"A Rhetoric for Literate Society: The tension between expanding practices and restricted theories. Inventing a Discipline, Rhetoric and Composition in Action." Inventing a Discipline. ed. M. Goggin. NCTE, 2000: 5-28
A Rhetoric for Literate Society: The tension between expanding practices and restricted theories
Charles Bazerman
University of California Santa Barbara
"Address an abiding social need." Richard Young
"The day is short, the task is long." Sayings of the Fathers
During Richard Young's career the teaching of writing has made enormous strides in knowledge and practice, in funding and institutional respect. Richard's vision, scholarship, and institutional leadership have been central to that story. Though the task is begun, however, it is hardly finished. We have only begun to sense how truly important writing and literacy are to the modern world and how partial and preliminary our tools are to speak to the need.
Those of us engaged in composition may have at first thought we just wanted to help some students to articulate their thoughts and to succeed in college, we soon were drawn into the ways our students participate in society and the ways literate practices hold our world together. Writing practices it now appears are integral to the complex forms of social organization that maintain what prosperity, amity, and health we have on this crowded planet. This expanded challenge calls for new research and new theoretical perspectives that will help us navigate through the enlarged landscape we are beginning to notice. As we make good on the challenge, we increase our claim on the resources, authority, and professional respect that will allow us to do the job properly.
The Social Space of Literate Activity
Work on academic and professional writing has sensitized us to the way writing is deeply embedded within intertextual networks. How we use our reading in our writing positions us in relation to previous texts, displaying the meaning and value we find in those texts, the relationship we see among them, and their role in the formation of the current moment. Every proposal for a new bridge rests on engineering textbooks, prior proposals, urban planning projections, internal corporate financial statements, contracts and materials catalogues, government policy and project documents, and many other sorts of files, reports, books, and correspondence--a few of which may be explicitly referred to, but all of which make the proposal what it is.
Interactions mediated by literacy occur in no single physical space and time, but a space of mutual imaginings that we visit every time we pick up a document or begin to fill a blank page (as early as the fifteenth century this virtual place was nominated the Republic of Letters-- Eisenstein 137n287). Textually mediated relations, nonetheless, draw sustenance and motive from our more immediate, embodied relations with the people and things that physically surround us (the problem of us and our neighbors getting across a particular canyon every morning sets in motion the intertextually complex paperwork of trying to get a bridge built). In turn, the circulation of texts alters the course of immediate events by dint of the altered knowledge, skills, perceptions, affect, thoughts, and commitments brought about by our reading and writing. We return from our reading and writing altered in ways that change our local behavior--we build far different bridges than we did five thousand years ago. The technologies of literacy and print culture, evolving over the last fifty or so centuries (supplemented in the last two centuries by rapidly changing, but still letter-reliant, electronic communications technologies, beginning with the telegraph) have provided means for our local society to be pervaded by what the sociologist Giddens has called time-space distanciation.
These specialized, highly elaborated forms of social participation abstracted from the immediate moment require literacy skills that extend beyond the text coding and decoding skills we associate with the lower grades of schooling, remediation, or adult literacy programs. In ever more challenging circumstances, people spend their whole careers developing specialized reading and writing skills--such as examining a legal brief for salient legal principles and relevant case details, in relation to precedent and prior court rulings or writing an engaging, reasonably accurate news story that conforms to current standards of the profession, on the basis of a few hours of information gathering and a few minutes of actual drafting. Because, however, such skills have been developed and passed on within their specialized fields of practice, they are often thought of as professional skills rather than literacy skills.
These specialized skills (e.g., reading and writing as judges do); the textual forms through which they are enacted (the opinion, the brief, the law review article); the social and cognitive means of text production (the appeals procedures that bring together documents for review and adjudication); the physical and economic means of text reproduction and distribution (the mixed government, private and professional association systems of legal publication that distribute the judge's opinion to legal offices, courts, and law schools throughout the country); the social arrangements and roles developed in conjunction with the elaboration of texts (law clerks and law librarians; state bars and bar exams; law companies and legal clients; lawyer-client privilege and obligations of lawyers as officers of the court)--in short the entire social, material, economic, symbolic apparatus of our multi-formed textual culture are historical inventions, becoming ever more pervasive and complex, as the number of people, texts, and social organizations have increased.
