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Week #11: My Lecture NO.tes used for the Seminar, Wednesday, 2000, March 29th.
Previous Notes for 1st two weeks | 3rd week | 4th | 5th | 6th&6bth | 7th | 8th | 9th
 The Works (to be studied and discussed): |
 1. Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale: SIUP, 1987.
Supplemental Readings:
1. Berlin, James A. "Writing in School and College English, 1890-1985." Ed. James J. Murphy. Hermagoras P, 1990.
I have taken he following reading notes from the Berlin-Seminar that I previously taught. I have here updated the notes.
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Berlin, the typologies |
The difference between the first and the second books is immense. While the chapters in the first one in particular are thin, the chapters in the second one are thick with descriptions of information. JB, in his 19th-century book, being one of the first covering that century, had little material to work with; he in his 20th-cenutry book, obviously closer in time and more blessed or cursed with available sources, writes a book that, I think, qualifies as a major 'resource book' itself.
His topology now is:
Objective Theories,
Subjective Theories,
Transactional Theories.
The threesome is more than ever 'Dialectical.' In fact, I would claim that the whole book is set up in a Hegelian, historical movement toward the Transactional.
Lest we think that the trio or threefold categories are as simplisitic as presented above, we need to attend to the richness of each. Objective Theories in JB's discussions are composed of several subsets or tendencies:
 Objective Theories:
- Current-Traditional Rhetoric
- Behaviorist (Robert Zoellner)
- Semanticist (S. I. Hayakawa)
- Linguistic ('Structuralist')
Likewise, Subjective Theories (founded on some philosophy of Idealism) are composed of several tendencies:
- Expressionist (Plato)
- Romanticism/Liberal Culturalist (a particular "strand" of Emerson, Thoreau)
- Depth Psychology (Freud and Post Freudian, C. Rogers and A. Maslow; B. Croce and M. H. Abrams, in literary criticism)
Similarly, Transactional Theories are composed of several tendencies:
- Classical (Baldwin)
- The Cognitive (Emig, Lauer, D'Angelo)
- The Epistemic (from F. N. Scott to Ohmann, Berthoff, Young-Becker-Pike)
Therefore, when I say that the book is dialectical in its structure and its narrative direction, I am suggesting that at the most general level and at its particular levels within each category, the book moves to a historical resolution of social-epistemic. To put a Deleuzian-Guattarian spin on it, I see the expositiory and argumentative sections becoming-social, almost as much as I see--dialectically--Emerson's Nature moving in a similar manner/ism. There is both hope and (I have to emphasize) optimism in this movement.
Let me further refine this statement: The account of histories of the rhetorics of teaching writing do not move, however, in block-like movements toward historical materialist salvation or resolution (the end[s] of history) but move demonstrably yet tentatively, hopefully and optimistically, toward the social. Or better put move as a perpetual becoming-social. The struggle is never won, but always waged. What is suggested in this un/kind of movement is that the struggle for making the teaching of writing social requires perpetual vigilance. Perpetual dialogical--polylogical--exchanges among its members.
What Jim has so carefully and strategically done is to pull us into conversation, into rhetorical exchanges about what we do. He situates or locates us in terms of his cognitive re/mappings (Jameson), and asks us, 'Is this where you want to be in relation to these other people attempting the teaching of writing?' And as he puts this question, variously, the question is always an "invocative" (Ede/Lunsford) and provocative question(s).
If Bill Coles tells his students, 'I want what you want when you know what you want' (which is only a dangerous half-dialectic in The Plural I), JB tells--asks--us, 'Being located here or here, where I situate you in relation to the rest of us, Is this what you want for US?' It's a very forceful, not-easy-to-deflect tactical question ... that JB puts to each of us.
Such a question put to you or me--to us--requires that we respond. Which we do.
| I find this wonderfully ironic in its collaborative structure: JB made two protocals for Flower/Hayes, became an Object, a rat running the composition maze for them. Then, later, he wrote about, ever so indirectly himself and the rest of us as Objects, liberating us all from the research-cum-pedagogical protocol produced by Flower/Hayes.... Which eventually and finally liberated Flower. Let's call it, as Baudrillard would, 'the revenge of the Object.' |
And thereby, JB perpetually reestablishes the conditions for further possible social-epistemic exchanges. (JB studied Invention from Richard Young in the NEH seminar, studied the various processes and methodologies, but himself became an inventional machine. This is his ethos: Becoming-Inventional.) Linda Flower read JB, was invoked and provoked, responded to JB, and became social ... for us and most importantly in her research and publications for US and our mutual students.
