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last.updated 10.21.07

 


Return to the Classics

Purpose

In the 1960s, as we have read in Berlin, scholars looked to classical rhetorical theory as a corrective to current traditional rhetoric's influence on composition pedagogy. We will examine the implications of this movement.

Before Class

  • Read Aristotle from The Rhetoric [BB]
  • Read Cicero from De Oratore [BB]
  • Read Bazerman & Russell "The Rhetorical Tradition and Specialized Discourses" [BB]
  • Read Lauer "Heuristics and Composition" [College Composition and Communication, 21.4]
  • Read Kinneavy "Translating Theory into Practice in Teaching Composition" [BB]
  • Submit PAB #4 to the Blackboard Discussion Board by the beginning of class
  • Note  Today is the last day to drop classes

FreeWrite

How would you distinguish the classical rhetoricians from the common sense realists? How would a writing pedagogy grounded in various classical rhetorical theories differ from one influenced by the realists? How would you negotiate this difference considering the realists were, to various degrees, influenced by some of the classicists?

Questions and Discussion (by Laura Bowles)

  • Given Lauer's 1970 assertion "Freshman English will never reach the status of a respectable intellectual discipline unless both its theorizes and its practitioners break out the the ghetto" (396), and given that composition as a discipline has looked to cognitive psychology to inform current theory, why do you think teaching composition is still ghettoized to the degree that it is?
  • Who's school would you rather send your children to: Plato's, Isocrates's, Aristotle's, or Cicero's? Why? At which school would you prefer to teach? Why?
  • What lasting influences do you see in rhetorical pedagogy from the classical period? From Cicero? From Aristotle?
  • What is the place of epistemology in today's study of rhetoric? Do we fall closest to the model of Isocrates, of Plato, or of Aristotle? (Kinneavy, 73).
  • Kinneavy says of the Sophists: "Sophists generally did not accept the epistemological basis of theoria, a level of certainty in knowledge, and opted instead for a degree of probability as the best that a man could attain in his political and legal activities" (70). Because of this, Sophists are often accused of being relativists. Is this a fair assessment?