History of Rhetoric

Rhetoric and Composition Concentration
M.A. Exam:  Fall 2009

 

Comprehensive Exam Reading List

 

Note: Many of the readings for the “History of Rhetoric” and the “Twentieth Century Rhetoric and Composition Studies” parts of the exam are found in the following anthology:

Bizzell, Patricia. and Bruce Herzberg, Eds. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001.

However, the exam does not require students to study particular translations or editions.  Readings from the English 589 “Pedagogies of Reading” course do not appear on this list, but may certainly be used in answering questions and analyzing texts on the exam.

Part I: History of Rhetoric

The following questions, which are relevant to any of the rhetoricians in this list, provide a useful framework for study and review:

1. How does this writer define rhetoric? 
2. Is rhetoric good, bad, or neutral?
3. Who is the rhetor?  What is his or her role in society?
4. What does the rhetor need to know?
5. What is truth?  How is it known?
6. What is knowable and what is not?
7. Is rhetoric teachable?  If so, how?

 

Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. George Kennedy, trans.  New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991.

Although there are selections from Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Bizzell and Herzberg (179-240), this complete edition is highly recommended.  The introduction and notes are very useful and the translation is very readable.  Throughout much of the history of rhetoric, Cicero and Quintilian are the major figures.  However, Aristotle’s rhetoric is far more influential in our own time.  The concepts of ethos, logos, and pathos are taught in schools today, and are important in advertising and marketing. 

Augustine.  “On Christian Doctrine, Book IV.” Bizzell and Herzberg 450-85.

Books 1-3 of On Christian Doctrine are about understanding the scriptures, while book four is about using rhetoric to teach that understanding to others. Book four takes classical rhetoric, mainly from Cicero, and applies it to the promulgation of the Christian truth to the people.  Thus Augustine says, “There are two things necessary to the treatment of the Scriptures: a way of discovering those things which are to be understood, and a way of teaching what we have learned” (117). 

Cicero. “From De Oratore.” Bizzell and Herzberg 289-338.

This dialogue, written late in Cicero’s career, is essentially a seminar in rhetoric in which major figures from Roman public life discuss all of the issues about rhetoric that have been controversial through the ages.  It is especially useful to think about the seven questions at the beginning of this list while reading this dialogue.  De Oratore and an earlier work by Cicero, De Inventione, were highly influential throughout most of the subsequent history of rhetoric.  

Conley, Thomas. M. Rhetoric in the European Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

This book is a very readable and intelligent overview of rhetorical history, with very well-chosen examples that serve to characterize authors and increase an understanding of their significance.

Gorgias. “Encomium to Helen.” Bizzell and Herzberg  44-46.

In this speech the famous sophist takes up the task of defending history’s most infamous wanton woman.  Is he successful?  Is rhetoric like sorcery, so that the people are powerless to resist, and therefore blameless if they follow?  This is the kind of rhetoric Plato attacks.

Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” in Dissemination. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981, 65-171.

This long essay provides both a deconstructive reading of the Phaedrus, and a good introduction to Derrida’s method of analysis, connecting classical rhetoric and postmodern theory. 

Jarratt, Susan C. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1991.

This book argues that Plato and Aristotle instigated a highly successful smear campaign against the sophists, and that we should reconsider them for our own time. 

Murphy, James J., et al. A Synoptic History of Classical Rhetoric. 3rd ed. New York: Hermagoras Press, 2003.

This book is a summary/study guide for classical rhetoric.  It is not usually assigned in English 581, but it is excellent for review purposes.  Highly recommended if your knowledge of the primary texts is a bit rusty.

Plato, Gorgias. Bizzell and Herzberg  87-138.

Plato’s attack on rhetoric in this dialogue has resonated for centuries.  Is rhetoric a thing of the greatest good, “a cause not merely of freedom to mankind at large, but also of dominion to single persons in their several cities” as Gorgias would maintain?  Or is it a semblance of the art of politics, just as cookery is a semblance of the art of medicine?

Plato. Phaedrus.  Bizzell and Herzberg 138-68.

Is this a dialog about love?  Is it about rhetoric?  Is it about truth?  Is it an argument against the technology of writing?  Is it about all of these things or about something else?  Does Plato relent, and admit that his arguments against rhetoric in the Gorgias were too harsh?  Scholars have argued about these things and more for many centuries.  In many ways, Aristotle’s Rhetoric is a response to the arguments of the Gorgias and the Phaedrus. 

