JEN

James Berlin – Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class

Disclaimer – I read this article out of Cross-Talk In Comp Theory instead of Teaching Composition, so the in-text citations match the former.

In "Rhetoric and Ideology," Berlin compares and contrasts three types of rhetoric: cognitive, expressionistic, and social-epistemic. Keeping in mind that Berlin is 100 percent Marxist, it was relatively direct in why he dismisses the first two theories and agrees with the third. He defines cognitive rhetoric a depicting “the structures of the mind corresponding(ing) in perfect harmony with the structures of the material world, the minds of the audience, and the units of language.” (721) One of the great aspects of cognitive rhetoric is its leading authority on “process” “rather than product”, which Berlin openly admits makes cognitivists “a strong force in composition studies.” (721.) But Berlin writes of this theory because of its lack of focus on ideology and its firm stance on scientific examination. Berlin says for cognitivists, “the real is the rational,” and this theory had people thing in a way that realizes their goals. But the goals are what Berlin questions from a socialist position: “it is possible, however, to see this rhetoric as being eminently suited to appropriation by the proponents of a particular ideological stance, a stance consistent with the modern college’s commitment to preparing student fo the world of corporate capitalism.”(723) Berlin discounts Expressivists for some of the same characteristics. Expressionistic thinking, as exerted by Peter Elbow, decries an underlying conviction that when individuals are not repressed by social order, the truth they hold will inconspicuously match up with the private truths of others. Meaning without influence, everyone else will eventually think like everyone else anyway. If you could read everyone’s private thoughts on a subject, they would all be thinking the same thing without outside intervention. For me this seems a little too sci-fi, and even moreso too unrealistic. Berlin says because of lack of social factor, this theory can “easily be co-opted by the very capitalist forces it opposes. After all, this rhetoric can be used to reinforce the entrepreneurial virtues capitalism most values: individualism, private initiative, the confidence for risk taking, the right to be contentious with authority.” (729) The social-epistemic view toward rhetoric is Berlin’s favored theory due to its relationship involving dialectical interaction of the observer, the discourse community of membership and the material conditions of existence, which are all grounded in language, not primarily knowledge. (730-31) Not only is this the most effect way of finding and expressing oneself, but it is also the hardest to visualize, according to Berlin. The subject itself is a social construct that is painted by the language of the individual, the community and the material world The collection of the many facets is what is difficult, but it is the most precise, Berlin says. Because of this global view, the social-epistemic rhetoric is also valuable for self-revision and criticism. The social is the center of self, the center of writing as a means to understand, self, society and the material world. Berlin in unapologetic in stating this is of Marxist influence, but he says of those skeptics, “One does not have to accept the Marxian promise in order to realize the value of the Marxian diagnosis.” (736)

Lindemann – What Do Teachers Need to Know About Rhetoric?

Lindemann gives us a nice summary of the history of rhetoric here. Basically what we need to understand is that rhetoric changes. It has changed from being a technique of the ancients, through the Medieval and Renaissance periods where rhetoricians focused more on style. At this time it was used to convert people to Christianity. A blend of poetics and rhetoric with Blair’s Belles Lettres in the 18th Century marked a turning point in rhetoric which would change the face of the discipline up into the contemporary period.. Old Rhetoric was persuasion, Burke says, that “stressed deliberate design.” (53). New Rhetoric exploded into the Contemporary period with Burke and Kinneavy, marking a change from persuasion to identification, as Burke puts it (53). Lindemann says “it makes no more sense to assert that rhetoric is principally concerned with persuasion, or with stylistic flair, or with literary analysis, than it does to ask our students to demonstrate the elocutionary skills of medieval preachers.” (59) I am not too sure about this. I am not advocating that we teach students to talk and write like Blair, but there is something to be said about eloquence. It demands respect, meaning that the way the words are presented can mean just as much as what they say. I think eloquence has been forgotten in today’s speech society, and maybe a new brand of eloquence needs to be born. A blend of information and persuasion, but what is important and credible is that the information used for persuasion is based on truth. I am trying to sound like Plato, is it working? Probably not, since my generation doesn’t necessarily put a lot of weight on eloquence.

