Lauer, Janice. Invention in Rhetoric and Composition. “Issues Over the Nature, Purpose, and Epistemology of Rhetorical Invention in the Twentieth Century.” Charles Bazerman, editor. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, the WAC clearinghouse, 2004.
Lauer, Janice M. Invention in Rhetoric and Composition. West Lafayette, Ind. : Parlor Press ; [Fort Collins, Colo.] : WAC Clearinghouse, c2004., 2004. Reference guides to rhetoric and composition. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.gsu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat05756a&AN=gsu.9920557593402952&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Larson, Richard. “Problem Solving, Composing, and Liberal Education.” College English, Vol. 33, No. 6. March 1972.
Larson v. Berthoff 1972
“Problem-solving, Composing, and Liberal Education” vs. “From Problem Solving to a Theory of Imagination”
Larson:
“Today we recognize that the act of composing is fundamentally the making of choices. The writer must decide, from among available alternatives, what data to include in his piece, what design to follow, what “voice” to assume, what style to adopt. In practicing composition, the student learns to anticipate and evaluate the consequences of adopting each rhetorical alternative—in other words, he learns to make wiser choices. And, since the student can hardly be said to choose among alternatives if he is not aware that there are alternatives, he learns to be aware of the range of options open to him—to see what might be said, to see the possible ways of arranging material, to see how different kinds of language establish different tones, and so on. Many teachers, indeed, build their courses on the conviction that their task is to help students discover the options available where writing is called for, and learn how to choose among those options” (628-629).
**The orientation of “material” that the students must become aware of (the “available means of communication” ala Aristotle) is outside of the student, somewhere in “the rhetorical triangle,” I guess.
For Berthoff, the “material” students become aware of is inside her own mind. In fact it isn’t material at all; it’s action. Berthoff’s point of view stems from the philosophy that students already possess the skills and abilities to compose, to make meaning. All people have this.
This is one of the clearest distinctions between between “process” orientations I’ve stumbled upon. Berthoff would recognize, I think, Larson as a ‘positivist’ in the way his view values outside-the-mind elements as what students need to become aware of, as though there is an objective array of “material” out there comprising “the available means of communication”): “data,” “voices” and “styles” are like costumes in the sense Larson evokes here. They are not created they are “assumed” and “adopted,” as though they already exist out there somewhere. The “possible ways” of arranging materials suggest there exists a fixed number of arrangements “out there.”
What’s amazing to me is how clear the distinction is, now that I’ve grasped it, between “problem-solving” and “problem-posing,” which is the orientation (inward, towards human meaning-making as natural ability).
Larson writes: “This kind of choosing, I believe, is one instance of a distinctive intellectual and imaginative activity in human beings. That activity has a more or less technical name, “problem-solving,” and it has distinctive values for the rhetorician quite apart from the perspective it gives a student on the act of composing. I would like here to identify some of the special features of “problem-solving” as a technique of inquiry and, by showing its usefulness to the rhetorician, suggest some applications of rhetoric in liberal education. //”Problem-solving,” to define it now very simply and broadly, is the process by which one moves from identifying the need to accomplish a particular task (and discovering that the task is difficult), to finding a satisfactory means for accomplishing that task” (629). The “intellectual and imaginative” activity Larson references here is “skill” not “ability”… It is about learning to identify elements of the rhetorical situation “out there” (as though they exist already in some measurable, ‘objective’ form).”
And for the first time in all of this study… I get it.
Lauer’s history of invention in the field:
1960’s
“The 1960s marked a turning point for invention. Discussions of invention were woven with attempts to revive an interest in rhetoric within the academy and in particular within English Studies. At the 1961 Conference on College Composition and Communication, speakers on a panel entitled “Rhetoric—The Neglected Art” argued for the importance of rhetorical invention (Virginia Burke), while others spoke of rhetoric as an intellectual art whose core was invention. In 1962, Elbert Harrington published an important essay, “A Modern Approach to Invention,” in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, contending that: “Most teachers know that rhetoric has always lost life and respect to the degree that invention has not had a significant and meaningful role” (373). Two years later, Dudley Bailey in “A Plea for a Modern Set of Topoi” challenged composition instructors to develop a new rhetorical invention, claiming that: “The heart of rhetoric has always been ‘invention’ and disposition” (115-16). In 1965, Robert Gorrell reported on a seminar on rhetoric held the prior December, organized by the executive committee of the College Composition and Communication Conference. The members were Wayne Booth, Virginia Burke, Francis Christensen, Edward Corbett, Robert Gorrell, Albert Kitzhaber, Richard Ohmann, James Squire, Richard Young, and Karl Wallace. Gorrell recounted that they had lamented the state into which rhetoric had fallen, offering as one of the reasons that “invention had become largely a matter of assigning a book of readings, presumably to provoke thought or stimulate ideas for writing” (139)” (74).