We know, for example, some of the outlines of the development of the system of scientific publication, which perhaps has been studied more intensively than other literate systems because of recent interests in writing across the curriculum and the rhetoric of science. The scientific article was a late comer--not even a possibility until the invention of the scientific journal in 1665 provided an occasion to develop particular text forms to circulate among specialized readers (Bazerman, Shaping; Atkinson). The kinds of arguments engaged in and the kinds of evidence, reasoning, and demonstrations brought to bear evolved over time as did the social systems of referees and editors. Even the character and role of journal reader evolved over time as the readers' interests, professional positions, critical criteria, and uses of the literature in daily practice changed. The social circulation and function of the journal as well interacted with the changing character of the sponsoring societies and their relation to economic, political, and class systems within which they resided.
Towards the nineteenth century, as literatures, investigative methods, and professionalization of authors and readers developed along with the critical challenge of the argument, articles began to approximate familiarly modern forms. Specialties and journals, however, proliferated, each with their own special character and discursive challenge. Now there are many kinds of journals, articles, and forms of writing in physics, geology, ecology, psychology, anthropology and every other of the specialized domains. Skilled producers of one kind of text in a specialty are not necessarily skilled producers of other kinds of text in that specialty, let alone in other specialties. The accomplished individual authors, editors, and publishers participate in an extensive system of book, journal, and other format production, circulation, and storage involving libraries, internet, universities, societies, and for-profit publishers. These specialized forms of knowledge production then intersect with many other discursive systems--corporate and financial, governmental, defense, industrial, legal, psychological practice, education. Each of these have their own complex history of forms, institutions and practices, and each has its own cadre of skilled and not so skilled practitioners.
Technology has an even more complex story interpenetrated with relations to other discursive systems, as I have learned in the course of examining the emergence of Edison's system of incandescent light and power. While science has tried to remove itself into specialized worlds of inquiry conducted by experts, technology is regularly in the business of gathering financial backers and clients, keeping stockholders and financial markets happy, gaining the cooperation of governments and publics, applying for and protecting patents and other legal statuses, positioning itself against the representations of competitors, drawing on increasingly sophisticated technical and scientific literatures, coordinating internal organizational work of development and production, managing public relations through the press, and positioning its products in the cultural market.
Yet, though distanced and abstracted from the local moment, these textually mediated interactions are deeply embedded in our sociality. Many of the elaborate forms and systems of literate communication grew out of the transparently social forms of letter writing--Emperors' correspondence with generals, governors, and emissaries formed the basis for bureaucratic forms of writing. Newspapers developed from letters of correspondence. Business memos reports, orders, and sales documents in the eighteenth century were still all simply business correspondence (Yates). That is, large distanced organizations grew from individual people sending messages at a distance to other individuals. Similarly, letter writing remains an important part of children's writing education, as teachers need to find comprehensible human motives and situations beyond the logic of school performance to draw students into this curious practice of inscribing signs.
The historically evolved systems of literate activity create elaborate textual underpinnings to our daily lives and social relations, even when we are engaged in clearly face-to-face events or experiences of the most material and physical kind. In the courtroom, oral arguments before judges and juries rely on boxes of documents, are located within a system of laws and precedents, and produce a court record and a written opinion (Stratman). Similarly the doctors' interactions with patients and medical interventions are informed by medical school textbooks and the current clinical literature, to which practical experience (such as clinical outcomes of surgical procedures) must be reduced if that experience is to be of general use. Politicians' handshaking is embedded within the electoral system established by laws and within a system of politics fed by news and party documents. Our semiotic understanding and organization of events and social order, as produced within special domains of knowledge and practice, and as stabilized in texts, pervade all aspects of our life.
