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January 17, 2007
On (Written) Argument
Berrill, Deborah P. editor. Perspectives on Written Argument. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, Inc., 1996.
Edited collections abound in this discipline, which is nice for exam preparation since I don't have to do a lot of journal searching for articles because there are so many authors involved in these collections.
I think my favorite essay of this collection is Berrill's own on "Reframing Argument from the Metaphor of War." For all the feminist scholarship aimed at inclusiveness and opening up the tradition, this seems to me to take on the core of the male-dominant nature of the history. Argument is not war, but Berrill does a nice job (as do other scholars in other places, to be fair) picking up on Lakoff and Johnson's work in Metaphors we Live By, highlighting how often the descriptions of verbal interaction include metaphors such as "destroy," "smash," and "demolish."
The point of this collection is to ask "what is argument?" and then "formulate what the question means" (2). It is not new information to me that the combative, debate-style version of argument isn't all that argument is. Since my goal was to be a lawyer, I learned that argument is case-building. In my years of biblical research, it might be termed "precept upon precept, line upon line." Story-telling is argument, it's a proposal to see the world in a certain way, to believe certain things are true about that world, and to life according to that view. So in the introduction to the volume, this comment stands out:
These different voices necessarily carry different beliefs about what constitutes validity, about what sorts of evidence are acceptable or even must be include, about what difference is all about and hence, what argument is all about. (5)
Basically, as Berrill says in her introduction, this collection taken as a whole points out that "the essential aspect of argument is the voicing of differences" (6). Some of the essays focus on the way children make arguments - narratives and stories and examples from which they expect others to behave or respond in a certain way. Other authors in the series talk about how people in other cultures (Japan, African Americans, other Pacific cultures) view argument. All these point to the decentering of Eurocentric theory of argument as logical and rational (only).
I'm not sure who the audience for this collection is. The series editor's preface specified "writing in the human world" and that the series "presents scholarly work on written language in its various contexts" (vii). As a CCR student, little in this text was new, though several of the essays were enjoyable to read.
Posted by cageyer at January 17, 2007 06:46 PM