This marked a return to valuing invention as an area worthy of pedagogical attention.
60’s-70’s
“Rhetoric as Epistemic A key influence on inventional research in the 1960s and early 1970s was the discussion of rhetoric as epistemic carried out largely in Communication Studies beginning in 1967 with Robert Scott’s “On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic.” Drawing on Stephen Toulmin’s distinction between analytic and substantive arguments, Scott argued for the possibility of rejecting “prior and enabling truth as the epistemological basis for rhetoric” (12) and instead proclaimed: ”rhetoric may be viewed not as a matter of giving effectiveness to truth but of creating it” (13). He cited Douglas Ehninger and Wayne Brockriede’s descriptions of cooperative critical inquiry as asserting that truth is not prior or immutable but contingent, “a process of interaction at any given moment” (13). Rejecting the idea that one first knows the truth and then makes it effective through rhetoric, he invoked Gorgias and the sophistic dissoi logoi in his argument that in the face of uncertainty humans create situational truths that entail three ethical guidelines: toleration, will, and responsibility. In the following years, others such as Robert Carlton, Richard Cherwitz, Barry Brummett, Thomas Farrell, Richard Gregg, Richard Fulkerson, Charles Kneupper, and Michael Leff contributed to this conversation” (75-76).
**No mention yet of Berlin or Berthoff
“Tagmemic Invention. Also in 1965, Richard Young and Alton Becker published their first account of the developing theory of tagmemic rhetoric, foregrounding new inventional strategies that stressed imaginative discovery. They called their exploratory strategy an epistemological heuristic based on how we come to know something. Contrasting their heuristic with Aristotle’s topics, which they viewed as a taxonomy of arguments already known, they offered a heuristic to help writers go beyond the known. In 1970, Young, Becker, and Kenneth Pike elaborated and expanded this theory in Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, based largely on maxims from tagmemic linguistics. Its epistemology emphasized the active role of the observer in discovering pattern and meaning, as well as the importance of complementary perspectives in investigating a subject. The text offered a strategy to help writers initiate inquiry with puzzlements and by framing questions. To guide exploration, they developed a heuristic procedure that they defined as a series of questions or operations to guide inquiry in order to retrieve relevant information, draw attention to missing information, and prepare for intuition. Open-ended and recursive, the heuristic guide was designed to help writers explore their subjects from multiple perspectives (particle, wave, and field) and investigate its contrastive features, range of variation, and distribution. The purpose of tagmemic invention was to assist writers in reaching new understanding and insights. This modern conception of invention, drawing as it did on studies of the process of inquiry and on a tagmemic theory, stressed the importance of invention in probing local cultural differences, the need for context in knowledge construction, and the role of cognitive dissonance as a major catalyst for genuine inquiry. In the 1960s and 1970s, the theory stimulated further research on invention and later spawned variations of the tagmemic exploratory guide” (80).
This is interesting. So Lauer’s description of tagmemics employs “discovery” in a way that posits “pattern” and “meaning” as “out there”. Here is contrast with Berthoff? Her complaint is that the heuristic is imposed, like a scaffolding, that while it might very well lead people to “insights” and “new perspectives,” what it doesn’t do is create an awareness in people that they already make meaning. It’s like… if literacy education began with Berthovian practice and moved into or through various heuristics, students would be able to see them for what they are… “speculative instruments” in and of themselves.
“In 1972, Lauer’s bibliographic essay on heuristics and composition was followed by a dialogue with Ann Berthoff, who disagreed with Lauer’s recommendation that composition theorists use work in psychology to develop new understandings of invention. Their exchange focused on several issues: 1) the introduction of material from another field into English Studies; 2) the humanities/science divide; 3) the explicit theorizing of invention, drawing on interdisciplinary sources; 4) the conception of invention as strategy or art. This last concern over teaching an art of invention had been long debated in rhetorical history, as Chapter 3 indicated. The contemporary debates over this issue will be taken up in dealing with inventional pedagogy” (81).
