How about we get started by posting the part of your Response Paper 1 that deals with David Fleming's vision for rhetorical education. You may either cut and paste from what you've got in hand, or you may modify the posting to reflect an new take.
Use the comment function to post and be sure to read what other people say. I'll post a response to Fleming myself after we get going.
12 comments:
I'm taken by Fleming's discussion of paideia, particularly because it injects a strain of morality into the study of rhetoric. In his paideutic (a word that's not in my dictionary and sounds hopelessly snooty) formulation, rhetoric becomes a kind of golden key that ennobles students and teachers alike. Normally I'm very skeptical of such claims, but I'm buying this. It seems that rhetoric, properly taught and properly received, teaches students how to think in a real and useful way, and how to apply that thinking for their benefit and for the benefit of society. The question I had while I was reading, and which Fleming addressed very briefly, is where this would fit in our profit-driven society / university culture. Many (most?) students want to earn (or simply buy, if it were possible) their degree so they can get into the workforce and make a gazillion dollars. Where does rhetoric fit into that model? Should it be placed there at all, or should it be put at a lower level of schooling—elementary, middle or high school—where maybe kids aren't thinking so much about careers and are possibly more receptive?
This is only a small part of what I read on Thursday:
I think I disagree with Fleming’s assertion that “rhetoric is a ‘discipline’ that has a particular shape and purpose and resists assimilation to other disciplines (184).” I’m not sure why--and perhaps this is one area in which I will have a major awakening as the class progresses--but I have a sense that this is a very narrow way of defining the word. And perhaps this is his point--that he must place such restraints on his understanding of rhetoric as a discipline separate from other disciplines as answer to a contemporary educational model that has watered down the idea of “rhetoric”. I do like the way he presents the educational use of rhetoric as both teaching writing and teaching about writing.
There is a lot in the Fleming that I find opaque. This is clearly directed at a much more advanced audience than I can be just now! I don’t know the writers, I’m not familiar with the terms, I don’t even have enough information about the classical teachers to understand references to Aristotle or Cicero (184). I’m also not convinced he has clearly explained his own ideas (if he is even clear on them himself), but has deliberately disguised them in the jargon. As a 102 teacher, I would never allow an argument to ignore the necessity of defining terms on common grounds. I circle back. Perhaps the insiders stand on that common ground which seems to be an Escher landscape to my mind.
I agree with Dan in finding the idea of paideia attractive. It may go against most of today’s societal expectations of wealth and gain, but I feel that studying something in order to make yourself better suited to acting beneficially on your world is a noble cause. Fleming (and Isocrates in the readings for Tuesday) have a point. The more a person knows about how the world works, how forces impact it, and how those connections can connect to other areas of the world, the more effective that person can be in understanding why. This can be significant in almost any course of study.
I also want to go back to my comment in class on Thursday, that a lot of people are exposed to rhetoric more than they think—just not in a formal context. This isn’t a bad thing, particularly in lower levels of education to prepare children for deeper study later on, but it needs to be carefully linked to formal teachings for rhetoric to truly be appreciated. I admit that I have an instinctual desire to reject rhetoric offhand as confusing, dense, and impractical. I have to constantly remind myself that rhetoric is useful and worth studying. This is mainly because while I have a good understanding of rhetoric in an informal setting, I have had to struggle in past classes to understand those same connections in a formal study.
Major sites of my interest in rhetoric revealed by Fleming's article includethe ancient methods that Fleming deems appropriate to contemporary education, particularly the Aristotelian means of enthymemic generation and Erasmian means of development for copia. (I don't know in what sense Erasmus employed the term copia: is it simply as a superabundance of vocabulary options and scholarly references?) I am intrigued by the possibilities of reversion to classical models of pedagogy in general, and the article has inspired me to further explore those models and how they might be applied in today's institutions. Schiappa's proposition, mentioned by Fleming, that Plato coined the term rhetoric as a reification of technical trainings for public speakers (rhetors) into a cohesive ideology was new to me, and this claim I would like to investigate further. (Will it be covered in our course of study?) I was not familiar with any in Fleming's litany of names of contemporary authors who have written on rhetoric (p. 185), though most of their pet phrases sounded familiar ("rhetorical sensitivity," "moral responsibility," "reasoned argument," "rhetorical sophisticate"), and I suspect that some conversance with these authors and their ideas would benefit my development as a scholar.
In answer to how abstruse and impenetrable I perceived Fleming's article to be, I did not see it so. Those contemporary sources that he cited with which I was not familiar he summarized lucidly and contextualized neatly, both within the larger conversation about rhetoric and within his own argument. Those sources from classical antiquity that he cited I already had some familiarity with, and they were equally well contextualized. His overall argument for the preeminence of a paideutic conception of rhetoric over anthropological and technological conceptions, and for an adapted implementation of the ancient paideutic methodology, was cogent, compelling, and highly illuminative. I admire how Fleming structured his argument by using the classical paradigm of nature, art, and practice, reinforcing the content with his form. The only part of Fleming's article that I found a bit muddled was his discussion of rhetorica utens and rhetorica docens: was he equating them with theory and practice respectively or with tekhne and dunamis respectively? I do wonder if there is perhaps an error in the Latin in the quotation from Sloane on p. 185: does Sloane mean in utrumque paratem?
