d toshare the concern for integrating writing, speaking, reading, and lis-tening, and to do so with special attention to the individual differ-ences and needs of students. While Iowa's program was typical, itwas also in some ways conservative, especially in its approach towriting instruction. Other programs included a greater use of lin-guistics and stressed the democratic and social purposes of commu-nication. The University of Minnesota, for example, looked upon itscommunications program as placing "emphasis upon the linguisticprocess itself and upon the mass medium of communication in itseffort to develop the student's general ability to communicate effec-tively as an adult citizen in a democratic society" (73). This stancewas not surprising, since one strong impetus for general educationcourses had been a report by the President's Commission on HigherEducation entitled Higher Education for American Democracy(1947), a report asserting the importance to democratic ideals of acommon core of knowledge. Minnesota's program in social ideals,however, was on the whole moderate, as were most programs thatshared this thrustFlorida's and Michigan State's, for example.

One general education program that was not moderate in anyrespect was the one found at the University of Denver. Althoughthis program was an original member of the Cooperative Study inGeneral Education sponsored by the American Council on Educa-tion from 1939 to 1944, it folded shortly after an essay by Levette

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Davidson and Frederick Sorensen on its communications course ap-peared in College English in 1946. An examination of Denver's pro-gram, as described in this article, reveals the influence of GeneralSemantics and, even more clearly, progressive education. More im-portantly, it shows the remarkable range of innovation that the com-munications course couid engender as well as the unfortunate ex-cesses that it could occasionally encourage.

It is not too much to say that Denver fell victim to the "life adjust-ment" emphasis in education that appeared after World War II. Thisdevelopment represented, in Arthur N. Applebee's terms, a distor-tion of the "traditional concern of progressive education with thecontinuing improvement of both the individual and society" (144).Paradoxically, it instead encouraged conformity and conservativevalues. Thus, for Denver, the skills of writing, speaking, reading,and listening were offered as tools for securing "the best possibleadjustment of the individual in the complex field of human rela-tions" (Davidson and Sorenson 83). Adjustment was one of the rul-ing objectives of the Denver program. Few students were exemptedfrom the course, for example, because high scores on entrance testsindicated "oververbalized, intentionally oriented students" whowere not "adequately adjusted in the field of human relations." Asfor students who had received high grades in speech in high school,they were "often egocentric extroverts" requiring "a great dealof additional training to undo the bad social habits . . . trainedinto them through competitive speech." Students with high gradesin high school English, on the other hand, were commonly "ego-centric introverts" who could prove to "need more help than theless 'superior' students" (84). Clearly a leveling process was going onat Denver.

The approach to reading, writing, and speaking instruction in thecommunications course was also influenced by psychological theory,with each area relegated to an appropriate "clinic'. directed by its"clinician," a specialist in the subject area supervising a corps ofgraduate students who were also called clinicians. Student writingproblems were interpreted and addressed in a remarkably uniqueway: "Work in the writing clinic is built upon the foundation ofRogerian nondirective counseling. It is felt that the student whoconsiders hitmelf a non-writer is blocked by fears similar to stagefright in the speaking situation. It is the task of the various clinics to

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find (if nossible) the causes of the student's particular blockages andto help him to overcome them." Difficulties in writing were seen notas an indication of the failure of the high school to provide necessaryskills (as a current-traditionalist would have argued) butas the resultof psychic disorders. The solution, then, was to be found not in re-mediation alone but in remediation coupled with therapythewriting teacher acting as a therapist. Thus, teachers at Denver, asmentioned above, were called -clinicians" and were usually gradu-ate students in English or speech working for a master's degree.These clinicians first provided tutoring so that the student couldgain immediate success, necessary because -failure in previousschool or social situations is the usual cause of the fear which is ablockage to accomplishment, especially in the speech situation."According to this analysis, a weak student has commonly been stig-matized as a failure, "as 'poor' in spelling, writing, reading, speak-ing, and then he has to live up (or down) to his self-imposed, orotherwise imposed, standard." The clinician was supposed to goeven further, however, in discovering the psychological blocks tolearning how to communicate, being required -to eollect and assem-ble as much biographical data as possible concerning the student, tofind his needs and his hopes and fears." The clinician was seen asbeing ideally suited to this task -because, since he is also a student,he is on the same side of the fence as the student and because hedoes not give grades." The program also offered a guidance clinicand a full-time psychiatrist for students whose -problems" exceeded-the depth of the clinics" (84).

If in these measures the Denver communications program car-ried the progressive's concern for psychological health to its illogicalextreme, it did attempt to implement the progressive's commitmentto fostering social harmony and democratic modes of thought. Thus,the clinicians also provided remedial help for those who needed it,the hope being that this would discourage the notion that the uni-versity was solely dedicated to training an elite group of students.The communications course was also designed to emphasize cooper-ation rather than competitive thinking, working in this way toward a-world state" that would "avert the onset of another war and theconsequent destruction of modem civilization as we know it." Thisemphasis on the social function of rhetoric was reflected in thestructure of assignments. Essays and speeches were set within a


rhetorical context, providing a purpose and an audience. And thespeaking undertaken was primarily in "panel:: and co-operative dis-cussion" (85) rather than formal speeches or debates, thus avoidingartificiality and the social separation of speaker and listener.

The writing course, a three-term sequence, was organized so thatit reflected the strange mixture of life-adjushnent, therapeutic, andsocial commitments of the total program. The first term was con-cerned with observing and reporting facts: "Preceding good com-munication must come good observingfact first, then words." Thesecond quarter focused on the research paper, an effort that in-volved the collecting, organizing, and presenting of facts. Duringthe third quarter, the student discovered ways to arrive at interestand emphasis. While this description seems influenced by a cur-rent-traditional skills approach, it was in fact an attempt to combinea subjective rhetoric and a social rhetoric, working toward a dia-lectical interplay. The progress of the course was described in thefollowing terms: "In the first quarter the student studies himself inhis more limited environment; in the second he studies his relationsto others in a wider environment (national-international); and in thethird he studies that inquiry of the person-as-a-whole in his en-vironment-as-a-whole which is called 'literature (85). This effort toachieve a dialectic between the individual and the social environ-ment was probably not successful, but the content of the work ineach quarter is worth considering, especially because of its depar-ture from current-traditional rhetoric.

The first quarter's work was built around a long autobiography, thepurpose of which was frankly therapeutic: "This is not the type ofautobiography generally assigned in high school. It is analytical (al-most psychoanalytical) and is based upon a long series of questionsdesigned to reveal causes of speech or writing blockage or of socialn. lladjustment." While the Denver program realized that this was a"dangerous business," it insisted that when used by the able teacherthis kind of diagnosis contributed to -the highest type of education,designed to help the person adjust IntellectuAy' and 'emotionally'to the kind of world and universe in which we live and will be living"(85). This autobiography was kept in a locked file, identified bynumber only, and read exclusively by the student's teacher and otherappropriate clinicians. The reason for this confidentiality was under-standable, given what the autobiography revealed about the stu-

116


dent: "We feel that, if the student will write out his emotional con-flicts, his difficulties with mama-papa, or his so-called 'sins,' he willhelp rid himself of the blockage of fear which comes from inwardfestering. In the serious cases, we leave this aspect of the course tothe psychiatrist. And we do everything in our power to avoid treat-ing anyone as neurotic or abnormal" (86). The second quarter of thecourse was given over to the research paper. It also consideredgrammar but, as in the first quarter, only insofar as the studentswere provided what they needed to know. Little was said about thisquarter in the College English article. The third quarter's design,liowever, was clear: the "main project" was "a piece of creative writ-ing done by the student and presented in some appropriate way bymeans of radio, stage, or publication" (86). Once again, the class-room activity followed the progressive's recommendation for an im-mediate purpose in a learning activity. Literature was producedrather than studiedor, perhaps, was studied through the device ofcreating it.

Unlike the teachers of many communications courses, those atDenver were skeptical of tests, arguing that what they were tryingto teach had not yet elicited an appropriate test: "The growth of thestudent, his adjustment to life and his determination, if necessary,to adjust his environment as well as himselfthese are what we aremost interested in; and we must be constantly on guard, in develop-ing our testing program, not to slip into mere testing of skills" (86).As a result, no formal testing procedures were introduced.

Three years after he and Davidson described the Denver programin College English, Sorensen explained that flaws in its approacheventually coused it -to blow up in various directions" ("Basic Com-munications Course" 325). However, the program is especially inter-esting to this history because it undertook a number of daring experi-ments in writing instruction and revealed some of the undevelopedpossibilities of the more conservative communications courses.Thus, although the Denver experiment was abandoned soon after itbegan to receive national attention, many of the commendable in-novations it displayed continued to appear in other programs. Forexample, Stephens College (Wiksell), the University of Florida(Wise), and Michigan State College (McGrath) emphasized the so-cial nature of communication, although they did so within a current-traditional framework. The student-centered orientation of commu-

117


nications courses further nurtured psychological approaches to theteaching of writii:g among individual instructors. Charles I. Glicks-burg of Brooklyn College, Robert L. Wright of Michigan State, andRonald Cutler of the University of Floridaas well as the partici-pants in a 1954 CCCC workshop entitled "The Freshman EnglishTeacher as Counselor"all argued that the composition instructormust consider the psychological integrity of students, treating themwith respect and consideration. And the application of the Rogeriannondirective approach to the writing class eventually affected ex-pressionistic rhetoric, as will be seen in a later chapter. Overall, thecommunications coursedespite its occasional excesses and falseturnsencouraged a fresh and worthy set of ideas in compositionand finally made a substantial contribution to the development ofwriting instruction in colleges.

Communications courses received a great deal of attention inwriting and speech journals during the forties and fifties, but theywere never a dominant force in either English or speech depart-ments. (At most schools, current-traditional rhetoric continuedto be the central approach to composition instruction, and, as wehave seen, was even a prominent element in some communicationscourses.) Their decline, moreover, was inevitable. Criticism of thembegan in the early fifties and continued throughout the decade (seeBowersox; Leggett, -What Are Colleges"; Arnold; Randall Stewart;Ebic1. Their fatal shortcoming in the end was the threat they posedto depirtmental autonomy and academic specialization. It is signifi-cant, for example, that the alternative to them commonly profferedby the English department was writing about literature. By themiddle sixties, it was difficult tc find communications courses at themajor state universities, and evea some of the smaller schools hadabandoned them. But, as nientioned earlier, they kept alive a vitalcurrent of ideas, ideas tha appeared in new forms in the sixtiesand seventies. Another importont development that was indirectlyencouraged by the communications course was the formation ofthe CCCC.

The CCCC

In 1947, a conference on college courses in communications washeld in Chicago. jointly sponsored by the Speech Association of

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America and the NCTE, it was concerned with the course itself, itsteachers, and its evaluation and administration. A number of partici-pants hoped that this initial meeting would lead to more meetings tocoordinate the efforts of speech and composition teachers. The hopewas not fulfilled. In 1948, however, George S. Wykoff, director ofEnglish I at Purdue University, delivered a paper at the NCTEmeeting on the importance of freshman composition to the collegestudent. The discussion it generated was so long and intense thatJohn Gerber of the University of Iowa proposed a spring meeting ofa day or two to continue the talk about composition. The NCTE au-thorized the meeting for April 1 and 2, 1949, in Chicago, and fivehundred people attended. Thus the Conference on College Com-position and Communication was bornits name reflecting the in-terest of both teachers in composition programs and teachers incommunications programs (Bird 33-35).

A number of elements contributed to the founding of a profes-sional organization of composition teachers. During the Depres-sion, almost all teachers in all English departments taught composi-tion, with estimates as high as three-fourths of the total numberthen employed (French; Creek). The efforts to improve the status offreshman composition teachers had begun in the late thirties. Com-position teaching had been regarded as apprenticeship work at mostlarger universities since World War I, a job that beginning teachersundertook until they had spent enough time in the profession toqualify for better things. Complaints about the burden of teachingfreshman writing had been published in English Journal throughoutthe twenties, but had largely disappeared in the thirties, probablybecause composition courses were among the few still in demand.By the end of the thirties, howeve;., enrollments in colleges wereagain increasing, and with the increase came a new sense of profes-sional identity among all college English teachers, not just thoseteaching writing. One obvious result was the establishme.,t of Col-lege English in 1939, r,2placing the college edition of English Jour-nal. Another was the appearance of articles that called for establish-ing new directions for the study of both literature and composition.In 1939, for example, English Journal included articles on the futureofliterary study by James II. Hanford and Bennett Weaver of Michi-gan, Kenneth Myrick of Tufts, and Percy D. Shelly of Pennsylvania.Two essays by Wykoff, published in College English in 1939 and1940, simultaneously argued for making college composition teafth-

1 19


ing a respectabk professional alternative, rather than keeping it anapprenticeship program for literature teachers. Essays by ArthurM. CG011 in 1943 and 1947 joined Wykoff's in calling for betterteaching conditions for composition teachers.

The sense of professional identity indicated by the establishmentof the CCCC had thus been crystallizing for some time. The in-crease in students just before the beginning of World War 11 andthen again after it with the influx of veterans had created the needfor teachers at the undergraduate level. The communications ap-proach gave composition courses a new identity, placing them in aspecial program that carried with it a commitment to democracy andto the welfare of students who had just suffered the horrors of war.Even though these communications programs were often devices touse scarce faculty more economically, they did elevate freshmancompositionas well as speechin the university power structure.And with the establishment of the CCCC Imd its journal, CollegeComposition and Communication, teachers of freshman composi-tion took a giant step toward qualifying for full membership in theEnglish department, with the attendant privilegestenure, promo-tion, higher salaries, leaveseven though these were not wide-spread until much later. The journal served as a forum for discussingthe lot of composition teaches as well as for encouraging and dis-seminating theoretical and practical research in the teaching ofwriting.

During the fifties the pages of College Composition and Commu-nication shed considerable light on the concerns of college writingteachers. (College English continued to publish essays on composi-tion, but these were until the next decade curtailed in number andlength as the new composition journal grew in size and readership.)In addition to publishing scholarly articles, the journal reported onthe recommendations of the workshop sessions that were a part ofthe two-day annual meeting until 1970. Each workshop involvedtwenty to twenty-five teachers who had registered in advance tomeet and discuss a particular topic; the topics selected reveal a greatdeal about the abiding interests of the profession. The journal's sec-ond number is especially interesting because it included sessionsentitled -The Function of the Communications Course in GeneralEducation" and -Objectives and Organization of the CompositionCourse." What is immediately apparent from these and similar dis-

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cussions that followed is the emphasis the communications courseplaced on the social basis of rhetoric and its importance in a demo-cratic society. Against this is seen the composition course's commit-ment to "effective communication," meaning by this the current-traditionalist's shuttling of meaning from the mind of the writer tothe mind of the reader"the power of clearly communicating factsor ideas in writing to a specified reader or group of readers." This isthe rhetoric of the meritocratic professional, instruction designed toenable students to meet the "requirements of writing without em-barrassment to the institution granting them degrees" ("Objectivesand Organization" 9). These early workshops also included sessionson grammar and semantics in the freshman course, reading andgrading themes, objective tests, the writing laboratory, the readingclinic, freshman English for engineers, high school and college artic-ulation, and administration of the composition and communicationscourses. All were to remain pressing concerns of the CCCC duringthe fifties and alien I would now like to turn to three other areas ofinterest to composition teachers at this time, areas that were to havelasting consequences for the discipline. These are the relation ofwriting instruction to literature, to linguistics, and to rhetoric.

Literature and Cürnposition

As noted earlier, the sense of professional identity among mem-bers of the English department blossomed just before World War 11and was further encouraged by the growth in enrollments afterward.And even as enrollments declined during the fifties, the anticipationof the growth in student population projected for the sixties keptspirits high. The New Criticism, furthermore, was providing an ap-proach to literature and its teaching that could serve as the basis forthe discipline of literary studies. This critical method promised acommon professional purpose to unify the diverse factions withinthe English department. It was especially appealing because it waspolitically safe at a time when academics were becoming the objectsof witch hunts led by the most powerful political figures in the coun-try. Armed with this new sense of professional resolve, English de-partment members began to protest any method of teaching writingthat was not based on the study of literature. If the department was

1 21


to be saddled with the service course in writing, went this reason-ing, it should at least organize the course around what it knewbestthe literary text.

This argument took a number of forms. Randall Stewart of Brownadopted the old view of liberal culture, arguinr. that students havedifficulty in composition because they have nothing to write about.He rejected the notion that students should write about themselvessince this would require "a flair amounting to genius," and most stu-dents "are not geniuses." lit dismissed providing rhetorical con-texts for discussion since these are commonly trivial (and of coursehe selected a trivial example to demonstrate his point), and he didnot like writing about social or political essays because he felt thisresulted in superficiality. But his final objection was that all theserequire the teacher to enter areas where he has no particular com-

petence" (16). Literature ought to be the subject of the writingcourse, and it "should be selected with reference not only to its in-trinsic greatness, but the opportunity which it offers for the continu-ous, cumulative discussion of the deepest things in man" (17). Stew-art's aim was to create Arnold's "current of ideas" (18) in the place of"a miscellaneous affair in 'communication skills (17). This view wasseconded in a letter of 1956 by Kenneth ale, who advocated re-placing the communications course with a course in writing aboutliterature, both for the student's sake and the teacher's: "Nowadays,full professors teach freshman composition, and while this may be awaste of talent (oftentimes I suspect it is), it does keep a teacher an-chored for brief periods between his voyages to strange and distantintellectual lands" (477). Great literature, he added, provides the"knowledge and stimulation" that the teacher needs to keep his ca-reer alive and vitalboth as teacher and as scholar.

This liberal culturist perspective is seen in a number of other es-says. In a 1955 piece, Robert M. Estrich of Ohio State argued thatpeople who teach only composition become "composition slaves"whose minds are destroyed by the experience. His opinion was thatcomposition is a remedial course that ought to be handled in highschool. If it is to be offered in college at all, those who teach itshould also be assigned to teach courses in literature, lest they be-come "slaves" or "hacks" (87). Harrison Hayford of Northwesternpretended to look at both the communications course and the litera-ture-based composition course in a spirit of fairness. He concluded

122

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probleins could be charged with a softness on communism. Fur-thermore, the position favoring literature was encouraged by theMLA in a 1939 document entitled "Statement of the Committee ofTwenty-Four," finally fOrmulated by Louise Rosenblatt, IlowardMumford Jones, and Oscar James Campbell. Put together by twenty-fOur college English teachers at the annual MLA conference, it at-tempted "to clarify for the members of the profession and for othersthe important service which the study of literature can render indi-viduals in a democratic state." This individualistic stance held thatliterature's first business is to warn against the pitfalls of the empha-sis on social values as found in the social sciences, the dangerousconsequences of which are clear: "The individual, thus submergedin the social mass, is merely a cipher, a helpless unit whose thought,feeling, and action are determined by impersonal forces over whichhe has little or no control" (262). Democracy, however, dependsupon "richly endowed and self-reliant individuals, sensitive to theindividual lives of their kllow-men and to their personal poten-tialities." Literature provides the one thing needed here: "What-ever the errors of rugged individualism in the economic sphere [theDepression was not yet over], the concept of political democracy as-sumes the efficacy of rugged individualism on the plane of thespirit... Literature makes for "self-reliant and well-rounded person-alities," providing alternatives in "modes ofconduct" and teaching awide repertoire of' choices among values and "among different emo-tions, temperaments, and achievements." The student therebylearns "to clarify his personal problems and at once to liberate andto control his personality." And all of this makes the individual abetter social being since "literature makes him cognizant of the sig-nificance of personal and social relations in an immediate and evendramatic fashion" (263).

This program for literary education was considered to have im-pc, -tant political benefits as well. The committee felt that the stu-dent could be made a good citizen through literature: "1 Iis feelingsare purged and disciplined by an application of the familiar psycho-logical doctrine of empathy, lle feels his impulses toward unrulyand subversive emotions to be at once released and controlled byadopting for the moment the career of fictional characters swayed bythe sanw emotions. in this way his brute instincts are transmittedinto civilized values." Literature thus rids the individual ofany im-

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pulses which might be counter to existing political arrangements,defusing them through vicarious experience. Literature also pro-vides thc student with "ideals charged with life [that] are thrust intohis inmost consciousness." Echoing Arnold, the committee de-scribed literature as "one of the formative experiences of civilizedlife" since it offers "the best and noblest thoughts of the best andnoblest men" (265). The committee expected teachers to carry outthe program it had outlined by presenting "wisely selected books,"one criteria of selection being "that socially subversive emotionsfind safe release through literature" (266).

In the forties and fifties, then, literature was seen as serving theindividual and acting as a safeguard against collectivist notions thatmight threaten the ideal of "rugged individualism on the plane ofthe spirit" and, finally, on the plane of politics. When writing teach-ers attacked the communications course for its neglect of literature,they were thus not exclusively defending the autonomy of the En-glish departmentalthough this certainly was a strong motive.They were also resisting political ideas that opposed their concep-tions of the primacy of the individual in the political process. And asRichard Ohmann and others have pointed out, this same tendency isfound in the New Criticism, the dominating force in English depart-ments in the fifties.

Linguistics and Composition

The appearance of structural linguistics in the fifties created a stirin English departments that affected teachers of literature as well aswriting teachers. Here I will focus on the latter. The claims made forthe possibilities of structural linguistics in the composition classwere nothing short of extravagant. Structural linguistics, many ar-gued, provided a new way of looking at language that was more ac-curately explanatory than any that had preceded it. This theory oflanguage, moreover, promised to provide the writing course with itsown subject matter, offering a new grammar that was to be the coun-terpart to literature's New Criticism.

