Concern about the “barriers” and “fragmentation”
of English lurks behind this essay, as it does behind an article Amy J.
Devitt recently published on rhetorical and literary theories of genre.
In her introduction, Devitt raises an issue critical for the future of
our field: “whether we in English studies can hang together topically—that
is, whether we can see ourselves as sharing a common object of study.”
If we can, Devitt writes, “then a greater argument can be made that we
in English should work to maintain our connections, for our different methodologies
and questions can complement and contribute to one another’s research and
teaching.” But if we can’t—if the “different subdisciplines of English”
have “no more in common with one another than do the studies of history
and literature, or philosophy and composition”—then “the question of whether
English constitutes a discipline is strictly a political question . . .
answerable in terms of political expediency or public perception more than
in terms of disciplinarity” (Devitt 696).
For quite some time, I’ve been thinking about the lack of a common “intellectual
pursuit” that gives rise to the concerns in the first paragraph, particularly
the “gulf” between composition and literature, what it means for the future
of English studies, and whether (to adapt Devitt’s phrasing) faculty in
composition and literature share a common object of study and teaching.
Recently, my thinking has been influenced by Gerald Graff’s assertion that
since literary criticism is “an extension of the general field of rhetoric
and argumentation,” an “implicit commitment to teaching argumentation”
potentially “binds literature and composition teachers together” in a way
that “can bridge the notorious gulf between literary and composition studies”
(329).
"I
hoped my work would . . . show that argument is such a compelling area
of agreement among literature and composition faculty that it can serve
as an intellectual center for English studies."
This idea—that “implicit commitment to teaching argumentation” might “bridge
the notorious gulf between literary and composition studies”—struck my
imagination. So as I began a sabbatical research project in 1999, I hoped
my work would verify Graff’s statement and show that argument is such a
compelling area of agreement among literature and composition faculty that
it can serve as an intellectual center for English studies. My research
sprawled over a range of subjects (diverse definitions of rhetoric, instances
of literary scholarship and pedagogy, contrasting views of argument, professional
motivations and behavior of faculty members) and ultimately brought me
to more modest conclusions than I had hoped for when I started—imaginings
about argument as an intellectual center for English studies that should
be clear by the end of this essay. But before I start working toward that
point, I should address the underlying premise that literary study is “an
extension of the general field of rhetoric and argumentation.”
Graff, there, fuses “rhetoric” and “argumentation” in a way that might
seem to make my project (at least that part of it dealing with conceptual
agreement among literature and composition faculty) a study in the obvious.
After all, argument is a key element of rhetoric, and rhetoric
is a cross-over term common in literary study. Decades ago, for instance,
M. H. Abrams wrote that “[t]he perspectives, much of the basic vocabulary,
and many of the characteristic topics of pragmatic criticism originated
in the classical theory of rhetoric” (14). Rhetoric is “probably
the oldest form of ‘literary criticism’ in the world” (205), wrote Terry
Eagleton a quarter century later. And six years after that, Jonathan
Culler described rhetoric as a source of integration for English and noted
that such different theorists as Eagleton and Paul de Man “have proposed
that literary studies be reconceived as (or give way to) an expanded rhetoric”
(118).
But the complexity of rhetoric, which includes far more than argument,
frustrates this too-easy approach to unity in our field. Consider, for
instance, some words on the subject in J. Hillis Miller’s “The Function
of Rhetorical Study at the Present Time.” The essay says that “the
development of integrated programs in reading well and in writing well
is the major challenge to our profession,” and Miller advances rhetorical
study as “the key to this integration” (93). At the same time, the
essay offers the following comment about rhetoric, “a two branched discipline
ever since the Greeks”:
It
would oversimplify to say that the study of rhetoric as persuasion belongs
to expository writing while the study of figurative language belongs to
programs in literature. Nevertheless, the relative emphases go in
those directions. (96-97)
Rather
than urge unity around common concerns, this passage implies a reason—grounded
in rhetoric itself—to have different emphases in literature and composition
instruction. This out-of-context snippet from Miller’s essay suggests the
difficulty of trying to see rhetoric, broadly conceived, as an effective
common ground for scholarship and teaching in literary and composition
studies. For as John Schilb has noted, “[w]hereas composition theory tends
to follow Aristotle, linking rhetoric with persuasion, poststructuralist
literary theory has often followed Paul de Man, seeing rhetoric as the
destabilizing interplay of tropes” (97).
"And
what of the “implicit commitment to teaching argumentation” . .