The Consequences of Literacy Revisited
The consequences of literacy are manifold. In the seventies and eighties when scholars such as Goody, Havelock, Olson, and Ong started to outline a coherent set of interpersonal and intellectual changes that accompanied the introduction of literacy, they were caught up short by the argument that the consequences of literacy depended on how they were used within their contexts. This argument was made forcefully by Scribner and Cole through their observations of the varied consequences of the multiple literacies of the Vai. Those people who used literacy in Western schools to work through puzzles in formal logic, increased their abilities in formal logic; but those who learned Arabic as part of Koranic scriptural practices increased their ability to repeat verbatim texts; and those who used the local rebus-like written language for letter writing were good at solving rebus puzzles. Literate people showed gains in cognitive skills corresponding only to the specific literacy practices they engaged in. Additionally, linguistic research pointed out that the spoken and written language were connected by a continuity of forms and functions, so that the social and cognitive habits of oral and literate people would not be distinguished across a sharp divide. (Chafe; Tannen).
Yet because the picture is more complex does not mean there is no picture. Rather we need to look at the specific social practices and forms that have developed around literacy. This is a direction that the anthropologist Goody was heading in one of his last books on the subject: The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. While this book still assumes something of a unitary logic of writing, it nonetheless points toward a great variety of social consequences in different spheres, with close attention to the historical and anthropological evidence from different societies. With respect to religions, Goody sees historical evidence that the concept of distinct religions that are similar and affiliated over substantial geographic regions, as opposed to varieties of local beliefs and practices, is tied to the emergence of scriptures as central to religious practices--scriptures that can define a set of beliefs stablely and recognizably over time and distances. Textually organized beliefs raise the possibility of universalism and the global applicability of beliefs. Literate priestly classes, having access to texts and control over doctrinal issues, may form bureaucracies of geographically dispersed belief practices and may aggregate the wealth and political power that often accompany geographic expansion. Further, attention to perceivable religious change (as opposed to historically evolution of practice which remains unnoticed by practitioners) is a function of recorded beliefs and recorded history--increasing the saliency of doctrinal questions, differences among sects, decreed belief changes, changes of allegiances, and the like.
Government, similarly, has new possibilities with the introduction of literacy. Goody notes such phenomena as the facilitation of emissaries and clerks over geographically dispersed areas, kept in communication by both written rule and correspondence. Literate government functionaries, engaged in taxation, census, and accounting, extend government control. Treaties can regularize relations with surrounding states. With centralization of power through literate communication, extended geographic areas may become reorganized into center-periphery relations, with the consequence that national ceremonies, rituals, and forms of loyalty come to supplement, if not replace, local loyalties. Goody provides similar accounts of legal and economic systems.
These literacy facilitated institutional systems may develop in varying relationship with each other. Sometimes they may coincide, as when economic power is centralized in the state or church, or the church or the justice system becomes an organ of state policy. On the other hand, complex tensions may arise among the church, state, justice, and economic systems, each affording certain social protections and opportunities based on their separate principles and methods of bringing texts to bear on the local moment.
While Goody attends to only four of the major institutional systems of societies, we may consider similar developments in all aspects of affiliation and activity--for example, numismatic clubs rely on international newsletters, catalogues, reference works, and correspondence; and sports leagues even at the amateur level have rules and rule-making bodies, league organization and bureaucracies, records and competitive rankings, publicity and news. Consider then the deeply literate practices of such institutions as hospitals and schools. Even the public sphere consists of complex networks of newspapers, magazines, press releases, political consultants, video news and commentary (which themselves are surrounded with paper, scripts, and bureaucracy), and other highly articulated systems which run on the written word. Even our bedrooms have been saturated by psychology, social science, and popular self-help publications, not to speak of the technology and economics of mattress making and the communications at a distance that have created the fashion market that influences the patterns on our bedsheets.