As Wayne State's Donald J. Lloyd explained in 1953, structural lin-guistics had come to rescue "a course which has sought its subject-matter in the past from anthropology to Marxism and Psychoanalysis,

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and on through vertebrate and invertebrate zoology, and henceis frequently charged with having no subject-matter of its own atall" (40). College Composition and Communication accordingly pub-lished in 1953 and 1954 three articles by George Faust of the Univer-sity of Kentucky that surveyed the new theory. In 1954, the journalsponsored a panel at the annual CCCC gathering entitled "FreshmanTexts in the Light of Linguistics," featuring Harold B. Allen of Min-nesota, Paul Roberts of San Jose State, Villier Matthes of UCLA,and L. M. Meyers of Arizona State. The recorder for the session wasFrancis Christensen of the University of Southern California. In aseparate essay in the same year, Allen called for empirical researchinto the application of structural linguistics to the compositioncourse, research that might determine the value of this theory forwriting instruction. By 1958, two new textbooks in compositionbased on structural linguistics had appeared: Lloyd and Harry R.Warfers American English and Its Cultural.Setting (1956) and Rob-erts's Understanding English (1958). (It is worth noting, however,that in the same year an article by Ralph B. Long entitled "Gram-marians Still Have Funerals" was critical of these textbooks, men-tioning in passing the work of Noam Chomsky.)

A lucid statemer t of th( .ipplication of structural inguistics in thecomposition classroom in a 1959 essay by Warfel, of the Uni-versity of Florida. He (1ribed structural linguistics as having "un-locked the secrets of language," so that the "teaching of compositionmust undergo a revolutionary change" (205). He went on to identifythe key propositions of this new discipline. Language is a social ac-tivity arising out of the interaction of human beings. It is also a sig-naling system that can be described in mathematical terms. Speechis primary and writing is derivative of speech, but the differencesbetween the two are as important as the similarities. Speech "is astream of significant oral sounds uttered into the air in homogenoustime relationships in such a way as to give the distinct impressionthat a tune or melody accompanies the rhythm of production" (206).Gestures and "vocal qualifiers, like whispering, rasping, wheezing"Ina accompany speech, but sounds and intonation patterns are themost important. Writing, on the other hand, "is a set of significantgraphic marks inscribed on a physical substance in homogenousspace relationships whose total effect is usually that of geometric de-sign" (207). The effects of the two are markedly different. Writing

12.6


-poorly represents time, melody, gesture, and vocal qualifiers,-whereas speech -has difficulty in conveying the effect of writtenscroHs and serifs and degrees of darkness on type" (206). The twosystems do, however, have similiarities, being made of significantunits in contrastive relationship to each other.

All of this points to a new way of teaching composition, a methoddemonstrated in the textbook Warfel authored with Lloyd. Accord-ingly, in his essay Warfel went on to assert that composition teachersneed to understand the system of English, a system characterizedby -the algebraic theory of functions, ariables, and constraints"(207). They must come to see the sentence as a sequence of func-tions that form predictable patterns, not as a sequence of words, andthey must then teach -the sentence patterns and the way they arebuilt up" (208). Teachers should let students know that English ismarked by stability in the functions of sentences and in the wordorder within these functions. Recognizing the limits to the numberof words within a sentence and within the structures of a sentenceinvolves knowing -the laws of substitution, modification, apposi-tion, compounding, and word order." These limitsthe permissiblelengths for sentences and structures within sentencescan, fur-thermore, be studied empirically. They should not be left to thelore of the -rhetorical or logical," as in most composition textbooks.A writer's style grows out of the choices she makes in these mattersout of syntactical choicesand thus -rhetoricians should state theserules in terms of syntactical operations." The composition teachermust finally know -the mathematical laws of language . . . and for-mulate his didactic procedures upon them" (209).

Warfel pointed out other implications for using the lessons ofstructural linguistics in the composition classroom. Since speech inchildren is a -social inheritance" (209) mastered by the age of six,the language system is always more important than individual vo-cabulary items. The child learns the system and ways of using itmore effectively in a social setting. As a result, the compositionteacher should duplicate this social process in the classroom so thatthe student can learn to manipulate the resources of the system: -Ex-pertness in writing the simple sentence patterns must be achievedfirst, and then the many ways of saying anything can be added asoccasion warrants. Imitative pattern practice is essential whenevera student is allegedly 'at a loss for words. No student lacks words; he

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lacks experience in putting the words he knows into patterns" (210).And this practice in filling patterns can be applied to all the struc-tures of the sentence. Its primary purpose is "imitation for es-tablishing habits" (211), with a view to inculcating a knowledge ofpatternssyntactical devicesbefore pushing for originality or sty-listic variety. The most inappropriate response a teacher can maketo these pattern drills is to use the red correction pen. Studentsshould be guided gently and slowly through the various syntacticalpatterns: the noun function as subject, the verb function, apposi-tion, compounding, the verbals, the noun-function clauses, and theadverb as word-clause and word-group.

In his essay's closing comment, Warfel revealed the revolutionryrole he saw for structural linguistics in the writing class, lie in-tended his mcthod to replace three common approaches. First, hewanted to get rid of semantics, "an almost useless and distractingappendage to composition instruction." Second, he recommendedabandoning the use of reading selections, the "pre-occupation withideas as opposed to the student's mastery of the language system."For Warfel, the "business of a composition class is to achieve fluencyin writing; it is not to give a general education programthe liberalarts college exists to do that job" (212). The sole activity of the com-position class must henceforth be "those aspects of language whichprovide insight into the student's lifetime task of increasing his skillin writing and reading." And this will have profound professionalconsequences for the writing teacher: -I dare say that a teacher'sself-respect will increase as he senses that his profession has its ownsubject-matter and its own technology in which he can be an expert.Like a physician or an engineer, he has specialized in a limited fieldof knowledge; his value to society results wholly from the compe-tence with which he ministers to his clientele. That ministry in-volves language, its systematic operation in the mouths and ears ofall people and the possibility of lifting every student's knowledge,experience, and production in writing to the highest level ofcompe-tence" (213). At last writing teachers would have a clearly definedintellectual discipline on which they could build a profession. Fi-nally, Warfel advocated replacing the workbooks based on tradi-tional grammarat the time enjoying great popularitywith thenew structural grammar which relates language operation to com-

position." In this new scheme, writing instruction would still focus

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The Communic ions Emphasis: 1940-1960 115

on grammar, but the grammar would be that of structural linguistics.Writing teachers would thereby offer to students -scientific insightinto their most important set of social habits" (213)into languageand could in this way help society achieve unity.

Warfel's optimistic forecast of the place of structural linguistics inwriting instruction was not unusual for the fifties and on into thesixties. It led to the work of Christensen and the considerable re-search built on his foundation during the seventies. The enthusiasmseen in Warfel was rarely afterwards as high, however. The theoreti-cal disagreements among linguists themselves, especially after theemergence of transformational grammar, diminished the confidenceof writing teachers in linguistics. Still, the impact of structural lin-guistics on the development of rhetoricboth theory and prac-ticeought not to be underestimated and will be considered in thenext chapter.

The Revival of Rhetoric

A renewed interest in rhetoric as a discipline of profound histori-cal importance and of considerable contemporary relevance arose inEnglish departments during the fifties. This was especially encour-aged l)y the revival of Aristotelian humanism at the University ofChicago, a part of the move toward general education in response tothe Depression and World War II. Indeed, one of the earliest artides to attempt to reintroduce the classical conception of rhetoricto the writing class came from a group of teachers at this university.In 1952, a College English article by Manuel Bilsky, McCrea Hazlett,Robert E. Streeter, and Richard M. Weaver stressed the importancein argument of -what the traditional rhetoricians called invention,"meaning by the term "the discovery of contentof relevant sup-porting material." Significantly, they emphasized the primacy of in-vention over logic because it alone would "assist in the process ofcreation." The essay went On to discuss "what the classical writerscalled topoi or 'regions, and what have come to be translated as the'topics.- (211), focusing on genus, consequence, similarity, and au-thority. While the essay itself introduced little that was new, it dis-played a use of rhetorical categories that had been given only passingattention since the lectures of John Quincy Adams were published in

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1810. The essay was the first of many in the fifties to propose histori-cal alternatives to current-traditional notions of rhetoric. offeringother paradigms for the discipline.

An even more comprehensive attempt to restore the formal studyof rhetoric to the English department was described in a 1954 essayby Henry NV. Sams, also of the University of Chicago. Sams was in-terested in identifying the -fiekls of research in rhetoric"that is,locating the areas of the discipline that merited study in the acad-emy. Ile began by identifying -the fundamental conditions of rheto-ric which channel and contain research- (60), relying for guidanceon Biehard MeKeon's -Rhetoric in the Middle Ages," a 1942 Specu-lum essay that was reproduced in B. S. Crane's Critics and Criti-cism, Ancient and Modern. Sams considered rhetoric to be a situa-tional art more dependent on Instory than other kinds of diseourse,a systematic discipline based on organized theory, and a practicaldiscipline, meaning that it is -assimilated and shaped by the philoso-phies which it serves- (61). Given these characteristics, Sams feltthat a number of research projects in the field were clamoring forattention. The first of these was the provision of reliable editions ofthe major texts, including translations. Sams listed those alreadyavailable from the ancient, the medieval, and the modern periods,and offered suggestions for projects still in need of undertaking. Asecond area of investigation suggested was the study of -sources, in-fluences, and interrelationships- (63).

Sams went o to discuss briefly the historical influence of therhetoric classroom in the shaping of thought and literature, pointingto the work of Donald Lemen Clark on Milton and of T. W. Baldwinon Shakespeare. lie also considered the areas in which research inrhetori c. and literature overlap, citing M. W. Croll, George William-son, Sister Miriam Joseph, and Rosemund Tuve. Sams closed with aplea for a general history of rhetoric and a list of four contemporaryareas of rhetorical activity worth considering: practical research incommunications using quantitative procedures; studies of inter-national relations; studies of mass media; and, finally, studies in con-temporary rhetorical theory.

Sams's article is especially significant because it provides evidenceof a renaissance in rhetoric in the fifties that extended across thecurriculumin English and speech, in social studies and history.The role of rhetoric as the basis of education in the past and as

1 0


a major concern of a number of key academic disciplines in thepresent was made clear. Rhetoric was being elevated to a new levelof academic respectabilityor at least being restored to somethinglike its previous status. And a number of articles that appeared inCollege Composition and Communication shortly after Sams's essaysupport this notion.

J. E. Congleton's "Historical Developments of the Concept of Rhe-torical Proprieties" offered a thumbnail sketch of the history ofrhetoric, dividing rhetoricians into those concerned with truth andthose concerned with effectiveness. Congleton began his discussionwith Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, omitted the medievalists,moved on to Ramus, and then covered Hugh Blair and GeorgeCampbell. He next devoted an extensive section to elocution and toAmerican rhetoric, including in the latter a consideration of the roleof invention, claiming it to be an abiding concern of the nineteenthcentury. A significant feature of Congleton's history was that heoffered it in the hope that it would contribute to building a betterfreshman composition course. He wisLed to recommend concern for"the truth of the message" over "effecti veness of expression" (144),and he was convinced that a knowledge of the history of rhetoricwould further this end.

Three related essays appeared alongside Congleton's, each at-tempting to place rhetoric in its relation to language studies in gen-eral, carving out for it a spot in the modern English curriculum.James B. McMillan of the University of Alabama dist:nguished theconcepts of language, linguistics, philology, and rhetoric. He de-fined rhetoric as "the art of speaking or writing effectively" (146) anddivided it into practical and aesthetic studiesthe former using ex-perimentation. Rhetoric uses linguistic statements, he explained,but is a separate discipline. Sumner Ives of Tulane focused on gram-mar in the composition class, but he first asserted that teachingcomposition involves two other concerns as well: "It should also in-clude study of the relationship between the natural world and thelanguage code which represents it, or semantics; and it should in-clude training in the use of language to inform, to convince, and tomove, or rhetoric" (150). It was important to Ivesas to McM illanthat grammar, semantics, and rhetoric all "be based on the samepremises about i4aguage" (150).

Finally, W. Nelson Francis of Franklin and Marshall College at-

131


tempted a more ambitious project, a survey of the relation betweenmodern rhetorical theory and developments in linguistics. He con-cluded that the two come together in style, "the actual selection anddisposition of words and sentences" (157). What is of special interestin his article, however, is his estimate of the current state of rheto-ric. Francis asserted unequivocally "the return to respectability ofthe term rhetoric itself, as well as of the formal discipline which itdenotes" (156). His concept of rhetoric was a broad one, includingboth eighteenth-century and classical categories. Thus, he sawrhetoric as being concerned with the discussion of virtually all dis-cursive prose, "a method, backed by a long and vigorous tradition,for systematically discussing all forms of discourse that lie betweenscientific demonstration (which is the domain of logic) on the onehand, and artistic or creative literature (which is the domain ofpoetic) on the other" (157). This eighteenth-century conceptionof rhetoric was paired with a classical conception of its function,making rhetoric the discipline used to discover knowledge, notmerely to present it: "In the court of law, the legislative assembly,the committee meeting, and the press conferenceanywhere, infact, where issues must be found and decisions reached under cir-cumstances that do not permit the objective thoroughness of sci-ence or the imaginative impracticality of artrhetoric is the toolthat must be used to reach an approximation of truth upon whichaction can be based" (157). Consistent with this notion of discoveryis rhetoric's division into invention, disposition, and style. As Fran-cis's treatment makes clear, rhetoric in all its comprehensiveness wasbeing returned to the writing teacher, opening up areas of discus-sion that had long been abandoned and thereby enriching the com-position classroom.

There were still other indications of the restoration of alternativeconceptions of rhetoric in the study of writing. Weaver's Composi-tion: A Course in Writing and Rhetoric, a textbook influenced byclassical rhetoric, was published in 1957. One of the first of EdwardP. J. Corbett's contributions to our knowledge of the history of rheto-ric appeared in 1958, entitled "Hugh Blair as an Analyzer of EnglishProse Style." And one of the workshops listed for the 1958 CCCCwas "Rhetorical Invention: Good Subject Matter for Composition."Rhetoric as a discipline had clearly arrived, with consequences thatwould become apparent in the next two decades.

132


Before closing this chapter, I would like to inention an additionaldevelopment that had lasting consequences for composition instruc-tion. The previous chapter noted the use of process models of com-posing by certain proponents of expressionistic rhetoric. This con-certi for "process" also appeared among a few expressionists in thefifties. For example, a 1954 CCCC workshop report entitled "TheFreshman English Teacher as Counselor" explained that if-a teacheris interested in the process of writing and insists that his studentsbe aware of the process, he will find that students' personal prob-lems sometimes appear as an integral part of the writing problems"(96). This position was seconded in a 1958 essay by Ronald Cutler,"The Autobiography as Creative Writing." An emphasis on processwas also found in discussions of socially based rhetorics. In 1952Frederick Sorensen recommended an instructional approach thatemphasized the democratic social context of composing while insist-ing that writing be taught as a three-stage process consisting of in-vention, arrangement, and style. And in 1953 Barriss Mills of Pur-due argued in "Writing as Process" against the current-traditionalversion of the composing act, with its emphasis on assigning sub-jects, outlining, and superficial correctness. He wanted to base thewriting course on a process of composing that emphasized a rhetori-cal purpose, a rhetorical context, writing, and revision. Accordingly,he recommended using a laboratory method in which the teacherworked with the student at each stage of the process.

Economic, political, and social developments between 1940 and1960 had placed in motion a current of ideas that would profoundlyaffect the teaching of writing. These ideas would also be involved inthe sweeping economic, political, and social changes that wereabout to take place in the nationdialectically acting as both agentand product of historical developments. And this is the subject ofthe next chapter.

133

6

The Renaissance of Rhetoric:1960-1975

TH E MOST CRUCIAL EVENTS FOR THE FATE OF WRITING INSTRUC-tion during the sixties and seventies were the intensification of theCold War and changes in economic, social, and political arrange-ments that resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of studentsattending college. The space race signaled by the launching of Sput-nik in 1957 eventually led to federal funds being invested in theteaching of literature and composition for the first time in Americanhistory. This in turn brought about a reintegration of the efforts ofthe NCTE and the MLA after a separation of nearly fifty years. Theproduot of this mutual effort was new activities to improve theteaching of writing in both high schools and colleges. The growth inthe number of students attending college was as much an effect ofthe expansion of the corporate and state sectors of the economy as itwas a result of the growing size of the student-age population. Ascolleges during the sixties became the training centers for the newspecialists needed in business and government, their power, pres-tige, size, and numbers increased. And, as in the 1890s with the ap-pearance of the new university, the research ideal again proved tobe the dominant influence in highereducation (Veysey, "Stability andExperiment" 17). While this development worked against writingcourses because of their position in the undergraduate curriculum, italso encouraged the professionalization of composition teachers, aneffbrt that had been underway since the formation of the CCCC inthe fifties. The larger student population necessitated more writingteachers, and these teachers began to promote graduate training for

134

The Renaissance of Rhetoric: 1960-1975 121

their discipline. By 1975, graduate programs in rhetoric and com-position were forming, and rhetoric was becoming a respectableacademic specialty.

This chapter and the next will consider the developments in thediscipline that led to the return of rhetoric to the English de-partment, restoring it to a status nearly equal to that of literatureinstruction in many departments. The professionalization of com-position instruction was accompanied by the corresponding profes-sionalization of literature teaching. As Richard Ohmann has indi-cated, it was not until the sixties that literature faculties began toenjoy all the perquisites of the profession, earlier accorded only tomembers of science departments. The growing interest of writingteachers in rtietoric as a discipline had its counterpart in rhetoricalapproaches to literary criticism appearing in scholarly literaturejournals. Both developments contributed to a proliferation of ar-ticles advocating new methods of writing instructionsome ofwhich, as we shall see, really were not particularly new. This chap-ter will investigate the historical events attending the revival of in-terest in rhetoric. The next will examine the theoretical and prac-tical results for the classrooni.

As Arthur N. Applebee has demonstrated, the public schools hadbegun to experience harsh criticism during the forties and fifties.This came frum a variety of sources: from Robert M. Hutchins andMortimer Adler of the University of Chicago, from two Harvardcommittees appointed by James B. Conant, and from such critics asMark Van Doren, Arthur Bestor, Paul Woodring, and Vice-AdmiralHyman G. Rickover. The launching of Sputnik in 1957 gave cre-dence to the criticism of the quality of American education and ledto the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958. Thismeasure was at first designed to improve school instruction in mathand the sciences, but by 1964 Aso included the study of literature,language, and compositionespecially the latter two. Meanwhile,the Ford Foundation funded a series of "Basic Issues" conferences in1958, designed to examine the teaching of high school English.These conferences were undertaken by the MLA, but, after anNCTE protest, included representatives from the American StudiesAssociation and the College English Association as well as from theMLA and the NCTE. A third development that focused on the im-provement of high school English instruction was the appearance of

135 .


the Commission on English founded by the College Entrance Ex-amination Board in 1959. This group extended the work of the BasicIssues conferences, publishing Freedo,n and Discipline in English in1965. These three developments were important because they sig-naled a reunion of the efforts of the MLA and the NCTE for the firsttime since 1910. They are also worth noting because they each en-couraged an application of the work of Jerome Bruner to the teach-ing of literature and, especially, composition, with consequencesthat are still being felt.

Jerome Bruner, a flarvind psychologist, was an important butlargely unacknowledged source of the process models of composingthat are now a commonplace of our intellectual environment. Heprovided the ruling concepts and much of the language on whichthese models are based, and what he did it supply was developedby those who called upon himD. Gordon Rohman and Albert 0.Wlecke and, later, Robert Zoellner and Janet Emig, for example.Bruner was the author of The Process of Education, published in1960 as the final report of the ten-day Woods Hole Conference spon-sored by the National Academy of Sciences. While this meeting wasintended to examine the teaching of science in the schools, Brunerincluded in the final report frequent mentions of literature instruc-tion. More importantly, his thought as found in The Process of Edu-cation as well as in other works--The Act of Discovery- and -TheConditions of Creativity" in On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand,for examplewas influential in other ways. For example, the Com-mission on English report mentioned above was strongly influencedby Bruner's notion of learning. When, moreover, the federal fundsfor research projects, curriculum studies, and teachers institutes inEnglish began to flow, the importance of Bruner's ideas was againmarked. These funds first came from the U.S. Office of Education in1962 under the terms of a program that came to be called ProjectEnglish. By 1964, the National Defense Education Act had been ex-panded to include funds for English. Bruner's influence in the pro-grams funded by both agencies was inescapable.

Bruner introduced the language of cognitive psychology, includ-ing the influence of Piaget, to education circles. llis emphasis wason learning as "process," a concept that had been an important partof progressive education (and, as indicated earlier, an emphasis ofsome weiting teachers in the twenties and after). Bruner differed

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study conducted by Rohman and Wlecke.) The individual must ar-rive at a unique, personal sense of the knowledge of the disciplineconcerned; only through this private perception is learning andcomposing possible.

As Applebee has indicated, federal funds for research in thelearning of English were at first usea almost exclusively for readingskills and composition, literature being a later consideration (201-2).The major reason for this, ofcourse, was the practical orientation oflegislators, but the phenomenon also indicated the difficulty of de-veloping student-oriented research projects in literary studies. Atany rate, this emphasis on research in writing instruction, coupledwith the great increase in the need for writing teachers due to ex-panding enrollments, contributed to the renaissance in rhetoric incollege English departments. As mentioned in the previous chapter,rhetoric as a discipline had already begua its return to academic re-spectability in the Eirties and fifties, encouraged by the efforts ofthe CCCC and such developments as the revival of Aristotelian hu-manism. The resurgence of rhetoric continued with great vigorthe sixties, with numerous efforts aimed at making sense of the stud-ies being undertaken and at making recommendations for future di-rections of study. I would now like to turn to these efforts.

One of the most significant documents of the period was a pam-phlet entitled The Basic Issues in the Teaching of English, basedon the 1958 Ford Foundation conferences mentioned earlier andpublished as a supplement to College English in 1959. This docu-ment consisted largely of questions that sought to identify thebasic issues in the discipline of English, focusing on public highschools as well *as colleges. In discussing writing, the report at-tempted to identify potential research questions, with the influ-ence of Bruner again apparent: "Of what skills is the practical artof writing composed? Which of these can be taught most easilyand most effectively at what levels? Can the teaching of these skillsbe distributed among the various levels?" (9). The report went onto ask wlwther writing should be taught as expression or as com-munication and to inquire about the relation of writing to gram-mar, t6 thinking, and to literary study. A section on the training ofcollege itachers acknowledged the failure of graduate schools to

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prepare students for their careers: "It appears that our teaching-assistant graduate students and young Ph.D.'s may expect ninetypercent of their first six years of teaching to be in freshman coursesand composition. Yet the typical Ph.D. program is almost com-pletely void of courses dealing primarily with language and rheto-ric" (12). The report closed this section by asking, "Can the teachingof composition be raised to the same level of academic respecta-bility as the teaching of literature?" The discussion of the issuesimplicated in this querythe hard work, the low pay, the denialof advancementdid not encourage an affirmative answer. Still,the mere fact that the question could be entertained by a groupof scholars representing the MLA signaled a new attitude towardfreshman compositionand one that encouraged hope for the dis-cipline of rhetoric.