. that Graff believes has the potential to bring literature and composition
faculty together? This, my research suggests, may provide the strongest
evidence of argument’s potential as common ground among literature and
composition faculty."
That sort of dichotomy (of which my research yielded many examples) limits
the role of “rhetoric” as an intellectual center for English. But “argument”
clearly is important within literary study, in the practice of literary
scholars and often, as well, in the content of their scholarship.
As I put it in the conclusion of an unpublished essay on “Argument in Literary
Study,”
.
. . Annette Kolodny casts substantial matters of literature and theory
as arguable propositions, and . . . Jane Tompkins sees critics’
arguments
as central to the reputation of literary figures and to canon formation.
Later, Stanley Fish says that the critic’s “purpose is to persuade
the rest of us to the version of the facts he espouses,” and Steven Mailloux
writes that “theories can be defined . . . by the arguments they
make in relation to . . . competing theories.” Then Ellen Rooney
explores the “problematic of general persuasion” that she believes
“dominates American literary theory.” All this, of course, doesn’t
prove Gerald Graff’s claim that “literary criticism (including literary
theory)” is “an extension of the general field of . . . argumentation.”
But it does at least point in that direction.
And what of the “implicit commitment to teaching argumentation” (329, emphasis
added) that Graff believes has the potential to bring literature and composition
faculty together? This, my research suggests, may provide the strongest
evidence of argument’s potential as common ground among literature and
composition faculty. For argument has a special relationship to reading
and writing that can attract intellectual interest and prompt pedagogical
action from scholars and teachers in composition and literature.
In English departments across the country, of course, some rhetoric faculty
are teaching courses that stress argument, and others are pursuing writing-in-the-disciplines
work across the campus, even as some of their literature colleagues are
teaching or developing first courses that embody textbook advice such as
this from Michael Meyer’s Thinking and Writing about Literature:
Most
writing assignments in a literature course require you to persuade readers
that your thesis is reasonable and supported with evidence. Papers
that report information without comment or evaluation are simply summaries.
. . . In developing a thesis, remember that you are expected not merely
to present information but to argue a point. . . . Arguing about literature
. . . requires that you present your interpretation of a work (or a portion
of it) by supporting your thesis with clearly defined terms, ample evidence,
and a detailed analysis of relevant portions of the text. (9)
It
doesn’t take too much imagination to sense how an “argument agenda” could
bring such faculty together to work on the undergraduate curriculum for
majors and minors.
One example of such work is the sophomore course—one developed “over ten
years with the help of dedicated colleagues” (18)—that Monika Brown discusses
in the pages of the CEA Critic. Brown describes a course in
which students read and debate a range of theoretical materials and selected
literary works so that “through one another and through guided contact
with professional writing” they begin to join “today’s critical conversation”
(25). For instance, the “culminating assignment” of one unit
invites
each student to participate further in the conversation of critics by preparing,
writing, and revising with peer [and teacher] assistance a 900-to-1000
word original critical essay. The essay takes a position in a critical
debate already explored in class: whether [for example] A Doll’s
House is feminist . . . or how a film interprets Tess’s character.
The student writer . . . must formulate a position to debate, support it
with evidence from the literary work, and incorporate, respond to, and
document relevant passages from three or four critics. . . . (23)
This
approach, Brown notes, “is no radical departure from traditional classroom
practice” (23). But the “class debates and guided writing activities
offer training for the rising English major and future English teacher
as they create a classroom interpretive community” and help “make students
conscious of the diversity of modern critical views and the assumptions
that underlie modern approaches to literary analysis” (23–24).
Another example of the argument agenda at work is the course Judith Ferster
described in a paper at the 1999 CCCC meeting. The paper, “Teaching
Argument Through Literature in First Year Composition,” featured a late-in-the-semester
assignment in which students used careful reading, library research, journals,
and short writings to find an appropriate interpretative framework for
a small group of literary works and then use that framework as context
in a paper drawing on print and Internet sources as well as on the works
themselves. Behind the assignment lay the Toulmin model of argument,
with its “claims,” “reasons,” and “warrants.” Course instruction
fused argument and literature by particularizing matters of literary study
as warrants that can work to ground arguments about works of literature.
For instance:
•
“If an element of the work (e.g., a word, a pictorial image, a figure of
speech) is repeated . . . , it may be thematically important.”
•
“If every time one element appears, another is also repeated, the connection
between them (the fact that they vary together), may be thematically important.”
•
“If a work that appears on the surface to be simple can be shown to have
a deeper complexity . . . , it may be evaluated more positively than on
first viewing.”