Literacy does not require or inexorably lead to any particular development, but it is a powerful tool available for organizing, extending, providing resources, and transforming all of our social endeavors. Once transformed these endeavors embed literate practices within their fundamental mechanisms of organization. These practices, as Scribner and Cole (drawing on Vygotsky) point out, are associated with specific forms of cognition. As people use the various tools of literacy, they learn to think with these tools. As discourse about law develops, we think more about the law, and to think we use precisely those discursive terms of the law--so that if we want to discuss with our friend a court case in which we have been embroiled, we need to draw on the terms and events of the law to explain what is happening, and why it is important that the opposing attorney filed a motion to dismiss before the depositions, rather than after. If we want to escape the stabilized terms of the literate institution so as not to be constrained by the institution's own assumptions, we need to develop or draw on a critical vocabulary, most likely to be found in a critical literature, as in critical law studies. That is, even to inspect and query one literate system we may need the resources and strength of another.
Literate practices also embed specifics of the processes of the text production, distribution, and use. By pursuing the situated practices within discursive sphere, we can find new direction for writing process research which lost some steam with the recognition that processes vary across individuals and circumstances. When viewed as embedded within specialized literacy systems, writing processes can be seen in part to be shaped and modeled by the institutional history and activity; further, atypical processes can inform us about the particularity of specific events and of each individual's form of participation.
Directions for Research
The complex but sketchy picture that is emerging of how literacy works in structuring the modern way of life, however, only points to the need for more research and theory to help fill out, extend, and make more definite that picture. Goody points toward one direction for fundamental research into the history of specialized literacy practices and their consequences within the many different societies, starting from less elaborated social forms and observing how literacy enters into their expansion, transformation, and complex organization (see also Besnier). Such chronological investigation can help unpack the complex of current practices and systems. Such research complements rhetoric and composition's recent researches into writing and literacy across the curriculum, in the disciplines, in the professions, and in the workplace. These inquiries start at the other end, with highly developed literate systems which the student or neophyte must learn in order to participate in. These participations may range from the most routine practices to core decision making or innovation that transforms the nature of the endeavor. The success of one's literacy socialization into specialized practices may be measured by how much access one has to the most central resources and mechanisms of communication and how one makes use of that access.
In the historical middle we have some allies and resources from scholars engaged in the history of the book and print culture (building on the pioneering work of Eisenstein and Chartier), as well as historians of specialized domains, such as the history of science and technology (for example, Dear) and the history of journalism and the news (for example, Schudson). Help may be also gained from a few scholars who have entered into parallel studies of other paper and ink symbolic practices, such as the history of numeracy (see Cohen; Porter) and the history of drawing as an everyday practice (Bermingham). The thriving profession of the history of literacy (see Kaestle), though it is not yet focused on the rise of literate systems of social organization nor the advanced skills of specialized literacies, provides extensive data on the extent of literacy and the circulation of popular texts. There are further allies in current sociological, anthropological, and situated psychological studies of various forms of work and affiliation (see for example, Engestrom and Middleton); the puzzles presented by the recent introduction of electronic media in a range of activities has particularly brought attention to the embedding of symbolic activity within social arrangements.
Using these interdisciplinary resources to frame research projects can move us in the direction of establishing a truly fundamental understanding of the importance, mechanisms, and consequences of writing in society. Such a research program would broaden the basis for our discipline from our current marginal hold at students' transition to the university (one which for many reasons we should not give up--Bazerman, "Response"). First year writing, or academic writing at all levels of undergraduate and graduate education, is where personal literacy development of students meets the range of specialized literacy practices of contemporary professionalism. However, these points of greatest tension between individuals and demand are hard to understand and respond to unless without the large picture into which these moments of educational demand fit.
The Limited Domain of Classical Rhetoric
Rhetoric has historically developed as a reflective, practical, strategic art of language use, from the point of view of the language user. As such it provides a theoretical model and a theoretical starting point for considering how we can effectively operate in this emerging world of literate interaction. To develop theoretical terms that are appropriate to literacy, we need to develop new rhetorical categories that extend beyond the limited vision of classical rhetoric, which was concerned with a small range of historically particular oral performances, embedded in societies which differed substantially from ours. Not least significantly, in the ancient world the novel technology of literacy had not entered so deeply into the major institutions of social organization. In the last two millenia, there have been some attempts to to address rhetorical challenges created by the growing pervasiveness of literate communication, but no truly coherent set of categories has yet emerged that are both literate and rhetorical.
