DawgNotes

So, just to be a bit feisty (or as Dianna has dubbed me, to fulfill my role as a shameless agitator...) I would argue that rhetoric is not privileged in our program. I would further argue some of our faculty members privilege critical theory over just about anything, and it often appears in classes that have "rhetoric" in the title. Cultural Rhetoric sometimes seems to be cultural studies and critical theory.

Derek was right about the jobs that our graduates go on to, that they are composition based, or writing program director aimed. I think this is in part a result of the kinds of jobs that are available (comp/rhet job listings tend to talk a whole lot more about comp than about rhetoric). Most comp/rhet folks hired into English departments are asked to teach different kinds of composition, from FYC to technical writing and other genres in between. But seldom have I seen a posting that asks the candidate to be prepared to teach rhetoric courses. And even if such a posting existed, nothing I've learned in graduate school leaves me feeling prepared to teach such a course.

Robert Connors writes in several places in Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy about speech and communication breaking off from English, and rhetoric going with the comm folks. Look at our own school: CCR may be housed with the writing program and part of A&S, but Communication and Rhetorical Studies is part of a different college. That seems worth interrogating on its own. The way rhetoric is taught and discussed in those courses is different than they way we take it up - as evidenced from Ty's comments in this thread, and other comments he has made.

I wanted to be in this program because of the "cultural" modifier in rhetoric. But what I thought that meant was that I would get to work with with many ways rhetoric is employed in culture, to bring my experiences in the world of business into the "house that Aristotle built" to better learn how to analyze different genres of real-world writing , and subsequently to apply classical rhetoric techniques and strategies to broaden and develop my own skills with language, and ultimately to learn how to teach that variety of skills to students. I can't imagine for the life of me ever being in a composition or lower division rhetoric course and teaching Foucault, or Lacan, or Althusser, or any of the other dozens of theorists I've been subjected to in the same of English or CCR. That renders my "training" somewhat useless to me intended practice.

So to wind up this very long post, let me just ask that we be a little more careful and a little more precise in furthering this damaging binary of composition and rhetoric. It's bad enough that we have a field still subordinated to "literature" or the critical theory urge of many English departments; we don't need to further divide ourselves. I found it very disturbing in my English courses when instructors attempted to draw lines between the "writers" meaning the creative writing/MFA students, and the "scholars," of the MA/PhD students. It was a ridiculous division and I said so in class. We, the MA folks, weren't all caught up in theory, some of us really appreciated literature, and those writers in the room knew a lot more about analyzing forms and plots and characters, etc., than we did. We had plenty we could learn from them, and I fought against the needless attempts at divisivness. Much as I am doing here. The creation of text, whether written, visual, hybrid, digital, or whatever, is also an exercise in rhetoric. I think we do ourselves more good by seeking the "and" rather than the "or".