*** this summary avoids characterizing the debate in terms of positivism… interesting… And I’m not sure I’d characterize Berthoff’s disagreement like this. The fact that psychology is “used” to understand invention isn’t her point; it’s the way psychology, and other ‘sciences’ offer “heuristics” as though they offer a way to measure, account for, writing/literacy, not as ‘speculative instrument,’ not in any pragmatic way… These approaches to teaching writing miss the essential work of turning student attention to the fact that they already compose, make meaning. For students to become aware of how to compose by noticing that they already do it… Axiomatically this places the value of meaning-making, of composing, squarely in the realm of humanities….
“During this decade, there were also meta-theoretical discussions, categorizing and evaluating sets of topics. In 1973, W. Ross Winterowd’s “’Topics’ and Levels in the Composing Process“ positioned inventional guides into two categories: topics that were a closed or finite set and topics that were open, to which more could be added. He maintained that Burke’s Pentad and the tagmemic guide were finite sets that encompassed all possible perspectives, while the classical topics were an open set. In 1967, Lauer proposed two criteria for evaluating heuristic procedures: whether they helped writers probe all aspects of the rhetorical situation (writer, audience, and situation), and whether they specified a clear set of operations in a direction of inquiry” (82).
**Here it is easy to see Berthoff’s complaint; “probe all aspects of the rhetorical situation”… implies there is a set of something ‘out there’ to be comprehended, a measurable something ‘out there’…
“Other theorists in the 1970s foregrounded nonlogical acts and the imagination as central to invention. In 1972, in both “Response to Janice Lauer: Counterstatement” and “From Problem-Solving to a Theory of the Imagination,” Ann Berthoff spoke of the imagination as the legacy of the Romantic Movement, of the form-creating powers of the secondary imagination, and of the uses of chaos” (82).
**Here is the mention of Berthoff.
I’m coming to understand why Ann uses the term ‘chaos’… Though I think people use the word loose from her theory of language.
“Although differences existed among prewriting, classical invention, and the tagmemic guides, the theorists proposing them were not in conflict with each other, attempting to discredit each other’s inventional practices. Instead they saw them as complementary, accomplishing different ends. Disagreements were strong, however, over the value of heuristics versus reliance on the imagination, the nonlogical, and the unsystematic” (84).
*Excepting Berthoff? She doesn’t see the way things are going here as “complementary” or merely “pluralistic”
“During this period, the writer was generally considered to have a unified coherent subjectivity and a powerful agency that could be enhanced by inventional practices. Most theorists constructed their practices for a writer who occupied a nongendered student position primarily in an introductory writing class. They proposed general heuristics that could function for different types of discourse, including expressive, persuasive, and expository” (84). **Not Berthoff. And here we see the kind of categorization Berthoff vilifies.
70’s – 80’s
“In the second decade of work on invention, new theories emerged, previous theories and practices were studied, and rhetorical epistemology was further discussed, with some issues becoming more contentious. Linda Flower and John R. Hayes developed cognitive rhetoric, studying composing processes through the use of protocol analysis. Others like Ann Berthoff continued to emphasize the imagination and the use of nonrational heuristics.” (84).
*This is interesting… Berthoff’s praxis labeled “nonrational heuristics”… I wonder what this means? Is this a general category assigned to pedagogy anchored outside of classic rhetoric & notions of logic? This certainly seems to identify something ‘post-structural’ or ‘extra-structural’….
This is the category Lauer uses here: “Non-Rational Invention, Shaping, Imagining, and Forming” (86)
“In 1980, James Britton, in a collection of essays from the Ottawa conference, offered another perspective on invention that he termed “shaping at the point of utterance,” arguing that writing itself is heuristic. Working from a comparison of speaking, Britton held that once writers’ words appear on the page, they act primarily as a stimulus to continue writing. Movements of the pen capture the movements of thinking in a moment-by-moment interpretive process. The act of writing becomes a contemplative act revealing further coherence and fresh patterns. This conception of a heuristic echoes Isocrates who, according to Richard Enos, defined writing as a heuristic that guided creativity and intellectual complexity (“Literacy in Athens”; see also William Benoit)” (86).
**This description is interesting. Berthoff would hold that it’s not necessarily so, but that writing (and reading) can be heuristic… in order for it to be heuristic practice, composer must gain awareness that she composes, how she composes, etc. *Again, an essential distinction of Berthoff’s work lies in axiology, as Fulkerson would say, the underlying values orientation anchoring the philosophy. Ala this description, Britton and Enos seem to deal with writing/invention as an activity separate from a person’s individual mind and experience.