One of the most perceptive of the observers of developments incollege composition teaching at this time was also an integral part ofthe changes being made. Albert R. Kitzhaber was involved in writ-ing programs at Kansas, Dartmouth, and Oregon, and he served aschair of the CCCC meeting in 1959 and as NCTE president in 1964.When in 1959 the College Section meeting of the annual NCTEconference selected as its topic the elimination of freshman English,as it was then being taught, from the curriculum, Kitzhaber waschosen to respond to Warner G. Rice's affirmative response to theproposition. Kitzhaber's statement was one of the earliest of a suc-cession of enlightened comments he and others were to offer onthe issue.

Rice's presentation consisted of the usual recitation of English de-partment commonplaces, all of which had been shown to be ques-tionable during the seventy-five-year history of the subject: Stu-dents should learn to write in high schools, and not much could bedone in college for those who had not. Students could spend theirtime in college more profitably by enrolling in an elective courserather than freshman English. While freshman English was inex-pensive in terms of cost per credit hour, it constituted a large por-tion of the English department's budget. Abolishing the coursewould therefore save money and would (somehow) force high schoolsto assume responsibility for improving writing instruction. Finally,getting rid of freshman composition would improve the lot of col-

13J


lege teachers, enabling them to turn to "different, and more attrac-tive, channels" (362). This, in turn, would improve morale since fewteachers wanted to teach the course as their principal concern.

Kitzhaber's response to these charges was based on a historicalunderstanding of the subject that few educators of the time dis-played. (After all, his doctoral dissertation had been an analysis ofthe changes college rhetoric instruction had undergone in the nine-teenth century.) Kitzhaber admitted that the course as it thenexisted was inadequate in content, methods, and materials. The so-lution, however, was not to abolish it, but to improve it, and no onecould do this better than the English department. First of all,changes in high school writing instruction had to be made. Thiscould not be done by mere mandate; English departments neededto become cooperatively involved with high school teachers in de-veloping better methods for teaching writing. Even after this wasaccomplished, however, the college writing course could not beabolished. The course was, finally, an integral part of the humanistictraining of students, and its proper subject matter was language,rhetoric, and literature. Unfortunately, only the lastliterature asinterpreted by the New Criticismwas currently a strong part ofthe English teacher's repertoire, even though all three fell withinher province. Kitzhaber acknowledged the importance of the "NewGrammar- of structural linguistics, seeing it as a counterpart of theNew Criticism. What was needed, he asserted, was a "New Rheto-ric" to complete the triad.

Kitzhaber's notions of the way writing should be taught and themeans for improving it continued to appear in essays published inCollege English, in College Composition and Communication, and,most completely, in his boo::-length treatment of the field entitledThemes, Theories, and Therapy: Teaching of Writiri, College,published in 1953. It should be noted that although Kitzhaber wasamong the most conspicuous of the spokespersons arguing for newapproaches to writing instruction, he was not alone in this effort.His views will, however, be treated at length here because they sostrongly represent the calls for a New Rhetoric that appeared duringthe sixties.

In "New Perspectives on Teaching Composition" (1962), Kitzhaberreported on the kinds of summer workshops in composition for highschool teachers that had been devised by the College Entrance Ex-


amination Board's Commission on English. These workshops were:tremely important because the premises on which they were

based soon became commonplaces of writing instruction in manyhigh schools and colleges. In keeping with the guiding influence ofBruner, the emphasis in the composition class was to be on the writ-ing process. The first premise of these workshops was that the bestway to familiarize teachers with the process was to make them writ-ers, enabling them to learn "at first hand the nature of the problemsfaced by any writer." The second premise was that composition isnot merely a mechanical and practical skill, "but instead an impor-tant way to order experience, to discover ideas and render themmore precise, and to give them effective utterance" (441). Composi-tion, Kitzhaber maintained, "is intimately related to thought itself"(442). Since writing is involved in the very structure and discoveryof knowledge, it is at the heart of education, one of its most liberat-ing and humanizing agencies.

Kitzhaber went on to describe the two courses in writing thatwere designed to prepare high school teachers for writing instruc-tion. It is worth noting that these roughly corresponded to the twoapproaches to writing instruction that have constituted major forcesof innovation in the subject for a considerable periodup to andincluding the present. The first course, based on a reading of Plato'sPhaedrus, fell into thc category of expressionistic rhetoric, empha-sizing the limits of language and the importance of the unique pointof view manifested in voice. The second demonstrated an approachcloser to that of Aristotle (although he is not named), emphasizingwriting as a set of choices growing out of the complete rhetoricalcontext: "the writer's own identity, his subject, his purpose, and hisaudience" (442). Kitzhaber closed the essay with a plea for morecourses in writing instruction at the college level and, significantly,with a call for research into the nature of the writing processac-knowledging, however, that writing is an art and not a science. Thecall for research, it should be mentioned, made specific reference tothe availability of funds through Project English.

Kitzhaber's plea for research in the composing process, his em-phasis on writing as an art, and his assertion of the central place ofcomposition in the total curriculum were repeated in -4C, Fresh-man English, and the Future," an address to the CCCC that waspublished in its journal in 1963. Here he also called on the CCCC to

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take up the three recommendations as permanent features of itsprofessional platform, and finally asserted that the freshman com-position course should become the focal point of the organization'sefforts. Kitzhaber's proposals had come out of a study of the fresh-man composition course nationwide that he had undertaken atDartmouth with the financing of a large Carnegie Corporationgrant. The results of this study, based on an examination of nearlyone hundred syllabi and on visits to eighteen four-year colleges, ap-peared in two places: -Freshman English: A Prognosis" in CollegeEnglish in 1962, and Themes, Theories, and Therapy in 1963. Sincethe first was a capsule statement of the second, it will be consideredin detail.

In "Freshman English: A Prognosis," Kitzhaber reported On thechanges taking place in the freshman writing course. He found anaccelerating decline in the number of remedial courses being of-fered on college campuses. Writing laboratories and clinics, ratherthan class time, were being used for students in need of help ingrammar and usage. At some schools, even the labs and clinics werebeing abandoned. Textbooks for the course were becoming "moredifficult and more scholarly" (477). Proficiency exams in English forsophomores and juniors were being eliminated because so few stu-dents were failing them. As provisions for less able students weredecreasing, those for the best students were increasingfor ex-ample, waiving of the freshman composition requirement (and some-times replacing it with a literature requirement), accelerated coursescovering the work of two semesters in one, and enriched courses re-quiring more writing and more reading (especially in literature).Freshman students at four-year colleges were better prepared thanin the past, explained Kitzhaher, but this was not the result of anoverall improvement in the students entering college. Since thenumber of college-age students was expanding at a rate greater thanenrollments at four-year schools, colleges could select better stu-dents. Furthermore, the increase in the establishment of junior col-leges meant that the less able students were more often attendingtwo-year schools. High schools were also doing a better job of pre-paring students for college work. There had been, Kitzhaber ex-plained, "a swing away from 'whole child,' `life adjustment' educa-tion toward a philosophy of gre: tellectual rigor in the teachingof academic subjects" (479). S s were writiry; more in high

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school English classes, and major efforts had been undertaken to im-prove the instruction at that level, including teachers institutes, re-search in writing instruction, and curriculum study centers.

Unfortunately, while high schools had begim to improve their in-struction in writing, Kitzhaber discovered no corresponding effortin colleges. In his estimate, the colleges were continuing to rely onhigh schools for the real work of composition teaching, with the re-sult that the former simply had not in any way been influencedby the new studies in rhetoric and linguistics. The majority of col-lege courses continued to fall into the current-traditional camp (asKitzhaber would soon demonstrate in the first chapter of Themes,Theories, and Therapy), emphasizing grammar, superficial cor-rectness, modes of discourse, and the discussion of "things in gen-eral." Kitzhaber went on in his essay to point out that college com-position continued to be conceived of as a "service" course: "It hasexisted only to remedy deficiencies of earlier instruction, to helpstudents write well enough so that they can pursue their other col-lege studies without making gross errors in usage and expression"(481). The changes that had been made in the c llege course hadbeen designed to make it a class in writing about literature. Unfor-tunately, this had shifted the emphasis from rhetoric to poetic, andthe principles of composing had been lost in the transition.

Kitzhaber proposed in place of the "service" concept and the bel-letristic method an approach based on the rhetorical tradition, aheritage extending back over twenty-five-hundred years to ancientGreece. As he explained, the subject matter of such a course isrhetoric: "It is a discipline that performs the invaluable function ofhelping the writer or speaker to find subject-matter for a discourse,to evaluate and select and order it, and to give it fitting expression."Rhetoric and logic, not simply correct usage, are needed, and theywill provide the basis for college composition, a course now to beregarded as "a liberal subject, a cultural subject, for it helps to disci-pline thought and give form and point to its utterance" (481). Thiscourse should be provided for all college studentsand for a verygood reason: "It will be the only course a student takes in which thequality of his thinking and of his written expression, together withthe principles that underlie both, is the central and constant con-cern" (482). Finally, rhetoric courses and courses in teaching stu-dents to write should be a part of the program offered by the college

1 3


English department to all prospective high school and college teach-ers. English departments must likewise encourage research in theseareas, Kitzhaber noted, so that along with the New Criticism andthe New Grammar we would have a New Rhetoric, not a warmed-over nineteenth-century version of this important.discipline.

One of the most significant statements supporting Kitzhaber's pro-posal to return rhetoric to a place of prominence in the English de-partment was Wayne C. Booth's "The Revival of Rhetoric," a lecturedelivered at the MLA meeting in 1964 and published in 1965. Ad-mitting that rhetoric had taken on pejorative implicationsand notwithout reasonBooth argued that there was nevertheless a needfor what rhetoric at its best had historically trained its students todo: "to engage with one's fellow men in acts of mutual persuasion,that is, of mutual inquiry.- English departments were providingnonmajors a composition course "as shameful as any of the ills theypurport to cure.- Majors and graduate students were being treatedin a manner even more deplorable: "At most universities still a stu-dent cannot undertake serious rhetorical study even if he wants to,for lack of teachers, courses, or library facilities.- Booth chargedthat members of the English department were neglecting their dutyto provide the student with "guidance in the true art of transferringideas, motives, intentions from his mind to other men's minds- (10).Likc Kitzhaber, he called for a new rhetoric to complement thenew grammar and new stylistics" (11). This would ,iot simply be a

revival of Aristotle, Quintilian, Campbell, or Whatelyalthoughtheir ideas needed to be made available for study. Liooth felt thatthe age was a rhetorical one with unique demands: We believe inmutual persuasion as a way of life; we live from conference to con-ference.- Moreover, he felt that English studies as a discipline is in-herently rhetorical in that it is concerned first and , 'emost withpersuasion among its members, Consequently, his recommenda-tions to the English department were simple and pointed: "first,that in a rhetorical age rhetorical studies should have major, re-spected place in the training of all ,,,aehers at all 1 is, and sec-ondly, that in such an age, specialb4tit in rhetor studies of allkinds, narrow and broad, should cal ry at le.- . professionalrespectability as literary history or literal y criocimn in non-rhetoricalmodes.- Booth closed by asserting that literary scholars could safely

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turn "from belles lettres to rhetoric" (12) with confidence that theirnew work would be both serious intellectually and relevant to society.

A number of others contributed to the effort to redefine rhetoricand writing in the college classroom. The most effective and leastconspicuous of these were the editors of the NCTE publications onwriting instruction during this period. Ken Macrorie from 1962 to1964 and William F. Irmscher from 1965 to 1973 made College Com-position and Communication the kind of leader in writing instruc-tion that Kitzhaber hoped it would be. And College English editorsJames E. Miller, Jr. (1960-66), and Richard Ohmann (1966-78) con-tinued to keep rhetoric and writing at the center of the concern ofEnglish departments. These four figures, along with Research in theTeaching of English editors Richard Braddock (1967-72) and AlanPurves (1973-78), were immensely influential in, by and large, sa-lutary ways. Through making available a wide variety of researchstudies, they contributed to the creation of a discipline.

A host of scholars used these journals to respond to the calls for anew rhetoric. Virginia M. Burke, in a 1965 essay entitled "TheComposition-Rhetoric Pyramid," made a plea for "connected andscholarly efforts to restore rhetoric as the informing discipline in thepractice of composition at all levels" (3). Displaying her knowledgeof the rich history of rhetoric with a brief summary, Burke arguedthat a "new rhetoric" was nevertheless neededone that would re-place the emphasis on superficial correctness, the four modes of dis-course, and the objective method. Hans P. Guth argued in "TwoCheers for Linguistics" against making linguistics the center of thecomposition class. He insisted that rhetoric must be the subjectmatter of the writing courseoccupying the place between litera-ture and linguistics, encompassing "the potentiahties and dangers oflanguage as the powerful medium in which most of the concerns of[the student's] private, practical, and political life find their expres-sion or reflection" (492). In "Rhetoric and the Quest for Certainty,"Guth again took up the argument, asserting that rhetoric must com-bine featur-s of linguistics and literature. Thc -,:omposition teacherdeals with public discourse, aiding the student in the discipline ofself-expression. the responsible interpretation of experience, andthe, articulation of policy in public dialogue. Similarly, in "What Are

145


Colleges and Universities Doing in Written Composition?" GlennLeggett disputed the notion that freshman composition should be aservice course. Instead, he said, its subject should be rhetoric, "theway the raw materials of language get to be communication" (42).Like Guth, he felt that rhetoric combines linguistics and literature,occupying a place between the two.

A nr,Inber of essays were more ambitious in their attempts to de-fine the scope of modern rhetorical study. In "Rhetorical Research,"Martin Steinmann, Jr., called for research in rhetoric, promising to"try to define 'rhetoric,' to outline the sorts of rhetorical researchmost needed and kast needed, and, finally, to briefly describe thepresent state of rhetorical research" (278). He defined rhetoric as"the effective choice of synonymous expression" involving six vari-ables, variables that recall the Aristotelian triangle: "the speaker orwriter, his utternnce, his context (occasion or medium), his audience(listener or reader), his purpose (the effect that he intends his utter-ance to have upon his audience), and the effect of his utterance uponhis audience" (280). Steinmann's emphasis on choosing between syn-onymous expressionsa curious choice since he argued that lan-guage and thought are oneled him to fly in the face ofmost ob-servers of the time by excluding invcntion"the choosing betweennon-synonymous expressions" (281). It also led him to exclude moraland ethical choicesanother curiosityrestricting rhetoric to "ef-fective expression," consisting ofarrangement and style.

Steinmann went on to define the five kinds of rhetorical researchcurrentiy needed. In his classification, the first is basic rhetoricalresearch, work that moves from effective expression to theoriesabout what makes for effective expression. Here rhetorical rules areformulated by examining successful rhetorical products. The next ismetarhetorical research, the investigation of theories of rhetoric toproduce metatheoriesdescription and prescription of what makesfor an adequate theory. The third type, pedagogical research, isconcerned with studying effective ways of cultivating writing orspeaking Ability in order to develop theories about how best to teachrhetoric. The fourth, rhetorical criticism, applies theories of rhe-torical effectiveness to specific rhetorical texts, demonstrating thefeatures that make the texts successes or failures. Finally, historicalor comparative rhetorical research is concerned with studying rhe-torical theories and their relation to each other. Steinmann closed

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his article by reviewing some of the relerant research in rhetoric,emphasizing the interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary nature ofthe effort. He acknowledged, however, that little had been doneand that the need for such research was just being recognized.

Three related studies are worth mentioning. In -Very Like aWhale--A Report on Rhetoric,- Robert Correll presented a re-sponse to a semim r on rhetoric sponsored by the CCCC at Denverin 1964. He discus ed the field of new rhetorics beginning o appear,looked at the history of rhetoric as it applied to the present, andconsidered the interdisciplinary nature of rhetoric in calling for newresearch. He closed with a view of the relationship of rhev toteaching of English, warning that any teaching rhetoric must becomprehensive because it must not only deal with the entire com-posing process but also consider the contextual nature of choices. In-The Four Faces of Rhetoric: A Progress Report," James Murphy re-sponded to the MLA-sponsored Conference on Rhetoric and Litera-ture held at the 1964 and 1965 MLA meetings. These sessions weretrying to establish order in the study of rhetoric, defining the termso that it could serve as a useful guide to research and discussion.Murphy argued that the term has four senses. The first is rhetoricas a historical subjectthe rhetoric of Cicero or Quintilian. Thesecond is rhetoric as theory, without regard to timeabstract state-ments about rhetoric in general. The third is rhetoric as a set offormulated preceptsadvice about composing the text. And thefourth is rhetoric as recognizable structures in literary workstropes, for example, or more broadly considered, the analysis of lit-erary works in terms of rhetorical effects on audiences. As Murphyexplained, however, the members of the conference sessions arrivedat no consensus on the issue, considering only the difficulties ofthe term as it was then used. Finally, this overview would not becomplete without mention of Francis Lee Utley's 1968 essay -TheBoundaries of Language and Rhetoric: The English Curriculum."This article offers the most comprehensive overview of the notionsof rhetorical theory and research prevalent at the time, identifyingthe major forces at work in the discipline. It is the best guide torhetoric and composition in the mid-sixties, and it has been con-sulted with care in preparing this chapter and the next.

A significant impact on the emerging field of rhetorical studies wasalso made by a number of essay collections and book-length treat-

14


ments. Edward P. J. Corbett's Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Stu-dent (1965) offered an application of Aristotelian rhetoric to the writ-ing class and also provided a useful history of rhetoric as a discipline.Gorrell's Rhetoric: Theories for Application (1967) and Gary Tateand Corbett's Teaching Freshman C omposition (1967) provided class-room applications of new rhetorical approaches. Steinmann's NewRhetorics (1967) collected essays on some of the most promising di-rections that rhetoric was taking, including tagmemics, FrancisChristensen's generative approach, and sociolinguistics. Steinmannwas following the lead of Daniel Fogarty's Roots for a New Rhetoric(1959), an attempt to suggest a theoretical base for a modern rheto-ric in the work of S. I. Hayakawa, I. A. Richards, and KennethBurke. Fogarty, unfortunately, found no audience until the seven-ties. Steinmann's effort was treated more favorably in its own day, aswere the works of W. Ross Winterowd and James L. Kinneavy, bothof which merit separate attention.

Winterowd's Rhetoric: A Synthesis (1968) attempted to makesense out of recent developments in rhetoric. Strongly influencedby Aristotle, Burke, and recent linguistic theory, the volume beginswith a general introduction and chapters on Aristotle and neoclassicrhetoric. It then considers the theoretical base of the emerging newrhetoric, acknowledging the influence of Burke in genera! andChomsky, Christensen, and Bruner in particular, Winterowi's con-tribution, however, is original in its synthesis of these materials andits application of them to the classroom. Finally, the book includes asection on rhetoric and poetic, showing how the two inform eachother. Despite the fact that Rhetoric: A Synthesis fails to considerinvention except in passing, the work shows a commendable at-tempt to come to terms with the forces in the sixties that were map-ping out new directions for rhetoric.

Kinneavy's A Theonj of Discourse (1971) was a monumental at-tempt to make sense out of the new interest in rhetoric, providinga historical, philosophical, and linguistic basis for discussions ofrhetorical discourse. Kinneavy took all rhetorical utterances as hisprovince, attempting to create both a taxonomy of the componentsof rhetoric and a language for discussing it. The book is learned,relating the aims of discourse to their sources in the history ofthought. The chapter on expressive discourse, for example, ana-lyzes the history of the form, tracing it through Epicurus, Lu-

148


cretius, Vico, Rousseau, Herder, von Humboldt, Schelling, Freud,Jung, Croce, Spingarn, and Dewey, among others. The discussionculminates in a lengthy and engaging treatment of Sartre and an ap-plication of the expressive theory now demonstrated to a discussionof the Declaration of Independence. A Theory of Discourse remainsthe best theoretical treatment of discourse theory and continues toprovide a rich store of materials for informed research in the area. Italso has served as an example of the successful use of the historicalmethod in rhetorical research.

Finally, special mention must be made of Research in WrittenComposition, an overview of empirical studies in the field tm to1961. Put together by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, andLowel Schoerall of the University of Iowathe work took a hardlook at the kind of empirical research composition had encouraged.Its findings were highly critical of the efforts undertaken in the area,offering a detailed litany of shortcomings in the research, and posingquestions about writing and its teaching that needed answering.The report, however, represented a major step in the developmentof composition studies. Only a discipline confident of its value andits future could allow this kind of harsh scrutiny. The work signaled anew rigor in empirical research in rhetoric, making specific method-ological recommendations for future studies and reporting on stud-ies considered exemplary. This volume led to the establishment in1967 of the journal Research in the Teaching of English, with Brad-dock as its first editor.

Before closing this chapter, I would like to consider the role oflinguistics in shaping the discipline during this fifteen-year period.It is no exaggeration to say that the study of linguistics in the En-glish department during the twentieth century has been one of themost formative influences in the study of both literature and rheto-ricso much so that today language itself has become, in one guiseor another, the central focus of nearly all scholars in the English de-partment, regardless of their specialty. As was repeatedly noted inearlier chapters, linguistics research has also been crucial in remind-ing teachers of the social basis of language and of the class structureon which it is based. This effort, begun early in the century with thelikes of Fred Newton Scott and two of his students, Sterling AndrusLeonard and Charles Fries, has been carried on more recently in

149


the work of James Sledd, and bore conspicuous fruit in the CCCC'sposition statement entitled "Students' Right to Their Own Lan-guage" in 1974.

