Self, society, and text in rhetoric and composition theory since 1970

Abstract

I attempt in this study to explicate and critique the theory and practice of composition: the intellectual suppositions about what writing is, what purpose it should serve in the university curriculum, and how we ought to teach it to undergraduates. My central argument is that since about 1970 composition studies has attempted to re-incorporate the vitalist individualism of earlier decades (which James Berlin calls the rhetoric of expressionism) into two formal schemes: (1) a cognitivist "process" theory of writing, and (2) a radically pragmatic, "epistemic" theory of discourse, generically referred to here by Kenneth Bruffee's term, "social constructionism." By accident or design, both methodologies have avoided issues of cultural politics raised by capitalism's structural inequality in the distribution of wealth, power, and literacy. By presenting writing as an objectified, rule-governed technique that can be taught and learned as a step-by-step process without reference to the cultural context that gives it meaning, those who study and teach writing have ignored or denied the social semiotics of power relationships and the inter- and trans-textual nature of all written discourse. Chapters 1-3 trace the emergence of cognitivism, particularly in the work of Janet Emig, Lee Odell, and Linda Flower, which, I argue, served to translate self-reflexive expressionism into a quasi-scientific discourse supposedly "above" politics. Recent developments in social-epistemic discourse theory are treated in Chapters 4-5, where I try to show that "social constructionism" teaches a rhetoric of conformity to institutional discourse as the authorized repository of "knowledge." Chapter 5 maintains that current pedagogy "privatizes" rhetoric by encouraging students both to nurture a privileged inner "voice" and to practice a "rhetoric of consensus" in the public sphere. Finally, in Chapters 6-7, I sketch my vision of a "cultural turn" in composition studies, a "rhetoric of difference," based on semiotic and poststructural criticism of cultural texts, which would displace both the self-referentiality of personal experience (in either expressionist or cognitivist guise) as well as the narrow vocationalism that equates writing with conformity to social and institutional conventions.