April 10, 2007
Out of my Hands
I am pleased to report that my exams are now complete - off my desk, out of my hands, in the hands of committee members who will at some future date pronounce judgement on my effort.
They are not great writing efforts. I would do things differently on all of them. But I learned a lot about myself, my interests, and my abilities in going through this process. It was hard and I will always think I could have done better.
So now I have a year old seminar paper that is past due to be crafted into an article, and an older than that paper to be crafted into a different article, and a prospectus to start work on, and a Cs proposal for next year. But all that will wait, at least one week. I need to re-enter my own life again and do some stuff that's been backing up all around me. A little cleaning, a little filing, a little organizing, some errands to run, service appointments of several kinds to schedule, friends to play with, a life partner to be nice to and do stuff with, some means of restoring balance. Then I can return to studenthood.
Thanks to everybody who supported and tolerated me these past months, especially GR, whose house todo list is among the many things that have been waiting for this process to be done. We can finish moving in now. Really we can.
Posted by cageyer at 06:23 PM | Comments (2)
March 04, 2007
Deliberative skills for citizenship, or why I wanted to teach composition
On the list of things many people don't know about me is that I was invited into Phi Beta Kappa when I graduated from the University of Washington. I don't often reflect on that membership, in part because I've been so busy reading for classes and exams and what have you that there hasn't been time. But last spring, several bits in the society's newletter gave me a strong moment of "yeah, that's what I'm talkin' about." This draft has been sitting for months, but as I am wrestling with exam questions, it offers the answer to the primary question of why learn the canon of rhetoric, and why I wanted to teach composition.
"Accepting membership into Phi Beta Kappa, Professor Gnomes reminded us, is an acceptance of the obligation to carry learning into citizenship in a participatory democracy"
The first principle, that learning has a purpose beyond mere knowledge, is as old as rhetoric, as the Sophists teaching the art of speaking to men who needed to represent themselves in a really participatory democracy, a much more direct model than we have in the United States. But it isn't just about speaking well or even winning the moment, because the phrase finishes with a reference to democracy. What is that, in the here and now, and what learning is needed to participate in it?
"we are apt to suppose the whole story of democracy is about majority rule. But a moment's reflection reminds us that democracy is also about the reasons why majority rule is important and about its limits. A bit more reflection discloses that democracy must also be about deliberation into the question 'what is the right thing to do?'"
The will of the majority is heavily influenced by a small minority. Political party platforms, religious beliefs as propounded by various Christian denominations, other religious systems, leaders social movements, and more than many would like to believe, the image makers of advertising, movies, and television programming. It wasn't that long ago, compared to the long history of rhetoric, that major legislative decisions were made in the government of the United States as the result of a group of men seated (or standing) in a room, debating, sometimes contentiously, the right thing to do. The men we refer to as the Founding Fathers debated at length and heatedly over the documents that became the (written) backbone of our country. John Quincy Adams was not only a distinguished lawyer, he was a great orator and held the first Boylston chair in... yes, rhetoric, in the United States. The United States Senate history features great speeches and debates from great orators. The United States Congress has its share of great oratory in its history as well, romanticized most notably in Jimmy Stewart's portrayal of a young idealist sent to the great hall in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But these days, anyone who watches C-SPAN can tell you that often the men and women featured on that screen are reading text to a camera and a fairly empty room. It's not the same thing at all.
But it is also the case that these examples are the top layer of a participation process that begins in the homes and classrooms our villages, towns, and cities across the country. The conversation over dinner shapes what the child believes is true. The message conveyed on the television and other media are screened and filtered through that system, even as they shape it. Later, when that child goes to school, he or she is influenced by the teachers, by the interactions with other students, and by the material offered for learning. By the time a young person is old enough to vote (and old enough to go to college) they bring a value system to that opportunity. The informal spaces are just as important as the formal ones, and the persuasion that takes places in those spaces is often unnoticed.