Quintilian. Institutes of Oratory. Bizzell and Herzberg 359-428.

This work is a curriculum for a first century C.E. Roman school complete with assignments, goals and objectives, and advice to the teacher about difficult students and situations.   There is much here that will resonate with composition teachers today.

Campbell, George.  “From The Philosophy of Rhetoric.” Bizzell and Herzberg 902-46.

Bizzel and Herzberg say that Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric “has been justly praised as the turning point in the development of rhetoric in the eighteenth century, as the first modern rhetoric, and even as the first real advance in rhetorical theory since Aristotle.”  Campbell attempts to update rhetorical theory by integrating classical rhetoric with natural science and psychology.  This work is a precursor to current rhetorical and composition theories.

 

Part II: Composition Pedagogy

Bartholomae, David.  “Inventing the University.”  When a Writer Can’t Write:  Studies in Writer’s Block and Other Composing-Process Problems.  Ed. Mike Rose.  New York:  Guilford, 1985.  134-165.  Rpt. . in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory:  A Reader, Second Edition.  Ed.Victor Villanueva. Urbana, Ill.:  NCTE, 2003.  623-653.
           
Publishing this essay in the mid-1980’s, Bartholomae was responding, in part, to a then-current debate as to whether the difficulties encountered by “basic writers” were best addressed by examining internal (i.e., cognitive) issues or by exploring and demystifying the academic conventions the writers were struggling to master.  Bartholomae clearly comes down on the side of the latter position, arguing that the main challenge facing any novice writer at the university is to “invent” the university, i.e., to approximate the moves and language of academic discourse.  Helping students achieve this formidable task, according to Bartholomae, involves not only a demystification of academic conventions but also a careful analysis of the kinds of problems that students have in struggling with the discourse.  “Inventing the University” can thus be read not only as a response to the work of process theorists like Murray or Emig, but also as a foundational text influencing much subsequent discussion of what a rhetorical pedagogy should look like in a university setting.  Reading it in dialogue with other texts on your list, you may wish to consider the kinds of strategies, the kinds of writing curriculums, that effectively address issues of audience, purpose, context, and language in settings specifically defined by the enterprise of generating new knowledge within disciplinary fields.

Bartholomae, David, and Anthony Petrosky.  Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts:  Theory and Method for a Reading and Writing Course.  Boynton/Cook, 1986.  (ENG 587)

This text offers both a theory and a body of practical approaches (e.g. assignments, exercises, commentaries on responding to student writing) in a basic writing course.  Studied in relation to other texts on this list, Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts can be read in a number of ways, e.g. as a reference point for developing one’s own composition pedagogy, as an extended case study for evaluating the meanings of such terms as “basic writing” or “freshman composition,” or as an opportunity for testing the relationships between theory and a specific body of classroom practices.

Berlin, James.  “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class.”  College English, Vol. 50, No. 5 (Sep., 1988), pp. 477-494.

In this article Berlin updates the categories he developed in his earlier article, “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories.”  In the newer article, there are only three rhetorics competing for attention in the composition classroom—cognitive, expressionistic, and social-epistemic—and Berlin defines them in their differing relations to ideology and epistemology.  Berlin sees “cognitive” rhetoric as the heir of what he called “current-traditional rhetoric” in the earlier piece, and associates it with cognitive psychology and scientific approaches to composition.  Because it purports to be scientific, it does not recognize ideology.  Berlin characterizes expressionists as believing that “when individuals are spared from the distorting effects of a repressive social order, their privately determined truths will correspond to the privately determined truths of all others.”  Thus, expressionistic rhetoric promotes the ideology of the individual struggling with society.  Finally, Berlin describes social-epistemic rhetoric as locating the “real” in a dialectical interaction between the individual, the discourse community, and the material conditions of existence.   Whatever categories Berlin is using at the moment, the important message here is that ideology and epistemology influence composition theory and pedagogy.

Brodkey, Linda. “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in ‘The Literacy Letters.’” In Cross-Talk in Comp Theory:  A Reader, 2nd Edition. Ed. Villanueva, Victor. NCTE, 2003. 677-96.