For a number of reasons, however, linguistics did not provide thepanacea for composition studies that was predicted by many in thefifties. The theoretical shift from structural linguistics to transforma-tional grammar created considerable confusion among nonspecial-ists, as discussed,'for example, in the exchange between Sledd andHarold B. Allen in volume 23 of College English. Arguing from atotally different perspective, current-traditionalistssuch as A. M.Tibbettsfeared the relativism in language introduced by the newlinguistics and preferred the security of traditional grammar. Therewere also doubts, as already indicated, about the ability of lin-guistics to provide all that was needed to learn and teach writing.Guth in "Two Cheers for Linguistics" and Gorrell in -Structure inThought," for example, both expressed reservations about the abil-ity of modern linguistics to aid students in discovering relevant andmeaningful discourse.

Nevertheless, the influence of linguistics in rhetoric has been for-midable and, on the whole, salutary. The most influential spokes-person for the value of linguistics in composition instruction hasbeen Francis Christensen. In "A Generative Rhetoric of the Sen-tence" (1963), "Notes toward a New Rhetoric: I. Sentence Openers;II. A Lesson from Hemingway" (1963), and "A Generative Rhetoricof the Paragraph" (1965), Christensen taught composition teachers anew way to look at sentence and paragraph formation. Combiningan empirical approach that considered the way writers actually com-pose sentences with lessons from the new linguistics, he provided afresh method for research, as well as a pedagogy for the sentenceand paragraph. The claims that Christensen had at last developedthe new rhetoric were exaggerated, for rhetoric is much more thansentence and paragraph formation. lie had, however, taught writingteachers something about the relation of form to meaning, especiallythe ways in which linguistic forms can themselves generate meaning.

A number of other applications of linguistics were destined to beimmensely influential. In 1964, Donald R. Bateman and Frank J.Zidonis published the results of their experience with teachingtransformational grammar to high school students. Beginning in1965, Kellogg W. Hunt and R. C. O'Donnell (early recipients of

150

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cent College English essay by Jim Corder, for example, provoca-tively raising the specter of the one true way. As (Ins history hasattempted to demonstrate, :towever, rhetoriclike poeticis al-ways marked by multiplicity. While one system may emerge asdominantthe one preferred by the powerfUl, f)r exampleit willsimultaneously be challenged by other systems, these challengesproliferating in proportion to the freedom tolerated in the societyinvolved. I would now like to consider the intellectually rich andvaried rhetories that arose during this renaissance period of 196075a treatment that will celebrate rather than suspect the varietydisplayed.

7

Major ithetorical Apprc 11es:

1960-1975

TIIE CALLS FOR A NEW '11IETORIC IN THE SIXTIES AND EARLYseventies encouraged a wealth of research and speculation on com-posing theory. I would now like to consider the major approaches towriting instruction that appeared at this time, classifying them ac-cording to the epistemology that underlies the rhetorical assump-timis of each. The first group to be examined will be approachesbased on an objective rhetoricpositivistic theories that locate re-ality in the material world. The most prominent of theseasidefrom current-traditional rhetoric, of courseare the behavioral ap-proaches found in the work of Lynn and Martin Bloom and ofRobert Zoellner. The second category, subjective rhetoric, locatesreality within the individual, the lone agent acting apart from thematerial or social realms. Subjective rhetoric, which was especiallyprominent during the late sixties and early seventies, is employed inexpressionistic approaches. The third rhetorical class, the transac-tional, argues that reality is the product of both the observer andthe observedthe private and the publis:and is located in the in-teraction of the two. The most obvious of the transactional ap-proaches is the classical, fimnd especially in the work of Edward P. J.Corbett and Richard Hughes ai.d Albert Duhamel. Those basingtheir approach on cognitive psychology also fall into this categoryand include Janet Emig, Janice Lauer, Richard Larson, and vrankD'Angelo. A third variety of transactionalists will be called the epis-temies. This group is an especially problematic one because theterm epistemic is currently being used in the English department to

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refer to two different varieties of rhetoric. The source of this confu-sion will be considered in discussing this group. Finally, the rheto-ries of this period were responding to widespread protests againstthe Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and related issues, and consider-ing these responsesincluding the attempts to rusist the protests orto ignore them altogetherwill be a concern of this chapter.

Objective Rhetoric

The rhetoric most obviously based on a positivistic epistemologyduring this period aros.. out of the influence of behaviorist psychol-ogy. In 1962, an essay by Douglas Porter, a behaviorist in the Gradu-ate School of Education at Harvard, app.2ared in College Composi-tion and Communication. Entitled -The Behavioral Repertoire ofWriting," the article argued that the covert nature of writing behav-ior does not preclude the application of behavioral learning prin-ciples to it. The technique recommended was to -infer and describecovert behavior by observing palpable antecedents and consequentsto the behavior" (14). In other words, the successful writing actshould be analyzed in terms of its sequence of observable behavior,and students should be directed to engage in this sequence, withreward,. attending successful performance. In the same journal inthe same year, John F. Huntley of the University of Iowa discussedthe principles of programmed learning in writing instruction, basinghis comments on B. F. Skinner's behaviorist psychology. tic ex-plained that this method would be available to teachers as -soon assomeone has the patience to work out the 10,000 steps- (64) in thewriting process through experimentation. An article in the sameissue by Charles Simon described the unsuccessful use of a pro-grammed learning aid, Joseph C. Blumenthal's Engli.sh 200. Thisisolated experiment had little impact, however, as behaviorist prin-ciples continued to influence the publication of workbooks on gram-mar in the sixties and seventies.

Behaviorism in the composition class seemed to be restricted toworkbooks on grammar and usage until Lynn and Martin Bloom in1967 and Zoellner in 1968 began to publish articles on their two dif-ferent behavioristic approaches. Enthusiasm for their respectivemethods was never great, and Zoellner attracted outraged replies

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Major Rhetorical Approaches: 1960-1975 141

from colleagues througkmt the country. Still, the techniques re-ceived considerable attention and became involved in a number ofother deveiopments in writing instruction at the time.

The clearest and most complete statement of the position of Lynnand Martin Bloom is seen in "The Teaching and Learning of Argu-mentative Writing" (1967). Their method is based on psychologicallearning theory (Martin Bloom was a social psychologist)morespecifically, reinforcement theory: "Rewarded behaviors tend topersist while punished behaviors tend to be dropped." The problemfor the teacher "is to identify what stimuli and what responses arepresent in the writing process in order to reward and to punish ap-propriately." Difficulties in teaching writing are inevitable because"the stimuli and the responses take place largely at the symbolic levelin the student's mind." The traditional approach to teaching writingthIls into all the traps implied in this description. Using the languageput into currency by D. Gordon Rohman and Albert 0. Wlecke,although applying it to a different epistemology, Bloom and Bloomargue that the teacher usually does little in the prewriting stages ofcomposing, focusing instead on the "post-writing critique." The stu-dent is largely left to her own devices in discovering meaning. Theteacher's critique, meanwhile, is most often ineffective or evenharmtill because "we don't really know whether we are rewarding theright thing for the right reason from the perspective of the student'slearning processthe dynamic process that occurs while the writingis being created" (129). In other words, teachers cannot be sure theircomments are reinforcing the desired kinds of behavior because theydo not know what kinds of behavior are desirable: they simply do notknow how good writers write.

Bloom and Bloom describe three activities they attempted in im-proving their composition instruction. The first, conducted by Mar-tin Bloom, was a carefiil and systematic observation of a student as hewrote a number of themes: it involved recording "each discrete sen-tence or fragment he wrote," and noting "the errors and corrections,pauses, interruptions, 'environmental events, and timing." Bloomdiscussed each theme with the student afterward considering howthe parts fit into the whole, stylistic choices, and the larger context ofthe paper. Ile discovered that the student followed the current-traditionalist's description of the process: "a theme idea gets intro-duced, developed, and summarized." Ile also fo and, however, that

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the process was not neat and orderly, with "discontinuities and inter-ruptions" (130) being a normal part of it. The second activity involvedthe application of reinforcement principles. Since the teacher cannotbe present throughout the composing process, she must become asymbolic presence. Both in-class comments by the teacher and theinstruction offered by rhetoric texts may be help-ful but are usually ineffective because there is no guarantee thatthey will be continually in the writer's mind while composing. Pro-grammed learning devices are useful, but they cannot help in mattersof content. Bloom and Bloom propose that the solution to writingproblems can be found "in making the thinking process visible toboth student and teacher." This is done by "having the student makesuccessive approximations toward preferred goals of writing" in anumber of ways: making the student aware of a given writing prob-lem, getting him to generate several possible solutions to it and thento select the best one, and, in a conference, giving the student adviceabout his choices so that he "creates a set of standards and operatingprinciples for himself which he can use the next time he writes atheme" (131). Bloom and Bloom eventually developed a set of work-book exercises to bring about this kind of behavior, the exercisesbeing divided into three areas: generating ideas, construction of thepaper, and self-evaluation. These, it should be noted, included suchtraditional rhetorical categories as audience and purpose.

The last activity involved the teacher's evaluation of student work.In this regard Bloom and Bloom advocate that students be madeaware of the standards of evaluation used and how they are to beapplied. The student as well as the teacher should then apply thesestandards in evaluating the student's product. The purpose is tomake the student self-sufficient and responsible for his own workrather than reliant on the teacher fbr approval and judgment.

Zoellner's "Talk-Write: A Behavioral Pedagogy for Composition"took up all of the January 1969 issue of College English. Like theapproach of' Bloom and Bloom hefime it, it relies on the language ofRolunan and Wkekethis time, however, in the service of a rheto-tic that is even more explicitly based on the behavioral psychologyof' B. F. Skinner. The great mistake of the current approach to writ-ing, Zoellner explains, is that it is grounded in an instrumental meta-phor that is flawed. We have defined writing as Hum& on paper,formulating "a one-to-one relationship between the thinking pro-

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cess on the one hand and the printed word on the other.- This hasled to a "product-oriented rather than [a] process-oriented- ap-proach (270), in which we assume that we have actually said some-thing meaningful when we have told a student that her essay isunclear or disorganized because of faulty thinking. The problem isnot with faulty thinking but with faulty or maladaptive behaviothe "concrete, discriminable, and empirically accessible behavioraldimension to the act of writing to which we have insufficiently at-tended- (271). We must look at the "scribal act- that produced thewriting, the process involved in it, rather than the product itself.The important consideration is not the scribal artifact but the stu-dent's behavior in producing it.

Zoellner is convinced that many and perhaps most of the studentswho experience difficulties in writing have these problems becauseour ruling metaphor for dealing with the process has created a dis-sociation between what a student thinks and what she writes. Heargues that "there exists an intervening behavioral term which, inthe phrasing of the information theorists, constitutes a quantifiableand manipulatively accessible amount of 'noise in the channel(273). Zoellner proposes that we replace our think-write metaphorwith a talk-write metaphor. In order to bring about learning, wemust shift our attention from thought, a phenomenon beyond per-ception, to talk, a phenomenon which can be observed and manipu-lated. The answer to our difficulty can be found in the learning the-ory of behavioral scientists, who see learning not as an internaleventas do most writing teachersbut as a "replicable and mea-surable external event, specifically the frequency or rate at which anorganism 'emits' a discernable 'bit' in the behavioral continuum-(274). We must isolate these external events in order to reinforce thedesirable ones.

Zoellner's proposal for the new composition pedagogy includes,he asserts, much of what is done in the classroom nowfor ex-ample, the emphasis on rhetorical principles, long themes, modelessays, and even outlines. But in each case he would provide a be-havioral element. According to Zoellner, teachers must offer stu-dents instruction that involves the stages of the writing process andnot simply the specifications of the final product. This instructionmust be "visible rather than invisible- (284), meaning that it inus;.involve ol.:servable behavior rather than thought. It must be di-

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rected to the student's unique writing difficulties. And it must al-ways involve engaging in particular acts rather than striving for par-ticular qualities or emulating particular models.

Zoellner spells out the characteristics of the classroom in whichthis behavioral pedagogy could take place. He advocates that thestudent talk out her ideas and immediately record them as theteacher provides an instantaneous response. The nature of this re-sponse is crucial: it must always be couched in terms that ask thestudent to talk, not to think. Thinking, Zoe liner explains, is in ourculture dissociated from talking and invites no immediate response.To accommodate this method, the classroom would have to be re-(:esigned to contain wraparound blackboards or large pads of news-print on which students could write visibly enough for all to see.The vocal-to-scribal dialogue in the class would involve a number ofpossible permutations: teacher to student or students, student tostudent or students, or students to student or students. Such a class-room would resemble an art studio rather than a lecture hall. Revi-sion here would be a simple matter since the student could quicklyerase or rip out and throw away what she has rejected. She wouldalso be learning the difference between vocal and scribal conven-tions as she devised ways to deal with them. Filially, the studentwould always receive immediate reinforcement, knowing at the mo-ment rather than one or two weeks after the fact about the effective-ness of her performance.

The behavioral approach ofkrs a number of other benefits. Itpromises to correct the tendency of English teachers to createthrough their emphasis on -higher things- and superficial correct-ness a split between words-for-teacher and -words-for-me.- It alsoencourages the expression of the self and the development of aunique voiceor at least does not prevent the voice from develop-ing, as does the correction chart. The behavioral approach also em-phasizes the social nature of writing 1),, teaching composing within asocial environment. And it shows the writing teacher engaging inthe composing act in the classroom, just as the pianist plays for hisstudents.

Zoellner's monograph evoked immediate response, with CollegeEnglish presenting some twenty-three pages of letters on it in theMay 1969 issue. Not all were disparaging, but the tone of those thatwere was sometimes irrationally harsh. Zoellner also engaged in

15d


a follow-up interchange with Bloom and Bloom in College Englishin November 1969. This response is especially noteworthy becausein it Zoe liner includes an extensive discussion of Thomas Kuhn'sThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a discussion defending theproposition that, as Zoe liner explains, -my opponents and I are ar-guing from two totally different paradigms of human behavior, thedifferences of which are not susceptible to resolution by rational ar-gument and discussion" (-Response" 215). Finally, in 1972 he criti-cized narrowly conceived and antihumanistic behavioral objectivesin an essay entitled -Behavioral Objectives for English."

While the behavioral rhetorics of Bloom and Bloom and of 'Loch-ner did not attract a large following or inspire many textbooks, theydidas this chapter should make evidentstrongly affect the waysin which writing teachers think and talk about the writing process.The distinction between process and product, for example, whilenot original with the behaviorists, was encouraged by them, as wasthe notion that the teacher could intervene in the student's writingprocess to improve it. Indeed, stripped of their behaviorist ra-tionale, many of the techniques recommended by Zoe liner andBloom and Bloom are commonplace today fin- example, the focuson the activities of writing rather than on thinking skills or reading.

Subjective Rhetoric

The most pervasive form of subjective rhetoric during the sixtiesand seventies was found in a group of diverse approaches commonlycalled expressionistic. These share a common epistemology: theconviction that reality is a personal and private construct. For theexpressionist, truth is always discovered within, through an internalglimpse, an examination of the private inner world. In this view thematerial world is only lifeless matter. The social world is even moresuspect because it attempts to coerce individuals into engaging inthoughtless conformity. For the expressionist, solitary activity is al-ways promising, group activity always dangerous.

It is important, however, to distinguish the varieties of expres-sionistic rhetoric. At one extreme can be found the anarchists, argu-ing for complete and uninhibited freedom in writing, including theintentional flouting of all convention. At the other extreme are the

159


few that are close to the transactional categoryespecially to epis-temic rhetoric. These rhetoricians see reality as arising out of theinteraction of the private vision of the individual and the languageused to express this vision. In other words, in this view languagedoes not simply record the private vision, but becomes involved inshaping it. The unique inner glimpse of the individual is still pri-mary, but language becomes an element in its nurturing. This brandof expressionistic rhetoric finally falls short of being epistemicasthe term has been defined in discussions of rhetoric over the pasteighteen years, a definition to be considered laterbecause it de-nies the place of intersubjective, social processes in shaping reality.Instead, it always describes groups as sources of distortion of theindividual's true vision, and the behavior it recommends in the po-litical and social realms is atomistic, the solitary individual actingalone. But this will become clearer in discussing epistemic rhetoriclater in this chapter. The important expressionists who fall into thislatitudinarian camp are Ken Macrorie, Donald Murray, Walker Gib-son, William Coles, Jr., and Pet:.ir Elbow.

The earlieit and most theoretically complete statement of an ex-pressionistic rhetoric found in this period is Rohman and Wlecke'sP-e-Writing: The Construction and Applica:ion of Models for Con-cept Formation in Writing, a federally funded research study pub-lished in 1964. The two tested a method in which students were re-quired to keep a journal, practice certain meditation techniques,and use analogy. More important for this history is that the studyprobably did more than any other to establish the language of pro-cess in discussions of writingconsidering the stages of prewriting,writing, and rewriting in composing, and especially emphasizing thevalue of the first. This study also set forth the major elements thatwere to characterize expressionistic writing instruction in the yearsto come and articulated the sources of there elements. As men-tioned earli,!r, Rohman and Wlecke relied upon Bruner's cognitivepsychology. Their purpose in doing so, however, was not to considerstages of cognitive development in the student or even the inherentstructure of the disci,pline, although they make passing mention ofthe latter. Instead, they were interested in emphasizing writing asdiscoveryspecifically, discovery of the self. In keeping with thiscommitment, they also calkd upon M. II. Abrams's discussion ofro-mantic expressionistic theories of poetry in his The Mirror and. the

160


Lamp, doing so to underscore the organic, creative features of com-posing. From this perspective writing is seen as art, an art thatarises from within the writer. Rohman and Wlecke further relied onthe -self-actualizing- psychology of Rollo May, Abraham Maslow,and Carl Rogers, seeing writing as an act that authenticates and af-firms the self. Finally, although these features can be seen in mostexpressionistic rhetorics of the periodDonald C. Stewart's TheAuthentic Voice: A Pre-Writing Approach to Student Writing beingthe most complete and intclligent textbook based en the work ofRohman and Wleckeit should be noted that a given version maystress one feature over another.

I would like to begin with one of the early statements of an ex-treme form of expressionistic rhetoric. In a previous chapter, the re-lation between depth psychology and expressionistic rhetoric wasmentioned, writing being seen as the attempt to record the truthsdiscoverable within the inner depths of the psyche, truths that aredenied and distorted by society. S. I. Hayakawa, in an unusualstance for him, embraced this position in an essay in College Com-position and Communication in 1962. The essay asserts that fresh-man English should be like group psychotherapy: both Fresh-man English and therapy, the aim is to integrate conflicting feelingsand purposes . . . to come to terms with challenging realities, to ac-quire self-insight and therefore to grow in one's capacity to under-stand and handle problems.- Both irmst provide a relaxed and -per-missive- atmosphere so that one can feel free -to try out one's ideas-(-Learning to Think- 7). Students must write regularly, and Haya-kawa specifically recommends the free-writing method of surrealistpoets (themselves, of course, inheritors of certain notions of depthpsychology), involving sessions of fifteen or twenty minutes withoutattempts at revising or editing. The teacher and student readers arethen encouraged to read this free writing in order -to find things toeminnent favorably on- (8). Hayakawa at the same time does suggestthat the free writing be combined with the study of semantics andwith abundant reading. Still, the expressionistic base of the courseremains intact.

Hayakawa's mention of the practice of surrealist poets points toanother kature of expressionistic rhetoric: it considers writing to bean art, the original expression of a unique vision. Indeed, one mea-sure of the success of writing in capturing the unique, individual vi-

1 61


sion is originality of expression. Thus, Margaret Blanchard in a 1964essay in College Composition and Communication contrasts the ra-tional and creative approaches to writing instruction, preferring thecreative because it "calls forth imaginative, intuitive, empatheticresponses, which stimulate in the student an appreciation of hisown interior powers as well as the values incorporated in literature"(20). Creative writing in the composition class "deepens awarenessof self and others" (21). In an accompanying essay entitled "TheEssay as Art," Harold 1 Simonson argues that the essay is not amatter of rhetorical mechanics, erudition, or instruction: "My case,in short, is for the essay as personality, intimacy, inwardness."Simonson appropriately quotes Leslie Fiedler's assertion that theessay offers "the artist's self, his self-revelation" (36). The studentuses original language, avoiding clichés, in order -to discover him-self and come forward under his own colors" (37). And Simonsoncloses with a reference to Emerson, who along with Thoreau is mostfrequently cited by expressionists as an intellectual forebear. Fi-nally, in the issue in which these two essays appearedentitled-Composition as Art"Ken Macrorie explains that his interest aseditor in assembling the essays was to offer an alternative to lin-guistic and rhetorical approaches to teaching writ;eg. These ap-proaches, after all, "may become too analytical and mechanical totap all the human powers of freshman students" (-Composition asArt," back cover).

A later but compatible assertion of the expressionistic notion ofwriting as art is found in Lou Kelly's "Toward Competence and Cre-ativity in an Open Class" (1973). For Kelly, "the content of composi-tion is the writeras he reveals his self, thoughtfully and feelingly,in his own language, with his own voice" (645). The identification ofthis kind of classroom with the Bogerian encounter group was bythis time so commonplace that Kelly felt compelled to deny that thedescription fit her classroom. Iler objective remained, however, theattempt to provide a free environment in which individuals wouldcreatively discover the self'. Shnilarly, Jean Pumphrey in 'TeachingEnglish Composition as a Creative Art" (1973) advocates "I; shift inemphasis from teacher-student to student-peer evaluation, and anopening up of the classroom to let in real problems," meaning prob-lems that are of genuine personal concern. Pumphrey uses "write-ins" (five to ten minutes of free writing) and fiction writing, with

162


students arriving at generalizations about writing by examiningtheir own process. Revision then follows but is never allowed to be apart of free writing. The students are creating their own worlds, notrecording someone else's--engaging in -a process of scattering, thebringing together of various parts into a new whole" (667) that re-sults in fresh discov.2.ry.

