sean zwagerman - teaching rhetoric composition … · sean zwagerman local examples and ... work...

458

C C C 6 6 : 3 / f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5

CCC 66:3 / february 2015

Sean Zwagerman

Local Examples and Master Narratives: Stanley Fish and the Public Appeal of Current-Traditionalism

This article analyzes the rhetoric of public attitudes toward composition, as represented in Stanley Fish’s “Think Again” blog in the New York Times and in comments posted by his readers. Fish denounces the field of composition as highly politicized and anti-academic and advocates instead a belletristic, current-traditional approach. The dialogue between Fish and his audience exemplifies the web of definitions and logical fallacies by which current-traditionalism and belletristic English frame public attitudes. To the extent that composition’s “public turn” involves engaging public opinion, compositionists must anticipate this framing or else find their engagements ineffective, even self-defeating.

Scholars who believe the field of composition is making—or needs to make—a public turn are troubled by our scarcity of prominent public intellectuals (Butler 59). Elsewhere, where the local turn crosses the archival turn, David Gold argues that archival research into diverse geographies of writing pedagogy necessitates a revision of the “totalizing narratives” of previous composition histories. Gold declares “our ‘dominant’ narratives,” including the narrative that current-traditional pedagogy was a ubiquitous and homogeneous force, “dominant no more” (19). But although compositionists have long challenged current-traditionalism’s methods and are now interrogating its actual historical

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 458 2/5/15 12:54 PM

selson

Text Box

Copyright © 2015 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

459

z w a g e r m a n / l o c a l e x a m p l e s a n d m a s t e r n a r r a t i v e s

Clear, engaging, and disputatious, Fish is the ideal blogger—some of his posts provoke more than six hundred responses—and the ideal public agitator.

dominance, it would be a mistake to minimize its powerful influence on public discussions about composition.1 For regardless of the extent to which current-traditionalism did or does directly guide classroom practice, it continues to frame public attitudes toward writing pedagogy, and thus—to the extent that the public assesses practice and influences policy—continues to influence com-position. In fact, if we shift our attention from archives to attitudes, members of the public often assert local practices and individual ex-periences as support for dominant narratives and totalizing perspectives, in particular the perspective of current-traditionalism. There-fore, compositionists who heed the call for more public intellectuals may well find their arguments unsuccessful, even self-defeating, if they do not anticipate the rhetorical appeals and the framing effects of popular current-traditionalism.

Meanwhile, current-traditional composition already has its prominent public intellectual: Stanley Fish. Whether discussing writing instruction or his other current topic, the definition and limits of academic freedom, Fish asserts a “very strong distinction . . . between academic work which is contemplative and exploratory, and political action” (“State”). This distinction, as I argue, works hand in glove with belletristic current-traditionalism. As for Fish’s influence, his recent mass-market books, Save the World on Your Own Time and How to Write a Sentence, condemn the current state of literacy and of writing instruction. Both were best sellers. Twenty-three of the blog posts in Fish’s New York Times “Think Again” blog (2006–13) address composition or issues in the humani-ties to which composition and rhetoric are directly relevant, with a potential audience of twenty-nine million readers (“Media Kit”).2 Clear, engaging, and disputatious, Fish is the ideal blogger—some of his posts provoke more than six hundred responses—and the ideal public agitator. While Sophia McClennen criticizes Fish’s “neoliberal mantras” (McClennen 463), reader Dick Bradley denounces him as “a devoted liberal and socialist” (Fish, “More,” comment 19). “‘Stanley Fish,’” writes Stanley Fish on the topic of Stanley Fish, “is a placeholder for ideas you don’t want to be associated with” (“When”). And indeed, not ev-eryone is pleased to have Fish representing composition. In response to Fish’s blog entry “What Should Colleges Teach?,” Straight Face writes:

[Y]ou presume to know what you are talking about when you discuss the teach-ing of writing when you obviously don’t. Why does everyone think they know what should happen in a composition course whether they are physicists or

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 459 2/5/15 12:54 PM

460

C C C 6 6 : 3 / f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5

once-upon-a-time theoreticians or Miltonians who write for the New York Times? (comment 126)

But given his public prominence, Stanley Fish does “represent” composi-tion, in a couple of senses. Unlike Straight Face, most of those who comment on Fish’s blog consider him, as a university professor who has taught composition, a legitimate representative of writing instruction. More importantly for the persistence of current-traditionalism, Fish represents—he personifies—the popular beliefs that originate in readers’ local and individual experiences; Fish reflects these beliefs and experiences back to his readers validated and amplified by his academic ethos. His blog is thus a scene in which the master narratives many compositionists wish to revise or replace are retold and reinforced by means of the local and individual. Fish is an academic insider who validates, for example, the popular narrative that students can’t write and that writing teachers are to blame. Translated into pedagogy, this belief typically results in some version of current-traditionalism. And despite some novel elements, Fish’s approach to writing instruction is indeed current-traditional, within a belletristic conception of English as the refined appreciation of literature.

Now the term current-traditional can swipe a broad brush across the variations in an attitude or pedagogical approach, or—like neoliberal and socialist—can be used to silence discussion by condemning others’ opinions as “ideas you don’t want to be associated with.” Though Gold is correct that current-traditionalism is neither “easily classified” nor monolithic, it does not follow that the term is inherently problematic; it does, however, need to be de-fined. To that end, and in order to contextualize Fish’s attitude and methods, I cite W. Ross Winterowd’s eight “legacies” of current-traditional thought:

1. Style and form become pretty much the “all” of rhetoric.

2. Rubrics, such as the five-paragraph essay, make composition easier to teach.

3. Pedagogy becomes text-oriented, as opposed to process-oriented.

4. Instruction becomes bottom-up (from word to sentence to paragraph) rather than top-down (from purpose or intention to general plan to textual details).

5. Instruction becomes “methodical,” a series of statements or injunctions leading students systematically through the composing process.

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 460 2/5/15 12:54 PM

461


6. The classification of modes (description, narration, exposition, and argumentation or persuasion) becomes almost universal.

7. Rhetoric as the art of public discourse is abandoned. . . .

8. Correcting themes becomes the teacher’s primary, if not exclusive, concern. (Winterowd, Teacher’s 31)

Winterowd states that “current-traditionalism simply has no advocates” (En-glish 14), and among compositionists this is generally true. But among profes-sors in many disciplines (including literature and critical theory), politicians, pundits, and the public, current-traditionalism has many advocates, though most have never heard it so named. To read rhetorically Fish’s popular writings and the comments they arouse is to appreciate another way in which Fish is representative: joining the ceaseless flow of news stories, editorials, letters, and comments lamenting the sorry state of literacy and writing instruction, Fish’s work typifies the logical fallacies and impacted terminology by which current-traditionalism and belletristic English frame public attitudes and resist efforts to challenge those attitudes.