Ontologically I question the presumption in seeking to impart rhetoric with "more autonomy from nature;" the practice of rhetoric as conceived by the ancients may be understood in one sense as in harmony with nature, and in another sense as the integral work of nature. I also find dubious Fleming's suggested campaign for the disambiguation of form and content via abandoning credence in le mot juste (le mot here meaning more broadly logos, the terms of expression in general): unlike most of Fleming's other points, this did not seem to be grounded in the ancient teachings on rhetoric, and I myself do not wholeheartedly concur with it.
I define retoric as the use of language to persuade or to build identity with an audience. Fleming's quotation from Cole that rhetoric "originally meant 'a speaker's or writer's self-conscious manipulation of his medium with a view to ensuring his message as favorable a reception as possible on the part of the particular audience being addressed.'" (p. 171) provides a definition that I can agree with. My first encounter with the study of rhetoric occurred in an undergraduate communication theory class when I learned about Aristotle, Kenneth Burke's theory of dramatism, and Fisher's narrative paradigm.
At this point, I would like to comment on our discussion in class about rhetoric being taught in English, Communication, and Philosophy departments. All three departments have insights into rhetoric from their particular viewpoints. I believe there is much to gain when students of rhetoric can exchange ideas across departments. Perhaps we'll be pleantly surprised that there are theories and interpretations that we can agree on.
I believe Fleming makes a good point when he writes, "To revitalize rhetorical education, we need to recapture this focus on the language user as a citizen." Too often, I think of the users of rhetoric as salesmen of ideas or products that may not really be worth selling. That is why, I then think, they have used the rhetorical devices they have used. Redefining the user of rhetoric as a "citizen" creates a more positive impression of rhetoric than the current models of contemporary politics and advertising. Here, I would like to interject an additional comment after our class discussion on Thursday: the more education and the earlier we start that education on rhetoric, the more fully we will understand what rhetoric is and how we use it everyday in our speech and writing, yielding a more positive impression of the term rhetoric."
"The purpose of ancient rhetorical education, in other words, was to shape and strengthen in its students certain ethically framed, action-oriented, intellectual capacities," Fleming writes. (p, 180)
From my limited perspective on classical rhetoric, I found the discussion of anthropological and technical rhetoric difficult to understand. "Fleming's sentence on page 177 - "Seen thus, rhetoric is an artifical means for producing natural discourse" - is especially confusing to me.
As far as it went, I am persuaded by Fleming’s view of what contemporary rhetorical education should look like, especially his concept of integrating theory and practice. University studies are far too academic; we do too much training and far too little development of students as citizens of the larger community. Integrating theory and practice is crucial to teaching both critical thinking and citizenship. Albuquerque is very fortunate to have a high school that focuses on service learning and college preparation (my daughter is a student there), and I would love to see the same kind of program at the elementary school level. Fleming writes that in order to “revitalize rhetorical education, we need to recapture this focus on the language user as citizen.” Yes! And, like Quintilian, I think this program should be life-long, and begin early.
“‘Rhetoric’ is a weapon in the postmodern war against grammar, logic, and science” (170), is an interesting idea I found in the Flemming article. I’m not sure I understand it, however. My take on this issue would fall into the idea of paradigm, meaning any given person sees reality in a slightly different way, and this perception dictates what is true for that person. Thus, everyone acts through rhetoric, or persuasion, to try and get other people to see how things work in their reality, or perception. For example, I could use my rhetoric to debunk another person’s rhetoric if I could merely convince them that my way of thinking (and my way of presenting the information, thus using persuasion) was superior and correct. But, their own rhetoric would be an opposing force in this act. Either that, or I am totally misunderstanding, which is a definite possibility.
One part that he was dead on was the overall confusion between ‘little’ and ‘big’ rhetoric. When to use which, how to explain it? I have struggled, as others have, in how to teach it to my Freshman English students. And what is the point of learning the ‘Big’ when maybe it is unlearnable or ungraspable because the virtue of its size, while ‘Little’ when taught as techniques with practical applications is manageable- but incomplete.
But I wonder if is ‘Big’ so unteachable? We cannot hope to teach all there is (or learn) in dance or music or art, yet we can teach awareness, consciousness, and a fair appreciation for the scope within these fields. I liked on his points of Paideutic Rhetoric, Fleming quotes Isocrates and Quintilian,'the body must be assisted by continual practice, self control, diet and above all by nature.' Fleming compares the study of rhetoric to 'learning to be a gymnast, musician, or dancer.'