My interest comes from the moments those beliefs and values come into competition with one another. How do we know how to present and discuss our ideas? In my exam reading, I learned that the "active listening" skills I had endured in high school emerge from a theory of argument developed by Carl Rogers, a model designed to recognize the difficulty is arguing over what is the right thing when competing values are in play. That process is really hard for most people, but the key point of it is that one has to slow down from the emotional outburst and reaction to consider and carefully state one's position (and the other's, as well). This consideration and care of communication is my interest. I used to be a "corporate facilitator." What that means, at its core, is that I facilitated processes whereby individuals in a particular community reflected on their own values, the values they represented as they worked, and the ways they communicated with one another and those outside their community. This subject and this interest is not new to me, it's just really hard to translate into the exam question model. What passes for communication is too often the spewing of emotion and unreasoned, unsupported, opinion. And it's tempting to say that such conversation is okay in the informal realm, but it really isn't, because it's what happens in those spaces that shape what comes to be accepted, to be the "will of the majority" in the public and political realm. To really participate in democracy one has to be able to recognize what is at stake in the sound bytes and slogans that too often pass for truth.
"So Phi Beta Kappa's purpose entails public advocacy of the skills of deliberation that are important to citizenship. What are those skills? Essentially, there are three ingredients:
1. capacities of critical thought that provide an understanding of how to make and evaluate arguments
2. possession of knowledge of the facts whose relevance to things that matter makes them reasons that can be presented in arguments, and
3. discernment about what matters--that is, what is worth deliberating about.
If citizens in a democracy are to deliberate, these are their tools. They need to be able to think; they need facts to think with; and they need a grasp of what is worth thinking about.
So if we want a democracy that is about more than counting votes, a democracy in which citizens are equipped to withstand the skills of manipulators and in which the connection between truth and freedom is clear, we will support the ideals of Phi Beta Kappa."
(all quotes so far from John Churchill, (PBK) Secretary
in The Key Reporter, Spring 2006)
Now, I don't want anyone to think for a moment that I believe everyone should be a member of PBK, because I don't. But I do think its principles are important, and I firmly believe that rhetoric is the key discipline in furthering those principles. All the theories, all the variations, all the methods and terminologies and systems that have emerged over the years are important to know precisely because they are a range of tools for analyzing communication and for crafting communication in an increasingly atomized yet "globalized", individually separate yet increasingly multi-cultural, mutli-value-holding, yet still participatory democracy.
That is only as good as the participation in it.
Only as good as the men and women speaking and writing that shape its ideals, beliefs, legislation and relations. The United States does not sit in isolation. Reasoning out the right thing to do involves many knowledges, the ability to hear and discuss beliefs that are new and sometimes contradictory to our own. It requires rhetorical agility.
Professor Peter J. Gomes's, to whom Mr. Churchill referred in the comment at the beginning of this post, said:
"At the very point where the clarity of ideas, the clarity of the written and the spoken word, the principles of intellectual passion and integrity have never been in greater need or shorter supply - it is at this moment, it seems, that our Society should stand poised to contribute its greatest effort to the well-being of our republic".
Exactly what I think about the art of rhetoric, as both discipline and practice. The art of speaking and writing well needs to be at the center of learning, tools for analysis, practice, and persuasion.
In working through questions for exams, I think in some ways it all comes down to this: how can 2500+ years of theory and practice of an art concerned solely with speech (and writing) be rolled up, adapted, and used to teach and exemplify deliberative skills for citizenship in this participatory democracy at this time?
Posted by cageyer at 09:26 AM | Comments (0)
January 28, 2007
Questions?
Eileen was pushing me again last week about my questions. Questions. The bane of my graduate school existence is this requirement of questions.
So today I continued my reading of George Kennedy's Classical Rhetoric and its Secular and Christian Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, and I got at least some glimpse of what might constitute a question with regard to this major exam on rhetoric. Kennedy's book is a history. It is not an anthology with commentary added. In fact, there are few textual excepts. But there are references to rhetoricians I've never heard of until today. There is a logic to the structure of this history that is more than linear through time. And it is a different history than I've been used to in this "discipline." And maybe that's the core of the question:
What is the difference between rhetoric as an academic discipline in the sense of the modern university, and rhetoric as a series of practices in a variety of social and political contexts over a very long period of time?