Fish’s Writing Class“We are at that time of year,” Fish writes, “when millions of American college and high school students will stride across the stage, take diploma in hand and set out to the wider world, most of them utterly unable to write a clear and coher-ent English sentence” (“Devoid”). We have heard this lament before—students demonstrate “bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing, [and] ignorance of the simplest rules of punctuation,” complained Harvard president Charles Eliot in 1873 (Hook 115)—and we will no doubt continue to hear it.3 Fish blames writing instructors who, instead of teaching writing, teach content—“the enemy of writing instruction” (“Devoid”). The broad imperative of higher education, Fish believes, is to “‘academicize’ the subject; that is, to remove it from whatever context of urgency it inhabits in the world” (“Always”). The opposite of academicizing is politicizing, and “the present state of composition studies is the clearest example of the surrender of academic imperatives to the imperatives of politics” (Fish, Save 49). Students in these “so-called courses in writing . . . will be learning nothing they couldn’t have learned better by sitting around in a dorm room or a coffee shop. They will certainly not be learning anything about how language works” (41).

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 461 2/5/15 12:54 PM

462

C C C 6 6 : 3 / f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5

So what is academicized composition? To resist the politicized classroom and the “temptation of content” (41), Fish advocates “a return to basics,” where

“the focus of writing instruction should be form, and only form” (“Writing”), and the basis of form—and thus of writing instruc-tion itself—is the grammatically correct sentence. So when Fish says “form” he means “school grammar” and syntax. Demonstrat-ing his sentence-based approach, Fish addresses “a range of organizational and grammatical problems” in a law student’s final paper by assigning the following task:

Take “Jane baked cookies” or some other sentence of the same structure and build it up and out into a sentence of at least 100 words without losing control of the sentence’s basic structure. That is, you should be able to describe the relationship between the words and phrases you add and the sentence’s core structural logic, a logic your additions and elaborations must honor and preserve. (“Writing”)

The foundations of sound writing, in other words, are parsing and sentence expansion. Having mastered the sentence, Fish claims, a student can, “by ex-trapolation and extension, write anything” (How 8). Fish’s only support for this dramatic assertion of the current-traditional “microcosmic to macrocosmic view of discourse” (Crowley, Methodical 132) is, of all things, a quotation from Roland Barthes: “a discourse of any size ‘is a long sentence’” (Fish, How 8). Fish could just as well have quoted Alexander Bain, whose current-traditional textbook, English Composition and Rhetoric (1866), states, “he that fully com-prehends the method of a paragraph, will also comprehend the method of an entire work” (151); replace “paragraph” with “sentence” and these words could be Fish’s.

Once students have learned to construct a proper sentence, how exactly do they proceed to “write anything?” In Fish’s composition course, they don’t:

On the first day of my freshman writing class I give the students this assignment: You will be divided into groups and by the end of the semester each group will be expected to have created its own language, complete with a syntax, a lexicon, a text, rules for translating the text and strategies for teaching your language to fellow students. (“Devoid”)

This course may appear to depart from Winterowd’s definition and from

To resist the politicized classroom and the “temptation of content” (41), Fish advocates

“a return to basics,” where “the focus of writing instruction should be form, and only

form” (“Writing”), and the basis of form—and thus of writing instruction itself—is the

grammatically correct sentence.

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 462 2/5/15 12:54 PM

463


current-traditional templates like the five-paragraph essay and the modes (legacies 2 and 6). But, in fact, those forms of writing are absent from Fish’s course not because it deviates from current-traditionalism, but because, as Paul Lynch says, it is “an interesting course in something, [but] not in writing, since the students never actually write.” So whereas a typical current-traditional composition course might begin with the grammatically correct sentence and end with the argumentative essay, the text in this class is not a composition at all, but a formal demonstration of the logic of grammatical rules. It is an interesting course in what Patrick Hartwell calls “Grammar 2,” the linguistic study of the workings of language—a fine thing, but not a “freshman writing class.” So Fish’s academicized current-traditionalism results in a composition course not only devoid of content, but also devoid of composition.

More typically current-traditional is Fish’s reduction of rhetoric to the formalized study of figures, including “allusion, compression, parallelism, [and] alliteration” (How 9). The imperative to academicize provides the rationale for this belletristic move. In “The Last Professor,” Fish insists that “higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world”—or in Winterowd’s words, “Rhetoric as the art of public discourse is abandoned.” Rhetoric as the study of figures has instead a direct and designed relationship to literary appreciation: “If you learn what it is that goes into the making of a memorable sentence . . . you will also be learning how to take the appreciative measure of such sentences” (How 8–9). Literary appreciation, in turn, is its “own good,” and the humanities, Fish insists, “don’t do anything, if by ‘do’ is meant bring about effects in the world” (“Will”). So the question a rhetorically minded writing teacher might ask a student—“What do you want this piece of writing to do?”—is thus literally none of our business.

A Legacy of TasteIt may seem surprising that Stanley Fish, often associated with postmodern anti-foundationalism, should be so thoroughly current-traditional in his approach to composition. But “postmodern current-traditionalism” is not necessarily an oxymoron. First, academics do not always think to extend their theories of identity, politics, or textuality to writing pedagogy; a professor who believes that students are just socially inscribed bodies occupying a range of subject positions may still decide that those bodies need more grammar drills. Second, in what is probably Fish’s best-known contribution to composition

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 463 2/5/15 12:54 PM

464

C C C 6 6 : 3 / f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5

scholarship, “Anti-Foundationalism, Theory Hope, and the Teaching of Com-position,” he argues that “practice has nothing to do with theory, at least in the sense of being enabled and justified by theory” (355). Though Fish’s “Anti-Foundationalism” has prompted numerous responses from compositionists, his blog and recent books make clear that when it comes to writing instruction, his anti-foundationalism is a red herring. Fish may align himself philosophi-cally with Rorty and Kuhn, and his readers may compare him to Derrida (Fish, “Another,” comment 33 by Christopher Swift), but there is no question whom Fish the compositionist most resembles. “The Last Professor” sounds very much like the first: First Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres Hugh Blair (1718–1800).

Of the lasting effects visited upon the fields of English, rhetoric, and com-position by the 115 editions of Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, originally published in1783, Thomas P. Miller writes, “Whereas classical theo-rists defined rhetoric as a political art, Blair . . . and the other rhetoricians who institutionalized English subordinated political rhetoric to belletristic literary studies” (3). “With Blair et al.,” says Winterowd, “rhetoric left the agora . . . and retreated to the drawing room” (English 66). Fish advances Blair’s cause, aca-demicizing rhetoric and envisioning the classroom as a drawing room where “tenure-track professors . . . discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting,” reveling in “the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist in-quiry for its own sake” (Fish, “Last”). Fish believes the humanities are defined by their “removal from the decision-making pressures of the larger world” (“Always”), and Blair would approve: “Belles Lettres and criticism . . . open a field of investigation peculiar to themselves” (13), an aesthetic field free from quotidian concerns and actions—free from, to use Fish’s dyslogistic term for relevance, politics. So not only is Fish’s resemblance to Blair unsurprising, but it is inevitable. With writing quarantined from public purposes and audiences, there are only a few things left for student writers to do: develop an apprecia-tion of beauty and genius in literature classes, try their hand in creative writing classes, or learn the rules and forms in composition courses; all they can do, in other words, is belletristic current-traditionalism.