And
argument shaped specific statements on the assignment sheet, for example:
•
“Your thesis can make a claim about the usefulness of looking at these
texts together.”
•
You should “address an audience made up of people who disagree with your
point of view.”
•
Try to “persuade your audience that you are correct or at least to open
their minds a little to your point of view.”
One motive for the class Ferster described is clear in her title—teaching
argument through literature. But Ferster also told her audience that
the approach had been developed so that the first-year writing course could
give students something required in no other general education course at
her university—experience reading and writing about literature. In
serving both of those ends, Ferster’s approach suggests that argument and
literature can work together in courses that stress thoughtful reading
of literature as well as argument’s concerns for analysis, logic, audience-awareness,
and persuasive evidence.
A different sort of example is the upper-level course James Kastely describes
in College English. This upper-level course centers on Sophocles’s
Antigone
as a way to avoid problems that Kastely sees in the way argument usually
is taught: failure to engage students adequately and productively
with positions other than their own, and resistance to the differences
that mark culture and discourse in our world (see 222–23). Kastely’s
approach is suggested by his title, “From Formalism to Inquiry: A Model
of Argument in Antigone.” He proposes teaching argument in
“a course in which argument itself is seen as problematic and hence in
need of philosophical interrogation” (223). And he sees Antigone
as an especially productive focus for instruction “because it challenges
the very possibility of argument” (224).
Over some twenty pages, Kastely works with a wide variety of sources, including
Sophocles’s play itself, to show that “[t]exts like Antigone offer
an alternative to the current teaching of argument, for they . . . offer
no easy or mechanical solutions but pose argument as a problem and offer
it for serious reflection” (239). And it isn’t necessary to unravel
Kastely’s careful and interesting argument to realize the inherent interconnection
of argument and literature in Kastely’s proposal that Antigone and
similar literary works should
be
taught
as theoretical works in argument. These works would allow us
to teach argument as a philosophical or political problem and not as a
mode of presenting evidence for purposes of justifying claims. Instead,
they would raise questions as to why arguments so often fail, and they
would open students to questions of why, given the unlikeliness of success,
someone might argue. And a course based on such texts would train students
. . . that the point of serious exchange is not to . . . seek domination
or control but to risk understandings in the hope of discovering new understandings
of themselves and others. . . . (239–40, emphasis added)
James Kastely’s article suggests how complexities of argument can be understood—and
taught—by focusing on works of literature. Judith Ferster’s effort
to phrase literary principles as “warrants” suggests that argument can
be used to help general students read perceptively and write convincingly
about works of literature. Monica Brown’s course involves majors
and minors in the persuasive give-and-take that makes “critical debate”
much more than a metaphor within literary study. Together, these
three approaches reflect a very positive intellectual and professional
interest in relationships linking reading, writing and argument—relationships
I’ve found phrased in a variety of ways:
•
Teaching writing “as a way of learning to read and reading closely as a
model of careful writing is to guide students to the discovery of the powers
of language: should that not be the chief mission of any and all
English departments?” (Berthoff 680)
•
Helping students read a literary work closely enough “to recognize that
it has an argument” because it is the “ability to recognize the argument”
that will allow them “to summarize the text and to talk or write about
it intelligently” (Marius 179–80)
•
Teaching “reading and writing as interconnected activities” by means of
which students “can conjecture a text’s . . . argument and can establish
a responsible critical dialogue with it, as well as with the text they
compose in response to it” (Salvatori 195)
•
Naming critical reading “as the center of our discipline” and “stressing
it in our teaching and writing” so that we can say “that we teach students
how to follow and conduct complex arguments” (Peltason 17).
"Both
of those things—intellectual interest in argument and willingness to carry
that interest into pedagogy—suggest argument’s potential to serve as a
common point for professional activity by scholar-teachers concerned about
undergraduate education."
Beyond intellectual and professional interest in reading, writing,
and argument, the three courses just discussed show that some faculty are
acting
on their concerns to bring argument and literature together in the undergraduate
English curriculum. Both of those things—intellectual interest in
argument and willingness to carry that interest into pedagogy—suggest argument’s
potential to serve as a common point for professional activity by scholar-teachers
concerned about undergraduate education.
Among faculty interested in perceptive reading, good writing, or effective
undergraduate education—the many scholar-teachers represented here by Brown,
Ferster, and Kastely—argument has considerable power to motivate common
priorities in teaching and scholarship. For these women and men,
argument is an intellectual center for their work as teachers and scholars.