86-87: Berthoff
“In 1981, Ann Berthoff proposed some inventional practices in The Making of Meaning: Metaphors, Models, and Maxims for Writing Teachers. As a way of “rediscovering the power of language to generate the sources of meaning” (70), she introduced learning the uses of chaos as the source for alternatives for the writer. In her discussion of invention, she said that in addition to such devices as heuristics, which she characterized as helping students to take inventory of what they knew, another way of getting started was to question what the reader needs to know. As an important way of forming concepts, she mentioned specifying and called for a reclaiming of the imagination, the active mind, which she argued finds or creates forms.”
This is pure summary. No discussion. No distinctions elucidated between “meaning making” and “knowledge construction” or invention. Again we see “uses of chaos” identified without discussion. I’m thinking here, too, there is too much “knowledge” here as opposed to “meaning making”… “heuristics”… “as helping students to take inventory of what they know”… Berthoff, however, is interested in how we do it, compose “knowledge,” make meaning. So while yes, this is something the students already do, it is not a matter of “taking inventory”… Such a characterization mistakes action for thing. The last sentence suggests this without discussion, interpretation…This writer has not be interpolated by the idea, for sure.
- 91 “Rhetorical Invention as Hermeneutics”
Lauer mentions Mailloux, Burke, Nystrand, Warsham… not Berthoff:
(“Is Reading Still Possible,” A Sense of Learning, pg. 108: “I want to claim that reading—like writing, like teaching—is a hermeneutic enterprise.”)
93: “In 1980, Mike Rose further cautioned that heuristics could be turned into formulas.” **This was Berthoff, too, though perhaps more than ‘cautioned.’ I wonder if Rose ever read or thought about Berthoff….?
94: “In 1989, Terry Beers discussed the “new classicist” and “new romanticists” theories of invention, asserting that “contrasting perspectives suggest the possibility of dialectical rather than exclusive relationships” (25). Engaging in an axiological analysis of these theories, Beers urged a consideration of their value and the relative permanence of these values, thereby doing justice to their interdependence. At the end of this decade, Winterowd, in “Rhetorical Invention” in Composition/Rhetoric: A Synthesis,” discussed some of the previous work on invention, stating that “rhetorical invention concerns the generation of subject matter; any process—conscious or subconscious, heuristic or algorithmic— that yields something to say about a subject, arguments for or against a case” (35). He represented different positions on heuristics, putting them into the framework of what Paulo Freire called “problematization” (38-46).”
“New theories extended the range of invention from cognitive to nonrational to hermeneutic, with the divide widening between inventional claims for heuristics and hermeneutics.” ***Does this characterize the Lauer/Berthoff debate?
“This decade of inventional studies closed in 1987 with Richard Young’s second bibliographic essay, “Recent Developments In Rhetorical Invention,” which clustered its entries under the following headings: composing process; rhetoric as an epistemic activity; situational context, including audience and ethos of the writer; heuristics, pedagogy and methods of invention; and the history of invention. These headings bespeak the expansion and complication of inventional studies during this decade. The conception of the subject position of the writer in theory and practice changed little during this period..” (96).
“Diversified Invention: Mid-1980s to the New Millennium”
“In this third period, studies of invention migrated to many sites, including writing in the disciplines and the rhetoric of inquiry. Larger theoretical movements also influenced studies of invention. The rise of social construction, deconstruction, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and cultural studies challenged conceptions of writers’ agency, individual invention, certainty and the advisability of general strategies. These theories posited multiple writer positions, writers written by language, social conceptions of invention, the importance of local knowledge, discourse communities, and the role of readers and culture in inventional acts. Theorists also foregrounded the hermeneutical, interpretive, and critical purposes of invention while previous theories of invention were modified” (96).
Lauer’s description of rhetoric and invention at this time begins to include deconstruction and post-structuralism. There is a sense in her language of a train having left the depot, the city, reached the countryside and amped to full-throttle. (particularly on page 100)
“In 1988, Bennett A. Rafoth and Donald Rubin edited a collection of essays, The Social Construction of Written Communication. In the opening essay, Rubin identified four types of social constructive processes: 1) writers’ constructions of mental representations of the social contexts in which their writing is embedded; 2) writing as a social process that creates or constitutes social contexts; 3) writers creating texts collectively in discourse communities; and 4) writers assigning consensual values to writing (2)” (101).