To do this lifelong training is needed and the ultimate goal is one that rhetoric is 'internalized'- as in dance- the difference between someone who dances and a dancer. I still am uncertain of all that the study of rhetoric contains, but I can certainly tell it is vast and includes the study all of its extensive definitions. Like Bharata Natyam, a classical Indian dance form I study, the definition is just the tip of the iceberg, underneath contains language, culture, context, history, technique, application and so much more.
Rhetoric isn’t just the skill/art of persuasion. It is the development of the student from absorber of knowledge to producer of knowledge. I have always approached education from a social justice perspective. It has always been a major goal in my classes to get students to think for themselves and to be critical of information handed to them. On page 178 in the article Fleming writes about rhetoric being, “a course of study, one incorporating theory and practice but subordinating both to the moral and intellectual development of the student, who is seen primarily as a future citizen in a community of free and equal citizens.” This definition of rhetoric resonates the most with me.
What rings true to me in Fleming’s article? Well, I agree with the quote by Erasmus (pg. 185), that versatility and complexity of mind, achieved through “…resources of language and skill in argumentative procedures…” protect against “…the educated man’s gravest pitfall, that narrowness of mind which, in Erasmus’s lexicon as well as in ours is called dogmatism.” I think narrow-mindedness is the primary cause of most of our problems in modern society, and in my experience, people with a love of language and a love of learning tend to avoid that pitfall; however, it is not foolproof—after all, no amount of rhetoric can erase individuality.
What I find abstruse or impenetrable is that I don’t know much about any of the many experts Fleming quotes, or about the rhetoricians who originally created these theories, practices, systems, etc. I would like to say that Fleming is oversimplifying things, trying to turn a complex subject into a three-part list and narrowly defining the beliefs of the Sophists, among others. But I don’t know enough about what they believed to really argue that. What I can say is that I don’t agree with Fleming's approach. Yes, it would be great if rhetoric were taught more effectively and earlier; however, I don’t agree with Fleming’s distillation of rhetoric into 3 separate concepts. What I see is a continuum spanning different levels of understanding of and different theories about the same idea. Yes, the theoretical, sophistic concepts of rhetoric and language being intrinsically linked to human knowledge are far away on the spectrum from the teaching of a system to help students become better communicators. But I think that trying to limit the study of rhetoric to one spot on the spectrum is to suggest that all students have equal interest and aptitude in the subject. I think most students would benefit from some instruction in how to communicate more effectively, and I think many students are already getting that in English 101 and 102 classes. I also think that rhetoric makes an attractive basis for a liberal education. But the reality of our society is that many students now attend universities to study a specialized field that will allow them to go on to a specialized career. And we need dentists and engineers and nurses and architects. Does everyone really need a liberal education? Yes, it would be great if our society were made up of liberally educated, introspective citizens who took their civic responsibilities seriously, but I think it is unrealistic to expect that that can be achieved in a society as large and as diversified as ours. Sadly, we have outgrown democracy.
Sorry to come late to the party, so to speak. Paideia troubled me, as does all of the assertions of greater moral fiber through the study of words. I understand, I think, the gist of the claim; in a highly oral culture, the word is always backed up by the ethics of the speaker. In this kind of context, teaching virtue is an important part of teaching the verbiage, hence Isocrates (and to some degree, Fleming's) emphasis on the behavior as a counterpoint or emphasis to the words. He (Isocrates) seems to be quite fond of arguments from logic and ethics (logos and ethos), and Fleming appears to have bought this, to a great degree.
However, it creates a troubling problem for people in a highly symbolic or literate society (which, to my mind, the US is); how does one approach an argument meant to use the character of the speaker as a measure of the message in a culture where the message can be removed from the speaker such that I might never have to meet the speaker to hear the message, or what little information I have of the speaker is garnered fourth, fifth or sixth hand? I suppose that teaching, to some degree, offers a chance to observe the speaker and the message, but this kind of case is not the entire class of opportunities in which rhetoric is learned, utilized or observed.
Moreover, I worry about leaving moral choices in the hands of teachers, instead of insisting that the individual is responsible for moral and civic behavior.
Color me a sophist, I guess.
The following is an excerpt from my response paper from last week:
While reading the Fleming article I had many questions but the area I was most interested in was the discussion regarding big and little rhetoric. The idea that English departments consider little rhetoric to be ‘first year course of written composition” and big rhetoric to mean “a power that ranges across the entire domain of human discourse” seemed to conclude that teaching young writers the value of words, argumentation, writing skills and persuasion is an unimportant task, or at least one that isn't valued by soicety.
I was also interested in the comment that anthropological rhetoric is “independent of and prior to human agency”(175) The concept of agency can be a complex one, but I’m unclear of its relation to or independence from rhetoric. I’m continuing to consider this idea of rhetoric and its relation to agency. The three different types of rhetoric; anthropological, technological and paideutic rhetoric are interesting breakdowns and I think they all help define the values and purpose of rhetoric in society, education fields and it’s place in reality.
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