821 Blog 2: What's Old Is New

Leff, Michael. “Tradition and Agency in Humanistic Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003): 135-47. Print.

Michael Leff’s attention in this article is the connection he sees between “tradition” (or what we might term classical rhetoric) and rhetorical agency. In particular, he is interested in exploring the tension of individual rhetorical agency and the influence of community on the rhetor. From his perspective, the rhetorical tradition serves as a sort of mediator between the ideas of writing as an individual and writing as a member of a community (or writing for an audience in general).

Leff establishes his sense of the postmodern conceptions of both tradition and agency by claiming that postmodern views oversimplify how traditional/classical rhetoricians actually addressed agency. For example, he points to postmodern claims that clascial oratory was unidirectional (from the rhetor) and that the audience played an essentially passive role. But he notes that these views are inaccurate to the realities of traditional rhetoric. While he acknowledges that many rhetoricians of the classical period did address (quite strongly in some instances) the importance of the rhetor’s ability to persuade (even manipulate?) the audience, he argues that classical views were much more complex. Leff instead provides numerous examples (from Isocrates to Cicero) of rhetoricians discussing the influence of the audience over the rhetorical choices made by the rhetor. Thus the rhetor is both shaped by the community and an individual participant within that community. He looks to Isocrates as an example of this, particularly his address on changes to Athenian democracy he hoped to see initiated. Isocrates carefully selected his sources and worked within the expectations of the community not to upset their perspectives on democracy but to advocate for the changes he wanted.

Though brief, the historical context that this article provides on rhetorical agency is quite helpful. It complicates the views of traditional/classical sensibilities as more social than many tend to think of them (or at least as he claims some tend to think of them). His focus on classical rhetoricians underscores the importance of the rhetorical past, advocating that we cannot and should not shrug off tradition simply because we have “new” perspectives that we think conflict with past notions. However, I feel that Leff approaches some of these complicated theoretical notions too briefly. He accuses postmodern theorists of oversimplifying the practices of traditional rhetoricians, yet I feel he does much the same to the postmoderns, suggesting in a few sweeping sentences to have captured their entire view of classical rhetoric. Indeed, this fosters the very sorts of neglect that concern him. Perhaps what we need is not only a willingness to examine past theories more deeply but present ones as well.

Rhetoric and/or/not Composition?

Horner, Bruce, and Min-Zhan Lu. “Working Rhetoric and Composition.” College English 72.5 (2010): 470-94. Print.

In this article, Horner and Lu examine the seemingly settled relationship of rhetoric and composition, exploring how these terms are used in the field and what relationships (political, pedagogical, and theoretical) are implied by certain uses of the terms. Their argument rests on the idea that for rhetoric and composition to be a flexible discipline, the understandings of “rhetoric” and “composition” need to be constantly revised to reflect the histories and the changes in material conditions of the work of the discipline.

They begin by plotting the various uses of rhetoric, composition, and rhetoric and composition. They find that these terms are either synonymous with each other, with writing, and/or with English; that the terms are rarely defined; and that rhetoric and composition often appear in a hierarchical relationship. Such uses of these terms, they argue, effectively hamstring the possibility of a dynamic and non-hegemonic discipline. They emphasize the need for a more conscious sense of what these terms mean to us and for a more developed sense of “the histories and conditions” of the work of rhetoric and composition (475).

To apply these methods of “working” rhetoric and composition, Horner and Lu examine how this work would affect the first-year writing course and graduate level courses. For them, a more productive first-year writing course would resist “the dichotomizing of rhetoric and composition” (480) that arises in debates about the role of the course—service or something else, for example. Their vision is a course focused on rhetorical concerns but those that arise from and are to be “reworked” in student writing. They see some graduate curricula as positioning rhetoric as historical and composition as pedagogical and theoretical. Such a separation limits students’ abilities to fully contextualize both the history and theory/pedagogy of the discipline and reinforces the hierarchical relationships that keep the two separate. On a broader scale, then, they are looking to a more inclusive sense of rhetoric and composition, one that values both the theory and the practice as mutually informing instead of mutually exclusive.

Admittedly, I take for granted the relationship of rhetoric and composition and rarely give much thought to how I use the terms, how I view their relationship to one another, and how this may reinforce certain hierarchies between the two. And though I am hesitant to discount the need for “real world” writing skills in undergraduate composition courses (as they seem to want) and have no experience teaching graduate courses on which to evaluate their claims about graduate programs, I do find their sense of the entrenching positions of rhetoric and of composition as doing the discipline a disservice. Throughout the article, they pose numerous questions that anyone seriously exploring rhetoric and composition and their relation to one another needs to consider.