---

Garrett

The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English Composition-Fan Shen

I never thought of our method of composition instruction being as deeply entrenched in our culture until I read this article. The idea that styles of writing are so embedded in cultures and identity never really comes up until you have to change that style of writing. Shen talks about the differences she had making the transition from Chinese to English, especially in the composition course where the emphasis was to “write what you feel and know,” as opposed to her culture where “presenting the ‘self’ too obviously would give people the impression of being disrespectful of the Communist party.” She simply wasn’t taught to use “I.”

What I found equally interesting was the Chinese method of writing “from surface to core,” or coming to the point gradually and systematically, instead of stating your thesis outright. Is this just the American method of paper writing, a brazen way of stating our intentions immediately? I remember when Dr. Mermann came to our Theory class last semester, she too discussed the problem she had transitioning from German to English paper writing, stating that the method she was taught had the thesis at the conclusion of the paper, with the rest of the essay logically leading up to that point. In fact, I saw much of Dr. Mermann’s discussion in Shen’s article, because, as Shen states, it seems that “learning to write in English is in fact a process of creating and defining a new identity and balancing it with the old identity.” I seemed to understand this was Dr. Mermann’s experience too.

Another cool aspect of Shen’s essay was her description of “yijing” or the “process of creating a pictorial environment while reading a piece of literature,” which I didn’t fully understand until I read her examples. It’s seems like a way of touching on the author’s finer points, while putting yourself as the reader into the actual space of the work. What a strange, novel concept. I can imagine a professor scratching his head when reading what’s supposed to be a critical piece that seems like prose or poetry. But at the same time, isn’t this an ongoing argument between creative writing camps and critical writers, or personal essayists and autobiographers, etc., the list goes on. Is creative work as difficult to do as critical work? Is it just as valid? I think in Shen’s case it’s strange that for such a culture that seems to deemphasize the individual in writing would value placing oneself into the work “in order to reach a unity of nature, the author, and the reader.” Then again, the emphasis is based on shared experience, not individual experience. It’s still cool, and I wonder if it’s something composition instructors take into account with Asian students. Last year, in Linguistics, we would have said that their “cultural schema” is different than ours, meaning they a different base of beliefs, values, etc. How do you accommodate that?

What do Teachers Need to Know About Rhetoric?

Ah, Campbell and Whately, how I’ve come to love you….not. But in all seriousness, I did find this essay interesting if just for the history of rhetoric and how it’s developed to encompass so many different meanings. Coming from a specifically persuasive stance, all the way to Burke’s assumption that “rhetoric is a function of language that enables human beings to overcome the divisions separating them,” it’s gone through many cycles (53). If anything, this show’s languages adaptability and underscores a topic we’ve been discussing in Dr. Etheridge’s class: historical context. You have to take into account when something is occurring and why before you can even begin to understand it, and that’s why I like the rhetorical definitions that include something about audience consideration. You can’t write in a vacuum, and you have to take into account the forces around you, whether consciously or not. I imagine this is why composition instructors have shifted more towards the “write what you know” school, or write about yourself. I think this philosophy fits more in line with Burke’s “identification” appeal as opposed to “persuasion” for rhetorical uses. We write, more often than not, to understand the world around us. Writing is, as we just read in Etheridge’s class (sorry to keep referencing Chuck), that “in-between” spot that is the point between reality and thought, between object and imagination. I think this was in Berlin’s essay about Emerson.

I also say, in the discussion about Kinneavy’s theories, a reflection of our program’s emphasis on genre. “Furthermore, the modes of discourse overlap; a given text may have a dominant mode, but ‘in actuality, it is impossible to have pure narration, description, evaluation, or classification.’” (56). There are no set lines or divisions in writing, just as there is no set writing process for every writer. The world doesn’t work that way, which is a good lesson to learn, while also learning the respective genres.