In Blair and his descendants, these seemingly contradictory pursuits—the appreciation of belles lettres and the production of grammatically correct sen-tences—are united by the doctrine of taste: “[P]ractice in attending to different flavours and tastes of liquors wonderfully improves the power of distinguishing them, and of tracing their composition. . . . Precisely in the same manner, with

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 464 2/5/15 12:54 PM

465


respect to the beauty of composition and discourse, attention to the most ap-proved models, study of the best authors, . . . operate toward the refinement of taste” (Blair 17, 18). “Some appreciate fine art,” Fish writes, “others appreciate fine wines. I appreciate fine sentences” (How 3). Blair believes that as society evolves, as it has in “the polished nations of Europe,” people need to express “their conceptions with propriety and eloquence” (9); therefore, “the study of poetry may be useful . . . for embellishing [one’s] style” (341). Fish believes that writing is worse than ever, so eloquence must be recovered—in part through the appreciation and imitation of literary examples. Blair sees culture’s ascen-dance, Fish its decline, but both assert the belletristic impulse to distinguish the “pure gaze” of the “high aesthetic” from the naive gape of “ordinary vision” (Bourdieu 32). Fish selects his exemplary sentences not for their “substantive political or social or philosophical points,” but “because they are performances of a certain skill at the highest level,” like “sports highlights” that we admire but could never hope to equal (How 3). This subtraction of purpose from performance is quintessentially belletristic: the sentence’s doing is aesthetic not rhetorical, even though separating these two aspects of doing lessens our appreciation of both. Like sports highlights, Fish’s sentences are removed from the very context that makes them purposeful, consequential performances.

Blair’s most notorious impact on rhetoric is his dismissal of invention on the grounds that “one who had no other aim, but to talk copiously and plausi-bly, by consulting [the loci] on every subject, . . . might discourse without end” (317). What is actually bothering Blair is that the commonplaces of invention threaten to make literacy commonplace, even among those “without any genius at all” (317). Blair discourages students from reading Aristotle or the Sophists, recommending instead “Demetrius Phalereus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus; both write on the construction of sentences, and deserve to be perused” (345). Blair thus diverts the student’s attention from invention to the study of forms. So does Fish: “Form, form, form, and only form is the road to what the classi-cal theorists called ‘invention’” (How 27). If we agree with Crowley that “it is rhetoric’s attention to invention that differentiates it from all other practices and fields of study” (“Composition”), then what remains of rhetoric after Blair gets done with it no longer deserves to be called rhetoric at all.

Fish actually goes further than Blair in taking the rhetoric out of rhetoric. To McClennen’s charge that Fish “forecloses the possibility of civic engage-ment and democratic action” (464), Fish replies, “That’s not quite right. I don’t foreclose the possibility; I just want to locate it outside the university and the

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 465 2/5/15 12:54 PM

466

C C C 6 6 : 3 / f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5

classroom” (“Neoliberalism”). By the ethics of academicizing, academic writ-ing betrays itself if it moves beyond “linguistic forms,” and rhetoric betrays the academy if it looks beyond the “cloistered setting” of the humanities. Contrast Fish’s characterization of the “hot-button” talk found in politicized composition courses to his own involvement in an academic conference:

Participants argued . . . about where and with what methods inquiry into the ques-tions should begin. Actually asking and answering them was left to other arenas (the arenas of the legislature, the courts and the ballot box) where their direct, as opposed to academic, consideration would be appropriate. The urgency presiding over the occasion was not the urgency of doing something, but of understanding something. (“Politics”)

The “other arenas” from which rhetorical argument is distinguished are arenas that, for Aristotle, make rhetoric necessary: the forensic and the legislative. To

excise from the classroom all politicizing as Fish defines it—encompassing everything that is not academicized, and thus everything from polemi-cal indoctrination to civic participation—is to excise rhetoric itself. Only when composition and rhetoric are severed from a broadly defined politics can relevance be a question rather than a given. A dogmatically “politicized” composi-

tion teacher may control or restrict relevance but does not impose it. For relevance is not supplemental to composition and rhetoric but intrinsic, and the attempt to remove it leaves nothing but—and by now this should come as no surprise—style and form.

The attitude toward relevance is actually the greatest difference between Blair and Fish. Blair believes that literary appreciation improves character; Fish wryly observes that, if true, English professors should be supremely virtuous. Though Blair reduces rhetoric to style and form, he does not entirely disregard content or purpose (192–93). Fish, however, celebrates those sentences “whose content is their form, . . . sentences that are great in part because they are so determinedly self-reflexive and aspire to the condition of pure objects” (How 136). Here we see how poststructural textual fixation, the ille ne pas hors texte, opens the door for current-traditionalism: language, Fish asserts, is not “the vehicle of a subject matter it serves” but “is its own subject matter” (135–36). Fish’s self-reflexive textuality makes Blair seem like an activist: “To the question ‘of what use are the humanities?’” Fish writes, “the only honest answer is none

To excise from the classroom all politi-cizing as Fish defines it—encompassing

everything that is not academicized, and thus everything from polemical

indoctrination to civic participation—is to excise rhetoric itself.

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 466 2/5/15 12:54 PM

467


whatsoever. . . . An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good” (“Will”). Through this false synonymy of relevance and instrumentality, Fish reduces Blair’s “rational and useful entertainment” to simply rational entertainment or, as Fish calls it, academic work:

The [conference] took on some of the aspects of an athletic competition—parry, thrust, soft balls, hard balls, palpable hits, ingenious defenses. . . . [A] set of intel-lectual problems [were] tossed around and teased out by men and women at the top of their game. The pleasure was palpable and a bit esoteric, for only a small number of people in the world care whether originalism is a textualist or an in-tentionalist enterprise. (“What Is”)

The current-traditional, bottom-up conception of composition here extends all the way up to academia itself, which, like a fine sentence, is a self-reflexive site of pleasure. Fish’s belletristic current-traditionalism thus reinforces popular beliefs that need no reinforcing: the belief that academic work is a pastime that “only a small number of people in the world care” about, and that the humani-ties are as relevant to the real world as a degree in fencing.

Current-Traditional Debate: Arguments Going NowhereLike his popular books, Fish’s blog posts about composition and rhetoric do rhetorical work among both academic and nonacademic readers. And since the ability of readers to leave comments is a defining characteristic of blogs (Eveland and Dylko 106), “by its structure the blogosphere is supportive of ar-gument and counterargument” (Tremayne 264). This does not mean, however, “that careful deliberation is the norm” (264). Rather, though blogs potentially invite “informed and reciprocal interactivity among knowledgeable people” (Warnick and Heineman 60), the reality often resembles the eristic debates of talk radio (Johnson and Kaye); Fish’s tendency to frame issues as antagonistic binaries encourages such eristic, and the “literacy crisis” has proven to be a reliable topic for generating outrage.