As they do this work—collaborative curricular development among literature
and rhetoric faculty, for instance, or individual research leading to provocative
and persuasive articles—they share the intellectual and professional potential
of argument with campus colleagues as well as a wider circle of professional
colleagues who encounter their ideas in conference sessions or in the pages
of journals they read. When some of these colleagues are intrigued
or challenged by what they hear or read about that work, the circle of
scholar-teachers will expand and the level of cooperative professional
activity centered on argument will grow. And it is through this process
that I imagine argument serving as common ground for literature and composition
faculty and bringing a measure of greater unity to English studies.
That is a less definitive and optimistic conclusion than I had hoped to
reach when I began exploring the idea that “implicit commitment to teaching
argumentation” potentially “binds literature and composition teachers together”
in a way that “can bridge the notorious gulf between literary and composition
studies” (Graff 329). Or maybe I should say it is a more realistic
conclusion. For my research over the past year, and more, drove home for
me things that daily frustrate cooperation within English studies: bedrock
disagreements about the nature of English, the motivations and personal
attitudes faculty bring to professional discussions, and the way faculty
use argument in their professional lives.
Those are matters for continuing research, and maybe future articles.
And while they temper optimism, they do not invalidate the evidence that
argument, a central concern of rhetoric and of many composition faculty,
is important in literary study and in literature teaching. Many faculty
in literature and composition, then, share argument as (to adapt Devitt’s
words) a common object of study and teaching. For that reason, I
believe, “a greater argument can be made that we in English should work
to maintain our connections, for our different methodologies and questions
can complement and contribute to one another’s research and teaching” (Devitt
696).
Works
Cited
Abrams,
M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp. New York: Oxford UP, 1958.
Berlin,
James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English
Studies. Urbana: NCTE, 1996.
Berthoff,
Ann E. “Reclaiming the Active Mind.” College English
61 (July 1999): 671–80.
Brown,
Monika. “Joining the Critical Conversation in a Sophomore Literature
Class.” CEA Critic 62.1 (Fall 1999): 17–33.
Culler,
Jonathan. “Imagining Changes.” The Future of Doctoral Studies
in English. Ed. Andrea Lunsford, Helene Moglen, and James F.
Slevin. New York: MLA, 1989. 79–83.
Devitt,
Amy J. “Integrating Rhetorical and Literary Theories of Genre.” College
English 62 (July 2000): 696–718.
Eagleton,
Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1983.
Engell,
James, and David Perkins, eds. Teaching Literature: What Is Needed Now.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.
Ferster,
Judith. “Teaching Argument Through Literature in First Year Composition.”
Conference on College Composition and Communication. Atlanta.
26 March 1999. Quotations are from handouts: “Literary Argument Seen
Through Stephen Toulmin’s Terms for Informal Reasoning,” and “Writing Assignment
4: Researched Application of an Interpretive Framework to a Literary Text.”
Graff,
Gerald. “Afterword.” When Writing Teachers Teach Literature.
Ed. Art Young and Toby Fulwiler. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook,
1995.
Kastely,
James L. “From Formalism to Inquiry: A Model of Argument in
Antigone.” College English 62 (Nov. 1999): 222–41.
Lanham,
Richard. Literacy and the Survival of Humanism. New
Haven: Yale UP, 1983.
Marius,
Richard. “Reflections on the Freshman English Course.” Teaching
Literature: What Is Needed Now. Engell and Perkins 169–90.
Meyer,
Michael. Thinking and Writing about Literature. Boston:
Bedford-St.Martin’s, 1995.
Miller,
J. Hillis. “The Function of Rhetorical Study at the Present Time” ADE
Bulletin 62 (Fall 1979). Rpt. with some changes in Engell and
Perkins 87–109.
Peltason,
Timothy. “Making the Case for Literary Education.” ADE Bulletin
125 (Spring 2000): 14–19.
Said,
Edward W. “Restoring Intellectual Coherence.” MLA Newsletter
Spring 1999: 3–4.
Salvatori,
Mariolina. “The ‘Argument of Reading’ in the Teaching of Composition.”
Argument
Revisited; Argument Revised. Ed. Barbara Emmel, Paula Resch,
and Deborah Tenney. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996. 181–97.
Schilb,
John. “Composing Conflicts: A Writing Teacher’s Perspective.” Teaching
the Conflicts: Gerald Graff, Curricular Reform, and the Culture Wars.
Ed. William E. Cain. New York: Garland, 1994. 95–108.
Scholes,
Robert. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as
a Discipline. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.
Seitz,
James E. Motives for Metaphor: Literacy, Curricular Reform, and
the Teaching of English. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1999.
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