Twentieth-century rhetorical theory breaks with Current Traditional Rhetoric, claiming that the individual subject is an effect of discourse, not its producer (in other words, we don’t write language; language writes us); that our identities and our knowledge of the world are ideological (neither objective nor subjective, but the product of discourse); and that discourse is plural—discourses. Insofar as we refuse to identify completely with the subject positions in certain of the discourses that constitute us, resistance is possible—and so, therefore, is change. Brodkey argues that change is needed, based on her study of how educational discourse creates a disempowering ungainliness in not only institutional but also interpersonal relationships between teachers and students. Teachers would seem to be vigilant indeed—when it comes to protecting their “class” privilege, that is. 

Clark, Irene L., et al.  Concepts in Composition:  Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing.  Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003.  (ENG 587)

Read all three sections: the first four chapters on elements of composing (process, invention, revision, audience), the next three chapters on influential concepts (assessment, genre, voice), and the chapters on “mismatches” between students and academic discourse (grammar and usage, non-native speakers, non-standard dialects). Each topic is placed within a historical context; competing views on it are discussed; classroom applications are suggested; and a seminal essay or two on that topic is included. This volume’s approach, then, should help you situate, critique, and appreciate the strategic, interest-driven ways other composition theorists use terms like “correctness,” “invention,” “revision,” “voice,” and the like.

Downs, Douglas, and Elizabeth Wardle.  “Teaching about Writing Righting Misconceptions:  {Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies.”  College Composition and Communication 58 (2007):  552-584.

Drawing on over twenty years of research in writing studies, Downs and Wardle question widely held expectations of first-year writing courses.  They refer to   scholarship challenging the concept of a “universal academic discourse,” and they question the assumption that generalized writing instruction can easily transfer into the different kinds of writing situations and discourse communities at a college or university.  Seeking to counter these misconceptions, the authors argue that first-year courses should be about writing – not how to write in college – and that such courses should introduce students to “realistic and useful conceptions of writing” (557).  A critical reading of the article would involve a close look at the way Downs and Wardle use existing research to critique certain assumptions and offer others in their place.  A close and critical reading would also consider the relationship between Downs’ and Wardle’s theories and the courses they developed – as well as the way that the authors evaluate the outcomes they observed.  The article can be read fruitfully in conjunction with such other texts at Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts, Berlin’s “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” and Fulkerson’s “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.”

Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford.  “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked:  The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy.”  College Composition and Communication 35 (1984):  155-71.

Seeking to develop a robust, “fully elaborated view of audience,” Ede and Lunsford criticize theoretical models that either overemphasize the knowledge of actual audiences (“audience addressed”) or the construction of “fictional” audiences (“audience invoked”).  In place of these models, they offer a tentative theory that attempts to “balance the creativity of the writer with the different, but equally important, creativity of the reader.”  As you examine their claims and illustrations, see how Ede and Lunsford critique the arguments of Walter Ong (“The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction,” cited elsewhere on this list), and consider the extent to which their model may (or may not) be applicable to the teaching of first-year composition today.  In doing so, compare Ede and Lunsford’s treatment of audience with that of other writers on the list (e.g. Bartholomae, Clark, Elbow).             

Elbow, Peter.  “What is Voice in Writing?”  in Everyone Can Write:  Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing.  Oxford, 2000.  184-221. (ENG 588)

Elbow describes three debates over what he calls “large, ideological questions” about the nature of voice and its relations to issues involving self and the “relation of the text to the writer.”  Arguing that these debates need not be resolved in either/or terms, he proceeds to offer five meanings of the term “voice,” arguing that the concept is “a practical critical tool we can use rather than just fight about.”  You may find it helpful not only to evaluate Elbow’s definitions and claims of usefulness but also the way in which he frames the debates.  How might you approach his arguments and methods in light of your other readings?

Emig, Janet.  “Writing as a Mode of Learning.”  

Emig makes the case for writing as a mode of learning that is unique so that teachers will
look for ways to help their students write more often and more variously, not less. Emig lists many authorities in this short essay; the names, however, are less important than the principles they espouse about writing’s uniqueness, especially its differences from speech. It wouldn’t hurt to write out these principles. In writing them out, you can begin putting them into dialogue with usually like-minded but sometimes different (if not contradictory) principles at work elsewhere in this reading list (Bartholomae and Petrosky, Berlin, Clark et al., Elbow, and Rosenblatt). Note also some interesting tensions within Emig’s essay itself: e.g., Polanyi’s critique of objective knowledge is cited as congenial for writing as a mode of learning: into “‘every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known.’” At the same time, Emig just as approvingly cites Bruner: “‘Writing virtually forces a remoteness of reference on the language user.’” How do we reconcile personally passionate contributions to what is known and remoteness from what is known?