Through Fish as current-traditionalism’s representative and spokesman, blog readers perpetuate arguments and attitudes tracing back from Fish to Blair and beyond. Through the logic of parochialism, through the syllogistic leap from local example to global conclusion, readers’ individual experiences stand as evidence for the validity of the current-traditional master narrative. Tom Hill, for example, praises Fish’s pedagogy even though Hill’s example dis-proves his own point: “I teach in China. All the Chinese trained native Chinese

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 467 2/5/15 12:54 PM

468

C C C 6 6 : 3 / f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5

English teachers with whom I work can state the names of sentence components with great skill. Very few of them are capable of writing a coherent paragraph of five correctly structured sentences. Thank you for an excellent article, Dr. Fish” (“Writing,” comment 47). As validated by personal experience, current-traditionalism resists refutation, even from its own internal contradictions.

Though a few respond as Straight Face does, most academic readers of Fish’s blog join him in reciting what I have elsewhere called the literarist’s la-ment (Zwagerman). Afflicted by the infelicities in a pile of essays, the belletristic professor concludes that students’ writing is worse than ever, thinks back nos-talgically to his own grammar-heavy high school English classes (“Worked for me,” Fish says), and complains that no one teaches the basics anymore. Though every linkage in this chain of reasoning is suspect, the lament is a popular and resilient form; Fish laments in exactly this manner in “A Classical Education: Back to the Future,” and Deborah’s response to “What Should Colleges Teach” is so exemplary as to almost seem a parody:

I am a literature professor at a top-twenty liberal-arts college, and I too find that all my students—freshmen to seniors—are poor writers. They make grammatical and syntactical mistakes as well as mixing metaphors and committing other er-rors of style. . . . I studied grammar rigorously all through, well, grammar school. . . . Moreover, I read throughout my childhood—real books, not Dr. Seuss—and grew up in a house where the subjunctive mood was correctly used. None of these conditions applies for today’s college students. In my literature courses, even the most advanced, I’m forever teaching “remedial writing”—“on the side.” . . . There is a writing department, too, but their courses do seem to echo the trendy content Professor Fish deplores here. So I do the job myself. I try to give students the suggestion that they become as sensitive to their style in writing as they are to their sense of what-not-to-wear or what music to load onto their IPods. I’m still trying. (comment 215)

The attitude here comes straight from Blair: vulgar students, reared in homes without books or subjunctives, force the English professor to teach remedial writing in a literature course. One can trace also to Blair the ambivalent and paradoxical attitude toward style: the professor cherishes stylistic sensitivity, while equating style with ornament and fashion. We can decline this invitation to oscillate between grandiosity and self-loathing by understanding style not as a matter of preventing one’s metaphors from mixing but as an aspect of the writer’s craft, responsive to audience, motive, genre, and scene. Unfortunately, an understanding of style—or of anything, really—as rhetorical is scarce in the comments.

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 468 2/5/15 12:54 PM

469


Public versions of the lament rely upon and perpetuate a web of resilient logical fallacies. A prominent false dilemma is the belief, which Fish promotes, that there are only two ways to teach writing: one (current-traditionalism) is rigorous; the other (framed as expressivist or politicized) is frivolous. M. E. Hansen likes Fish’s arguments and likes rules and rigor:

Yes. Yes. Yes. It’s about time, too. . . . There aren’t all that many teachers of English who themselves know the rules of grammar and rhetoric. Even fewer are eager to read though4 the mess of student work submitted for review and correction. It is so much easier to encourage stream-of-consciousness writing, or ‘journaling,’ or some such idiosyncratic nonsense. (“What Should,” comment 174)

In response to “What Should Colleges Teach? Part 2,” Misha writes, “I’m very reluctant to recommend that [students] visit my campus’s writing center because I’ve heard that what they are taught there is to ‘find their authentic voice’. That’s all well and good, but how about first learning how to write a grammatical sentence?” (comment 25). On the opposite side, writing from an expressivist perspective, Re-vival deploys the same fallacy to dismiss rhetoric as current-traditional: “Ah yes, let us hone our rhetoric skills. But, let us also remember that some expressions should only be tamed and mastered for the sake of becoming wild again” (“What Should,” comment 531). Leah concurs:

Your arguments make sense, if one wants to become a secretary. But if I want to write well, then being forced to write by the rules destroys my creativity just as much if not more than what it teaches me. Yes, writing in correct grammar would help me, but it would also destroy much of my proposed effect, as it would many authors’. It’s like forcing people to walk in shoes that don’t fit them, just because other people’s feet are built like that. (“What Should,” pt. 3, comment 3)

Though an interest in “proposed effects” should invite discussion of rhetoric, here it does not because the proposed effect is the creative inscription of the writer’s uniqueness, of genius. Whereas rhetorical effectiveness involves imagin-ing one’s self in someone else’s shoes, Leah resents the size of other people’s feet.

Although the preceding four comments represent two opposing posi-tions, they are one in their zealous commitment to those positions and to the oppositional logic of the false dilemma that contains and sustains them. Since the false dilemma sorts everything into one of two bins, and since anything foreign to one’s own position must belong to the other, this debate accomplishes nothing but its own continuance. And since belletristic English (Fish’s version included) is a weird hybrid of the methodical writing of formal essays and the

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 469 2/5/15 12:54 PM

470

C C C 6 6 : 3 / f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5

sensitive reading of creative literature—a hybrid resulting from the excision of invention and public motives—what looks like pointless debate is often not even that, but rather is one aspect of belletristic English arguing with another. For example, J. C. Hallman objects to Fish’s focus on formal rules: “The job of words and sentences is to convey sensibility, to take emotions and ideas from one head and put them in another head” (“Writing,” comment 29). But against Fish’s twenty-first-century interpretation of Blair, Hallman gives us instead the straight eighteenth-century version, countering current-traditional writing instruction with current-traditional faculty psychology.

Current-traditionalism’s equation with rigor seems to be its strongest public appeal. In this equation, a fallacious appeal to tradition—the anxious and atavistic “back-to-basics” impulse—cooperates with the fallacy of question-able causation, the enduring belief that skills drills transfer directly to students’ writing (Winterowd, English 43). Fish then amplifies an appeal to common sense—writing teachers should just teach writing—with a paradoxical appeal to novelty: current-traditionalism is radical.5 Fish insists that all composition courses should “teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else.” (Again, rhetoric means to Fish what it means to Blair: the analysis of figures, and exercises in style and correctness.) However, Fish laments, “This advice was contemptu-ously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research” (“What Should?”). Rather than gradually dying off as unfit, current-traditionalism is thus reanimated, advanced by Fish’s potent ethos: he cleverly positions himself as an outsider on the inside, and current-traditionalism becomes, of all things, anti-establishment. As J. Bell writes, “For a long time now, the suffocating nar-cissism and political agendas of the writing industry have allowed teachers to enjoy their journey, but their students never reached the goal” (Fish, “Writing,” comment 16).