Of all the spontaneous talk that people do every day in response to immediately perceived circumstances, with only limited forethought or reflection, only a small and unusual subset gave rise to the intellectual apparatus of classical rhetoric and a class of professional rhetoricians to provide advice and instruction for successful speech. The special class of speech events that ancient Greeks and Romans worried enough about to support the formation of a rhetorical profession were high stakes, competitive events to influence public evaluations or decisions. These triadic communications appealed to the third party audience for preference over one's opponent or opponents.
If you were accused in public of appropriating your neighbor's land, or if you wished your neighbors to take up arms against a neighboring state, or if you wished to advance the leadership and trust of a political ally, you might spend some time reflecting on what the situation was, how you might best speak to that occasion, and how you might disarm your opponents' position. You might well ask for advice from the most skilled of speakers and review people's memories of the most effective such talks in the past. If you anticipated a public future for your citizen child, you might even want the child to be educated in the arts of public influence. Rhetoric, consequently, was designed to address oral high stakes, public forums on forensic, deliberative, and epideictic matters.
Without that professional class and its social roles of advice giving and education, the literature on rhetorical theory would not have developed. Consider some contrasting cases. In the classical world it was not felt that interpersonal conversation was problematic or of sufficient stakes so that a reflective art on their conduct was developed; research and pedagogy on personal talk only became a substantial industry with the rise of modern clinical psychology which gave us reasons to value the quality of communication with intimates. Similarly in the classical world, market negotiation and sales talk may have been learned in the family and in daily practice, but no highly reflective art developed at that time, no schools of marketing were formed, no advertising agencies provided lunch trade to the restaurants of Athens, and the language of commerce had no role in the formation of rhetoric. The reasons of power, class, and social motive that led to the selection of speech types that developed intellectual, social, and economic apparatuses for their refinement are interesting to consider, but here I need only point out the fact of selectivity.
In the classical world, although there was some teaching of writing (Murphy, Rhetorical Tradition) and written texts presented principles of rhetoric, grammar, and logic and while accounts and records were kept, laws were written, and legates and embassies communicated with, no extensive system of reflection and strategy developed around writing except as a form of scripting oratory or reading except as a means of access to past oratorical performances, to be imitated and learned from (for example, Quintilian, Institutio, book X). Literature, largely as scripted public performance of dramas and odes, drew the attention of the philosophers, but primarily concerning the effect of communal performance on the emotional state and moral character of the citizen audience. The art of poetics was a more spotty affair, the concern of the small subset of people engaged in creating the literature.
Following the lead of Quintilian, up through the nineteenth century, writing continued to be taught primarily as a means of scripting oratory. Accordingly, rhetorical teaching remained directed toward public performance concerned with high-stakes, highly visible issues of justice, deliberation, and communal formation. In the medieval period a rhetorical was also articulated for preaching, another highly public, scripted, high stakes performance concerned with the instilling of values and commitments and directing communal behavior.
Ars Dictimina as a Literate Rhetoric
The narrowness of rhetorical focus was despite the great proliferation of forms of writing in increasingly elaborate social systems, as I have suggested earlier. Within separate faculties of law, medicine, philosophy, and the other arts, students practiced a variety of literacies, but considered their practices as law or medicine or philosophy rather than as a form of language use. Few masters of specialized language thought about the communicative nature of their disciplines, and if they did provide support for neophyte writing, it tended to be through untheorized books of forms and models for imitation.
