Last class we talked extensively about the different camps of rhetcomp studies, and the two camps that interested me the most were the Fishian structuralists vs. The Sociological Historicists.  Or, to simplify these terms even more, People Who Think We  Should  Teach Only Fundamentals of English and Everyone  Else Who Thinks English Should be Taught as Part and Parcel to a Grander Sociological Examination.

The aspect of this conversation that I found most intriguing was how antagonistic the two camps felt toward one another.  Fish is especially critical of the Historicists because he seems to think that the sociological aspects of this camp are trumping their primary responsiblity of rhetcomp studies, which is to teach students how to write.  Meanwhile, the Historicists are (perhaps understandably) perturbed by Fish’s condescending, holier-than-though tone.  After all, situating English instruction within a grander sociological framework can be a useful tool for persuading the interest of students within that sociological framework.

From my point of view, neither of these two schools of thought has a corner on the market.  The helpfulness of both camps depends on both the skillset of the teacher as well as the interest level of the students.  Some teachers more versed in a grander sociological background will, no doubt, be better at tailoring their lesson plans around this skillset.  Meanwhile, teachers like myself who are weaker in Grand Historical Backgrounds and more interested/versed in the fundamentals of English, can use the Fishian approach to teaching English with greater degrees of success.

However,these are not mutually exclusive paradigms for approaching the instruction of English.  I can foresee  myself using both skillsets depending on the day.  Teachers would be wise to mix and match from all of the different schools of Rhetcomp; intellectual promiscuity is the road to a more satisfying and unifying intellectual discourse and will certainly result in the highest utilization of the broadest level of skillsets for both the teacher and the students.

I was reading through some of the Enculturation articles, and I couldn’t seem to get the Sharon Crowley idea out of my head that, “[The] history of close ties between rhetoric and composition ended in the late-nineteenth century… when ‘composition’ acquired a new meaning and a new praxis…  given it by the Arnoldian humanists who invented the first-year requirement…”

That’s giving a lot of power to one mid-nineteenth century critic and those who would choose to follow.  Or, in Crowley’s words, those who would “kill off the vestiges of rhetorical study that remained in American colleges at the time.”  Why is “kill off the vestiges of” her preferred word choice?  Why not “changed” or “overshadowed” the former methods of rhetorical study?  Why give your enemies the power to take down the classical rhetoricians?  And they are, clearly, her enemies.  But she isn’t a rhetorical purist, either, falling back on the work of Charles Sears Baldwin, a late nineteenth early twentieth century rhetorician, in lieu of the ancient Greek or Roman writers.

It seems as though she is less concerned with the general removal of rhetoric from composition, and more concerned with the resulting methodology.  Sounds like a legitimate concern to me, and by the end of her piece I can’t help but be on board, for the most part, with her argument, but I feel that there is still room for “intellectual sophistication” and rhetoric in my composition class.