Since Fish tends to be a polemical and oppositional writer and the blog comment forum a polemical and oppositional place, one must be wary of re-sponding in kind, of rejecting something just because Fish endorses it, whether that “something” is grammar, style, or apolitical pedagogy. Straight Face, for example, dismisses Fish’s criticism of compositionists in part by dismissing Fish as an outsider. But like Fish, Maxine Hairston has criticized leftist writing instructors for politicizing composition, for putting indoctrination before in-struction (185). Fish and Hairston are hardly two peas in a pod, though: whereas Hairston writes to motivate and empower composition experts against what she sees as corrosive outside forces, Fish sees the insiders—“the composition

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 470 2/5/15 12:54 PM

471


establishment”—as the problem. And in Fish’s mobilization of the argument, unlike Hairston’s, the desired effect of depoliticizing the humanities is precisely the effect of current-traditionalism itself: “the point of introducing [political agendas] into the classroom should never be to urge them or to warn against them,” Fish writes (“What Is”). But once again, Fish’s academicizing eliminates rhetorical motives and genres that are important precisely because they are intended to have an effect: in this case, the legislative and the epideictic, writing that urges or warns. Thus does the targeting of ideological zealots also impact anyone who teaches writing and rhetoric as public arts.

Meanwhile, Fish’s nostalgic appeal for restoring “the basics” to college composition has a possible consequence he likely had not anticipated. D. Clark writes:

Thank God there are teachers like Mr. Fish who can and will still defend the teach-ing of the basics! By sixth grade a student should be able to identify the parts of speech of a sentence. If he can’t, he shouldn’t pass! By ninth grade he should be able to distinguish a phrase from a clause and an intransitive verb from a transitive verb! If he cannot, he should not pass. By twelfth grade he should be able to parse and diagram a sentence. If he cannot, he should not graduate. It is a disgrace that such standards need even to be stated. (Fish, “What Is,” comment 35)

Now Clark may have a point: if after twelve years of grammar drills a student still cannot diagram a sentence, he probably should be denied graduation—or given a medal for twelve years of heroic resistance. But once composition is reduced to current-traditionalism, and current-traditionalism to the basics, we might well ask: why should the basics be taught in university? Kathleen agrees with Fish, though by her second paragraph Fish might wish she didn’t; her association of composition with the basics sweeps in—and then sweeps away—all of belletristic English:

I agree with Fish that everyone should have more grammar and writing courses. Not only do we need to work on the basics, most of us have a definite sentence structure style that we repeat too often in our writing. . . . As to literature, I hon-estly cannot see any usefulness in it beyond high school. Wasn’t “literature” or “reading” simply a means to insure that all of us could actual read? (Fish, “What Should,” comment 28)

Kathleen seems to have missed Fish’s assertion that usefulness is irrelevant to the humanities, and her utilitarian dismissal of literary study might seem rather extreme. However, I think her attitude is quite common, if seldom stated so

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 471 2/5/15 12:54 PM

472

C C C 6 6 : 3 / f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5

bluntly; certainly many undergraduates (and their parents) see no reason to major in English. So not only does current-traditionalism eviscerate rhetoric in theory, but it also eviscerates rhetoric (and perhaps literature, too) in practice: current-traditionalism reduces rhetoric to style and form, style and form are devalued as basic, and the basics should be taught before college. Note the appearance and the demise of rhetoric in this series of responses to “What Should Colleges Teach?”

I learned to parse in junior high & learned to write in high school. . . . Writing, like speaking, is a skill best learned when very young. If a college student can’t handle a sentence that exceeds six words, he won’t be able to compose a sentence that exceeds six words when he’s 40. (Marie Burns, comment 27)

College is a good place to learn the finer points of argument, irony, stylistic flourish and the use of citations in longer works. But High School is the place to learn to write sentences, paragraphs, and the (in)famous Rhetorical Essay. (Palu, comment 62)

It bothers me that students at the college level cannot write. It also irks me that we have come to expect that basic skills such as writing and mathematics should be taught at the college level. I do not refer to advanced writing skills or high level mathematics, but fundamental subjects like grammar and rhetoric. (Emile, comment 95)

If writing involves negotiating the complex interactions among writer, text, audience, and context, then there is no way to argue that writing instruction should end in high school. But if learning to write means learning to use com-plete sentences, and if rhetoric is synonymous with stylistic and formal etiquette (I suspect that Palu’s “(in)famous Rhetorical Essay” is the five-paragraph theme), then it becomes easier to argue that composition has no place in universities.

One might think to counter the equation of writing and rhetoric with “the basics” by appealing to rhetoric’s history, which predates the nostalgic “good old days” by a couple of millennia. For some readers, however, the alignment of rhetoric with “the classics” makes it seem anachronistic and expendable—the same fate it suffers when included among the basics. Here are two responses to “A Classical Education: Back to the Future”:

So let me get this straight—we make our students spend a whole lot of time learning Latin and Greek and Rhetoric and Grammar, employing drilling and rote learning, all of which will come at the expense, probably, of science and modern languages? (Malcolm, comment 45)

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 472 2/5/15 12:54 PM

473


I see no reason to turn back the clock, especially when a solid scientific and mathematical education produces a better citizenry, capable of making reasoned decisions and critically evaluating claims. (Hammond, comment 55)

As part of the basics, rhetoric was too practical for university-level study; as a field with a long and rich history, it is not practical enough. Though Hammond (above) wants citizens “capable of making reasoned decisions and critically evaluating claims”—that is, citizens with rhetorical knowledge—Hammond believes this rhetorical knowledge comes from science and math classes. Lest this seem eccentric, consider Ehkzu’s comment, which begins with a call for rhetoric but ends up in a most unexpected place:

[A student] needs to be able to listen to someone she likes, like President Obama, yet when he says we must grant amnesty to illegals because we can’t deport them, she should realize he just used the false choice fallacy. . . . That’s what today’s students really, really need. And what society really, really needs them to have. I love good poetry. I can discuss Klee’s later paintings and how they dovetail with Richard Strauss’s later compositions. But our liberal arts students need more math and science first, because it’s 2010. (“A Classical Education” comment 140)

Why do these appeals for argumentation demand not rhetoric but math and science? Because, while readers may argue whether the humanities are valu-able or frivolous, their assessment of value or frivolity arises from a shared definition of the humanities as, to quote Fish, a place for “the pleasures of thinking about thinking freed from the burdensome expectation that we will finally get somewhere” (“Pragmatism’s”). Or to quote Blair, even “the most busy man” needs something to fill the day’s “vacant spaces” (13). And what could be “more agreeable in itself, or more consonant in the dignity of the human mind, than in the entertainments of taste, and the study of polite literature?” (13–14). Chris, a professor of applied mathematics, defends the humanities, but entirely on belletristic terms:

I’m one of those useful professors (in applied math). . . . At their best, the humanity professors help us to understand the world of our mind and imagination as well as serving as catalogers of our culture, past and present. . . . The thought of losing our humanities professors saddens and depresses me. They are precious and in the long run, very useful, for the reasons mentioned above. (Fish, “Last,” comment 154)

“Belles Lettres and criticism,” Blair writes, “strew flowers in the path of sci-ence” (13), and the mathematician will miss the humanities professors (and the flowers) when they’re gone. So will John Ahlstrom, who agrees that the

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 473 2/5/15 12:54 PM

474

C C C 6 6 : 3 / f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5

humanities are valuable, but that the value is ineffable: “Why do I lament the loss of humanist education? Well, I lament it precisely because I believe it has value, though immeasurable” (Fish, “Last,” comment 139). “The doctrine of taste,” Winterowd writes, “etherealized humane letters” (Teacher’s 28), and both critics and advocates of the humanities continue to uphold this doctrine in public debates.