One of the more sophisticated attempts to develop a reflective art of a specialized literacy practice was the ars dictaminis. This medieval art of letter writing, as exemplified in one of its most well-developed texts, the anonymous Principles of Letter Writing, pays particular attention to issues of class and role (foregrounded in the extensive treatment of the salutation), establishing cooperative relations through a secure bond of sentiment and obligation (considered in the section on "The Securing of Good Will"), establishing the situation (in the adaptation of the Ciceronian narration), and identifying a specific point of cooperation (in the new rhetorical section called the petition). To seek cooperative action, in an essentially dyadic relationship, the letter aims to strengthen social bonds which are attenuated by the distances of place, time and acquaintenceship which writing mediates. Further, with the occasion of the request not being immediately in front of the correspondent's eyes, the letter must represent the situation so as to orient the reader toward the requested transaction. While the narration in a persuasive speech may serve to cast a current and visible situation in a particular light, the narration in the letter must itself evoke the situation in the imagination of the reader. With the situation evoked, the reader appropriately respected according to hierarchy with its obligations and loyalties, and with no opponent present or evoked, there is likely to be little need for persuasion; accordingly the Ciceronian speech elements of division, proof and refutation are not present in this form. Thus the art of letter writing begins to reframe the problems of strategic communication away from oral contest towards new social dynamics and difficulties of literate interaction, particularly as they take shape within a hierarchical society.
Audience attention, trust, and good will are particularly fragile in written communication. Readers face difficult work in imaginatively and favorably reconstructing the situation, activity, and author's presence of the texts they are reading; as a consequence, ruptures of misunderstanding, mistrust, or just difference may rapidly lead down a path of inattention, twisting of meaning, lack of sympathy, or the framing of objections and accounts of the shortcomings of the writer. A reader's alignment with the text is not easily regained once the bond between writer and reader is broken; furthermore, the writer has no way of monitoring the reader to sense a rupture and attempt a repair strategy. Speakers often regain wandering audiences, but writers rarely do. The ars dictaminis pays particular attention to the social, personal, and linguistic resources available to ensure such a rupture does not take place, and counsels risking the displeasure of the reader only when the writer's hierarchical authority is adequate to assure compliance and continuing obedience.
The Renaissance Pleasures of the Textualized Word
Although the ars dictaminis was a powerful force in the medieval world, and eventually provided the foundations for later commercial and government correspondence, it did not have a long-term effect on the rhetorical traditions. Nor did the literate and graphic forms of Ramism influence rhetoric, despite its displacing dialectic within philosophy and its offsprings of natural philosophy, social philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy of the mind--each in turn developing into sciences with their own peculiar practices.
During the Renaissance literate composition and the circulation of manuscripts and books, may have fostered the concern for style, which extended far beyond the moderate classical concern for figures and tropes intended for oral delivery. Writing facilitates the polishing of individual phrases and sentences as well as the elaboration and amplification of thoughts by insertion, as Quintilian had already recognized. Copiousness, and elegance, are far more amusing and tempting when one is sitting alone in a study than when one is speaking on the forum steps to a fidgety audience. Style and copiousness also influenced personal face-to-face manners, but in the court as an indication of refinement. As such it also was associated with the refined literary practices of the court, where it perhaps found its highest form in the poetry, prose, and verse drama of the period.
At that time refinement of phrasing was not theorized as a literate practice, and was seen simply as an extension of style in the scripted oral tradition (soon to extend in eighteenth century oratory to scripted gesture mapped out in graphic form). In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, such verbal play was specifically associated with the pleasures of the text and the highly textualized imagination of deconstructionist literary criticism that sees disrupted texts as formed from small stylistic gestures carried out separate from any social or referential contexts that they may give the illusion of evoking (Barthes). In any event, the literate inclinations of stylistic rhetoric did not lead to an examination of the basic communicative conditions of textuality or the social functions being carried out by literacy, except as a marker of personal refinement and witty amusement of equally refined audiences. Rhetoric in this aspect we might say became a marker of social distinction--a formulation that even its practitioners might have accepted.