Throughout the sixties, essays arguing for writing as self-expressioncontinued to appear, moving, as might be expected, in increasinglyoriginal directions. Thi- method of writing instruction was encour-aged by the Dartmouth Conference, a meeting in 1966 of teachersand scholars from the United States and Great Britain at DartmouthCollege to discuss the teaching of English in the public schools. Theemphasis in john Dixon's report on the conference, Growth throughEnglish, is on language and personal growth, the use of Englishstudies for building an -inner wlrld." Ann Berthoff has offered atelling criticism of this stance, :nguing that the Dartmouth Confer-ence supported a bifurcation of language use into the commu-nicative and the expressive, the communicative being identifiedwith the public, rational, and empirical, and the expressive with theprivate and emotional. I ..e result, she argues, is that expressivewritingincluding arthas been divorced from the world of prac-tical affairs, becoming powerless and ineffective, a trivial discourseof cathartic but ineffectual emoting. Berthoff's description of therecommendations of the Dartmouth Conference, to be taken up ingreater detail later, is compelling. There was also in the late sixtiesand early seventies, however, a branch of expressionistic rhetoricthat attempted to identify explicitly the personal and private withtl.:2 political.

The connections between the expressive elements of compositionas depth psychology, composition as art, and composition as politi-cal act are seen in II. R. Wolf's "Composition and Group Dynamics:The Paradox of Freedom," an essay appearing in College English in1969. Using a -psycho-sexual analysis" calling on R. D. Laing andBruno Bettelheim, Wolf argues that all writing ought to be -theunique expression of one '! unique experience.' (441). After notingthat his best writing section had been made up primarily of activistsand creative writers, Wolf concludes that these two gloaps shared-the free assertion of their own selves and their world views- (442).Ile further insists that, because of the creative nature of the com-

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posing act, only such self-assertive behavior can lead to success. ForWolf, this premise resulted in a course in which small student groupsworked independently of the teacher. For others during this time, itgave rise to the "composition as happening" phenomenon, and anumber of essays describe this approach.

In a 1967 essay entitled "English Composition as a Happening,"Charles Deemer attacks the university, charging that it is opposedto education because it fragments and alienates students. Citingsuch figures as Norman 0. Brown, John Dewey, Paul Goodman,Marshall McLuhan, and Susan Sontag, Deemer calls for the com-position course to become "an experience" in which the teacher's au-thority is removed by having the student become an equal partici-pant in learning. The model for this course is the "happening," anart form distinguished by its making the audience part of its veryexistence. This aesthetic experience involves shocking and surpris-ing the audience-participant into awareness, and Deemer arguesthat such experiences should become the basis of the compositionclass: "Clear writing and clear thought come only after clear experl-ences, yet the inspiration of such experiences has been virtually ne-glected by educators." Teachers should shock students into under-going thse clear experiences. They can, for example, speak fromthe back of the room or from outside the side windows, or they canconduct discussion to Ray Charles records. In this scenario, teach-ers become actors who reduce the distance between actor and audi-ence, including the audience in the drama. The student will thenparticipate in the realizaion of his own awareness of his inade-

quacy" (124), arriving at his personal version of truth.Other articles in this vein followed. In a 1971 College English es-

say, Leo Hamalian and James V. Hatch described the use of the hap-pening in the literature class, providing a brief history of the phe-nomenon and explaining that it "is not concerned with product . . .

but with process" (325). In 1972, Michael Paull and Jack Kligermanoffered a variety of experiencesincluding the happeningthatstudents could undergo in the classroom in order to overcome theirtendency to allow "interpretation of experience embodied in thelanguage of others to order their own experience" (652.). The mostcomplete application of the happening in the composition class,however, was reported in an article in the February 1971 issue ofCollege Composition and CommunicatMn.

164

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152 Rhetoric and ileality

bers of their camp. Consequently, they offered in their essays andtextbooks a rhetoric meant to counter the charge of solipsism or an-archy. Sometimes this is explicit. Murray, in a 1969 article entitled"Finding Your Own Voice: Teaching Composition in an Age of Dis-sent," acknowledges that student power is a fact and that politics en-ters the writing classroom. This does not mean, however, that thestudent and teacher do not have responsibilities. Murray maintainsthat individualism and freedom ought to be encouraged, but thatthese must be defined within a range of limitations for both teacherand student. Coles similarly takes pains .1 a 1972 essay to dissociatehis approach from approaches that see the composition class as aplace for therapy or political confrontation. The self he is concernedwith in his composition class, he explains, is "a literary self, a selfconstruable from the way words fall on the page. The other self, theidentity of the student, is something with which 1 as a teacher canhave nothing to do" ("Unpetty Pace" 379). These attempts to denythe broader implications of tneir positions are not always convinc-ing, especially given the individualistic cast of their methods. Still,their emphasis on the place of language in shaping the self does saveMurray and Coles, as well as a number of other leaders of theirgroup, from some of the excesses of their contemporaries, and Iwould like to close this section by commenting on this matter.

Macrorie, Gibson, Coles, Murray, and Elbow all agree that writ-ing is art and, as such, can be learned but not taught. All that theteaelwr can do is provide an environment in which the student canlearn, rdying on sudi activities as free writing, rewriting, journalwriting, editorial groups, and the encouragement of the originalmetaphor. As I have stated elsewhere, the purr)se of free writingand journal writing is to capture one's unique, personal response toexperience; the purpose of emphasizing metaphor is to learn to cap-ture tlwse preverbal responses in language; and the purpose of edi-torial groups is to check for the inauthentic in the writer's response(Berlin, "Contemporary Composition"). Such a teaching environ-ment has at its center the cultivation of the singular vision and voiceof the student. This cultivation takes place, however, not throughtlw happening or tlw pohtical confrontation, but through study ofthe ways in which language is involved in expressing one's percep-tions or a private, intuitive version of reality. Tlw writing activities

1 Eh


in the classroom are thus designed to teach students ts Ise languagein arriving at their own vision of the .alto increase their abilityto call on all the resouices c" language in discovering their personalinterpretation of experience. This 1..ner vision finally exists ap.from language, but language is necessary 4, order for the individualto shape an interpretation that constitutes a better approximation ofit. Every chapter of Macrorie's telling writing )1- example, is de-signed to demonstrate "the way language works in us" (4). Similarly,Murray devotes an entire essay to a word-by-word analysis of hisone-sentence definition of the writer: "A writer is a.1 individual whouses language to discover meaning in experience aud communicateit" ("Interior View" 21). Here language is emphasized as "a sturdytool for the exploration of experience" (25). In "Composing theWorld: The Writer as Map-Maker," Gibson emphasizes that wordsdo not record the world, but construct it. And Coles, like Gibson anadmirer of Theodore Baird of Amherst, explains that his sequentialwriting assignments are designed to get students to the real subject:"language: its relationship to experience and individual identity"("The Sense of Nonsense 27). Finally Elbow similarly asserts that"I don't know what I perceive, feel or think until I ean get it intolanguage and perhaps even into someone eVo's head" ("ExploringMy Teaching" 751). IIis emphasis, like that of all the expressionistsconsidered in this section, is un the "I," on defini 2; the self so as tosecure an authentic identity and voice.

This type of expressionistic rhetoric focuses on a dialectic betweenthe individual and language as a means of getting in touch with thesell Indeed, even the dialectic between th- wriL r and the editorialgroup is designed to enable the writer to understand the numilesta-don of 11( identity in language throwlt considei ing tit( reactions ofothersnot, for example. to Iv.gin to understand ;iow meaning isshaped by discourw communities. And it is tilis commitw-nt to anepistemology th .t locates all truth wit,' in a personal construct aris-ing from one's unique selfhood that pre% ents these expressionistsfrom becoming genuinely epistemic in their approach, despite theiruse of activitiessuch as the editorial groupthat on tl. surfaceare social in nature. All of this can be seen in Elbow's Writing with-out Machers, one of the most articulate and pedagogically resource-fill of tlw expressionistic textbooks.

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Elbow's purpose in this text is avowedly to empower students, toenable them -to become less helpless, both personally and politi-cally" (vii). This power, however, is not political in any overt sense;it is instead conceived in personal termsgetting control over one'slife through getting control over words. Elbow's authority for hisstatements is thus appropriately established through his personalexperience, -making universal generalizations upon a sample ofone" (16). The teacherless classroom gives the student the freedomfor self-development, especially crucial in a writing course, a placein which -there is learning but no teaching" (xi). Writing is an or-ganic process of growth and discovery involving wordi, but it is im-portant to remember that the growth and discovery is always per-sonal: -Only you have grown, your words have not" (23). This isalways the case because -writing is, in fact, a transaction with wordswhereby you free yourself from what you presently think, feel, andperceive" (15). Writing allows for the attainment of a new and betterunderstanding of the self, a process that involves placing the self in adialectical relationship with a variety of elements. Thus, Elbow rec-ommends -cooking--interchanges between people, between ideas,between "words and ideas, between immersion and perspective,-between metaphors, between genres and modes, and "between youand the symbols on paper- (xi). All of these interactions are usefulheuristics based on a free play oflanguage. This language-play, how-ever, is intended as a method of discovering the nonverbal reality ofthe self: "Language is the principal medium that allows you to inter-act with yourself. . . . Putting a thought into symbols means settingit down and letting the mind take a rest from it. . . . A principalvalue of language, therefore, is that it permits you to distance your-self from your own perceptions, feelings, and thoughts" (54). Whilethe distancing does improve mmmunication, the most importantbenefit is that it leads to self-understanding. The editorial group inElbow's camp serves the same function; observing the responses ofother selves to one's words leads to greater insight into one's identity,a better grasp of how to -fulfill [one's] own goals, not their goals"(127). It is not surprising, then, that Elbow's version of the editorialgroup was influenced by tiAe methods of group therapy and of theencounter group (121). Finally, at the start of this discussion, I saidthat Elbow's approach is not overtly political. In tlw last analysis,

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however, for Elbow as for other expressionists, the personal is thepoliticalthe underlying assumption being that enabling individu-als to arrive at self-understanding and self-expression will inevitablylead to a better social order.

Transactional Rhetoric

Transactional rhetoric does not locate reality in some empiricallyverifiable external phmomenon (sense impression or the quantifi-able) or within some realm apart from the external (ideas or vision).

instead discovers reality in the interaction of the features of therhetorical process iiselfin the interaction of material reality,writer, audience, and language. The differences between the vari-ous types of transactional rhetoric lie in the way each of these ele-ments is defined and, more imporlant, in the nature of their rela-tionship. There are three rhetorics in this category: the classical,the cognitive, and the epistemic.

Classical RhetoricThe distinguishing feature of the version of classical rhetoric that

appeared during the sixties and seventies was its commitment torationality. From this point of view, classical rhetoric as found in Ar-istotle treated all the elements of the rhetorical situation: inter-locutor, audience, reality, and language. Indeed, this version in-sisted that all are inevitably involved in the rhetorical act and somust be considered in pedagogy. The elements, however, are de-fined in rational terms, even though slight concessions are made tothe emotional and ethical appeals. The main reason for this is thatthis rhetoric regards reality and the mind of the interlocutor as in-herently rationalindeed, as operating according to the stricturesof Aristotelian logic. And although recent discussions of classicalrhetoric have challenged this interpretation (Grimaldi; Lunsfordan(l Ede), discussions in the sixties and seventies clearly did not.

1 have already indicated in some detail the revival after 1950 ofinterest in rhetori ,. and its classical origins. The most conspicuousspokesperson for this point of view had been Edward P. J. Corbett,first at Creighton and then at Ohio State. However, before we con-

1 6


sider his extensive contribution to the study of classical rhetoric inparticular and composition studies in general, we should take noteof a few other figures.

Richard Hughes and Albert Duhamel published Rhetoric: Prin-ciples and Usage in 1962. Their approach is Aristotelian, and the ra-tionale for their method is explained in Hughes's "The Contempo-raneity of Classical Rhetoric," published in 1965. For Hughes,Aristotelian rhetoric is "explorative and pedagogic," offering thematerials needed for a modern rhetoric. Its three distinguishingcharactt'ristics are its vitalism, its concept ofargument, and its con-cept of topics. Vitalism refers to the creative quality ofAristotelianrhetoric, concern with "moving an idea from embryo to reality"(157); it is an art that deals with a process. The concern of Aristotlefor argument grows out of this creativity. Argument holds sway inthe area between fact and opinion and is concerned with "the gen-erative power of the rhetorical process producing a judgment fromjust such an area" (158). Rhetoric for Aristotle is first and foremostconcerned with discoverywith locating the material of effectiveargument. The topics, finally, are at the center of this discovery pro-cess, providing the means for arriving at a judgment. Hughes takesthe position that Aristotelian rhetoric, flanked on the one side bylogic and on the other by stylistics, can provide a corrective to ourspecialization and a center for a student's education.

In -A Plea for a Modern Set of Topoi" (1964), Dudley Bailey callsfor the study of the rhetorical tradition and argues that the newrhetoric will emanate from Coleridge, displaying "the sort of rela-tions which obtain among the det.lils of our thoughtobtain suc-cessfully, that is, in educated discourse." These relations "are thelogical and psychological patterns which listeners and readers of ourlanguage understand, and indeed anticipate in our discourse" (114).These are the patterns Bailey proposes as a modern set of topoi forthe writing class. Similarly, in "Honesty in Freshman Rhetoric"(1971), Margaret B. McDowell explains that the rhetoric course re-placed the communications course and the literature-compositioncourse during the late fifties and the sixties. She argues that thisnew rhetoric course should be based on three Aristotelian prem-isespremises articulated by Donald C. Bryant. The course shouldinclude both persuasive and expository writing, it should emphasizeinformed opinion rather than merely skillfully expressed opinion,

1 7t)


and it should offer instruction in dealing with controversial issues.In other words, the modern composition course ought to apply Aris-totelian principles in taking social problems as its subject matter,providing a purpose and an audience for writing, and emphasizingargumentation. Finally, in "The Boundaries of Language and Rheto-ric: Some Historical Considerations" (1968), Robert 0. Payne pve-sents an excellent survey of the rhetorical thought of Plato, Aris-totle, Cicero, Quintilian, and the Sophists. He goes on to argue thathistorical conceptions of rhetoric should be reexamined in our at-tempts to educate the whole person.

The most influential of the spokespersons for the return of classi-cal rhetoric to the composition classroom has been Corbett. HisClassical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, published in 1965,presents both a rhetorical pedagogy and a history of the disciplinefrom ancient to modern times. I have commented on the features ofthis rhetoric text elsewhere ("Contemporary Composition"; WritingInstruction), and here I would like simply to summarize its majorfeatures. Corbett's text is comprehensive in every way. Despite itsemphasis on the rational, it includes the emotional and ethical ap-peals, arguing for a holistic response to experience. For Corbett, theaesthetic and the moral must be included in the rhetorical act. Be-cause Corbett understands that rhetoric deals with the probable, heplaces persuasion at its center. The result is a rhetoric that includesinvention, arrangement, and style, guiding the student at everystep of the composing act.

Especially relevant to this discussion of classical rhetoric are Cor-bett's attempts to show the appropriateness of classical rlwtoric tothe modern political and social context. In "The Usefulness of Clas-sical Rhetoric" (1963), he argues that classical rhetoric addresses thewhole person, providing for the rational, emotional, and ethicalappeals. This rhetoric is likewise aware of the role of audience inshaping discourse. Classical rhetoric further provides for inventionthrough the Roman system of status as well as for arrangement andstyle, the latter including schemes and tropes. The ancient disci-pline of imitation can, furthermore, be applied to the lessons ofmodern linguistics. Corbett closes by offering classical rhetoric as acorrective to "the cult of self-expression." asserting that "what mostof our students need, even the.bright ones, is carefP1 .ivstematizedguidance at every step in the writing plocess" (WO. b "What Is

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Being Revived?" (1967), Corbett offers "a rapid survey of the rhe-torical tradition" (166)perhaps the best of these to appear in anyessay of the pe, tod. It is significant in that, after pointing to themost promising contemporary developments, he concludes: -Whatwe need now is a rhetoric of the proces, rather than of the product"(172). The language of process has found its way into discussions ofclassical rhetoric, just as it had with behaviorist and expressionisticrhetorics.

In -The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of theClosed Fist" (1969), Corbett applies the lessons of his conception ofclassical rhetoric to the controversies of the day, setting up his keyterms at the very start: -The open hand might be said to charac-terize the kind of perstrisive discourse that seeks to carry its poinby reasoned, sustained, conciliatory discussion of the issues. Theclosed fist might signify the kind of persuasive activity that seeks tocarry its point by non-rationale [sic], non-sequential, often non-verbal, frequently provocative means. The raised closed fist of theblack-power militant may be emblematic of the whole new develop-ment in the strategies of persuasion in the 1960's" (288). The essaygoes on to discuss the features of the rhetoric of the closed fist andits departure from the rhetoric of the open hand, starting with a dis-cussion of Renaissance .,.hetor;c and calrng upon Marshall McLuhanand Walter Ong in interpreting the shift. Tl ,. rhetoric of the closedfist, Corbett concludes, is nonverbal and rel, on demonstration--marches, boy..otts, sit-in: take-overs, riots" (291). Rather thanbeing geared to the solitzlry speaker or writer, 1t is -a group rhetoric,a grgarious rhetoric" (292, based on community and a commit-ment to community. Still another feature of the rhetoric of thedosed fist is that it is coercive rather than persuask resting on anirrational base that dnies choices. This leads to its being nonconciliatory, with speakers intentionally working -to antagonize oralienate the audience" (295) rather than trying to ingratiate them-selves. Corbett admits in dosing that he has indicated his prefer-ence through his method of presentation. And although he finallytries to be conciliatory, attempting to find conunendable elements inthe rhetoric of the closed fist and to establish a degree of rapprochc-

. .,,,veen the two rhetories, he fin, Ily explicitly asserts hisvolerence fOr the rational rhetoric of the .pen hand.

Classical rhetoric continued to be a pm wthil fOrce in thc com-

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position classroom through the sixties and seventies. While it wasnever widely used, its supporters managed to keep it at the centerof the discipline, a reminder of tf,e possibilities denied for so longby current-traditional rhetoric. Cassical rhetoric was eventually re-interpreted in the e:ghties, but this is a matter for the next chapter.

The Rhetoric of Cognitive PsychologyThe school of rhetoric based on cognitive psychology is distin-

guished by its assertion that the mind is composed of a set of struc-tures that develop in chronological sequence. The most importantof these structures are those that deal with the relationship of lan-guage and thought. In attempting to understand the nature of writ-ing, it is necessary to know the nature of these structures, how theyunfold in tune, and how they are involved in the composing process.Since the intellectual forebears of this rhetorical approach are Brunerand Piaget, this school most legitimately embraces the language ofprocess, seeing both learning and language as parts of developmentand of cognitive stages. Although the rhetoric of cognitive psychol-ogy focuses on the psychology of the individual, it is indeed a trans-actional approach. While the mind is made up of structures that de-velop naturally, it is necessary for the individual to have the rightexperiences at the right moment in order for this development totake place. Witlumt these experiences, or with the wrong sequenceof experiences, cognitive stnictures do not properly mature. Thus,the individnal's environment can play as important a role as the in-lie:ent mak( ip of the mind. From this point of view, writing alsoinvolves a transaction zkrnong the elements of the rhetorical context.The structures of the mind are such that they correspond to thestructures of reality, the structures of the minds of the audience,and the tures of laygtiagc. Learning to write requires the cillti-vation of 'tic appropriate cor,u,tive structures so that the structuresof reality, the audience, and languag,: cal be understood. In thisconnection, it should also be noted that since there is a correspon-dent harnmnv among these elements, to learn about any one ofthem is to lc. about all.

Janet Emig's The Cmnposing Process of Twelfth Graders (1971)was one of tlw most notable efforts of this school of rhetoric. WhileEmig is not ordinarily identified as a proponent of cognitive psy-chology, especially in her most recent work, this landmark study of

1 73


student writers called on some of the basic assumptions of the cog-nitivists. The ease-study approach used, for example, was based inpart on the method of Piaget's The Language and Thought of theChild. Twelfth graders were chosen because -ostensibly they haveexperienced the widest range of composition teaching presented byour schools" (3), and, by implication, are near the upper reaches ofthe developmental stages of learning. Emig was specifically con-cerned in this study with the process of composing rather than theproduct, but differed from Rohman and Wlecke in seeing the stagesas recursive rather than linear. Still, the stages were the same for allthe students investigatedor, stated differently, the evidence Emigfound most significant was that which could be found in all of thestudent responses. One of her major concerns, furthermore, was in-formation about the language development of twelfth graders. Al-though her focus was on the process of the twelfth graders, she in-vited research into the composing process of -persons of all ages"(5), assuming -there are elements, moments, and stages within thecomposing process which can be distinguished and characterized insome detail- (33). And in pointing to the research implications of herstudy, Emig drew a parallel between her study and the work ofthose who aLtempted to ideetify the developmental stages of lin-guistic performancespecifically, the efforts of Kellogg W. Huntand R. C. O'Donnell. She recomnwnded comparing the process andpractice of her twelfth graders with that of both professional andnonprofessional adult writers, and she suggested longitudinal stud-ies of students to -make better known the developmental dimen-sions of the writing process, both for the individual and for membersof various chronological and ability age groups- (95). She was also, itshould be noted, concerned with the efieets of intervening in thedevelopniental process as well as with the ways in which the processvaries among cultures and even personality types. Most important,Emig assumed that the rhetorical complexities involved in compos-Mgcomplexities :.he did not underestimatecan be explained bystudying the cognitive skills discoveeed in a case-study of twelvehigh school students. To understand the way tlww students performcognitively in writing is to understand the role of reality, audience,purpose, and even language in the rhetorical act.

The effect of Emig's study was widespread and significant. Shepwvided docunwnted evidence suggesting that the composing pro-

174

Major Rhetorical Approaches: 1t.160-1975 161

cess described in most composition textbooks did not conform to thebehavior of actual writers. She indicated flaws in the way writinginstruction is commonly approached, and further indicated thecomplex and unsystematic nature of composing, encouraging newapproaches to teaching it. Her effort resulted in more teachers call-ing upon the process model of cornposingprewriting, writing, andrewriting recursivelyas it suggested ways teachers could assiststudents in all stages of the process. Emig also pointed out the inap-propriateness of the criteria commonly used by teachers in evalu-ating student work. And early on, she urged that teachers be writ-ers. In short, this study contributed greatly to the way we think andtalk about writing and, as has been recently pointed out (Faigley etal. 5), the way we conduct research about it.

