Whose Aristotle?: a dialogic reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric in rhetoric and composition studies

Abstract

This dissertation addresses notions of disciplinary authority in rhetoric and composition studies, particularly how textual authority configures confrontations with Aristotle's Rhetoric. I argue that textbooks incorporating Aristotle's theories and translations of the Rhetoric are more powerful and influential than theoretical scholarly genres because of their dissemination and consumption by audiences both within the discipline and outside of it. Textbooks and translations challenge the attitudes toward orthodox hierarchies that privilege scholarly texts on Aristotle--commentaries, theoretical treatises, and histories. Adapting Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of "dialogue" in chapter 1, I offer a dialogic architectonics for secondary speech genres that are used within academic environments as a way to explore the multiple representations of Aristotle's theories in the discipline. Chapter 2 illustrates how hidden polemics--internal tensions among the writer's, the hero's, and others' words--are discovered in what appear to be monologic and privileged scholarly texts. The scholarship of William M. A. Grimaldi, James L. Kinneavy, and George A. Kennedy represent three distinct and competing interpretations of Aristotle's theories of rhetoric--philosophical, technical, sophistical. In chapter 3, I contend that Edward P. J. Corbett's textbook, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, operates as a chronotope of praxis on two levels: one for students promoting the importance of higher education to societal good and one for the discipline making the teaching and studying of rhetoric good for the academy. Employing Bakhtin's notion of carnival, I maintain in chapter 4 that Kennedy's translation, Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, and Sharon Crowley's textbook, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, promote the status quo of higher-education, while they simultaneously compete with and undermine the privileged scholarly genres of the academy. Chapter 5 addresses three concerns about the monologic tendencies of textbooks and translations: disciplinary authority that addresses issues of canonicity, institutional authority that is reflected in the classroom hegemony, and pedagogical authority that resides in the teacher's role. Bakhtin's answerability offers teachers a means to address these authorities through its bi-directional levels, answering for the self and answering to society.