Yes, I realize that I am stretching all this, drawing a cause-effect relationship here, but it's only what I can do in an attempt to describe my readings of JB's book. And others' readings. Our readings. In a rather 'collaborative' world, what we read, think, write, say, teach, learn has an effect on all of us. If seeing an object effects that object in toto, teaching a student how to write or think about writing effects all of us. Invoking colleagues, provoking them, bending and stretching a reading toward the social, cannot but bring about change. Socially and Epistemicly. These are--as I would hopefully and optimisticly think--ethical and political becoming-readings. Yes, it is becoming-of-us to re/think perpetually in this--if so, ill--mannered (baroque) way.
JB writes:
Rhetoric ... becomes implicated in all human behavior. All truths arise out of dialectic, out of the interaction of individuals within discourse communities. Truth is never simply "out there" in the material world or the social realm, or simply "in here" in a private and personal world. It emerges only as the three--the material, the social, and the personal--interact, and the agent of mediation is language. (17)
This trio--matter, social, the personal + language--recreates the very conditions of what Jim is always talking about, namely, the communication triangle. This is the orientation of his choice, one of course that we are 'familiar' with. (Recall how we began this seminar with the Question What do the maps (graphical representations) of the field have in common?)
Right after this statement, JB goes on to respond to Bob Connors's review of his 19th-century history. (I take up this response in the JB seminar; If you are interested, follow the above link.)
End of notes this time around: But here's a question that I want you to ponder for this evening's seminar: How does JB, in this discussion of 20th-century writing instruction in the U. S., return to his discussions of Emerson (Thoreau), Dewey, and F. N. Scott? Or to his discussions of "Brahminical romanticism" or "mandarin romanticism"? And how are these various personages or literary categories now connected? in the unfolding narrative? And what were your thoughts as JB reintroduces Macrorie, Murray, Coles, and Elbow? (pp. 151-55).
To What Degree does JB fall prey (pray?) to species-genus analytics?
What are the relationships between Romanticism and Socialism? Is it as simple as the relationship between the (so-called) Individual and the Group (or Social)? What might be the dialectical relationship between the (so-called) Individual and the Group? Does the relationship work and play in both directions? Is it the case that the Individual is drawn into the Group and then socialized? Does it work the other way around at times? (Please let me emphasize with these questions that I do not believe in or cannot think of how there can be an 'individual.' This is a concept that makes no sense to me. I can, however, understand how the subject (subjectivity, agent/cy) is formed into something that we might call the 'individual effect.' But then, following this thinking, I also cannot not speak of the 'group-[social]-effect.' The so-called individual is a product of negation, but the group is also a product of the negative. (The negative here, as I usually mean it is the founding principle of the Symbolic system we live and dwell in.) What then would a different--outside of the negative--groupless social be like? or How is it that "we" could or might think Becoming-Social?"
What is the difference between Liberal Culturalist and Social-Epistemic? And what is--becomes of--'Democracy' in the relationship between LC and S-E?
What is Jim's theory of Community? Yours? What is Jim's relation to the language (logos)? Yours? Where do you find Jim's in his/tory?
What action does Jim's history call us to?
Did you see the reference to Dewey and Hegel on p. 59? Interesting!? (Recall that I stated above, this second history by Jim moves in an Hegelian, dialectical manner.)
How and what is the significance of JB's dealing with the ever-shifting dialectic of rhetoric-poetics? Production-interpretation. (Both are obviously Production, but there is a sense, nonetheless, that they are different.) Recall that Jim opens his article "Writing Instruction in School and College English, 1890-1985" by saying: "English Studies in public schools and colleges in the U.S. during the last hundred years or so has organized itself around the teaching of literature and composition--more specifically stated, the interpretation of literary texts and the production of rhetorical texts" (183).
What is it that JB would have us do with rhetoric-poetics?
What parallels do you see between or among the unfolding history of the actual teaching of writing, the development of departments of English (literature in the vernacular, the inclusion of American Literature and the teaching of Writing/Rhetoric), and the apparently unplanned institution of professional organizations (MLA, NCTE, CCCC)?
More serendipitous questions to come!
NOtes12 >>>>
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