In one of the anthologies I read that focused on women, the editor wrote that the canon of rhetoric had largely been a history of men writing textbooks for other (primarily white, educated) men. Thus, the effort to theorize the communicative practices of women and non-white men... well, here's where the words start to stop making sense, and the essence of the question falls apart. If all communicative practices are rhetoric, then what is a canon, or why would there be one? But if there isn't a canon, then how is rhetoric an academic discipline? If the discipline is about theorizing practices of communication/persuasion/influence/instruction, then what makes it a companion to composition when it's already attached to speech? If it's attached to both, then why aren't they working together to theorize it (here is the institutional divide problem)? And how does any theory worked up by one side apply to or gain legitimacy with the other? To what purpose do we theorize these practices by these individuals across history?
In different periods, rhetoric had clearly defined purposes - from the forum of Athens, to the Senate of Rome, to the Church, to the bar - and these purposes drove the instruction. Young men received training in how to speak eloquently in this public places. Rhetoric and the instruction in it aimed at very practical civic purposes.
Pass by the many centuries, and re-enter at the latter end of the 20th century. Scholars work to recover women's communication - mostly written because of the lack of record of any public speaking - from ancient and medieval times. Other scholars seek to enter records of African-American speaking and writing into formal rhetoric studies. Why? Because these communicative practices served persuasive and influential purposes outside the spotlit public arena, and within the theoretical definitions of rhetoric, these communicative practices qualify for inclusion. Do people need to be trained in these forms of communication? Or only trained in how to study and theorize them? to what end is the education in rhetoric when it is all inclusive?
It's too easy for me, when I start with the questions, to end up believing the entire enterprise is futile. Then what?
Posted by cageyer at 08:47 PM | Comments (1)
January 11, 2007
Of Reading and not writing
I've been reading for my upcoming exams. I had originally planned to takes notes, the same way that I would take notes from a book I was using to work up a seminar paper. But this reading is different. I'm not preparing to write an argumentative paper, not really. What I'm really hoping for is to synthesize a broad base of knowledge in response to a question that is generated to allow me to demonstrate my understanding of the field.
Thus, taking notes on each separate text in my usual manner--where I pull out many pithy or interesting quotes and sometimes, but not often, add my own responsive comments to them--doesn't seem very helpful. What seems more useful here is to talk about these many texts in terms of their relationship to each other and to the larger topic and my goals for understanding it.
I came to this realization with some clarity this morning while considering The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric, a collection of essays edited by Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe. I obtained this book through Interlibrary Loan, and had to specially negotiate a two-week renewal after I missed the original due date (tip: check both the ILLiad system and the library patron info when accounting for the over 100 books checked out for exam purposes). The looming deadline for returning the book put me in front of the computer with it next to me. But there I got stumped. Should I take notes on each essay? Did I even care about each essay? what was really important to me about having read this book? What did I learn that pertains to my exam purpose?
I found the answer in the preface. This collection emerged from an international conference about 10 years ago. Editor Mason Sutherland makes note in the preface about two other collections already in print: Reclaiming Rhetorica and Listening to Their Voices. In the afterword, she discusses how those collections contributed to this and how this one differs. Voila! I had my answer. I have read Listening. So what I'll do next is read Reclaiming and then write about the three taken together under more general prompts like: what common themes appear through these texts? What are these editors/authors saying about the history of rhetoric and the role/place of women in it? What is rhetoric in this frame and how does it differ from the traditional rhetorical canon these texts are challenging?
Yes, there are sure to be some key quotes along the way, but the idea is broad understanding and dialogue between sources (gee.... where have I heard that assignment before?) across the history - my take on it, and how it makes sense to me.
Now that I have this little ah-ha, it seems so much easier to approach all the other texts I've read and have an idea what to do with them in terms of notes and preparation. 5 weeks or so to go. Don't anybody start a countdown.
Posted by cageyer at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)