---

Joanna

So, what do teachers need to know about rhetoric? From Lindemann’s chapter, I’d say the impact the different rhetorical traditions have had on the current perspectives on teaching writing and the idea of the multiple definitions of rhetoric. I think it’s pretty cool that a lot of us are taking Dr. Etheridge’s class at the same time as this (despite the heavy work load!) because it makes the connections between the rhetorical traditions much more evident. What I particularly liked about reading this chapter, though, was that it was a broad overview that encompassed periods of the rhetorical tradition that we did not cover in Dr. Etheridge’s class, such as the medieval period. I, for one, did not know about St. Augustine’s impact in “redirecting rhetoric from being a public, oral form of persuasion to a private, written form of literary interpretation” (45). Something that’s bugging me in the back of my mind, though, is that in Dr. E’s class we read something (I think by Berlin—correct me if I’m wrong) that said Blair was the most influential in America from the Scots because of his focus on written rather than oral rhetoric. What gets me is that when I read something like that it makes me think that before him written was not stressed, but then Lindemann tells us about St. Augustine and his redirection to a written form. So, had this shift from oral to written already been seen? Is it cyclical? This is the main thing that’s getting me a little confused—it seems like the focus of the different time periods shift, and each time it does, somebody new comes along with a “revolutionary” idea that already seemed to have happened in the past. I guess maybe studying these different periods shows us this, how history is connected and cyclical, which goes along with the whole idea of why we should even study rhetoric historically anyway, to figure out how it influences us even still today.

By reading Booth’s article, “The Rhetorical Stance,” right after reading Lindemann’s chapter, I saw a good amount of immediate connections between the two. Booth says that “the word rhetoric is one of those catch-all terms that can easily raise trouble when our backs are turned” (137). This goes along well with Lindemann’s discussion about the varying definitions of the word “rhetoric” and how it has been used differently historically. Booth even goes on to say that “the question of the role of rhetoric in the English course is meaningless if we think of rhetoric in either its broadest or its narrowest meanings” (137). This seemed very similar to Lindemann’s conclusion that “if we understand…the varied and changing purposes people have for using language, we will be better equipped to teach effectively the arts of rhetoric our culture now practices” (59). They’re both pretty much saying that we have to consider the various ways rhetoric has been defined and used in the past to understand how we can use it today.

I liked Booth’s article especially because of his anecdotes and analogies; I also think he’s funny, including phrases such as “a bramble bush of controversy” to describe the problem of strictly following one definition of rhetoric (137). I think his whole main point about using a “rhetorical stance” works well to describe how to fully develop a piece of writing. His basic definition of this is “a stance which depends on discovering and maintaining in any writing situation a proper balance among the three elements that are at work in any communicative effort: the available arguments about the subject itself, the interests and peculiarities of the audience, and the voice, the implied character of the speaker” (139). He argues that to teach students about this balance is an important goal for teachers of rhetoric to strive for. He uses the terms “pedant’s stance” and “entertainer’s stance” to describe some situations in which the balance is off-kilter, or what he calls “perversions of the rhetorician’s balance” (143). He gives some practical advice for finding ways to incorporate this “balance” into teaching students, by creating writing assignments that direct the writer towards a specific audience or purpose. This sounds pretty much like what the assignments we are trying to develop for our classes by giving them specific genres/discourse communities to write for. It keeps the students from writing what Booth calls “empty fencing” (140). He says to give the writing tasks some “human point, and therefore some educational value”(141), which pretty much sums up what we are trying to do.

Eva Marie’s Reading Response 06 12 08

Lindemann's essay was a comprehensive and very clear map of the history of rhetoric. It was a pleasure to revisit the various philosophers and their contribution to the conversation about what rhetoric is, what it does and how we do it. As Lindemann states in both the beginning and the conclusion of her essay, the rhetorical tradition is really the tradition of language changing to fit the social context of the time.

