There are a lot of things I’d like to comment about at greater length, but the topics these days are so plentiful that it becomes hard to focus. So this entry is merely a string of pearls (or swine-ish swipes) at a grab bag of stuff.
I thought about saying something when Collin and assorted other folks were discussing Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Rhetoric, but I read the book and found almost nothing of use to me. The issue which seems to lurk behind the book, I think, is brought into deeper focus with the faux-dialogue between Booth and Peter Elbow in College English March 2005—“The Limits and Alternatives to Skepticism.” The yawn which might have been heard (if you were near me) when I read these essays was deafening. Easy and unfair summary: people move across a continuum of belief and doubt. Fostering belief is as important, if not more important that accentuating doubt. Though critical thinking has pulled the foundation out from under most forms of any concept of shared belief, shared beliefs (Elbow’s “believing game”) still exist and we should listen to them (Booth’s “listening rhetoric”).
Okay, pass the milk and cookies. Next please! Can rhetoricians get over this already? I feel like I’m trapped in kindergarten.
I’ve been more excited by an older philosophy monograph, Surfaces by Avrum Stroll (1988). Though I haven’t finished it yet (it’s very dense) it promises much. From the back jacket:
Stroll’s first line of questioning—how we define and perceive a surface—issues a powerful challenge to one of the main assumptions of traditional epistemology. Then he looks into “the geometry of ordinary speech”— the terms we use to organize and structure the world we inhabit (“margin,” “border,” “limit,” “boundary,” “edge”)—and shows how this informal topological system resembles and differs from the mathematical science of geometry. In so doing, he opens up a novel philosophical issue to further discussion and research.
Projecting this backward onto Booth and Elbow, it seems to me that a better mode of inquiry would be to accept that there is doubt (nearly geometric in its precision in current critical discourse) and belief (which is sloppy and not nearly as precise in its boundaries) and to examine the inherent mismatch between the two. I think Melissa Ianetta, in the same issue of College English, does a better job of doing that in her article “‘To Elevate I Must First Soften’: Rhetoric, Aesthetic, and the Sublime Traditons.” Starting with the edited collections The Rhetorical Tradition and The Critical Tradition (I own and have used both, since I was a dual English/Rhet major as an undergrad), Ianetta suggests that the spin of the essays selected as central to the corpus of English literature (stressing critical thinking, or doubting) and those central to rhetoric (stressing sensitivity to the problem of belief) speaks volumes to the binary involved.
But maybe I’m just easily bored by the “can’t we all just get along” vibe of one strand of contemporary rhetorical theory. Enough, or too much. But there will probably be more later.
Yeah, I ended up wishing that I had read the book before I suggested it as our first text. I was working from my old memories of Modern Dogma, I think, where the vibe seemed less vanilla. I wanted to be able to post something more positive, more believing, about Booth’s book, but could never really work up the energy for it.
OTOH, I do have a copy of Stroll’s book, and I must admit that your comments above make me curious enough to dig it out and take another look…
cgb
Yeah, that is an easy and unfair summary; one that misses nearly every point made in that dialogue and profoundly misrepresents the dialectical moves Peter’s talking about. I’m happy to offer some other easy and unfair summaries: James Berlin says putting politics in the classroom is good. David Bartholomae says students must be assimilated. Mina Shaughnessy says we should pay attention to the errors basic writers make.
My point here is that such reductionism is easy to perform on any text, and serves as a useful excuse for intellectual laziness. Pass them milk and cookies this way, Jeff.
OK, yeah, that’s rather incendiary of me, and that’s not my goal here. I think, rather, I’m wanting to argue that some of the carnivalous discourse around Booth’s book that was rather dull and flat had such qualities because it relied on two rather facile rhetorical moves: the adding-nothing-to-the-conversation summary (I mean, we’d all read it already, so no need for a summary) and the simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down approval or condemnation without further elaboration. Neither are moves that composition teachers would tolerate from their students — so why do we think it’s OK to make them ourselves?
