On Rhetoric as Epistemic

Response Prompts

1. In what ways might social epistemic rhetoric respond to the challenges posed by postmodernism?

2. Of the many differences between speech and writing Emig lists, the first two are “(1) writing is learned behavior; talking is natural, even irrepressible behavior” (123) and “(2) Writing then is an artificial process; talking is not” (124).
3. In “Responses” (the follow up to the Bartholmae/Elbow debate), Bartholomae argues that “since the point of criticism is to ask questions of the things that seem beyond question, to ask students to see the natural as artificial, it cannot come from within. It will not happen on its own, but only when prompted” (87).
4. In what ways do each authors’ comments reinforce the speech/writing binary? OR, How is seeing thought/communication as either “artificial” or “natural” useful?

3. Emig concedes the “less useful distinction” is to see listening/reading as receptive functions and to see speaking/writing as productive functions. She cautions against equating “receptive” with “passive,” instead arguing that reading and listening are “vital, construing” acts. What might Elbow say about writing as a listening act?

4. James Berlin maintains social-epistemic rhetoric is the best system for teaching writing because “social-epistemic rhetoric views knowledge as an arena of ideological conflict: there are no arguments from transcendent truth since all arguments arise in ideology. It thus inevitably supports economic social, political, and cultural democracy” (20). He argues that since teachers cannot get away from ideology, they need to recognize it and use it in the classroom. From your position as a teacher, what are the issues surrounding ideology in classroom praxis?

5. more to come…

By Laurence Musgrove, on Flickr and at The Illustrated Professor

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