The theories we use today are truly embedded in phases of the rhetorical history. When the earliest rhetoricians were defining the use of language and before the needs of the wider population were a consideration, language was viewed by them as an art. It could be done by only a very select few Plato saw it as a way to discover truth which only a very few people (if any) were intellectually equipped to do. As Lindemann says, Plato thought of rhetoric as some people do today as having “no substance” and the art of deception (39). I would argue that Plato’s did rhetoric when he wrote against the rhetoricians in the ‘’Gorgias, ’’ that “Rhetoricians need not know the truth about things; he has only some way of persuading the ignorant…” Plato was persuading his audience to disdain the sophists and their practice of rhetoric.

Today, like in Plato’s time, we can hear people talk about rhetoric as having a negative connotation and they dismiss bad speeches with no evidence or substance as “just rhetoric.” As if rhetoric itself was intrinsically bad. Even people when asking a question may be answered with a, “is that a rhetorical question?” That sometimes connotes, that the listener is taking a passive role in the conversation. I feel that rhetoric has gotten a bad name precisely because many speakers speak without substance and try to persuade an audience with out evidence and based on emotional appeals.

If we look at the philosophers theories such Aristotle’s that argued against Plato’s dislike of rhetoricians that if rhetoric is done well is a practical art and can lead to “knowing” or learning new ideas. Like Plato, Aristotle agrees that if it is done wrong, id the speaker uses unethical means to persuade an audience.

Teaching methods such as Quintilian's that recommended that young students first attempt to master grammar are practice today as we have seen the development of class curriculum that breaks down English into different departments and disciplines.

Maybe not in the U.S. but in other countries today, people are not allowd the freedom to practice rhetoric when their governments are in turmoil. In Cicero’s time, the practice of rhetoric became very restrictive because it gave people a political forum in which to discuss their opinions.

Lindemann’s idea that rhetoric implies choice for both the speaker or the writer and the audience is a new concept for me. I think that is a lofty idea that deserves more thought because for me, persuasion is trying to remove a choice and implant another in it’s place. I have only understood rhetoric to be the art of persuasion through honest means. She states that it is more than the art of persuasion, that it ‘induces cooperation’ (40). I feel that there is a difference between inducing cooperation and creating identification such as Kenneth Burke’s idea of persuasion through identification.

The Greeks such as Aristotle laid out the ground rules for rhetoric with their identification and classification of rhetoric. Aristotle and Burke seem to be talking about the same issue with what Aristotle calls the nature of the audience and Burke calls identification. Both are rooted in psychology even though Aristotle does not name it specifically. Aristotle’s inventivo connects to today’s prewriting. In addition, the identification of different kinds of rhetoric such as forensic, deliberative and epideictic in the Greeks case is what we may call genre today. What is important to understand is the each era’s theorists reshaped how rhetoric should be used based on the needs of society

Do teachers need to know what rhetoric is? I think the answer is definitely yes. We could all just go and do rhetoric but If we do not know the reasons why theory changes and pedagogy adapts to the new theory, we can not move forward toward a way of teaching that is needed for our time. Case in point, today people are communication in new ways because of new technology. If philosophers do not take note of things such as ‘now time’ new, instant mail on the internet, or text messaging and video downloads, how will they form new conclusions about how people use language? And how will the education system conform to a new social order if they are not made aware of changes occurring in the human ability to communicate. Studying rhetoric and its constant changes is important to help understand and shape the next phase of human evolution in language and its use.

‘’’Berlin Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class’’’

Berlin argues that the use of rhetoric has been turned around. As Plato used rhetoric to find truth, Berlin says that now we create truth using rhetoric. He states that “instead of rhetoric acting as the …arbiter of competing ideological claims…, rhetoric is regarded as always ‘’already’’ ideological” (19). And so he says that in economic, social, or political issues we need to investigate the structure of the rhetoric presented for biases for one thing over another. The investigation needs to be conducted from an ideological perspective or through the dialectical interaction between the rhetoric as text and the interpretive practices brought to it. Berlin feels that a rhetoric has an ulterior motive,”can never be innocent” (20) and is not neutral (can never be a disinterested arbiter) to the claims of others because it already has embedded bias. Berlin breaks down three kinds of rhetoric that are utilized in classroom practices today and their relationship to ideology;

• cognitive psychology
• expressionism
• social-epistemic

Of cognitivists Berlin says they:

• Are not ideological but rather rely on the scientific
• encourages discursive practices compatible with economic, social political formations that are hegemonic,

Of expressivists Berlin says

• admits to being ideological
• against the scientism of current traditional rhetoric and its ideology
• but open to finding new ideas, because of its ideological position

Of social-epistemic (his preference) Berlin says they:

• admits to being ideological, but to question ideology
• preempts fault finding in their ideology because of self-criticism and self-correction

Berlin on Ideology

Berlin says that ideology is a very unstable term and he states that Goran Thurborn says that ideology is transmitted through language practices that are always the center of conflict and contest (21)

• constitutioning and patterning of how humans live their human lives as conscious, reflecting initiators
• ideology provides the language to define the (subject)self, others, material world and their relationships to each other

In other words; ideology is in language and it infiltrates all that we do / are

• it addresses that s good /bad / possible. We acquire a sense of identity through ideology
• provides standards for decision making, desires, most importantly, defines the limits of expectation (what is possible /impossible) stay poor or get rich , it decides who has power and what it can do? Gives us strong social endorsements, ideas of how power should be distributed

Ideology is pluralistic- any historical moment may engender various ideologies

Cognitive Rhetoric

The order of the day, scientific in nature, born of current trad rhetoric of the new American university 19th century who created science for profit, prepared managers / and elite joined paths created middle class. University created cognitivists for economic stability. Cog rhetorics claimed that they could write scientifically, proposing problem-solving approach to writing, arriving at how college students compose. Structures of the mind correspond with material / audience / language (sounds like structuralism). Advocated process writing –and 3 elements of it environment /writers long term memory /writing process in the mind. Keystone is the discovery that writing is a goal directed process.

Focus on the individuals mind, Writing becomes just another problem solving process & problem solving process as a scientific examination, real-world of experts. Learn to think in a way that will realize goals Power relegated to university-certified experts who have cognitive skills and training for problem solving (little mechanics) existent, the good, the possible seen as indisputable scientific facts not as humanly devised social constructs that are always open for discussion The real is the rational

---

Liza

I suppose we should be thankful that “In the twentieth century, especially among writing teachers, rhetorical theory has seen a resurgence of interest in invention or prewriting, in part to counter a preoccupation with the written product” (59). If rhetoric had not shifted from oral to written, we would not have jobs! Or we would not have the jobs that we have. I have to say that I am happy that our Composition and Rhetoric department is more Composition driven. I know Dr. Etheridge keeps saying that he came from a true Rhetoric department and I’m assuming that means that there was more of the “traditional” teaching and practice. Does taht mean that they followed oration more? Lindemann does talk about language being governed by the writer or speaker’s own purpose and then she mentions “traditional departments of rhetoric – especially invention, arrangement, and style” (58). All of that is part of our writing process now.

When I started reading this and got to the part that said, “We can teach writing without ever having read Aristotle,” it made me think that we can also learn about rhetoric without ever reading any of the philosophers. I think that students might be intimidated by the word itself. RHETORIC. Think about it. Say it five times. It doesn’t even sound natural. When I first learned what it meant, I realized that I just never had a name for it. That might make things easier. If you introduce it as “Today we are going to learn about rhetoric!” You might scare them and they will automatically think it is too difficult. Don’t lead with Aristotle, Cassiodorus, or Cicero. Learning it backwards is probably easier.

It’s like not telling a kid that calamari is squid. Tell them after they already try it and like it. (It worked for me anyway!)

---

---

Sean's Readings

Lindemann's discussion of rhetoric really helped me to define what rhetoric means to me. Her own assertion that "the terms associated with rhetoric change" (58) is enlightening, in that it underscores the way I've felt about rhetoric throughout my schooling. Every time I think I have a good concept of what it really means, I find myself thinking about it in a different context or situation and wondering if I had been to hasty in narrowing it down. I'm sure that for an incoming fresh(wo)man, rhetoric must seem like something each teacher uses for his/her own purpose and that there is no real definition. And, in a way, they would be right. Lindemann makes clear that we, as teachers, must help demonstrate "the varied and changing purposes people have for using language" (59) so that our students learn to examine their own rhetorical choices. This, I think, is a big part of that elusive goal of teaching "critical thinking".