Fulkerson, Richard.  “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.”  College Composition and Communication 56 (2005): 654-687.  (ENG 588)

By examining two collections of essays on composition pedagogy – one published in 1980, the other in 2001 (see Tate, below) – Fulkerson concludes that “composition studies has become a less unified and more contentious discipline early in the twenty-first century than it had appeared to be around 1990.”  This survey article offers a particular interpretation of the state of composition studies today.  Read it in relation to Tate et al’s A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, evaluating Fulkerson’s conclusions in light of your own analysis of the bibliographic collection. 

See also:  “Interchanges:  Responses to Richard Fulkerson, ‘Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century” (Dickson, Mejia, Zorn, Harkin, Fulkerson).   College Composition and Communication 57 (2006):  730-762.  (ENG 588).

Hartwell, Patrick.  “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.”

See Clark, Irene L., et al.  Concepts in Composition:  Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing. 

Murray, Donald M.  “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product.”  The Leaflet (Nov., 1972).  Rpt. in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory:  A Reader, Second Edition.  Ed.Victor Villanueva. Urbana, Ill.:  NCTE, 2003.  3-5.

          This short article, presented originally as a conference paper, can be seen as a primary document of the emerging process movement of the 1960’s and early 1970’s.  Critiquing the then-dominant current-traditional paradigm of composition instruction, Murray argues that writing is a “process of discovery through language.”  To teach writing is to teach “a process of exploration of what we know and what we feel about what we know through language.”  Imbued with the heady sense of change that early process theorists brought to their teaching and writing, the article leaves unexplored numerous questions that other theorists (contemporaries as well as later writers) subsequently took up:  what exactly is the nature of discovery through language?  How significant are the social contexts and dialogical interactions through which this discovery process occurs?  What gets in the way of discovery, and why are some writers more successful at it than others?  Are there different processes of writing?  And how new was the process movement?  What did it contribute to long-standing traditions of rhetorical invention?  This article can be fruitfully read in conjunction with (and in counterpoint to) a number of other texts on your list:  Clark’s Concepts in Composition (particularly the chapters on process, invention, and revision); Tobin’s article on “Process Pedagogy” (in Tate et al’s A Guide To Composition Pedagogies);  Emig’s “Writing as a Mode of Learning,” Sommers’ “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers,” Berlin’s “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” and Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University.”       

Ong, Walter J., S.J.  “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction.”  PMLA 90(1975):  9-21.

How do writers conceptualize their readers, particularly when the history of rhetoric has been dominated for so long by oral conceptions of audience?  Walter Ong answers this question with the assertion he posits in his title.  That is, successful writers “fictionalize” audiences they learn about “from earlier writers who were fictionalizing in their imagination audiences they had learned to know in still earlier writers, and so on back to the dawn of written narrative.”  Ong develops this thesis by discussing a wide range of writers and genres, arguing that innovation emerges from the ability to invent new conceptions of audiences.  This essay offers a point of departure for Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, who challenge Ong’s findings in their own “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked:  The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy” (also on this list).

Roen, Duane et al., eds. Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition.  NCTE, 2002 (ENG 587)

Perhaps the most “practical” text on this list, Strategies is intended first of all to document a wide range of everyday practices: from composing a syllabus to teaching grammar, punctuation, and usage (see Chapters Three through Ten and Chapter Thirteen). Second, it allows critical examination of these everyday practices and artifacts, such as examining (via Fulkerson) the unity between a particular classroom’s ideal/professed aims and actual practices. Third, it creates the opportunity (a) to test everyday practices and artifacts alongside the theoretical models found in Tate and Villanueva and (b) to compare these practices and artifacts with those more theory-specific practices and artifacts found in Bartholomae and Petrosky.