** This is interesting!! Hi Ben Rafoth.
The way “social construction” is characterized here… How does is square with Peircean triadicity? I wonder if Bruffee references Peirce or Berthoff or Richards…
What seems the distinction between Berthoff and these others, as Lauer characterizes the history of discussion in the field of invention, is a very Montessorian notion, the notion that we all, already, make meaning, compose, communicate successfully. That this is HUMAN NATURE, (the animal symbolicum). If this is the case, then is teaching still possible? necessary? What does teaching become? These other scholars and theories of rhetoric and language never seem to go there. Berthoff’s theory of language functions from a place where epistemology and ontology are dimensions of a moment. She operates from a place of “allatonceness,” embracing the act of making distinctions, not as a means of forming reality or expressing reality or participating in reality, but as heuristic. The heuristic here, however, is not purposed to lead students to “write better” or “read better” but to turn the attention and awareness to the fact that they already compose, to discovering how they do it, and thereby how they might do it differently—by activating an imagination—by giving them some control over these things that they already do and are.
“ In 1988, James Berlin situated composition theories within three ideologies: cognitive, expressionistic, and social-epistemic, critiquing the first two by arguing that cognitive rhetoric centers on the individual mind whose structures are considered to be in perfect harmony with the structures of the rational, invariable, material world, and expressionistic rhetoric whose epistemology stresses the power of the inherently good individual and whose writing process seeks self-discovery. He advanced social-epistemic rhetoric, which, he contended, is a self-critical dialectal interaction among the writer, society, and language” (105). She’s referencing the essay ?
Berlin, James. “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class.” College English, vol. 50, no. 5, 1988, pp.
477–494. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/377477.
?
Is this where “epistemic rhetoric” or “the new rhetoric” becomes “social-epistemic”?
“In an essay in Rhetoric Review, Berlin explained that poststructuralism considers the subject (the writer) as the construction of various signifying practices and uses of language in a given historical moment. The inventional work of rhetoric, then, he continued, is to study the production and reception of these signifying practices in a rhetorical context and to study cultural codes that operate in defining the roles of writer, audience, and the construction of matter to be considered. (See also Clifford and Schilb.)” (105)
***This is when “social-epistemic” turns attention to culture and identity, not merely “social constructivist”; the distinction is an articulation and focus on dissolution of writer/self as an autonomous agent?
106: Vitanza, Deleuze and Guattari
110 “Cultural Critique In this decade, many composition theorists began to advocate work in cultural studies as a way of theorizing the cultural function of written discourse. Some of these advocates offered inventional strategies to guide cultural critique. In “Composition and Cultural Studies,” Berlin created heuristics for a composition course that focused on cultural studies. These analytic guides combined the methods of semiotic analysis with those of social epistemic rhetoric in order to study the relationship between signifying practices and the structuring of subjectivities, such as race, class, and gender. The three acts that he proposed as a heuristic guide were: 1) locating binary opposites in texts; 2) discovering denotation and connotation that involve contestation; and 3) invoking culturally specific patterns (51). In “Marxist Ideas in Composition Studies” Patricia Bizzell maintained that cultural critique should include positive analysis. She argued that engaging students in Freirian critical consciousness entails studying how meaning-making processes are culturally constituted.” **First mention of Freire. Interesting no more talk of Berthoff. I wonder to what extent we might understand Berthoff’s development as a philosopher and theorist in light of her understanding of Freire’s theory of language and his pedagogy.
Berthoff’s praxis is Freirean and it is distinct from “cultural studies”…. She focuses on asking questions, not posing problems… She focuses on the practice and pedagogy. She values more than the purpose of Freirean pedagogy, its goals and worldview characterizations. Ultimately “cultural studies” as conceived historically in this account is distinct from “human studies”?
“Chapter Synopsis”
“All of these inventional theories since the 1960s have rested on epistemologies ranging from phenomenology to postmodernism. Theorists have also differed over what acts comprise invention (e.g., initiating discourse, exploring subjects and situations, constructing texts or arguments, and interpreting texts). Further, they have disagreed over the purposes for these inventional acts, positing goals such as raising questions; reaching self-actualization; constructing new understanding, meaning, or judgments; finding subject matter; supporting theses; critiquing cultural codes; learning and creating disciplinary knowledge; interpreting texts; and playing. They have also argued over the types of strategies, tactics, heuristics, or guides that best facilitate invention, including the Pentad, the tagmemic guide, the classical topics, freewriting, the double-entry notebook, journaling, collaborative planning, cultural code analysis, and playing with anagrams. As the decades have passed, scholars have disagreed more intensely over whether hermeneutics or heuristics were more effective as inventional approaches. Finally, over the years, conceptions of the subject positions writers occupy have become more complex and sites of inventional activity and its facilitation multiplied. Thus, debates over invention’s nature, purposes, and epistemologies have continued” (119).*** The double entry notebook. Sweet.
I wonder where the conversation sits now. How the digital has affected the conversations… Media and material… ?
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