And on that subject, the Booth article really brings home the necessity of developing critical thought in our students. His assertion that Americans "write very badly" (144) seems not to be a judgment of our capability as writers, but of our ability to first create a balanced rhetorical standpoint from which to write. And I would have to agree. I saw, as a grader in a freshman (or was it sophomore?) lit. class that the students could generally express their point in their writing, but they, en masse, left me wondering who they were writing for. Just like Booth states, some of the devices of rhetoric were plain to see in the work of these students; the ability to incite the reader was readily observable. The problem, however, is that much of these clear and engaging texts overshadowed a lack of substance that stemmed from the focus on style itself. I often had to ask myself, "What difference does this make?" On the other hand, Booth's mirror for this "perversion", his "pedant's stance" (140), seems to me to be something we might find in our WAC endeavors. Because many students of science or history tend to focus on the facts and data they are discussing, I think they probably have an ingrained tendency to forget about who their audience is or what uses their writing could have outside the simple goal of getting a good grade. I think the challenge for teachers of freshman comp. is finding out which end of the spectrum each student tends toward and then helping them work toward a better balance in their rhetorical stance. Booth, even though he wrote this more than forty years ago, rings true with his assessment of the way our culture seems to leave students on one side of the fence or the other; the fact that this article is still relevant tells me that finding a balance in rhetoric is an ongoing struggle for any writer and that we must help young writers realize this at an early stage in their academic and professional careers.

One more thing about Lindemann - I love the way she breaks down Classical rhetoric! I wish I had read her description of Aristotle's ideas before I read that text itself. I think I might have had a better idea about how it translated for my own writing skills, and how things like the 5 paragraph essay can be useful in the right context ( and, thereby, how any form of prose is partly defined by its context). Nice job, Lindemann! :)

---

Chelsie

Shen

This was a very interesting piece and literacy autobiography! I’m wondering if a lot of Asian cultures have the same writing practices. As writing instructors we need to be aware of the different cultures of the classroom and how each one views writing differently. The idea of topic sentences is apparently a Western tradition. It kind of reminds me of an advertisement. Grab the attention of your reader before they get bored and don’t read your work.

I have already mentioned this once before, but Slaughter told me that a lot of the Asian students plagiarize (I can’t remember specially which one she said). It’s not because they are trying to cheat, but because in their cultures it’s acceptable. They feel that they don’t have anything as important to say as what has already been said, so they just copy the previous work without citation. Very interesting. I think that the idea of plagiarism is kind of a new idea.

Give pieces of cheese slowly, Shen suggests. I think it would be interesting to look at different cultures and their writing practices as a classroom activity. Would this single out the students that are from other countries, or would they feel more comfortable. Maybe they will be able to recognize the differences more easily and soon. Shen says he wished he would have recognized these differences earlier, so the students could benefit greatly.

Lindemann

This was sort of an overview. I’ve been learning so much about the history of rhetoric in Dr. Etheridge’s class.

“Many modern rhetoricians agree that rhetoric is inoperative when the audience lacks the power to respond freely to the message” (41). This is a part of what Lindemann draws out as some of the assumption of rhetoric. This continues to show that rhetoric is definitely about persuasion. The audience must be willing to accept what the rhetor is saying, or be willing to argue that they are wrong.

“For Cicero, rhetoric is a branch of political science” (43). This is important. I can use this in my triad in the fall. It will be useful in making connections. I’m already seeing some of the things that Seminar can do to relate to Composition. Discussion about argument, etc.

Rhetoric is an instrument for social change. This is discussed on page 53. This is the point of Project Three. When I read this I immediately thought of Sojourner Truth using rhetoric as an instrument of social change. I think that this will be a great reading, assignment for the students to see how rhetoric causes social change. There are so many good sources, especially about civil rights. It’s the most recent and I think students are interested in civil rights. Feminism could be used.