One of the most engaging applications of cognitive psychology tocomposition studies was proposed by Janice Lauel in "Heuristicsand Composition" (1970). Arguing that writing teachers must "brealrout of the ghetto," she suggested calling upon research and theoreti .cal work in areas outside of studies in English and rhetoric. Themost significant of this research, in her view, had to do with discov-eryinvention, the heart of a vital rhetoric. Lauer recommendedgoing to the literature in psychology in search of heuristic proce-duresinventional techniquesthat could enrich the compositionclassroom, and she accordingly presented an extensive bibliographyof the area. Lauer's essay prompted a response from Ann Berthoffentitled "The Problem of Problem Solving," in which she chargedLauer with positivism. While Berthoff's response perhaps shed morelight on her own position (of which more later) than on Lauer's, it didenable Lauer to make a helpfOl response. Lauer explained thatrather than proposing that composition be taught as a mechanicalart of problem-solving, she was in fact offering a series of articlesthat examined the act of creation. Thus, she was not proposing thatstudents be taught to find "the right solution, the correct answer, ina finite number of steps governed by explicit rules"; instead, she wasproposing problum-solving as creativity, the open-ended quest forreasonable answers: -Problem solving as creativity uses not sets ofrules but heuristic procedures, systematic but flexible guides toeffmtive guessing" ("Counterstatement" 209).

This attempt to provide writing teachers with heuristicsflexibleguides to effective guessingthat were derived from the work of

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cognitive psychologists is also found in the work of Richard Larson.We recall that the expressionistic rhetoricians were also concernedwith invention, but that their method of addressing it was to pro-vide students with experiences or to get students to write freelyabout their experiences. Rhetoricians influenced by cognitive psy-chology, like classical rhetoricians, are more likely to provide a set ofprocedures for students to follow in generating the matter of dis-course. Thus, in "Discovery through Questioning: A Plea for Teach-ing Rhetorical Invention," Larson offers a set of questions for stu-dents designed "to stimulate active inquiry into what is happeningaround them in place of the indifference or passivity with whichthey often face other than the most dramatic experiences" (127).These questions, he explains, have grown out of his reading ofcog-nitive and other psychologistsBruner and Rollo May, for ex-ampleon creativity, as well as from the work of the tagmemicistsRichard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike on perspective.(This is the part of tagmemics, incidentally, most influenced by cog-nitive psychology, and Lee Odell makes the connection betweenPiaget, Brunei', and Pike explicit in "Piaget, Problem-Solving, andFreshman Composition.") Similarly, in "Invention Once More: ARole for Rhetorical Analysis," Larson distinguishes between twostrategies for invention. Thc first, like his own, helps "the studentto organize and define his observations" (665) and is designed tolead the student to understand data. The other, explained by E. M.Jennings in an essay entitled "A Paradigm for Discovery"based onArthur Koestler and Brunerattempts to get the student to thinkin the way that creative people think, juxtaposing unrelated ideas inorder to develop new concepts. As Larson explains, both "proce-dures must deal with the sense data of observation Or the concep-tual data from reading and speaking." The difference, he notes, isthat Jennings "looks first at the ways in which the mind works, not atways of understanding data" (666). For both Larson and Jennings,the structures of the mind parallel the structures of the worldtheinside functioning in a way that is identical to the outside when bothinside and outside are operating normally.

This view is also seen in "Problem-Solving, Composing, and I. ib-eral Education" (1972), where Larson defines problem-solving as"the process by which one moves from identifying the need to ac-

176


complish a particular task (and discovering that the task is difficult),to finding a satisfactory means for accomplishing that task" (629).Citing Dewey, Herbert Simon, and Lauer's -Heuristics and Com-position," Larson presents a seven-stage process and applies it toanalyzing Swift's -A Modest Proposal." Larson makes explicit thatthe method "is a mode of thought that assists the identification andresolution of difficulties." It is both a way of thinking, "an activity ofthe mind" (632), and a description of the structure of the external-worldthe world being the place where "a problem appears.- Theexternal world presents "a disagreeable condition" or informationthat "demands explanation" or, alternately, it poses "internal contra-dictions." The mind is so structured that it can immediately per-ceive these problematic conditions and "satisfy a need perceived inthe data" (633). Once again, the structure of the external world andthe structure of the mind are seen as working together in harmo-nious correspondence. Problems and solutions arise out of the in-herently rational nature of both the external world and the mindperceiving it. In this process, historical, social, or economic consid-erations are irrelevant; the individual responds to problems as ob-jective situations to which objective responses must be made.

There were other forces in the sixties and seventies emphasiz-ing the value of cognitive psychology to writing instruction. AsApplebee has indicated, the Dartmouth Conference was influencedby Piaget, L. S. Vygotsky, and the American George Kelly. The di-versity of these figures led it to define language as a continuum ex-tending from the purely external, referential, and objective, to thepurely internal, expressive, and subjective. Its emphasis on the ex-pressive encouraged expressionistic rhetoric (see Correll, "Tradi-tional Course"). On the other hand, its emphasis on learning as aprocess and on developmental levels encouraged the cognitive ap-proaches of James Britton in England and James Moffett in thiscountry. Britton's influence in America (lid not come into play untilwell into the seventies. Moffett's Teuchii tlw Universe of Dis-course, on the other hand, quickly becam, a strong influence inpublic education. A!; this work makes clear, Moffett sees studentsas :noving in their language development through levels of abstrac-tion: hum interior dialogue, to conversation, to correspondence, topublic narrative, to published generalization and inference. The

1.77


distinctions have to do with the distances separating interlocutor,audience, and subject. Moffett thus recommends writing and speak-ing activities that are appropriate to the stages of the student'sdevelopment.

One final rhetorical approach displaying the peripheral iufluenceof cognitive psychology ought to be mentioned. In A ConceptualTheonj of Rhetoric (1975), Frank D'Angelo makes a rigorous andambitious attempt to create a comprehensive rhetoric that takesinto account a generously wide variety of speculation in thc, fieldduring the previous twenty years. D'Angelo wishes to explain therelation between writing and thinking. Ilis basic assumption is thatreality and the mind are identical, corresponding structures that canbe studied directly: "The universe is characterized by intelligence,by design, and by interdependence." But this orderly universe isat the same time not merely logical. Approaches to understandingthe external world and the mind that perceives it must "combinethe scientific views of Aristotle or Tic lhard de Chardin with themetaphysical views of Plato, Jung, and Assagioli, to achieve a newsynthesis." Unlike most other eognitivists, D'Angelo attempts to in-clude in his synthesis the "anti-rationalistic, counter cultural move-ment of the sixties." His goal is a rhetoric that focuses "on logicaland nonlogical modes of thought, on reason and imagination, onthinking and feeling, on linearity and holism, on personal writing aswell as expository and persuasive writing" (vii).

Taking this broad spectrum as his province, D'Angelo proceeds inhis investigation along interdisciplinary lines, moving from cog-nitive psychology to linguistics, to anthropology, to philesopYz. torhetorical theory and history. His guiding principle is the se'reilstructuresin the mind, in the external world, in language . and indiscoursethat can be taken as constitutive, as basic units of order.As the title A Conceptual Theory of Rhetoric indicates, D'Angclostarts with the mind and wolks outward: "The study of rhetoric isthe study of the nature of human intellectual capaciWs. What arethe innate organizing principles, the deeper underlying mental op-erations, the abstract mental structures that determine discourse?"(26). D'Angelo moves from the mind to structures of discourse andback again, allowing each to illuminate the other. lie follows thismethod, furthermore, in examining the traditional areas of rheto-ricinvention, arrangement, and stylealthough, as has been in-

178

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1 7.


communitiesgroup oru,.. lized around the discussion of particularmatters in particular ways. Knowled, then, is a matter of mutualagreement appearing as a pi 0,itict of the rhetorical activity, the dis-cussion, of a given discourse cotnntunity. In fairness to Leff I shouldnote that, while he presents this view without distorting it, he addsthe oltjections to the position that have been proposed, including.;:is own reservations about it.

I wout.d now like to consider this concept as it has emerged in thedare of composition studies between 1960 and 1975. From the.,mic perspective, knowledge is not a static entity located in,ternal world, or in subjective states, or even in a col respon-

&nee between external and internal structures. Knowledge is dia-lectical, the result of a relationship involving the interaction ofop-posing dements. These dements in turn are the very ones thatmake up tile communication process: interlocutor, audience, reality,language. The way they interact to constitute knowledge is notmatter of preexistent relationships waiting to be discovered. Theway they interact with each other in forming knowledge emerges in-stead in acts of communication. Comimmication is at the centerof episteinic rhetoric because le-nowledge is ak aYs knowledge forsomeone standing in relation to others in a linguistically circum-scribed situation. That is to say, all elements of the communicationact are kiguistically conditioned: interlocutor, audience, and realityare all defined by language and cannot be known apart front the ver-Id constructs through which we respond to them. Language formsour conceptions of our selves, our audiences, and the very reality inwhich we exist. Language, moreover, is a socialnot a privatephenomenon, and as such embodies a multitude of historically spe-cific conceptions that shape experie.e, especially ideological con-ceptions alunit 1.4.1111011lic, piditical and siicial arrangements. Thus,in studying the way people communicaterhetoricwe are study-ing the ways in which language is involved ill shaping all the featuresof our experience. The study of rhetoric is necessary, then, in orderthat we may intentionally direct this process rather than be uncon-s,:iously controlled by it.

Epistemic rhetoric Ilidds that language is the key to understand-ing the dialectical process involved in the rhetorical act. Knowledgedoes not exIst apart from language. Thus, the task i the interlocutoris not simply to find the appropriate wo:ds to communicateto

1S u


containa nonverbal reality. Language, instead, embodies andgenerates knowledge, and there is no knowledge without language.For epistemic rhetoric, language is not, however, a single, mono-lithic entity. Within each society there is a host of languages, eachserving as the center of a particular discourse community. Eachcommunity--whether made up of biologists, composition teaclwrs,autoworkers, ward mem5ers, or baseball fansis built around a lan-guage peculiar to itself so that membership in the group is deter-mined by the ability to use the language according to the prescribedmethod. This specialized language can serve an inclusionary ffinc-tion because it prescribes and enforces assumptions about externalreality and the relationship of its w&mbers to this reality. Knowledge of what is "real" to the group ,an only be displayed by using itslanguage. More important, implicit in this language are rules of evi-,1,.ncecodes restricting what can and cannot be used in establish-

truth. Being a member of a comumnity requires knowledge ofthese rules, knowledge that is often tacit. Thus, for a community ofbiologists or composition teachers or autoworkers or ward membersor baseball fans, establishing truth involves engaging in a dialecticalinterchange that entails rules of evidence (what is real and not real),the members of the community (the audienc('), and an individualwho wishes to change or affirm the community's truths (the inter-locutor). This dialectic, moreover, is a complicated process that isnot cumulative or arithmetic in nature; knowledge does not usuallyresult from simply adding or subtracting rhetorical elements. In-stead, meaning comes about as the external world, the conceptionsthe writer or speaker brings to the external world, and the audiencethe writer or speaker is addressing all simultaneously act on eachother during the process of communicating. The result of this dia-lectic is unpredictable, providing for creativity and accounting fortl. inevitability of change.

I would now like to trace the manifestations of epistemic rhetoricduring this period, showing its theoretical and practical orientation.As mentioned in chapter 5, epistemic rhetoric grew out of the ac-tivity sArrounding the emphasis on general education and its com-mitment to the communications course, especially the focus onrhetoric as public discourse for a democracy and the insistence (ori-ginating with General Semantics) on the importance of language.This concern for language has been shared by linguistics and coin-

1 81


position teachers. In fact, during the sixties, seventies, and eightieslanguage has been the central preoccupation of the English depart-ment, a focal point of literary and rhetorical studies as well as stud-ies in linguistics. It should be noted, however, that no single rheto-ric I will be discussing under the heading of epistemic has realimdall of the elerients of the theory as I have just described it. Eachinstead displays strong epistemic elements, elementF sometimes de-nied by other features of the system proposed Still, in each caSe,the epistemic characteristics are the domit,; ones, warrantingplacement in this category.

One of the earliest statements of a type of ,1isteinic rhetoric ap-peared in I larold Martin's "The Aims of Harvard's General Educa-tion A," published in College Composition and Uummunication in1958. Martin argues that the freshman composition course shouldbe "concerned with language not simply as the medium by which atransmission of information takes place but as a phenomenon of par-ticular interest itself." This does not mean that it should be a coursein linguistics or in the history of the language or in theories of com-munication. Since thought is language, explains Martin, studentswill learn to write in order to improve their thinking. This reversalof the thinking-writing sequence is important since writing therebybecomes a way of thinking, not simply a way of recording thought.Language, then, is for the student "a tool for discovery, for inquiryabout the world and his reaction to it." Finally, Martin distinguishessatisfying the self from communication and in the end sees persua-sion as the most important function of rhetoricconvincing "an-ther to view an object or situation in a particular light and, per-

Imps, t.a begin action on the basis of that view" (88). According toMartin, languagethe focus of rhetoricconstitutes thought, dis-covery, and persuasion.

In an influential essay entitled "In Lieu of a New Rhetoric"(1964), Richard Ohmann, coauthor with Martin of a compositiontextbook, presents some of the spadework for an epistemic rhetoric.Rather than attempting a new rhetoric, Ohmann proposes to discussthe ways in which contemporary ideas of rhetoric resemble eachother, drawing on the work of' I. A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, S. I.layakawa, Allied Korzybski, Daniel Fogarty, Richard Weaver, Marie

llochinuth Nic;Iols, and Northrop Frye. Ohmann in fact creates a

182

Major Rhetorical Approaclws: 1960-1975 169

synthesis that is uniquely his own, although the spirit of Burke ispresent throughout.

Th old rhetoric emphasized persuasion. Olunann explains, butmodern rhetoric :ncludes other forms: "communication, contempla-,ioo, inquiry, self-expression, and so on." The old was more ag-gressive in its design on the audience, whereas "modern rheto-ric . . . lowers the barriers between speaker or writer and audience.It shifts the emphasis toward cooperation, mutuality, social har-mony. Its dynamic is one ofjoint movement t,,ward an end that bothwriter and audience accept, not one of an insistent force acting upona stubborn object" (18). The second characteristic of modern rheto-ric is that it regards the discipline as "the pursuit.and not simplythe transmissionof truth and right." Truth becomes ''not a lump ofmatter decorated and disguised, but finally delivered intact; ratherit is a web of shifting complexities whose pattern emerges only inthe process of writing, and is in fact modified by the writing (form iscontent)." A corollary of this stance is that the "writer does not be-gin in secure command of his message, and try to deck it out as be-guilingly as possible; he sets his own ideas and feelings in order dyas he writes." Rhetoric is also self-discovery, and this involves thewriter's style being an expression of the writer's personality. Finally,writing always takes place within a discot se community: "The c .m-munity that a piece of genHoe writing creates is one, not onlyof ideas and attitudes, but oi fundamental modes of perception,thought, and feeling. That is, discourse works within and reflect aconceptual system, or what I shall call (fer want of a term both briefand unpretentious) a world view. Experience, subtle shape-changer,is given form only by this or tha set of concep.ual habits, and eachset of habits 1.as its own patterns of linguistic expre-sion, its owncommunity." Thus language communities form, in fact, "a hierarchyof world views and corresponding communities" (19), ranging greatlyin size and makeup.

Ohmann then turns his attention to the implications of this posi-tion for the classroom. Ile suggests that the course begin with astudy of linguistic structures, including dialects, so students willunderstand that "to master standard written English is to becomecapable of participating in a linguistic community of considerableimportance in our culture" (21). This should be followed by a study

183


of semantics and syntactical alternatives. The course should thenturn to rhetorical considerations in composing the written text, withan emphasis on dialectical relationships. The text-content relation-ship involves the ways in which the writing process discovers mean-ing. The text-author relationship has to do with the author's self-discovery and revelation in writinr.. The text-audience relationshipconsiders the appeal from ethos in the search for a Burkeian identi-fication. Finally, the text in rdation to a world view is involved in allthreecontent, author, and audiencebut should be treated sepa-rately and in detail in the composition class. The point is to enablestudents to realize the diversity of world views within our societythe different ways in which language is used to organize experience.The object, ultimately, is training for citizenship in a dernocacy: thestudent "becomes a voting citizen of his world. rather than a boundvassal to an inherited ontology" (22).

Ohmann's essay is a major theoretical statement of epistemicrhetoric. Another such appeal was articulated by Kenneth Pike,later joined by Alton Becker and Richard Young. Pike, the rounderof tagmemic linguistics, ofkred two preliminary essays to-ard anew rhetoric in College Composition and Communication in 1964. Ayear later this statement was systematized by Young and Becker inToward a Modern Theory of Rhetoric: A Tagmemic Contribution"

(riprinted in W. Ross Winterowd's Contemporary Rhetoric: A Con-ceptual Background with Readings in 1975). The three went on towrite a textbook, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, published in1970. Here I will focus on the latter two works.

"Toward a Modern Theory of Rhetoric" presents the epistemictheoretical base on which the textbook was later built. Young andBecker explain that their point of departure is an application of cer-tain principles of tagmemic theory to rhetoric, arguing that "theprocedures a linguist uses in analyzing and describing a language arein some important ways like the procedures a writer uses in plan-ning and writing a composition" (131). They indicate that there aretwo basic heuristics or discovery procedures: a taxonomy of thesorts of solutions found in the past, and, as in tagmemic theory, anepistemological heuristic. Since modern rhetoric is concerned withdiscovering the new rather than deductivdy applying the alreadyestablished, the epistemological heuristic is the main concern. Thefirst premise of such a heuristic posits "the active role of the o1-

1 8 4


server in discovering pattern, and hence meaning, in the worldaround him" (132). The second premise is that "a complete analysisof a problem necessitates a trimodal perspective." This means tha,language phenomena and, indeed, all human acts must be "viewedin terms of particles (discrete contrastive bits), waves (unsegmenta-1,k physical continua), or fields (orderly systems of relationships)"(133). This gives rise to the well-known tagmemie grid throughwhich the writer is led to examine the topic and the reader fromthrce perspectives. (The grid was made more complicated in thetextbook.) The point of this approach is to develop ''a wide range ofsignificant perspectives" (143).

1 hying introduced the inventional heuristic--the basis of rheto-ric being discoveryYoung and Becker explain that they look uponrhetoric from a Burkeian point of view, seeing it as the effort of awriter to establish identification with an audience by understandingthat audience's perspective and attempting to get it to anderstandthe world through the writer's perspective. This is a "discussionrh-torit:" ratl. T than a rhetoric of persuasion; it is based on mutualrespect and .s dedicated to discovering shared interpretations ofexperience.

Aftr presenting a discussion of discourse patterns, the essayturns to the matter of style, and here the full implications of Yiningand Becker's position are made apparent. In their view, Inrm andcontent are one. This means that discussions of arrangement andstyle are finally discussions of invention: "A writer's style, we be-lieve, is the characteristic route he takes through all the choicespresented in both the writing and prewriting stages. It is th( mani-festation of his conception of the topic nmdicied by his audience,situation, and intentionwhat we might call his 'universe of dis-course (140). The individual writer functio:: .vit: in a discoursecommunity, and the choices made at all levels of composing involvelanguage and are the product of verbal interactions among the topic(reality), the writer, and the audience.

Rhetoric: Discovery and Change reveals a concern with preparingle student for citizenship in a democracy. The booksis an attempt to

establish a new rhetoric that can address the "conflicting ideologies"(8) of the time. Young, Becker, and Pike explain: "We have sought todevelop a rhetoric that implies that we are all citizens of an extraor-dinarily diverse and disturbed world, that the 'truths' we live by are

185

172 Rhetoric and Reatity

tentative and subject to yhange, that we must be discoverers of newtruths as well as preservers and transmitters of old, and that en-lightened cooperation is the preeminent ethical goal of communi,...a-tion- (9). Their approach conceives of rhetoric as a matter of publicdiscourse definel in terms of ethical deliberation and choice. This isimportant given the dialectical nature of establishing truth. Knowl-edge is not outside in the material world or inside in the spiritualworld or located in perfect correspondence of the two. It is theproduct of complicated dialectic:

Const,,itly eha iging, hafflingly complex, the external world is not a neat,vell-ordered p ice replete with meaning, but an enigma requiring inter-

pretation. ThiN interpretaWm is the result of a transaction betweenevents in the external world and the mind of the individualbetweenthe .vor:c1 -out there- and the individual's previous experience, knowl-edge, vahles, attitudes, and desires. Thus the mirrored world is not justthe SUM total of eardrum rattles, retinal excitations, and so on; it is a cre-ation :'rit reflects the peculiarities of the perceiver as well as the pecu-liarit . af what is perceived. (25)

I.anguage is the ground of this dialectical interplay. Rather than,nnply embodying truth so that it may be communicated, language..onstitutes experience:

1.ang,iage provides a way of writing: a set of symbols that label recurringeitunks of experience. . . . Language depends on our seeing certain ex-periences it, constant or repeatable. And seeing the world as repeatableth.oends, in part at least, on language. A language is, in a sense, a theory(), the universe, a way of selecting and grouping experience in a fairly(onsistent and predictable way. (27).

And the dialectic of language between the writer and the materialworld is accompanied by a dialectic between the' writer and the dis-course community in which the writer is taking part:

The writer must first understand tlw nature of his own interpretation andlmw it differs from the interpretation of others. Since each man segmentsexperience into discrete, repeatable units, the writer can begin by askinghow ins way of segmenting and ordering experience differs from his

186.


reader's. How do units of time, space, the visible world, social organiza-tion, and so on differ? . . . Human differences are the raw materials ofwritingdifferences in experiences and the ways of segmenting them,differences in values, purposes, and goals. They are our reason for wish-ing to communicate. Through communication we create community, theba.sic value underlying rhetoric. To do so, we must overcome the barriersto conummication that are, paradoxically, the motive for communica-tion. (30).

All of this leads to a version of the composing process (and the useof the language of process) that rivals Aristotelian rhetoric in itscomprehensiveness. Young, Becker, and Pike provit. for heuristics,for patterns of arrangement, and for direction in creating an effec-tive style. Structure and language here are indeed a part of in-vention since they are at the center of the formation of meaning, oftruth, not simply the dress of thought. The way a text is arrangedand stated is, after all, inextricable from meaning, so to change theshape or its language is to change meaning.