Rhetoric to the . . . Rescue?Fortunately, some of Fish’s readers do recognize that the dialogue his blog generates is a group exercise in unexamined warrants. Kory Ching writes, “I suspect that much of [Fish’s] posturing here is the result of a self-manufactured literacy crisis” (Fish, “What Should,” pt. 3, comment 299). J. Seitz6 elaborates:

It’s tempting to respond at length to the notion suggested here and soon to be echoed in readers’ comments that today’s students “cannot write an English sen-tence”—for this is the kind of nonsense that academics, self-appointed pundits, and almost anyone’s parents have been spouting for decades (nay, centuries). . . . In short, it doesn’t get us very far to say that writing courses should teach writing. What we need is a more vigorous public discussion of how to teach writ-ing effectively rather than ineffectively. If we begin with the notion that “students today can’t write” or that we need to return to a skills-and-drills curriculum, we’ll doom the teaching of writing right from the start. (Fish, “What Should,” comment 194)

What does genuinely, if infrequently, invite “a more vigorous public discussion” by putting pressure on the belletristic enclosure and reclaiming the word poli-tics is precisely that excluded by current-traditionalism and by Fish himself: a rhetoric deserving of the name, engaged and, if you will, political; rhetoric and writing recognized as purposeful social acts cannot but bring politics into the humanities and vice versa. Some readers endorse rhetoric without even realizing that they are doing so: Stephen, a former writing teacher, comments,

[Fish] characterizes writing as solely a matter of grammar and rhetoric. “Writ-ing” includes many other activities, such as learning how to formulate a suitable topic for a paper, learning how to organize the content of a paper, learning what counts as evidence and how to incorporate evidence into a paper, and learning how to present material clearly in a way that builds to a larger whole (I suppose the latter might fall under a broad definition of “rhetoric.”) (Fish, “What Should,” comment 22)

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 474 2/5/15 12:54 PM

475


Outside of current-traditionalism, all of this falls under the definition of rheto-ric. MC’s response is more rhetorically informed:

You cannot teach written argument without something for students to argue about. . . . Serious argument can be taught regardless of politics . . . or even of topical focus, as long as the topic in question is engaged in a way that allows students to recognize the anatomy of a discourse and where they locate themself. (Fish, “What Should,” comment 65, emphasis added)

I suppress the verbal hygienist in me who cringes at “themself,” and instead com-mend MC for restoring the rhetor to the act of writing, an act that, in Fish’s academicism, concerns only “the anatomy of a discourse.”

Even more cogent an argument for rhetoric is offered by Rich H. who, like MC, restores rhetorical motive to the equation and then completes the scene by noting that motives and texts necessarily anticipate or respond to a rhetorical situation:

The best writing instruction teaches students to learn about the context-depen-dent nature of writing so that they can recognize the appropriate kind of writing for the particular rhetorical situation they find themselves in. This requires that writing courses teach writing within the context of a substantive intellectual project, not as an abstraction. (Fish, “What Should,” comment 77)

Noteworthy here is the refusal to divorce writing from purpose, not from a desire to “politicize,” but because, in the illocutionary act of writing, the two are inseparable. R. S. Becker joins Rich H. in arguing for the intrinsic rhetoricity of writing, and therefore of writing instruction: “I think [Fish] denigrates the behavioral context that asks what are you trying to do to whom and for what reason, once called rhetoric” (Fish, “Writing,” comment 20). And still called rhetoric. In response to “What Should Colleges Teach? Part 2,” Jack writes:

Stanley Fish offers here a pedagogy for teaching style. . . . The ancient rhetoricians situated style among a set of five “canons”: invention (generating and developing ideas), arrangement (organizing ideas), style, memory, and delivery. . . . [Fish] treats [style] as though it were universal rather than inextricably tied to specific situa-tions or contexts. Ideally, students should develop an arsenal of stylistic devices, but they should also be able to put them into use in particular contexts to serve particular purposes. This requires an awareness of audiences, genres, and purposes for writing—i.e., practice in the art of rhetoric. (comment 314)

Noteworthy here is the refusal to divorce writing from purpose, not from a desire to “politicize,” but because, in the illocutionary act of writing, the two are inseparable.

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 475 2/5/15 12:54 PM

476

C C C 6 6 : 3 / f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5

These responses show how vulnerable current-traditionalism can be to even the slightest rhetorical pressure. To recognize writing as “context-dependent” is to see the inadequacy of “the modes”; to know the five canons of rhetoric is to know how much Fish is leaving out. Kenneth Burke’s description of educa-tion as “the institutionalizing of an attitude that one should be able to recover at crucial moments, all along the subsequent way” exposes the whole debate about internal versus external justifications as a false dilemma (15). Such rhe-torically informed responses to Fish’s blog, however, are few and far between. The twenty-three blog entries considered here prompted 3689 comments. Only 192 of those comments mention rhetoric. Of those, 84 show an informed or contemporary understanding of rhetoric, while the other 108 use “rhetoric” either in a current-traditional sense or as a synonym for deception.

In addition to these occasional appearances among the comments, socio-political rhetoric appears in a most unexpected place: in Fish’s own blog entries. Fish views higher education as “an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility . . . [in] the real world from which it rhetorically distances itself ” (“Last,” emphasis added). This alignment of rhetoric with inutility exposes the para-dox of Fish’s blog: he uses rhetoric to take his case to the public, to urge and to warn, to politicize. Furthermore, literacy and the proper role of universities are real-world, “hot-button” issues. In short, Fish’s blog does exactly what he says should not be taught: it does political rhetoric; it justifies the ways of the humanities to society.

Perhaps this criticism is unfair: as Fish states, he is not opposed to public rhetoric, only to teaching it in composition courses. However, Fish’s blog con-tains another significant discrepancy (or irony), one more difficult to dismiss. Fish believes that the humanities are endangered, threatened by politicizing from within and instrumentalizing from without:

The only thing that might [save the humanities]—and I’m hardly optimistic—is politics, by which I mean the political efforts of senior academic administrators to explain and defend the core enterprise to those constituencies—legislatures, boards of trustees, alumni, parents and others—that have either let bad educa-tional things happen or have actively connived in them. (“Crisis”)

So when the humanities face some actual exigency, then the cry goes out to rhetoric. But while many in rhetoric and composition would agree that the humanities need to make their case to the public, Fish’s ideal humanities de-partments are not only unwilling to justify themselves; they are unable. Such is the practical result of the imperative to always academicize. Fish states that

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 476 2/5/15 12:54 PM

477


“the real benefit [of the humanities] is internal to the enterprise, and so must be the justification” (“Crisis,” pt. 2). But since many education stakeholders are external, it follows that the justification Fish says is necessary is unethical, logically impossible, or otherwise doomed to failure: there can be no common vocabulary for identification, since to appeal for the humanities by speaking the other person’s language would be a betrayal of the humanities. Recall that “actually asking and answering” the questions raised by Fish and his colleagues at the academic conference “was left to other arenas (the arenas of the legisla-ture, the courts and the ballot box) where their direct, as opposed to academic, consideration would be appropriate” (“Politics”). But now Fish declares that the fate of the humanities will be decided in those very arenas, by “legislatures, boards of trustees, alumni, parents and others,” arenas in which the instruc-tors, students, and graduates of the academicized humanities are unwilling or unprepared to function. We confront once again the paradoxical role of rhetoric and composition within belletristic English: rhetoric and composition are debased or dismissed but are also the necessary practical arts that allow the belletristic enterprise to continue. To Fish’s legitimate complaint that the utilitarian demands of the marketplace unduly influence higher education, Walt wryly replies, “Utility has won it, but only because of the ineptitude of its opposite” (Fish, “Last,” comment 508). Into a world of symbolic action (and into meetings with administrators or voters), belletristic current-traditionalism sends grammarians with refined taste.