Rosenblatt, Louise.  The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work.  Southern Illinois, 1978 (ENG 589)

Rosenblatt argues that reading is a transactional experience: both text and reader construct meaning, participating in a process that must be initiated and negotiated. Even how each reader conceives a text’s “author” or “voice” is the product of some complicated business between reader and text. Rosenblatt’s demonstrations of the processes by which a text is negotiated into an essay (or argument or poem) have implications for the teaching of reading, which in books such as Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts is as much a part of teaching academic discourse as is the teaching of writing.
Shor, Ira.  Empowering Education:  Critical Teaching for Social Change.  University of Chicago, 1992 (English 587, 588)

In this text, Shor presents both a theoretical overview and a practical guide for transposing Freirean notions of critical pedagogy into American classroom settings.  Though his examples range across disciplines and educational levels, his most personal illustrations come from his experiences teaching English at the community college level.  As you read the text, consider what critical pedagogy shares with other “empowering” pedagogies (e.g. collaborative learning) and what features set it apart.  What does a critical theorist like Shor have to say about the attitudes (toward education, schooling, and authority) that students and instructors bring into a classroom – attitudes that can derail the learning process or enrich it?  Be sure you can define key terms like “problem-posing” or “critical consciousness” as you consider the both the problems and possibilities that can emerge from the use of critical pedagogy in a writing class.

Sommers, Nancy.  “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.”

See Clark, Irene L., et al.  Concepts in Composition:  Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing. 

Sommers, Nancy.  “Responding to Student Writing.”

See Clark, Irene L., et al.  Concepts in Composition:  Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing.  See also:  “Re-Visions:  Rethinking Nancy Sommers’s ‘Responding to Student Writing” (Sommers, Rutz, Tinberg).  College Composition and Communication.  58 (2006):  246-266. 

 

Part III: Twentieth Century Rhetoric and Composition Studies

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “From Marxism and the Philosophy of Language”and “From The Problem of Speech Genres.”Bizzell and Herzberg 1210-45.

Structuralism and post-structuralism generally follow Fernand de Saussure’s distinction between langue, language as ideal system, and parole, language in use.  While postmodern thought prefers systematic approaches and investigating the relationships between signs in systems, Bakhtin argues that the basic unit of language is the utterance (compare with Foucault’s statement)—a socio-linguistic concept that emphasizes the eventfulness of verbal interaction. His concept of “speech genres” anticipates “discourse communities”; it helps us think about issues in language acquisition, grammar instruction, and writing across the curriculum, as well as complicates rhetorical terms such as “context” and “scene.”

Booth, Wayne C. “From Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent.” Bizzell and Herzberg 1491-1519.

A nifty synthesizer of Burke, Perelman, and Weaver, Booth demonstrates that value-laden quasi-logical arguments are not only rational but also desirable because they consider humans as finite agents trying to affect, and yet willing to assent to, a complex of forces, rather than as products determined by innate drives, ideology, prior conditioning, or any “ism” that evacuates the meaningfulness of reasoning with others.
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983. (excerpts) (ENG 582)

Focus on the following chapters: “All Authors Should be Objective”; “True Art Ignores the Audience”; “Emotions, Beliefs, and the Reader's Objectivity”; “Telling as Showing: Dramatized Narrators, Reliable and Unreliable”; and “Control of Distance in Jane Austen's Emma.” Note in particular not only the canonical concept of the “implied author” but also Booth’s augmentations of Aristotle’s rhetorical proofs (ethos, pathos, and logos) and of Burke’s “symbolic action” (as laid out in the “Lexicon Rhetoricae”). Like Richard Weaver, Booth makes a case for ethical interests and values as substantive and inescapable.

Burke, Kenneth. “From A Grammar of Motives,” “From  A Rhetoric of Motives,” and “From Language as Symbolic Action.” Bizzell and Herzberg 1295-1347.

Burke invents a new system of analysis in practically every book.  In A Grammar of Motives it is the “pentad,” a five-term schema that looks at events from the perspectives of act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. In A Rhetoric of Motives, the key term is “identification,” a persuasive movement that is in some sense an amplification of Aristotle’s concept of ethos.  In Language as Symbolic Action Burke contrasts “Dramatism” and “Scientism” and asks, “how much of our reality has been built up for us by our “terministic screens”?  Each of these systems provides a wealth of insights when applied to almost any text.