Although I have placed Young, Becker, and Pike among the epis-temic rhetoricians, I must admit there is much in their system thatresists this placenwnt. Growing out of a linguistics influenced bystructuralism, they al-e at times more closely aligned with the rheto-ric of cognitive psychology. This is especially seen in their emphasison the tagmemic grid, their primary heuristic procedure. The de-vice seems to indicate that meaning is the product of rational andempirical categories, categoric s.hat characterize both the observer(the writer) and the observed (the social and material worlds). Re-lated to this is their seeing the issues that concern writers as reduc-ible to matte-s of problem-solving, with problems conceived of inrational terms, resolvable through the application of the tagmemicgrid. Finally, their reliance on Rogerian strategies tends to under-estimate the complexities of disagreement, of conflict, in matters ofpublic debate and, as a result, the notion of the dialectic necessaryto resolve it. These elements should not, however, obscure the epis-temic basis of their approach, a system that sees knowledge as a rhe-torical construct.

In the early seventies, Kenneth Bruffee began presenting a con-ception of rhetoric meant to be an alternative to both expressionisticand current-traditional rhetoric. Ilis approach was grounded in epis-

1-87.

174 Rlwtorie and Reality

temological concerns, examining the ways in which the -lassroornbehavior of teacher and student defines "human nature, the humanmind, the nature of knowledge, and the experience of learning"("The Way Out" 458). Thus, Bruffee looks especially at pedagogy,particularly the definitions of the roles of teacher and student andthe relationship between them that is enforced by classroom proce-dures. Bruffee's orientation regards knowledgeas social and comnut-nal in nature, seeing "teaching and learning not just as activitieswhich occur in a social context, but as activities which are them-selves social in nature." When he looks at the dominant pattern ofbehavior in the English class, he finds an "authoritarian-individualistmode" (458), a mode that includes a number of disturbingly familiarfeatures. In such a class, the only social relationships that exist arethose between teacher and student: "A student talks to the teacher,writes to the teacher, and determines his fate in relation to theteacher individually" (459). There is no relationship among the stu-dents, and any attempt by students to act collaboratively in learningis regarded as suspect. In this class, two teaching conventions aretypically followed: either the teacher lectures or the students recite.In the first, the teach s completely in control of all activities; evenwhen the Socratic method is used the teacher shapes the responsespermissible. While recitation seems to place power in the hands ofstudentstaking as it does the form of seminars, laboratory work,writing assignments, team projects, and tutorialsin fact the teachercontinues to be in control of the activities since each student is fi-nally responsible for her oum work, and then only to the teacher. Inall of these conventions and their various forms, the teacher pos-sesses absolute power: the student's duty is to follow course require-ments and to absorb knowledge from the teacher; the teacher's dutyis "to formulate the requirements of the course, impart knowledgeto students, and evaluate students' retention of it." Underlying thispower relationship is a mechanistic analogy, the notion that "knowl-edge is subject matter, a kind of substance which is contained in themind." The teacher's mind holds more of this matter than does thestudent's, and her responsibility is thus to reduce this inequalitythrough her teaching to transfer portions of her share into the wait-ing vacancy of the student's mind. Finally, the most important crite-ria in deciding on the knowkdge to be shared with students are

188


precedent and convention: "The teacher's responsibility is not onlyto impart knowledge which was imparted to him, but also to impartknowledge as it was imparted to him" (460).

Bruffee proposes collaborative learning as an alternative to thistraditional arrangement, pointing to the successful efforts in this di-rection taking place outside the classroomespecially in the women'sliberation movement and in certain anti-war activities. His strategyfor collaborative learning emulates these efforts by calling for theredistribution of power in the classroom, its "poly-centralization," ascheme consisting of "a number of small groups more or less equal inpower contending with one another.'' This situation resuits in indi-viduals supporting each other in a collaborative relation within eachgroup, enabling ,ower of each individual to equal the power ofthe group as a whole" (462). The shift is from authoritarian modes ofacting to collaborative and nonauthoritarian modes. The teacher'sresponsibility in this classroom is to be not a philanthropist, munifi-cently bestowing knowledge on his students, "but a metteur enscene whose responsibility and privilege is to arrange optimum con-ditions for other people to learn." Such an environment fosters so-cial relationships "in v.-1-..ich students share power and responsibilityas well as inlbrmation not peripherally but in the very process oflearning." The teacher must relinquish control, finding "his purposeas a teacher . . . in helping people discover, accept, and developtheir own intelligence and talent." This method is designed to servethe individual within a social framework, encouraging "the personalautonomy and wholeness which develops through learning in a con-text of human values, and with a recognition of human interdepen-dence" (470).

Although Brulfee followed up this theoretical presentation with apractical statement entitled "Collaborative Learning: Some Prac-tical Models" in 1973 and a textbook in 1972, he did not fully workout the epistemic implications of his view for the writing classroomuntil just recentlyespecially in the 1985 edition of the textbookand in a 1984 College English essay called "Collaborative Learningand the 'COM"..'i sation of Mankind.'" Still, as his later work makesclear, Brufke's critique of writing instruction and the alternative heproposed were from the start based on a conception of knowledge asa social constructiona dialectical interplay of investigator, dis-

189


course community, and material world, with language as the agentof mediation. The rhetorical act is thus implicated in the very dis-covery of knowledge--a way not merely of recording knowledge fortransmission but of arriving at it mutually for mutual consideration.

A number of others during the seventies also encouraged an epis-temie rhetoric. In "Topics and Levels in the Composing Process-(1973), \V. Ross Winterowd argues that theories of form and theoriesof style are sets of inventional topics. This contention serves tounify the process of composing within the field of invention, regard-ing it as an act of discovering meaning. Language is thus placed atthe center of composing, itself serving as the means and end of writ-ing. And Winterowd again takes up this theme as the Organizingprinciple of Contemporary Rheto,-ic: A Conceptual Backgroundwith Readings (1975). Hans Guth in -The Polities ofRhetoric- (1972)tries to demonstrate the relevance of dialectic in teaching writing asdiscovery, showing how this method is inevitably implicated in po-litical questions. For Guth, truth emerges from the interaction ofconflicting views, making writing an integral part of the search forknowledge. I would finally like to consider two essays by an edu-cator who has become a spokesperson for epistemic rhetoric, al-though she has never used the term in describing her method.

In -The Problem of Problem Solving.' Ann Berthoff argues thateducation, including the teaching of writing, is a political act. Thefundamental westion for writing teache:s, she explains, is clear:-Can we change the social context in which English composition istaught by the wvy we teach English composition?" (2.10). Writingmust be taught so that it is involved in students' personal and sociallives. Furthermore, students must be regarded as shapers of theirpersomi and social environmentslanguage users who find andcreate forms of experience through language. They must be re-garded as active agents who shape the world in which they live, call-ing on language to structure new social arramannentsnot simplypersonal ones divorced fror., the larger social context. Berthoirs ob-jection to the Dartmouth Conference is that it divided the use oflanguage into two unrelated areas: communication and expression.According to this view, communication deals with the public worldbut is limited to the rational and empirical; expression deals withthe personal but is exclusively emotional and creative. The flaw is

1 0


that this conception permanently sunders the two, rendering thesecond powerless. For Bertha', language in both realms is creative,the individual user shaping consequencesand doing so, further-more, as an integrated being who thinks and feels simultaneously.

In "From Problem-solving to a Theory of Imagination" Berthoffelaborates on her position. Calling on Ernst Cassirer, she defineshumans as symbol-using animals"that one creature whose worldof behavior is built by language and who makes sense of 'reality' by aprocess of linguistic invention and documentation" (638). She goeson to emphasize "that all language is dialectical; that in the very na-ture of linguistic predication, dialectic is born" (643). Langoage isnot simply a sign systemis not simply, in Richards's phrase, "a sortof catching a nonverbal butterfly in a verbal butterfly net" (641). Inthis essay Berthoff again denounces the arbitrary split betweenthinking and feeling, between the intellectual and the creative.Here she especially emphasizes the dangerous political implicationsof this division, citing in her behalf Paulo Freire. Reality is uot

out there," but the product of a dialectic involving ob-server and observed, and the agency of mediatien is languagethecenter of the work of the literature and composition teacher. ForBerthoff, "language builds the human world" (646). Rhetoric is es-pecially important in this regard because, rightly considered, it "is aformulation of the laws of imagination, that opellition of mind bywhi,2h experience becomes meaningful. . . . Rlwtoric reminds usthat the function ot language is not only to name but also to formu-late and to transformto give form to feeling, cogency to argu-ment, shape to memory. Rhetoric leads us again and again to thediscovery of that natural capacity for symbolic transformation, a ca-pacity which is itself untaught, God-given, universal" (647). Lan-guage is a "speculative instrument" that enables us to understandand change the world, and the study of the way language (Iles this isrhetoric.

As indicated earlier, all of the rhetories considered in this chapterwere inevitably a part of the political activism on college campusesduring the sixties and seventies. They were in fact involved in a dia-lectical relationship with these uprisings, both shaped by them audin turn affecting their development. The demand for "relevance" inthe college curriculum was commonplace, and these rk2torics--

1 91


particularly the classical, expressionistic, and epistemic varietieswere attempting to respond. We have already seen this responsemade explicit in a number of the essays consideredin those byCorbett, Murray, and Berthoff, for example. Even more pointed re-sponses were seen in numerous articles on teaching writing to par-ticular populationsthese approaches subscribing to a variety ofrhetorics. The December 1968 issue of College Composition andCommunication, for example. was entitled "Intergrcup Relations inthe Teaching of English" and included pieces on special approachesto teaching Ilack and American Indian studentsamong themJames A. Banks's "A Profiie of the Black American: Implications forTeaching" and Lorraine Misiaszek's "A Profile of theAmerican IndiaImplications for Teaching." There were also numerous commentarieson the relationship between writing and the feminist movemeni. Forexample, the College English issue for October 1972 was t titled"Women Writing and Teaching"with Elaine Hedges serving asguest editorand included essays by Tillie Olsen, Adrienne Rich,Ellen Peck Killoh, Elaine Reuben, and others. Related to this at-tempt to raise consciousness regarding inequities in the political andsocial system were experiments in teaching undergraduate litera-ture and composition courses. Jerry Farber's "The Student as Nig-ger," an essay denounciig the disempowering of student: in theclassroom, was an underground best seller on college campuses in1969 and 1970. Pedagogic:il essays by Elbow and Bruffee offeringnew classroom approaches also appeared. In addition, the De-cember 1971 issue of College English was given over io the topic"How can we shift responsibility and authority in the classroom? Isit right to do so?" The essays presentedboth affirmative and nega-tivedealt with teaching experiments designed to give studentsmore freedom and responsibility. (The best evaluation of these ex-periments is Bruffi:e's "The Way Out.")

Finally, numerous essays in College English and College Com-position and Communication discussed the preparation of collegeEnglish teachers, encouraging graduate schools to make courseofferings more closely aligned with the undergraduate teaching re-sponsibilities most graduates would face upon entering the profes-sion. For example, College English devoted its April 1972 issue tothe topic "Our discipline and its professional degrees: do they need

192


reconstruction'?" This question had been put forth freqnently in thepreceding decades, but, a.s the next chapter will demonstrate, notuntil the late seventies and the eighties was it addressed by the pro-fession as a whole. In this it fared better, I might add, than the pro-grams of most of the campus political activities of the period.

8

Conclusion and Postscript on thePresent

BY TIIE BEGINN1.\ r; OF THE SEVEN"' IES, TIIE BOOM IN STUDENTenrollment was subsi, ,!. and freshman compositionalways theobject of close scrutin; --was being considered in a new light.Throughout the sixties there had been the customary occasionalessay charging that freshman composition should be abolished.Warner Rice's appeal of 1960 has already been discussed; it was fol-lowed by a piece by William Steinhoff', also of Michigan, in 1961, byLeonard Greenbaum's "The Tradition of Complaint" in 1969, and byD. G. Kehl's satiric "An Argument against Abolishing FreshmanComposition" and Louis Kampf Is "Must We Have a Cultural Bevo-lution?' in 1970. The thrust of these argumentsgrowing out of tk.sixties experienceincluded the old allegations that the coursc washigh school material, did not achieve its goals, and was outside thedomain of a literature department. To these were occasionally addedthe charge that students were better prepared than in the past andno longer needed the coursi, or that to continue the course was toviolate the students' rights. The calls for abolishing the course in theseventies, on the other hand, were related to harsh economic re-alities. Thomas W. Wilcox in his generally unfriendly chapter onfreshman English in The Anatomy of College English (1973) re-ported that a comparison of the surveys he made in 1967 and 1972indicated "about 10 percent of all departments have recently re-duced the amount of English freshmen are required to take." Healso argued that more department would follow suit, especiallyamong "institutions of highest prestige" (99). In 1970, Michael F.

194

Conclusion awl Postscript on the Present 181

Shugrue, English secretary of the MLA, predicted that some uni-versities would abandon the reqi..red freshman English course -be-cause of budgetary cutbacks, fear of organized teat:king assistants,conviction that the co,u-se is ineffective ir improving the syntacticversatility of freshmen, belief that students no longer need a fresh-man composition course, ir al edicts from state homes assigning stu-dents in the first two years .o junior awl community colleges" (251).Ile admitted, how,..wer, that not many colleges had as yet abolishedthe course, and that only a few would eventually do so. In 1972Wayne C. Booth pointed tti cuts in government funding and theclamor for accountability in education as being behind the calls forgetting rid of freshman English, the course most likely to be tkm-onstrated a failure "by the crude tests of the accountability folk-(-Meeting of Minds- 242). Booth lamented that the English depart-ment was prepared to make this sacrificial offering in the hope thatit would leave literature teachers unscathed. free to pursue theirspecial areas of interest in the classroom.

Tlw value of tlwsc ore(lictions was tested in Fon Smith's essay'The Composition Requirement Today: A Report on a NationwideSurvey of Four-Year Colleges and Universities,- published in 1973interestingly enough, the yew that marked the one-liundredth an-niversary of the first appearance of freshman English at Harvard.Smith contrasted his findings with those of Wilcox's earlier study.Wilcox had reported that in 1967, 93.2% of the freshmen at theschools surveyed were required to take at least one term of Englishand 77.8% were required to take two terms. In 1973, however, only76% of the schools surveyed had at least a one-course compositionrequirement, only 45% had .1 requirement of two or more courses,and 24% had no requirement at all. It is important to note that therewas a marked contrast between private and state schools: Smithfound that although :31% of private schools had no composition re-quirement at all, only 11% of state schools fell into this category; fur-thermore, at many of the schools that had no required course, stu-dents chose the freshman writing class as an elective. Still, therewas no denying that fewer students than in 1967 were required toenroll in freshman writing courses. hi addition, Smith discoveredthat 41% of the state whools in his survey were expeciencing pres-sures to reduce the requirenwnt, and that over half of these (56%)required two or more courses. (1Ic also fimnd that 2% of the state

195


schools were under pressure to reinstate or increase the require-ment.) The major alternative method of satisfying tiw freshman re-quirement was through exemption credit, with 68% of all schoolsexempting at leasi some students (leaving only 8% of the totalsample that did not, it should be noted). Smith concluded, -Moreand more students are being exempted at the fewer and fewerschools where there are composition requirements" (143). On theother hand, -the higher the percentage of students exempted atschools, the likelier it is that the entrance requirements at thoseschools are high" (144). Exemption criteria included AdvancedPlacement scores, SAT and ACT scores, College Level ExaminationProgram (CLEP) scores, and the results of departmentally admin-istered exams.

Smith concluded his report with a look at the future. Ile pre-dicted a conthming decline of the freshman composition course: -Allsigns point to more schools dropping the composition requirement,more diminishing the one that (.xists, and more takng advantage ofwhat will probably soon be lw :er equivalency examinations" (148).He pointed to tighter budgets, the difficulty of proving the worth ofthe course with hard figures, the example of schools that had re-duced the requirement without adverse effects (especially appealingto schools that had (o compete for money and/or students), and therigidity of required courses in a curriculum that was becoming morestudent-centered.

Smith's prognosi. , ike all other predictions of the demise of thefreshman writing co,irse, proved to be inaccurate. In the December8, 1975, issue of Nriesiveek, one of the earliest of the -Why JohnnyCan't Write" articles deplored the writing deficiencies of high schoolgraduates and questioned the response of colleges to this problem.Shortly then after, colleges that had recently almhshed or dimin-ished the freshman writing requirement began to reinstate it. Andthis was not simply a response to the heavily publicized declines inSAT an :T scores among entering students. As Lester Faigley andThomas P. Miller have recently pointed out, changes in the econ-omy during the seventies served to increase the amount of writingrequired of college graduates, so that the -literacy crisis- that News-1-rek and other popular periodicals were discussing was inevitable.-It is no coincidence," they explain, -that the 'literacy crisis' oc-curred at a time when many colleges and universities were reducing

196

Conclusion and Postscript an the Present 183

or abolishing their writing programs while the jobs that their gradu-ates were entering increasingly required more writing" (569). Sincethe mid-seventies, English departments e,,erywhe:e have re-sponded to the call fOr more and better writing instruction. More-over, specialists to teach these courses and to train prospective col-lege teachers in conducting them are now availablethe growth ingraduate departments in rhetoric having been one 'uf the responsesto the demand for better writing. Today the freshmmi writing courseremains an essential element in the education of the majority of col-lege students, and the graduate training and research effort given torhetorichistory, theory, and practiceis greater than everbefore.

Rhetoric underwent a renaissance after World War It that hasreached full flower in the years since 1975. Signs of this are every-where. Graduate programs in rhetoric, as already mentioned, beg:In

to appear in the seventien, and continue to proliferate, with some ofthe i. ast prestigious English departments in the econtry providing

a place for them. New scholarly journals have em-mgt d to deal withthe growing interest in che history and theory of rhetoric as as

in classroom activitiespedagogy having been since the time of an-cient Greece an essential feature of rhetorical. considerations. Thescjournals include the highly theoret.1 PRE/TEXT as well as thehighly practical Journal of Basic Writing, both of which hav,3 found

a rcady audience among writing teachers as well as among manyliterature teachers. For an overview of these journals, see Connors,-Review: Journals in Composition"). Most important, the mush-rooming of 1.esearch in rhetoric has continued, and I would like toelme this study with a brief overview of this work.

I should at thc start mention that the taxonomy I have used indiscusshug rhetoric and writing up to 1975 does not prove as de-scriptive after this date. Tlw most important reason for this hasbeen the tendency of certain rhetorics within the subjective andtransactional categories to move in the direction of the epistemic,regarding rhetoric as principally a method of discovering and evencreating knowledge, frequently within socially defined discoursecommunities. Behind this has been what Fredric Jameson has char-acterized as "the discovery of the primacy of Language or the Sym-bolic" (186). Rhetoricians of all stripes have become involved in thediscussions encouraged by poststructuralist literary and culturalcriticism, by Marxist and other sociologistic speculations on culture,

197


and, especially, by the reawakening of philosophical pragmatism asled by Richard Rorty. All of these share to some extent an emphasison the social nature of knowledge. locating language at the center ofdie formation of discourse communities which in turn define theself, the other, the material world, and the possible relations amongthese. As 1 have suggested elsewhere, thinkers as diverse as AlfredNorth Whitehead, Susanne Langer, Michael Polanyi, Thomas Kuhn,Hayden White, Michel Foucault, and Rorty have put forth the no-tion that the elements traditionally considered the central concernsof rhetoricreality, interlocutor, audience, and languageare thevery elements that are involved in the formation of knowledge(Berlin, -Contemporary Composition"). To these theorists I wouldadd the names of Jameson, Roland Barthes, Raymond Williams,Terry Eagleton, Edward Said, and Frank Lentricchia. Rhetoriciansoperating from a variety of perspectives have appropriately turnedto these figures and others like them in discussing their enterprise,and in so doing have underscored the epistemic nature of rhetoric.

In considering the developments in the various categories of sub-jective and transactional rhetoric since 1975, I will mention boththose that fall within the boundaries that I earlier established foreach group and those that have passed beyond these boundaries. Ishould emphasize that I am not suggesting that these new develop-ments have led to an inevitable collapse of all schools into the epis-temie camp. I am simply saying that certain rhetorics, in the waythey have begun to consider the symbolic and social context of dis-course, have introduced elements ordinarily associated with epis-tem ic rhetoric.

Expressionistic rhetoric continues to be a vital farce in Englishdepartments, although its more extreme manifestations have van-ished. The work of Peter Elbow, Ken Macrorie, Donald Murray,William Coles, and Walker Gibson still attracts a wide hearing. Andas I indicated in the previous chapter, there have also been efforts tocharacterize certain branches of this rhetoric as epistemic. KennethDowst uses the term epistemic in aligning himself with Coles,Gibson, Theodore Baird, and David Bartholomae. Calling on suchfigures as Langer, Wittgenstein, I. A. Richards, L. S. Vygotsky,A. R. L-iria and Jerome Bruner (who recently has himself begun tosee language as constitutive of reality), Dowst looks upon certainuses of language as epistemic, forming as well as expressing knowl-

1 9 d

Conclusion and Postscript ;rn the Present 185

edge. IIowever, these uses are still primarily involved in shapingprivate rather than social versions of knowledge, and are distinctfrom a rhetoric that serves nonepistemic functionsin persuasiveor expository writing, for example. Bartholomaewhose earlierwork (on error analysis, for example) seemed more closely related tocognitivist approaches but can as easily be treated herehas re-cently moved firmly into the ranks of the epistemie category, callingon the discussions of discourse communities in Foucault and on thecultural analysis of Said, as well as on the rhetorical speculationsof Kenneth Burke and Patricia Bizzell. C. H. Knoblauch and LilBrannon have also used the term epistennc in describMg the rheto-ric they are constructing, a rhetoric that invokes Jacques Derrida aswell as Foucault, Linger, and Cassirer. However, their position, inboth theory and practice, conceives composing in personal terms, asthe expression of an isolated self attempting to come to grips with analien and recalcitrant world. This view accordingly denies the socialnature of language and experience and has students respond to ex-ternal conflicts through such activities as keeping a journal and writ-ing personal essays, rather than by engaging in public discourse toaffect the social and political context of their behavior.