Now What?So what are we to do? Dominic DelliCarpini writes, “if we are to act as literacy advocates, it would be short-sighted of us to ignore the chance to analyze the rhetorical appeals that [public] critiques . . . utilize” (546). And there is cer-tainly an opportunity to do in public forums what Gold identifies in revisionist histories: rhetorically engage, without reinscribing, inaccurate and counter-productive narratives. But to suggest that rhetoric will swoop in and save the day—magically transforming either public attitudes or student writing—is to reinscribe the debate, granting rhetoric the impossible social and pedagogical powers that advocates of the basics bestow upon grammar exercises. Instead I would suggest, at the risk of lowering expectations, that the most one should expect from initial forays into local public discourse (or, for that matter, from one or two semesters of composition instruction) is to get one’s oar in the current; one might wish—and perhaps even manage—to change the course

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 477 2/5/15 12:54 PM

478

C C C 6 6 : 3 / f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5

of public attitudes, but we can recognize the achievement of making a wave or two, of causing a local perturbation in the conversational status quo. It is, for example, cause for celebration (and amazement) to see a Globe and Mail article about Twitter and teen literacy cite not the usual cranks and hysterics but Andrea Lunsford (Thompson).

Yet the comments on Fish’s blog demonstrate how attempts to intervene in public discourse may fail or even backfire: the words one uses to enter and alter the conversation may already be defined and framed in ways that impede inter-vention. For example, while many compositionists deemphasize the teaching of style—in part as a reaction against belletristic current-traditionalism—style remains “of chief concern outside the field” (Butler 62). Paul Butler thus recom-mends that public compositionists take advantage of this interest in style as a way to enter the conversation and perhaps loosen current-traditionalism’s grip on public attitudes. (Absent such public compositionists, style has provided an opening for public intellectuals like Fish to speak on behalf of composition by speaking on behalf of style). To be sure—although current-traditionalism reduces style to taste, grammar to correctness, and rhetorical form to textual formulae—style, grammar, and form are vital to the craft of writing. But given how the word style is often understood, it may well be heard—however one attempts to reframe it—as the strewing of flowers and be either cherished or derided as such.

As with style, rhetoric likely doesn’t mean to the public what it means to rhetoricians and compositionists.7 Furthermore, there may be disconnec-tions or outright contradictions between people’s definitions and valuations of rhetoric and their description of sound writing instruction. My advocacy of a triangulation of rhetoric, composition, and a broadly defined sociopolitics must confront the assumption among many academics that rhetoric and composition are synonymous (Mailloux 164); this assumption collapses the triangle, so that rhet/comp becomes one-dimensional, and the sociopolitical side becomes a supplement of “politicizing” or disappears entirely. This same problem of framing awaits the invocation of politics, as Fish makes all too clear. Hairston herself presents a false dilemma wherein to teach writing as political is to be a leftist, and the only alternative is to teach writing “for its own sake” (179). To understand writerly motives as responses to issues may invite the intransigent categories of political divisions; to instead think of motives in relation to scenes or exigencies reframes politics as but one rhetorical scene and one terministic framework among many.

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 478 2/5/15 12:54 PM

479


Finally, note that even those expressly committed to sociopolitical rel-evance can find themselves calling for rhetoric without realizing it. In a recent survey of nearly three thousand American students, 84 percent said they would benefit from learning how to assess the trustworthiness of online information (Cohen and Kahne viii). Authors Cathy J. Cohen and Joseph Kahne applaud blogs and other new media for giving users a political “voice” but caution that “the promise of a democratic society is predicated on the belief that political actors have more than voice—they must also have influence” (xi). The authors recommend providing “the support and infrastructure youth need to move from voice to influence” (xi), yet there is no mention of rhetorical writing as the path from voice (expression) to influence (persuasion), of rhetorical read-ing as the skill desired by the 84 percent, or of rhetoric itself as the medium of participatory politics. In fact, the word rhetoric appears in this fifty-six-page report only once—as a synonym for “falsehood” (6). But, one might say, as long as there is support for rhetorical literacy, why should we care if it is not so named? Responding to Fish’s “Why I Write These Columns,” Michael Kent demonstrates why we should care, in words that are both a figurative and a literal warning about the consequences of allowing rhetoric to remain silent or misrepresented in public conversations: “So if I understand you: [your] column is not concerned with actual analysis of issues of current interest; it is, rather, a series of lectures on rhetoric? I’m dropping the course” (comment 4).

Notes

1. I recognize what a contested term public(s) is, but for the sake of this essay I use it very broadly to refer to people outside of academia who care about what goes on inside.

2. The blog posts that address composition or relevant issues in the humanities are listed in the Works Cited.

3. Boesveld (featuring an intervention of questionable success by Zwagerman), Flesch, MacDonald, Mathews, Sheils, and Sollisch offer contemporary variations of the complaint, with MacDonald’s complaint identical to Fish’s: compositionists teach content and politics at the expense of form. For a challenge to the belief that student writing is worse than ever, see Connors and Lunsford. For a history of the charge that whatever composition instructors are doing, they are doing it all wrong, see Greenbaum.

4. All comments are cited without corrections.

5. See also Tyre’s “The Writing Revolution,” in which current-traditionalism restores literacy and discipline to “a notorious public high school” (1).

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 479 2/5/15 12:54 PM

480

C C C 6 6 : 3 / f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5

6. James Seitz, associate professor and director, Academic and Professional Writing Program, University of Virginia.

7. This is not to imply that all rhetoricians and compositionists share a single definition of rhetoric. But within our diversity there is general agreement about the inadequacies of current-traditionalism.

Works Cited

Bain, Alexander. English Composition and Rhetoric: A Manual. New York: Appleton, 1866. Print.

Blair, Hugh. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. 7th ed. New York: E. Duyckinck, 1817. Print.

Boesveld, Sarah. “Grammar 4eva: Has ‘Techspeak’ Made Time-Honoured Language Skills Irrelevant in the Inter-net Age?” National Post 8 Sept. 2013. Web. 20 May 2014.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge, 1984. Print.

Burke, Kenneth. “Linguistic Approach to Problems of Education.” Humanistic Critique of Education: Teaching and Learning as Symbolic Action. Ed. Peter M. Smudde. West Lafayette: Parlor P, 2010. 3–41. Print.