New Literate Practices and Literature's Subsumption of Literate Rhetoric
At the same time as rhetoric was attending to courtly display--or rather at the same time as those interested in courtly display had appropriated the rhetorical tradition and the name of rhetoric--other forms of literate practice were developing, outside the official purview of rhetoric, and even overtly distinguishing themselves from the flowers of rhetoric. The systems of bureaucratic, commercial, and scientific literacy that were expanding rapidly during this period of colonial expansion, engaged in stylistic eloquence only insofar as they addressed issues of class, court patronage, or policy. While, for example, the early members of the Royal Society did engage in elaborate praise and metaphoric argument, particularly in relation to patronage and policy issues as well as maintaining social respect within a still largely gentlemanly endeavor (Shapin; Atkinson), other kinds of language use were being developed to carry out their new communal investigative labor, within which they saw the remnants of eloquence as a hindrance. Accompanying this overt hostility to what was called rhetoric then, these new practices were not theorized in rhetorical terms nor did they influence the concepts that formed the rhetorical conceptual canon.
Only in the 18th century did print communication become a serious topic of rhetorical analysis. Here my story narrows to Britain and America, which most directly influenced the tradition of writing instruction in the United States. In Great Britain, outsiders such as the instructors at the dissenting academies, most notably Joseph Priestley, and the Scots rhetoricians, beginning with Edward Aytoun and John Stevenson and continuing with Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, George Campbell, and Hugh Blair, recognized the new print culture of newspapers, journals, pamphlets, and books as the locus of social power. They noted that accomplished writers--people like Addison, Dryden, Johnson, Mandeville, Pope, and Swift--wielded much influence. The rhetorics of the latter eighteenth century, written for aspiring Scots and dissenters, included criticism of contemporary literary models to identify the character of effective prose. Further they began to note that plain style and plain speaking, avoiding extravagant art, was important in maintaining the faith of the readers. Priestley went so far as to recommend a halting style for speech, to demonstrate contempletiveness and sensibility, which are particularly prized by the literate and educated.
An audience, indeed that is wholly illiterate may have all their passions actuated by means of admiration, or astonishment, and mechanical communication but then there are few English audiences composed wholly of persons of so little reading and reflection as makes that practicable. And it is hardly possible that a person whose reading has lain among modern English books, or has conversed with persons of liberal education, should not have acquired more delicacy of taste, than to be taken with that gross and direct address of the passions, which Cicero adopted with applause.
(original italics, Priestley, p. 114.)
Some of the same rhetoricians who were noting the social power of Belles Lettres also noted other influential written genres that did not rely on classical persuasion. Smith in his rhetoric discussed didactic writing, and in other publications considered the psychological sources and consequences of the force of philosophic discourse (Bazerman, "Money"). Similarly, Priestley contemplated the nature of historical and scientific writing, making proposals for the most effective means of participating within and organizing such discourses (Bazerman, "How"). Even these rhetoricians who reached out into a range of higher status forms of literacy, however, did not attend to then powerful languages of commerce, law, or government bureaucracy. The focus of their expanded rhetoric still remained on issues of public persuasion in areas of fundamental values, belief, and policy, associated with the leisured ruling classes.
As a further break with prior rhetorics, these new print-oriented works abandoned previous assumptions about natural political order and human nature, to begin with minimalist Lockean views of human experience and associations. These rhetorics reconceived how humans used symbols to make sense of their own experience, to mediate between each other, and to form social order.
Sympathy, sensibility, and access to each others' experience became in this line of thinking important capacities for building human bonds. Belles Lettres was seen as the key to successful public discourse, both for individual success in touching others for one's own ends and for communal cooperation rising above meanness of spirit, narrow self-interest, and the limits of individual experience. This new stabilization of the literary public realm associated power and influence with the new educated classes of sensibility and letters in nineteenth century Britain, engaged in administering empire. In nineteenth and early twentieth century United States, Belles Lettres (in alliance with the new research orientation of the University) held sway over secondary and university higher literacy practices, though no longer called rhetoric. However, in the more protean American society of the period, commercial, corporate, journalistic, technical, scientific, and professional forms of literacy (entirely outside more traditional liberal education) gathered increasing importance and sophistication. A good index of the increasingly complex terrain of literate practices would be the variety of magazines and newspapers that flooded the American market in the century following the Civil War.