“We” (as in the royal we of me) think it is okay because, as a lit professor of mine once said, there isn’t enough time to read and apply critical analysis to every text that crosses our path.
I’ve read your commentary on the book, hoping that your deep engagement with it might provide some spark that would lead me to revisit it. It didn’t. Some texts provide rewards when read closely; most don’t. I file this under the “most” which also contains just enough pseudo-profundity backed with strong academic reputation that it forces people in our field to deal with them. I wasn’t under the gun, so I opted out, much in the same way that a student is free to “pass” on a class that sounds really boring to them.
As an aside, I team-taught with another scholar who had edited James Berlin’s final book. She would agree with your “unfair” summary and said as much to a graduate class. She enjoyed working with him although she personally thought the basic thrust of his pedagogy was a dead end, especially for those in practitioner-focused programs.
I should also remark that one of my favorite articles in a pedagogy class was written by Berlin. I don’t recall the title just now, but it was a survey of the major theories in composition pedagogy that ended with the thesis that all the theories were political, and that we should be aware of the politics involved. I agree. However, once this is admitted, does this mean that politics should be an integral part of the composition classroom? I don’t think so. Berlin did.
Do I want to read the collected works of Berlin, knowing that it will have little impact on my practice? No. We all, students and teachers alike, have the freedom to choose what we read.
Sometimes, a curt summary is a necessary thing. There are only so many hours in the day to read and write. I seem to recall that Jeff Rice said something similar to what I said about Booth in similarly acerbic terms. I wish I had the few hours I spent on the book back. If I save anyone else the trouble, I think of it as a service. Of course, no person with even the slightest critical faculty would take one or even two opinions as enough reason to not read something they were interested in.
When you say, “Some texts provide rewards when read closely; most don’t,” what I hear you arguing is that these rewards are a function of the text themselves. I’m arguing that, instead, those rewards are a function of the work that the reader does — which is implied, I think, in your later arguments about choice and interest, but I also still hear you wanting to shift blame back to the text. Consider the student who, when assigned a reading, says, “This sucks. It’s boring and stupid.” Is the reading sucky and boring? No. The student’s lazy, and attempting to cloak her laziness in a shallow seen-it-all know-it-all superiority. I’m suggesting that rather than declaring a book to have an inherent quality of suckiness, and offering a shallow misrepresentation as a reason why, it might be more helpful to say, “This book was unhelpful to me, because my politics/interpretive schemes/terministic screens/whatever intersect with the book’s in ways X, Y, and Z.”
Yes. Obviously, Wayne Booth is not in my living room to query about his opinions, which are no doubt far more nuanced than his book. While you might get great satisfaction from reading, say, the back of a cereal box I do not– I do make choices based on how I feel my effort will be rewarded based on the text.
The reader’s labor is a commodity in limited supply, whereas texts are relatively inexhaustible. Many scholars I deal with every day have no problem with saying “This sucks. It’s boring and stupid.” As a matter of fact, they take it to be part of their job.
In print, they provide copious reasons for the reason that they think that something is boring and stupid. In conversation, they often do not. Does this constitute a failure on their part? I think not. If pressed, they will provide concrete reasons.
My post traded at the conversational end of the spectrum, as most blog posts do. I feel no need to apologize for being “unhelpful.”
My surface appraisal was shallow, as shallow as I believe the arguments presented by Elbow and Booth are. A case of harmonious form and function. That, in fact, was a big part of my point. I felt no need to dissect the arguments in detail, and I don’t believe that I’ve misrepresented them that unfairly.
*In the time since I wrote this, but before I could post it, I was reminded that I have indeed found reading cereal boxes rewarding.
I must have had less to do in December of 2002.
Gotcha. Well, as I’ve written about in detail, I found Booth’s book spurred my thoughts in useful ways, as did Elbow’s portion of the recent CE piece — so does that mean I’d best declare them inherently un-sucky, and if so, does that mean the (scarce?) intellectual labor I performed in service of such a declaration was itself inherently sucky?
(Asked with tongue planted firmly in cheek.)