Butler, Paul. “Style and the Public Intel-lectual: Rethinking Composition in the Public Sphere.” JAC 28.1–2 (2008): 55–84. Print.

Cohen, Cathy J., and Joseph Kahne. Partici-patory Politics: New Media and Youth Political Action. Oakland: Youth and Participatory Politics Network, 2012. Web. 20 May 2014.

Connors, Robert J., and Andrea Lunsford. “Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College Writing, or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research.” College Composition and Com-munication 39.4 (1988): 395–409. Print.

Crowley, Sharon. “Composition Is Not Rhetoric.” Enculturation 5.1 (2003). Web. 20 May 2014.

. The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric. Carbon-dale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. Print.

DelliCarpini, Dominic. “Rhetoric Matters: Why Denial May Not Work This Time.” College Composition and Communication 64.3 (2013): 545–50. Print.

Eveland, William P., and Ivan Dylko. “Read-ing Political Blogs during the 2004 Elec-tion Campaign: Correlates and Political Consequences.” Blogging, Citizenship, and the Future of Media. Ed. Mark Tremayne. New York: Routledge, 2007. 105–26. Print.

Fish, Stanley. “The All Spin Zone.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 6 May 2007. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “Always Academicize: My Response to the Responses.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 5 Nov. 2006. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “Another Spin of the Wheel.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 3 June 2007. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “Anti-Foundationalism, Theory Hope, and the Teaching of Composition.” Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1989. 342–55. Print.

. “A Classical Education: Back to the Future.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 7 June 2010. Web. 20 May 2014.

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 480 2/5/15 12:54 PM

481


. “A Closing Argument (for Now).” Think Again. NYTimes.com 12 Nov. 2006. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “The Crisis of the Humanities Of-ficially Arrives.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 11 Oct. 2010. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “Crisis of the Humanities II.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 18 Oct. 2010. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “Devoid of Content.” Editorial. NYTimes.com 31 May 2005. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “Higher Education’s Future: Discuss!” Think Again. NYTimes.com 10 Dec. 2012. Web. 20 May 2014.

. How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. New York: Harper, 2011. Print.

. “The Last Professor.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 18 Jan. 2009. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “More Colorado Follies.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 25 May 2008. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “Neoliberalism and Higher Educa-tion.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 8 Mar. 2009. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “Politics in the Academy: The Same Old Song.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 6 Feb. 2012. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “Pragmatism’s Gift.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 15 Mar. 2010. Web. 20 May 2014.

. Save the World on Your Own Time. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

. “The State of Free Speech in Amer-ica.” Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. National Constitution Center, Philadelphia. 25 Mar. 2014. Web. 8 May 2014. Transcript.

. “Tip to Professors: Just Do Your

Job.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 22 Oct. 2006. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “What Is Academic Work?” Think Again. NYTimes.com 7 Feb. 2011. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “What Should Colleges Teach?” Think Again. NYTimes.com 24 Aug. 2009. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “What Should Colleges Teach? Part 2.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 31 Aug. 2009. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 7 Sept. 2009. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “When Harry Should Avoid Meet-ing Sally.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 3 Oct. 2011. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “Why Do Writers Write?” Think Again. NYTimes.com 11 Feb. 2007. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “Why I Write These Columns.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 9 Mar. 2008. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “Will the Humanities Save Us?” Think Again. NYTimes.com 6 Jan. 2008. Web. 20 May 2014.

. “The Writing Lesson.” Think Again. NYTimes.com 4 May 2006. Web. 20 May 2014.

Flesch, Rudolph. Why Johnny Can’t Read—and What You Can Do about It. New York: Harper and Row, 1955. Print.

Gold, David. “Remapping Revisionist Historiography.” College Composition and Communication 64.1 (2012): 15–34. Print.

Greenbaum, Leonard. “The Tradition of Complaint.” College English 31.2 (1969): 174–78, 183–87. Print.

Hairston, Maxine. “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing.” College Composition

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 481 2/5/15 12:54 PM

482

C C C 6 6 : 3 / f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5

and Communication 43.2 (1992): 179–93. Web. 15 May 2014.

Hartwell, Patrick. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.” College English 47.2 (1985): 105–27. Web. 20 May 2014.

Hook, J. N. “A Century of Change in English Teaching.” English Education 14.2 (1982): 113–24. Web. 20 May 2014.

Johnson, Thomas, and Barbara Kaye. “Wag the Blog: How Reliance on Traditional Media and the Internet Influence Cred-ibility Perceptions of Weblogs among Blog Users.” Journalism & Mass Commu-nication Quarterly 81.3 (2004): 622–42. Print.

Lynch, Paul. Rev. of Save the World on Your Own Time, by Stanley Fish. Composition Forum 20 (2009). Web. 20 May 2014.

MacDonald, Heather. “Why Johnny Can’t Write.” Public Interest 120 (1995): 3–13. Web. 18 May 2014.

Mailloux, Steven. Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.

Mathews, Jay. “A Cure for Bad Teaching of Writing.” Washington Post 25 Oct. 2012. Web. 20 May 2014.

McClennen, Sophia A. “Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Intellectual Engagement.” Works and Days 51/52, 53/54.26–27 (2008–2009): 459–70. Web. 6 May 2014.

“Media Kit.” NYTimes.com. 2013. Web. 30 May 2013.

Miller, Thomas P. “The Rhetoric of Belles Lettres: The Political Context of the Eighteenth- Century Transition from Classical to Modern Cultural Studies.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 23 (1993): 1–19. Print.

Sheils, Merrill. “Why Johnny Can’t Write.” Newsweek 8 Dec. 1975: 58–65. Print.

Sollisch, Jim. “If Computers Can Write, Why Not Students?” Christian Science Monitor 13 Jan. 2012. Web. 20 May 2014.

Thompson, Clive. “The Dumbest Gen-eration? No, Twitter Is Making Kids Smarter.” Globe and Mail 13 Sept. 2013. Web. 20 May 2014.

Tremayne, Mark, ed. Blogging, Citizenship, and the Future of Media. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

Tyre, Peg. “The Writing Revolution.” The Atlantic Oct. 2012. Web. 30 Oct. 2014.

Warnick, Barbara, and David S. Heineman. Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Print.

Winterowd, W. Ross. The English Depart-ment: A Personal and Institutional His-tory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1998. Print.

. A Teacher’s Introduction to Com-position in the Rhetorical Tradition. Urbana: NCTE, 1994. Print.

Zwagerman, Sean. “The Case for Not Teaching Grammar.” Education Canada 52.3 (2012). Web. 20 May 2014.

Sean ZwagermanSean Zwagerman is associate professor and undergraduate chair in the Depart-ment of English at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Wit’s End: Women’s Humor as Rhetorical and Performative Strategy (Pittsburgh 2010) and essays on plagiarism, rhetorical invention, and the rhetoric of humor.

h458-482-Feb15-CCC.indd 482 2/5/15 12:54 PM

sean zwagerman - teaching rhetoric composition … · sean zwagerman local examples and ... work...

Documents