The field in which I work is known as “rhetoric and composition” or “composition and rhetoric”, depending on whom you ask. However, if you ask me, rhetoric is the more important of the two.
Traditionally, rhetoric was concerned with spoken discourse, but even in the Hellenistic era, its application to written discourse was obvious. (Plato’s written dialogues are rhetorical masterpieces, even though they disparage both writing and rhetoric!) The Western rhetorical tradition has always been concerned with writing as a part of oratory. Speeches, after all, are usually written before they are delivered. When basic writing instruction became a collegiate concern in the late 1800s, it was predominantly rhetoricians, such as Fred Newton Scott, who led the field.
What today we call “composition,” however, does not have such ancient roots; composition was born out of necessity in 20th century America. As more and more non-traditional students (veterans, working class, racial minorities) began pursuing higher education, teachers of writing began to develop new discourses and theories targeted to the concerns of this non-traditional student population. Because “composition” came of age in the Civil Rights Era, many of its scholars saw their work not solely as a matter of “teaching writing” but also of addressing issues of civil rights and social justice. The field of composition is thus not about writing per se; it’s about using the writing classroom as a site for giving voice to traditionally marginalized voices and working toward a particular socalist vision of society.
Today, of course, there is a wide array of viewpoints and research agendas within “rhetoric and composition.” The process movement attempted to bring psychology and empirical research to the study of writing; expressivism brought us the ideas of “voice” and “free writing”; there are rhetoricians of science who look through a rhetorical lens at the texts produced by scientists; scholars of classical rhetoric continue to look at and appropriate the works of the Sophists, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian; visual and digital rhetoricians look at what writing and persuasion mean in the computer age.
In my opinion, however, the current field owes its being not to the composition movement of the middle 20th century but to the rhetorical tradition that stretches across all of Western civilization, back to the Hellenes and the Romans. Writing is an integral part of our field today, but nonetheless, it is the rhetorical tradition that gives our field its richness, ethos, and historical bearing. Plato and Aristotle addressed rhetoric in their works; Cicero was a master of it; St. Augustine taught it and preached it; Nietszche began his career lecturing on it; Joshua Chamberlain, of Gettysburg fame, was a professor of it; it was part of the medieval trivium and remained a staple of every educational curriculum until the 1900s. It has ties with philosophy, linguistics, stylistics, and semiotics. In other words, to be a rhetorician is to be part of a long and valuable tradition built on the ubiquitous role of creative invention, argumentation, and persuasion in the public arena. It is concerned with but, unlike “composition”, not limited to the needs of a college writing classroom.
What’s more, the rhetorical tradition provides tools with which we can approach a variety of semiotic systems; it is not limited only to written texts, the way composition is. (Compositionists will deny that they are so limited; however, I would argue that wherever they move beyond writing they necessarily move toward rhetoric.) As we enter the 21st century, a time of quickened semiotic change and hybridity of language and media, I think that the rhetorical tradition will continue to prove useful while it also proves itself, as it has proved itself for millenia, to be open to its own productive evolution. And as the field continues to look beyond alphabetic texts to study a wide array of objects, bodies, and practices as rhetorically meaningful, it is necessary that we draw on and advance the tools offered to us by the silva rhetoricae.
Discussion
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