Current Traditionalism & Modes of Discourse
Prefatory Notes & General Longwindedness…
Composition theorists love triangles, triads, and all things — it’s a magic number. Therborn’s ideological questions ask what is good, what exists, and what is possible. Bitzer’s rhetorical situation must have an exigence, audience, and constraints. Rhetorical appeals are ethos, pathos, and logos. Kinneavy’s communication triangle — comprised of encoder, decoder, and reality — illustrate the interrelationship of various elements responsible for the meaning-making attendant to the exchange of symbols (or discourse).
The communication triangle, which is well known to readers of Abrams, Kinneavy, and other scholars, has been a useful tool for us in examining the philosophical assumptions of the current-traditional paradigm. We believe that an adequate conception of rhetoric must account in some reasonable way for the elements in the triangle: reality, the writer, the audience, and the discourse. We are also convinced that an adequate method of instruction in writing must give a prospective writer a conceptual framework that encourages exploration of each of the elements in the communication triangle in the attempt to bring forth discourse.
As Berlin and Inkster demonstrate with current-traditionalism, using writer, audience, reality (and text/symbol/discourse) is a way to better understand a theory’s ideological position/s — a theory’s stance on what is good, what exists, and what is possible. In fact, Berlin and Inkster are such a good model that we will use a similar method to examine all the theory camps.
As I said in class, we’ll be working backwards this week and next, from the 1980’s discussions of product-focused writing (current-traditionalism; modes of discourse) in week 3 to the recorded genesis of the writing-as-process movement in week 4. As a preface to product-oriented writing (current-traditionalism), this week, Paulo Freire provides a nice introductory critique of a product-oriented educational system where students are merely empty vessels into which education not only dumps “knowledge,” but attendant ideologies, hegemony, and hierarchy, spitting out subjects, cogs in the machine.
There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes “the practice of freedom,” the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
Robert Connors’s heard the death knell of current-traditional modes of discourse in 1981, but even a few years later, Crowley wasn’t so sure. And she’s right. Current traditionalism isn’t dead (as evidenced by the numerous editions of the four current-traditional textbooks Berlin and Inkster reviewed — Longman last published an edition of The Practical Stylist in 2005!). Perhaps those winds of change Hairston mentioned still have some blowing to do.
Required Readings:
Assignments:
- If you haven’t yet requested alternate email access for the readings and/or selected an alternate email/WP account for your login to this website, please do so at your earliest convenience. (If you’re happy with all of your access and accounts, you can safely ignore)
- Please take a look at my list of ideas for “tech/teaching tools.” You’re not required to do anything, but I’d like to know if you’re interested in a particular tool, want to work with someone from a different section, have a suggestion that isn’t on the list… etc. Please feel free to comment on/edit the shared GDoc to keep everything in one place.
- Do some posting. You’re not required to post every week, but you do have to post ~20 times before the end of the semester. Now is a good time to start.
In Class:
- Tech (Teach) Tool Talk (should I assign? do you want to select?)
- Paulo Freire: Patron Saint of critical (and radical) pedagogy
- The mythos of pedagogical/ideological neutrality and the dangers false belief
- Taxonomy tables, possible systems of classification
- Current-traditionalism… dead or alive?
- Modes of discourse… what are they good for?
- Decoder, Encoder, Text: Who makes the meaning?
- Rhetoric & Ideology slides (prezi)
- CT Visual
- Remediation (slides)
- “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” in Chronicle of Higher Education
Recommended Readings
TBA (Forget about required readings… throwing readings off even this list hurts my heart… still deciding which readings to toss into obscurity… does anyone even read this far down?)