During this time, however, formal rhetorical teaching in Britain had vanished and in the U.S. had gone into a decline, stabilized under the simplified psychological assumptions of faculty and modes (Mulderig) and a simplified model of expository transmission of knowledge (Connors), both taught only to those who were viewed as not having yet reached adequate competence to take part in the literary literacy of liberal education. The theory that accompanied these pedagogic practices was in a fundamental sense arhetorical, in that it aimed at the development of cognitive faculties of the individual writer, rather than at the effective interaction with an audience. Improved communication and persuasion was assumed to come from the increased shared understanding and approbation of those whose faculties were similarly developed. People of reason and refinement would come to common understanding through intelligent writing. Composition became a mental discipline rather than a strategic art.
New elaborations of rhetorical theory in this century until the revival of composition rose primarily out of literary concerns and strongly bear the marks of addressing literary problems (as in the work of Burke, Booth, and by after-the-fact appropriation, Bakhtin). The formation of speech departments preserved a rhetoric aimed at spoken performance, with strong continuing allegiance to classical models. Technical, business, organizational, and journalistic writing developed their own trainings within the professional schools separate from English departments, composition, or rhetoric.
Composition's Rhetoric
In the United States in the Post World War II decades, the new field of composition, devoted to university writing, sought to develop new rhetorics out of communication and linguistics, seeking new grounds for considering the form and interactions of writing. After these impulses faltered, however, classical rhetoric, reimported from speech departments became the only alternative to literary models for considering what one would want to write, to whom, for what purposes, and in what form. The investigation of writing processes and the psychology of writing did provide new energy, research, and theory for composition, but has not provided much guidance as to what kinds of texts those processes might produce and what the consequences of those texts might be (see Russell, "Activity Theory and Process Approaches").
The issues of what one might write, for whom, and in what form, have, however, been reengaged by writing across the curriculum, in the disciplines and professions, and in the workplace, which have opened up the perspective I have been presenting here. The descriptive work of located writing practices has opened up new questions calling for new theory to guide people reading and writing in these new domains. Genre theory (drawing on linguistics, sociology, anthropology, history, and rhetoric) and activity theory (with its roots in psychology) have started to provide some shape to what we have found. Although orienting us to the social and personal dynamics of writing, however, these theories have not yet provided a comprehensive practical rhetoric to help guide people in their literate interactions.
Whether on the basis of these or other theories, a new rhetoric for literacy needs to be built hand in hand with our growing knowledge of how modern society has come to work through the written word. And that new rhetoric needs to be flexible enough to address the transformations of literacy in electronic media--where word, sound, visuals, and calculation are being integrated and moved rapidly and cheaply across great distances in environments structured by the technology. It is a new world, and it needs a new rhetoric. The way to move toward that rhetoric is continued research into the forces that actually are at play in the many texts that circulate in the social spaces created by the print and electronic worlds, and into the ways individuals and their activities are influenced by their engagement with mediating texts. By watching what these texts do and what people do with them, without assuming that they are simply reproducing the activities of the agora, we can move towards a rhetoric that will illuminate the great diversity of our communicative world.
Works Cited
Atkinson, Dwight. Scientific Discourse in Sociohistorical Context. Mahwah NJ: Erlbaum, forthcoming.
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For overviews and collections, see Russell, "Writing and Genre"; Bazerman and Paradis; Freedman and Medway; Odell and Goswami; Spilka; Swales, Genre .
See Bakhtin; Selzer, "Intertextuality"; Bazerman, "Intertextual."
Bazerman and Russell; Harris.
See, for example, van Nostrand.
Bazerman, Languages.
See Bazerman, Shaping; Blakeslee; Prior, Writing/Disciplinarity; Swales, Other Floors.
For overviews, see Murphy Rhetoric in the Middle Ages and Perelman.
For a translation of this text see Murphy, Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts.
Young, Becker, and Pike's Rhetoric: Discovery and Change can be well understood as the culminating work of this period.
See Bazerman, "Life"; Bhatia; Freedman and Medway.
See Russell, "Activity Theory and its Implications" and "Rethinking Genre Theory."