Classical rhetoric is also still alive and well in the English depart-ment and has recently taken a number of new directions. S. MichaelHalloran has called for a rhetoric of public discourse based on aCiceronian modela rhetoric of citizenship like the one dominantin American colleges just prior to the Revolutionary War. Still an-other revival of classical rhetoric has appeared in response to thereinterpretation of Aristotle found in William Grunaldi's Studies inthe Philosophy of Aristotle's Rhetoric. The approach is seen in anumber of pieces appearing in Essays on Classical Rhetoric andModern Discourse, edited by Robert Connors, Lise Ede, andAndrea Lunsford. The selections by Ede and Lunsford, by JamesKinneavy, and by John Gage are avowedly concerned with episte-mological issues, and each in its own way argues for the centrality of

.ition in Aristotletaking positions which move in the direc-of' considering his rhetoric to be, in a certain limited sense,

Lpistemic. From these points of view, Aristotelian rhetoric is notprimarily rational and deductiveas it had been interpreted in thefifties, for examplebut is a system that provides heuristics encour-aging the discovery of knowledge in the probabilistic realm of law,


politics, and public Occasions discoveries that include the emo-tional, the ethical, and the aesthetic as well as the rational. In thisscheme, while knowledge may not be a social construct, it is discov-ered through social behavior.

Cognitive approaches have perhaps been the most prol& duringthe past ten years. These include the work of several people alreadymentionedJanice Lauer, Richard Larson, James Moffett, andJames Britton, for exampleas well as a number of new investi-gators. The examination of the behavior of writers while composinghas been Gn e recent development, appearing in the research ofLinda Flowei and John Hayes, Sondra Ped, Nancy Sommers,Sharon Pianko, Lillian Bridwell, and Ann Matsuhashi. Another hasbeen the examination of texts that writers produce in order to locatein them demonstrations of the cognitive processes that were in-volved in their generationas in work by Lester Faigley andStephen Witte. Joseph Williams, E. D. Hirsch, Anne Ruggles Gere,Robin Bell Markels, Lee Odell, Charles Cooper, Glenn Broadhead,and the team of Donald Daiker, Andrew Kcrek, and Max Moren-berg. Theories of cognitive development have also been used in de-scribing composing in the efforts of Lunsford, Mina Shaughnessy,Loren Barritt and Barry Kroll. and Mike Rose. The considerablework in computers and composing also belongs in this category, withcontributors too numerous to mention here, although the 1984monograph on the subject by Jeanne W. Halpern and Sarah Liggettis a good initial overview of these developments.

Those applying cognitive strategies to writing behavior have alsobroadened the theoretical base of their study, some including anew interest in the social influence of learning and others expand-ing the range of psychological premises on which they rely. Ede andLunsford have collaborated in presenting essays on the role of audi-ence in composing as well as on the nature of collaborative writing,the latter invoking Foucault and Barthes in some of its claims, andboth emphasizing the social nature of knowledge. Kroll and JosephWilliams have also expanded their cognitive approaches to providefor the social. Faigley has recently presented an essay entitled "Non-academic Writing: The Social Perspective" that includes referencesto Barthes, Stanley Fish, Clifford Geertz, and Raymond Williams.Faigley has also collaborated with Roger Cherry, David Jolliffe, andAnna Skinner in Assessing Writers' Knowledge and Processes of

2 0

Conclusion and Postscript on the Present 187

Composing, a work that considers three conceptions of the compos-ing processthe literary-expressionist, the cognithre, and the so-cial, the last emphasizing the role of language and discourse com-munities in forming knowledge. Broadhead and Richard Freed havecombined cognitivist approaches and a concern for the constraintsimposed by the discourse community in a study of writing withina business setting. Frank D'Angelo, who continues to break newground with his phenomenologicalrather than empiricalap-proach to 1.e field, recently presented one essay en a Freudian se-miological analysis of advertising and another on the relation ofFreudian and Piagetian cognitive structures to the master tropes.Finally, the "process approach- to writing instruction has been mostinfluenced by cognitive pFychology, and its expansion to allow aplace for the social in shaping knowledge and learning can be seen inMaxine Hairston's "The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and theRevolution in the Teaching of Writing."

Rhetorics displaying the epistemic features described in chap-ter 7 continue to attract proponents. Berthoff and Winterowd ha,eoffered sustained leadership in this area, and a number of otherstudies have expanded the discussion of this rhetoric. Booth's Mod-ern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, a theoretical statement ofthis position, is strongly indebted to American pragmatisn as wellas to Kenneth Burke and Richard McKeon. Chaim Perelmon andL. Olbrechts-Tytecawhorn Michael Leff has described as display-ing epistemic featureshave, on the other hand, called for a rein-terpretation of Arist.,tle in positing a rhetoric of discovery. Furtherapplications of their method, showing argumentative strategies inthe process of structuring knowledge, are found in Charles Kneup-per, Jeanne Fahnestock, and Marie Secor. Richard Lanham calls forthe sophistic tradition to he placed in dialectical relation to the Pla-tonic, proposing a rhetoric in which at least pait of the time "wordsdetermine thought" (140). Donald Stewart also calls upon Plato, aswell as Fred Newton Scott's interpretation of Plato, to make a pleafor ethical mnsiderations la a time when language is regarded asshaping reality. Kinneavy in two recent essays traces the herme-neutic tradition that regards meaning as dependent upon situationand context from the sophists through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,Cicero, and Quintilian, and on up to more recent hermeneuticspeculation. Kinneavy's argument is that rhetoric is involved in dis-

29i


covering and shaping knowledge because of its role in assessing therelevant situational context of meaning.

Janet Eirig's recent efforts, especially on research paradigms andon writing as a way of knowing, furthr demonstrate the role of dis-course communities in forming meaning. Robert Scholes has alsodiscussed the effects of discursive formations in determining knowl-edge, calling upon Foucault for his ruling concepts. an effort inwhich he was preceded by James Porter. Kenneth Bruffee has re-cently offered a theoretical statement of his collaborative rhetoric,which is grounded in the pragmatism of Richard Rorty. PatriciaBizzell has likewise offered numerous statements on the role ofrhetoric in structuring knowledge, calling on 'lofty as well as suchdiverse figures as Thomas Kuhn and Terry Eagleton, probingas Ihave here and elsewhereinto the ideological as well as the epis-temological implications of rhetoric. The best work in writing acrossthe disciplines has also investigated the ways in which thc rhetoricalbehavior of academic disciplines shapes the nature of knowledgewithin the separate province-. Carolyn Miller, Charles Bazerman,and Greg Myers have each ir, different ways examined the social na-ture of discourse in scienceMyers calling upon Marxist concep-tions in his analysis. In another area, George Dillon in ConstructingTexts: Elements of a Theory of Composition and Style invokes psy-cholinguistic, deconstructionist, and reader-response theories toshow how reading and writing conventions are influenced by dis-course communities, and Sharon Crowley has in a similar fashiondealt with the u, .s of deconstruction in the writing cldssroom.Joseph Comprone has recently applied the thinking of Barthes inconsidering the art of composing, asking for a process -poised be-tween lock-step exercise and uncontextualized free writing" (231)a range of activities based on the complex -array of structural codes"(230) that constitutes language. Fin4lly, Richard Ohmann has con-tinued to explain the implications of his epistemic rhetoric for thewriting course; and Ira Shor in Critical Teaching and Everyday Life,calling in part en Paulo Freire, has proceeded along the same linesas Ohmanncreating, howevei, his own theoretical and practicalstatement.

Writing instruction has been dramatically transformed in the pasttwenty-five yearsa transformation that is salutary and ongoing.We have begun to see that writing courses are not designed exclu-

2u2

Conclusion and Postscript on the Present 189

sively to prepare students for the workplace, although they cer-tainly must do that. Writing courses prepare students for citizen-ship in a democracy, for assuming their political responsibilities,whether as leaders or simply as active participants. Writing coursesalso enable students to learn something about themselves, about theoften-unstated assumptions on which their lives are built. In short,the writing course empowers students as it advises in ways to expe-rience themselves, others, and the material conditions of their exis-tencein methods of ordering and making sense of these relation-ships. It is encouraging to report that it is once again receiving theattention it deserves.

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228

Index

Adams, John Quincy, 116-17Adler, Mortimer, 121Alden, Raymond, 55Allen, Harold, 112, 136Allport, Floyd, 84Applebee, Arthur, 81, 100, 121,

124, 163Aristotelian humanism, 115Aristotle, 26, 48, 81, 127, 155, 156,

157, 173, 185, 187Army Specialized Training Person-

nel, 96Aydelotte, Frank, 44, 72

Babbitt, Irving, 28-29, 46Bailey, Dudley, 156Baird, Theodore, 153Baldwin, Charles Sears, 1, 25,

41-43Banks, James A., 178Barnes, Walter, 89-90Barritt, Loren, 186Barthes, Roland, 184, 186, 188Bartholomae, David, 184, 185Basic Issues in the Teaching of

English, The, 124-2.5Bateman, Donakl R., 136Baugh, Albert C.. 70Bazerman, Charles, 188

Beck, E. C., 82Becker, Alton, 162, 170-73Behaviorist rhetoric. 9-10Bercovitch, Sacvan, 4Berthoff, Ann E., 149, 161, 176-

77, 178, 187Bestor, Arthur, 121Bildersee, Adele, 77Bilsky, Manuel, 115Bizzell. Patricia, 185, 188Black, Matthew, 70Blair, Ilugh, 1, 8Blanchard, Margaret, 148Bloom, Lynn, 140-42, 145Bloom, Martin, 140-42, 145Booth, Wayne, 130, 137, 181, 187Bower, Warren, 71Braddock, Richard, 131, 135Brannon, Lil, 165, 185Bridwell, Lillian, 186Briggs, LeBaron, 61Britton, James, 163, 187Broadhead, Glenn, 186, 187Brooks, Cleanth, 29Bruffee, Kenneth, 173-76,

178, 188Bruner, Jerome, 122-24, 146, 162,

184

Bryant, Donald C., 156

229

218 Index

Buck, Gertrude, 36, 46, 50Burke, Kenneth, 1, 17-18, 26, 90,

134, 165, 168, 171, 185, 187Burke, Virginia M., 131

Cairns, William B., 27Calverton, V. F., 90Campbell, George, 2, 8Campbell, Oscar Janws, 72, 90-91,

110

Cassirer, Ernst, 177, 185Cherry, Roger, 186Child, Francis James, 22-23Childs, Herbert Ellsworth, 84-85Christensen, Francis, 112, 115, 134,

136

Cicero, 117, 157, 185, 187Clapp, John NI., 34Classical rhetoric, 15-16, 155-59Cognitive rhetoric, 16, 159-65,

186- 87

Coles, William, Jr., 151-53, 184Compronc, Joseph, 188Conant, James B., 91, 121Congleton, J. E.; 117Connors, Robert J., 17, 185Coon, Arthur M., 106Cooper, Charles, 186Cooper, Lane, 44Corbett, Edward P. J., 3, 118, 134,

139, 155, 157-58, 178Corder, Jim, 137-38Corson, Hiram, 44Counts, George S., 59Crane, R. S., 29-30, 116Creative writing courses, 79-80Cremin, Lawrence, 13-14, 58, 60,

73-74Crowley, Sharon, 188Current-traditional rhetoric, 7-9,

26-27, 30, 36-38, 40-43, 65,70-71

Currier, Raymond P., 82

230

Cushman, Robert Earl, 12Cutler, Ronald, 104, 119

Dabbs, J. McBride, 78-79Daiker, Donald, 137. 186D'Angelo, Frank, 139, 164-65, 187Dartmouth Conference, 149, 163,

176

Davidson, Levette, 99-103Davis, H. W., 82-83Deemer, Charles, 150de Man, Paul, 29Democratic rhetoric, 35-36, 46-51Denney, Joseph Villiers, 35-36, 46,

49-50, 55'Derrida, Jacques, 185Dewey, John, 46-47, 50-51, 59,

163

Dillon, George, 188Dixon, John, 149Dowst, Kenneth, 165, 184Duhamel, Albert, 139, 156Dykema, Karl W., 85

Eagleton, Terry, 184, 188Earle, Samuel Chandler, 50Eble, Kenneth, 108Ede, Lisa, 185, 186Efficiency movement, 53-54Elbow, Peter, 151-54, 178, 184Eliot, Charles William, 20, 33Emig, Janet, 122, 139, 159-61, 188Epistemic rhetoric, 16-17, 145-46,

153, 165-77, 183-88Epistemology, 3-4, 6-7, 25-26,

27, 44, 69-70, 95, 139, 145, 153,170, 173-74, 185

Estrich, Robert M., 108-9Enrich, Alvin C., 69, 90-91Experience curriculum, 89Expressionistic rhetoric, 73-81,

145-55, 184-85

Fahnestock, Jeanne, 187Faigley, Lester, 182, 186Farber, Jerry, 178Faust, George, 112Fish, Stanley, 186Fiske, John, 27Flower, Linda, 186Foerster, Norman, 52Fogarty, Daniel, 94-95, 134, 168Foucault, Michel, 17-18, 184, 185,

186, 188

Francis, W. Nelson, 117-18Freed, Richard, 187Freire, Paulo, 177, 188Freud, Sigmund, 13-14, 73-75,

79, 187Fries, Charles, 88, 135Frye, Northrop, 29, 168

Gage, John, 185Geertz, Clifford, 4, 186General Semantics, 10, 93-95,

167

Genung, John F., 22, 40Gere, Anne Ruggles, 186Gibson, Walker, 151-53, 184Gilbrt, Allan Ii., 75-76Glicksburg, Charles I., 104Gorrell, Robert, 133, 134, 136Graff, Gerald, 29Greenbaum, Leonard, 180Greenough, Chester Noyes, 55Grimaldi, William, 185Guth, Hans P., 131, 136, 176

Hairston, Maxine, 187Hall, G. Stanley, 59Halloran, Michael, 20, 185Ilalpern, Jeanne W., 186Hamalian, Leo, 150Ilanford, James 11., 105Hartley, Helene, 83-84!latch, James V., 150

Index 219

Ilayakawa, S. 1., 10, 93-95, 147,168

Hayes, John, 186Hayford, Harrison, 108-9Hazlett, McCrea, 115Hedges, Elaine, 178Ilenry, Ralph L., 85Hcyda, John, 18Hicks, Granville, 31, 90Hill, A. S., 37Hillegas, Milo Burdette, 54Hirsch, E. D., 186Hoffman, Frederick, 14Honors program, 72Ilosie, James F., 34-35!loud), Snow Long ley, 80Ilubbell, George Shelton, 72Iludson, Arthur Palmer, 69Hughes, Richard, 139, 156Ilunt, Kellogg W 136-37Iluntley, John F., 14011utchins, Robert M., 121

I(leas approach, 51-53Ideology, 4-5, 32, 35-51, 71-72,

166, 171

Irmscher, William F., 131Ives, Sumner, 117

James, William, 59Jameson, Fredric, 18.3Jefferson, Bernard, 68-69Jennings, E. NI., 162Johnson, Burges, 8.3-84Johnson, Edith Christina, 78Johnson, Oakley Calvin, 76-77Jo lliffe, David, 186Jones, Iloward Mumford, 110

Kampf, Louis, 180Karier, Clarence, 60Kehl, 1). G., 180Kelly, George, 163

231

220 Index

Kelly, Lou, 148Kennedy, George, 3Kerek, Andrew, 137, 186Killon, Ellen Peck, 178Kinneavy, James L., 134-35, 185,

187-88Kitchen, Paul C., 70Kitzbaber, Albert R., 55, 125-30,

137

Kligerman, Jack, 150Kneupper, Charles, 187Knoblauch, C. II., 7, 165, 185Koestler, Arthur, 162Korzybski, Aired, 93, 168Kroll, Barry, i';6Kuhn, Thomas. 145, 184, 188

Langer, Susanne, 184, 185Lanham, Richard, 187Larson, Richard, 139, 161-63, 186Lathers, Eleanor, 84Lauer, Janice, 139, 161, 163, 186Leff, Michael, 165-66, 187Leggett, Glenn, 131-32Lentriechia, Frank, 184Leonard, Sterling Andrus, 51, 88,

135

Liberal culture, 11, 35, 38-40, 43-46, 71-72

Life adjustment, 100Liggett, Sarah, 186Literacy, 1, 39, 44Lloyd, Donald J., 111.-12Lloyd-Jones, Richard, 135Long, Ralph B., 112Lounsbury, Thomas, 43, 44Lowell, James Russell, 46Lunsford, Andrea, 185-86Lutz., William D., 151

McCloskey, John C., 78McDowell, Margaret B., 156-57McKee, J. IL, 69

232

McKeon, Richard, 116, 187McMillan, James 13., 117Maerorie, Ken, 131, 148, 151-53,

184

Marekwardt, A. 11., 88Markels, Robin Bell, 186Martin, Harold, 168Marx, Karl, 4, 17, 165, 183, 188Matsuhashi, Ann, 186Matthews, Brander, 46Mellon, John C., 137Merriam, Ilarold C., 50Michigan plan, 34Miller, Carolyn, 188Milk c:ifwin L., 34Milk James E., Jr., 131Miller, Thomas P., 182Mills, Barriss, 119Misiaszek, Lorraine, 178Mqffett, James, 163-64, 186More, Paul Ehnore, 28Morenberg, Max, 137, 187Murphy, James, 3, 133Murray, Donald, 151-53, 178, 184Myers, Greg, 188Myrick, Kenneth, 105

National Defense Education Act,121, 122

Nichols, Marie Ilochmuth, 168Norton, Charles Eliot, 46

Odell, Lee, 162, 186O'Donnell, R. C., 136-370'11 are, Frank, 137Ohmamt, Richard, 111, 131, 168-

70, 188Olbrechts-Tyteca, L., 187Oliver, Kenneth, 109Olsen, Tillie, 178Omnibus, 71Osgood, Charks C., 43-44, 72, 73

11.414 221

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I I ...,14 8(4 12 111 112

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I 4 5." I' 4 - ..1,441 IA.,. tooihe 4 ti-

1 4 )1 I 4. 41 %% 414,1, 1'011

222 Index

Steinmann, Martin, Jr., 132-33,134

Stewart, Donald C., 147, 187Stewart, Randall, 108Streeter, Robert E., 115-Students Right to Their Own

Language,- 136

Taine, Ilippolyte, 27Tate, Gary, 134Taylor, Warner, 62-64, 71Taylor, Warren, 86-88, 90Therborn, Goran, 4Thomas, Joseph M., 52, 55Thompson, Roy T., 82Thorndike, Edward L., 54, 59Tibbetts, A. M., 136Todorov, Tzvetan, I, 25-26Tyler, Moses Coit, 27Types approach, 70-71

Uniform Reading Lists, The, 33Utley, Francis 11AC, 133

Valesio, Paolo, 3Vance, Earl L. 85-86Van Doren, Mark, 121Veysey, Laurence, 22, 46Vico, Giambattista, 165Vygotsky, L. S., 163, 184

Walcott, Fred C., 88Walker, Lynette, 84Ward, Frank Earl, 82Ward, Lester Frank, 59

234

Warfel, Harry R., 112-15Warren, Robert Penn, 29Watt, Homer A., 50Weaver, Bennett, 105Weaver, Raymond, 75Weaver, Richard M., 115, 118, 168"4.'mann, Robert, 90Wendell, Barrett, 27Wesenberg, Alice Bidwell, 79Whately, Richard, 1, 8White, Hayden, 17-18, 184Whitehead, Alfred North, 184Wilcox, Thomas W., 180Williams, Joseph, 186Williams, Raymond, 21, 184, 186Winterowd, W. Ross, 134, 176, 187Witte, Stephen, 186Wlecke, Albert 0., 122, 141, 142,

147-48Wolf, H. R., 149Woodberry, George, 46Voodring, Paul, 121Woolley, Edwin, 41Worthington, Katherine Stewart,

50Wozniak, John Michael, 18Wright, Robert L., 104Wykoff, George S., 105-6

Young, Richard, 162, 170-73

Zidonis, Frank J., 136Zoellnei, Robert, 9-10, 122, 140,

142-45

James A. Berlin, Director of Freshman English at the Universityof Cincinnati, received his Ph.D. in 1975 from The University ofMichigan. He has published widely on rhetoric and on Victorianliterature and is the author of Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges.

Books in the Studies in Writing andRhetoric series

Writer's BlockThe Cognitive DimensionMike Rose ISBN 0-8093-1141-0

Evaluating College Writing ProgramsStephen R. Witte and Lester Faigley ISBN 0-8093-1124-0

A New Perspective on Cohesion in Expository ParagraphsRobin Bell Markels ISBN 0-8093-1152-6

Computers and ComposingHow the New Technologies are Changing WritingJeanne W. Halpern and Sarah Liggett ISBN 0-8093-1146-1

Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century CollegesJames A. Berlin ISBN 0-8093-1166-6

The Variables of CompositionProcess and Product in a Business SettingGlenn J. Broadhead and Richard C. Freed ISBN 0-8093-1262-X

Invention as a Social ActKaren Burke Le Fevre ISBN 0-8093-1328-6

Teaching Writing as a Second LanguageAlice S. Horning ISBN 0-8093-1327-8

Writing GroupsHistory, Theory and ImplicationsAnne Ruggles Gere ISBN 0-8093-1354-5

Rhetoric

Berlii, here continues his unique history of American college com-position begun in his Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-CenturyColleges (1984), turning now to the twentieth century.

In discussing the variety of rhetorics that have been used in writ-ing classrooms Berlin introduces a taxonomy made up of three cate-gories: objective rhetorics, subjective rhetorics, and transactionalrhetorics, which are distinguished by the epistemology on whicheach is based. He makes clear that these categories are not tied to achronology but instead are to be found in the English department inone form or another during each decade of the century.

His historical treatment includes an examination of the formationof the English department, the founding of the NCTE and its role inwriting instruction, the training of teachers of writing, the effects ofprogressive education on writing instruction, the General EducationMovement, the appearance of the CCCC, the impact of Sputnik, aridtoday's "literacy crisis."

James A. Berlin is Director of Freshman English at the Universityof Cincinnati.

Southern Illinois lThiversity PressCarbondale and EdwardsvilleFor Orders: P.O. Box :3697 Ciirbondale. If, 62902-3697

ISBN 0-8093-1360x

237

rhetoric. · including the formation of the national council of teachers of english, the appearance...

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