Burke, Kenneth. Counter-Statement. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968.(excerpts) (ENG 582)

The main chapter is what Burke calls “our set piece, the ‘Lexicon Rhetoricae’”; this essay is a “machine” for reading rhetorically, “an instrument for clarifying critical issues (not so much for settling issues as for making the nature of a controversy more definite).” It may be thought of, then, as an upgraded version of stasis theory. What Burke says about “ideology” and the interaction between artful appeals and actual readers provides a powerful way to rhetorically engage postmodern claims about power, the priority of form, the subject, and agency. Key chapters that prepare for the “Lexicon” are “Psychology and Form,” “The Poetic Process,” and “Program”; see “Applications of the Terminology” for the “Lexicon” in action.

Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Bizzell and Herzberg 1471-1490.

Much of Derrida’s work deals with the problem of writing and speech, as first discussed in Plato’s Phaedrus. Is writing simply a “trace” of an absent word?  Is language a free play of signifiers with no referents in the “real” world?  In this essay, Derrida analyzes writing as communication, in terms of the binary of “presence” and “absence.”  An excellent example of what came to be called “deconstruction,” it troubles some major rhetorical commonplaces: the intention of the writer, the role of the reader, and the rhetorical situation itself.

 

Foss, Sonja et al.  Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric, 3rd ed. Long Grove, Il.: Waveland, 2001.

This recommended support text provides concise overviews of the theories of major twentieth century rhetoricians (e.g. Burke, Richards, Toulmin, Foucault, Weaver, Perelman).  For each rhetorician, the authors include biographical information, useful summaries of key theoretical concepts, and synopses of scholarly commentaries about the contributions of each figure.  

Foucault, Michel. “From The Order of Discourse” and “From The Archaeology of Knowledge.” Bizzell and Herzberg 1432-1470.
           
These two excerpts introduce a reader to Foucault’s epistemic view of knowledge: the way that our knowledge is defined by discourse and, in particular, by a whole variety of factors impinging on the nature of discursive practices (the role of institutions, disciplines, power relationships, etc.).  What are the consequences of looking at language and discourse in this way?  What kinds of comparisons can be drawn between this approach to language and the approaches of such rhetoricians as Bakhtin, Burke or Perelman? 

Perelman, Chaim.  “From The New Rhetoric (with L. Olbrechts-Tyteca),” “From The Realm of Rhetoric,” and “From The New Rhetoric: A Theory of Practical Reasoning.” Bizzell and Herzberg 1372-1409.

Like Burke, Perelman (with his sometime collaborator, L. Olbrechts-Tyteca) has enlarged the vocabulary of classical rhetoric: the particular audience and the universal audience, presence, dissociation of concepts, quasi-logical arguments, to name a few. By arguing that even the “real” is established rhetorically, Perelman was instrumental in founding the “New Rhetoric,” distinguishing the realm of rhetoric from the realm of science—and without marginalizing the former. 

Richards, I.A. “From The Philosophy of Rhetoric” and “From The Meaning of Meaning (with C.K. Ogden).” Bizzell and Herzberg 1270-1294.

Inquiring in The Meaning of Meaning into how words and symbols come to mean, Richards focused on context (created by words in their “interaction” and “interanimation” with other words, sentences, paragraphs, etc.) and the sorting process, concluding that meanings (like arguments) are in people, not in words and things (as distinct from George Campbell, who claimed that every word has a “proper” or “correct” meaning). The Philosophy of Rhetoric explores the multiple functions of language (compare with Bakhtin’s speech genres) and the telling influence of context on meaning (compare with Derrida’s deconstruction of context).

Toulmin, Stephen. “From The Uses of Argument” and “From Logic and the Criticism of Arguments.” Bizzell and Herzberg 1410-1431.

Composition texts often teach some version of Aristotle’s concept of the “enthymeme” or rhetorical syllogism. Toulmin’s work is an attempt to update Aristotle and provide a new framework for understanding practical reasoning without resorting to formal logic.  In another sense, Toulmin’s system is an update on Roman stasis theory, helping the rhetorician figure out at what level the disagreement in the argument lies.

Weaver, Richard. “Language is Sermonic.” Bizzell and Herzberg 1348-1360

Connecting Plato’s value-oriented work in the Phaedrus to Aristotle’s substantive and procedural analysis, Weaver ranks the common topics of argumentation: from the lowest, “circumstance,” through “cause and effect,” then “similitude or analogy,” up to the highest, “definition,” which because it gets to truthful essence is Weaver’s “God” term. One needn’t endorse Weaver’s hierarchy to regard his strategies for discerning a speaker’s/writer’s disposition (or sermonic angle) as insightful and broadly useful.