Getting Meta: My dissertation and the Rhet/Comp/Lit Interface
[Note: Rereading an old post on changing my dissertation topic, I found the following, which was buried in the comments section of the above post. I wrote it, forgot about it, and now, after rereading it, I've decided to bring it up out of comments for the purpose of rumination. What's posted here has been revised and expanded.]
It may just be that I want to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak, mixing medieval and contemporary rhetorical and compositional practices and theories, and in doing so engage the rhetoric-composition-literature divide (or interface, as I like to think of it) and the noetics and practices of oral, chirographic, print, and digital culture. Sweeping, yes, but the new focus touches on all of these issues to varying degrees. It’s not the study of the conceptions and practices of memory in Anglo-Saxon England, which is the topic I started out with, but it is where my study of memory has taken me. Certainly, it’s not a journey most people would have made, but I was already used to seeing connections between my work with medieval literature and my work with rhetoric and composition through my work with orality-literacy studies and the media ecologies of oral, chirographic, print, and digital cultures.
As a scholar, I want to exist somewhere in the middle of all of this, and this dissertation better reflects that. For me, it’s all strongly connected, both the old topic and the new one. The idea here is not to mine literature for rhetorical figures or to use literature as examples of model writing, but to think of literature as alternative ways of knowing, representing, and practicing what we do. In doing so I acknowledge the historical connections among rhetoric, literature, and composition that predate the romantic fetishization of literature. For me, this means considering literature as a subset of rhetoric as Vitanza asks us to,1 while at the same time recognizing that rhetoric itself emerged out of, or developed alongside, poetics.2 My goal is not to replicate medieval practices of composition and medieval ways of knowing, but to use those ideas to think about our own practices differently, to use their ideas to help use (re)create new analogies and metaphors, to imagine what contemporary versions of medieval memory practices might be like and, most importantly, to use their conceptions and practices to think differently about how rhetorical memory applies to us. In other words, to borrow a term from science fiction studies, I want to use the cognitive estrangement we have with medieval rhetorical culture productively.
And speaking of science fiction studies, Samuel R. Delaney ends his essay “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’–or, the Conscience of the King” with a reference to a historian who, after spending two years reading science fiction, returned to Jane Austen, his favorite author of “serious” literature. The historian had this to say about his experience of reading Austen after reading so much science fiction: “Before, I used to read novels to tell me how the world really was at the time they were written. This time, I read the book asking myself what kind of world would have had to exist for Austen’s story to have taken place–which, incidentally, is completely different from the world as it actually was back then. I know. It’s my period.” Delaney doesn’t refer to it as such, because the term didn’t exist when he wrote the essay, but we now call this “science fiction thinking.”
Science fiction thinking means being open to interpretive spaces normally closed off to us. For instance, one of the most famous examples of science fiction thinking comes from the same Delaney essay: “Then her world exploded.” In a Jane Austen novel, the interpretive space around that sentence is quite different than the interpretive space around it in, say, a novelization of Star Wars, Episode IV. In science fiction, “Then her world exploded” can be interpreted metaphorically or it can be taken literally. Boom. The planet Alderon is gone. It’s taken as a given by science fiction types that science fiction thinking works backward, as it did for Delaney’s historian, permeating all aspects of our lives. For what it’s worth, while I’d largely stopped reading SF when I started graduate school, I started up again shortly before I turned towards rhetorical memory. I’m not saying there’s a connection between these two events, but I’m not saying that there’s not. It’s something that’s occurred to me as I’m writing this.
That’s enough wild speculation from me for now.
Any way, in my attempt to understand rhetorical memory, I don’t want to look to the past–to medieval rhetoric and medieval literature–to understand what the world was like. Rather, I look to the past in order to think what the world could be like now.
- Vitanza, Victor J. “Critical Sub/Versions of the History of Philosophical Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 6.1 (1987): 41-66. While Vitanza regards literary and cultural criticism as part of rhetoric as well (43), I would suggest that they are part of hermeneutic, which is rhetoric’s counterpart. I should note that I do not consider rhetoric and hermeneutic as two sides of the same coin, but, instead, as on the same side of the coin with logic and dialectic as their opposite. [↩]
- See, for instance, Jeffrey Walker’s Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity. And, as I touched on in my CW 2007 presentation on Walter Ong’s digital turn, in his unfinished book Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization, Ong discusses the Greek terms logos and mythos, and suggests that while we translate both to mean “word” or “speech,” logos also means “computation, reckoning, account of money handled” and mythos also means “tale” and “story.” Logos, Ong explains, with its Indo-European root leg- is based on “a spatialized, exteriorized visual and/or tactile metaphor,” and mythos, with its Indo-European root meudh or mudh, ”signifies to reflect, think over, consider – activities interior to the human being.” Noting that both Plato and Aristotle “undertook to oppose this synonymous use of mythos and logos and to draw careful distinctions between the two terms,” Ong suggests that this split leads to logic and dialectic on the one hand and rhetoric and poetics on the other. It’s no wonder then, that with the Neo-Aristotelian valorization of philosophic rhetoric as an alternative to Current-Traditionalism, which was itself closely tied, I believe, to New Criticism, that contemporary composition studies is so skeptical of making connections between composition studies and literary studies. In this same way it’s no surprise that Vitanza, who embraces the Sophists and wants sophistic histories of rhetoric to counter the “tragedy of ‘Philosophic Rhetoric’” (45), embraces poetics and literary criticism as part of rhetoric. [↩]
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Twitter Feed- Four separate sets of plans canceled on me this weekend. With few friends in this state, that's an epic failure.
- One class down and one to go.
- The Call of Cthulhu in Under 2 Minutes http://nblo.gs/7sqXb
“For me, this means considering literature as a subset of rhetoric as Vitanza asks us to”
And Wayne Booth and Winston Weathers and some others.
You have a little old school rhetorical scholarship going here. Mixing it up with lit. Too bad others can’t see such benefits.
Yeah, I am working in an old tradition and one that does have some legitimacy, which makes it all the weirder in some of the reactions I get. It wasn’t part of my plan as I started out, but I’ve found myself collecting arguments against the narrow definition of composition studies such as Vitanza’s statement above. In part it is a defense mechanism, but it’s also becoming central to my argument: the narrow conceptions of composition studies tend to define the discipline in such a way as to exclude memory. Actually, it’s probably better to say that they tend to focus attention away from issues that are vital for developing a fully realized conception of memoria.