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February 26, 2007
Starting to figure it out
A short while ago, I was reviewing a little short textbook on argument, thinking about using it for my then-upcoming WRT 195 class. This book, Good Reasons: Designing and Writing Effective Arguments, was written by Lester Faigley and Jack Selzer. The authors begin by discussing Silent Spring, the reasons it became such a hit/classic, and how that text demonstrates principles of argument. I particularly liked their analysis of Carson's intervention is an otherwise dominant dialogue. The authors move on to discuss several types of argument, including visual, narrative, causal, etc. I thought it would be great to pair this book with Silent Spring, which I don't think anyone reads anymore, and the other texts they analyze as the readings for a course.
Jack Selzer also wrote one of my favorite chapters in What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. The chapter is "Rhetorical Analysis: Understanding How Texts Persuade Readers." I found his explanation of rhetorical analysis to provide an excellent umbrella theory for the other topics in that book (that's fodder for another post, however).
Now I'm reading Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives in detail, with a view to exams, and I'm finding myself, for the first time ever, interested in being able to teach a graduate level course in a comp/rhet program. The course would feature this text, and all of the readings he discusses and analyzes in developing his philosophy of rhetoric. The range here is amazing, from the ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric teachers and orators to English Literature, to political economists, to Marx, to philosophers. Most of the references I've either read, or at least heard of, but what an interesting course that would be (for me, anyway) because Burke's point is that with a widened view of what persuasion is and his concept of identification as the other key to understanding rhetoric, every discipline has something to offer to the understanding of rhetoric, and rhetoric has a foundation to offer to every discipline. Exactly what I've long been thinking. Rhetoric should be a central part of the university, and should serve as a foundational course for all other disciplines, such that material from all other disciplines is considered in rhetoric instruction. Phew! How big an agenda would that be?
Anyway, I was reading blog posts yesterday about the nature of rhetoric instruction, where one entry remarked on the distance between the first year composition course, where students might get some degree of instruction in rhetoric, and the PhD course in rhet/comp, with not much in between. Someone proposed rhetoric as a major. Well, a liberal arts education used to be philosophically driven (hence the ultimate title) and rhetoric and philosophy still seem closely aligned, so why not?
So if I have this spark, this first ever thought about a graduate course (which I see as being an introductory course at the graduate level), maybe I am starting to have a definable sense of my own place in all this that I can articulate and attach to established theories. Wouldn't that be something?!
Posted by cageyer at February 26, 2007 10:26 AM