The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric

5. Select, Narrow, and Amplify: Invention in Mature Current-Traditional Rhetoric

5 Select, Narrow, and Amplify: Invention in Mature Current-Traditional Rhetoric Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth , other teachers followed in the footsteps of Rippingham, Newman, and the others. The list of those who wrote current-traditional textbooks is impressive, not only because of its size but because some authors held impressive scholarly credentials, often in fields other than composition. These writers included Alexander Bain, Henry Noble Day, Fred Newton Scott, Gertrude Buck, George Lyman Kittredge, Charles Sears Baldwin, Henry Siedel Canby, Edith Rickert, Charles Manly, Norman Foerster, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Rudolf Flesch, Paul Robelts, Richard Weaver, and Frederick Crews. Bain was a psychologist, Day an aesthetician. Kittredge was a Shakespeare scholar, Rickert and Manly were students of Chaucer, and Foerster was a student of American literature. Brooks is a critic, Warren a novelist and poet. Crews is also a critic. Canby was a historian. Buck, Scott, Baldwin, and Weaver were rhetoricians. Flesch was a reading theorist, Roberts a linguist. Hundreds ofothercurrent-traditional textbooks were written by scholars or teachers whose most enduring claim to fame lay in their participation in the major textbook tradition associated with American composition instruction. Despite the scholarly credentials of some authors who wrote currenttraditional textbooks, a good deal of evidence suggests that as currenttraditional rhetoric matured, its writers gradually lost touch with the theory of discourse from which its model of invention had sprung. During the middle years of the nineteenth century, it was still possible to profess rhetoric in American colleges. Henry Day was familiar with classical and modem rhetoric and with the history of logic as well, as 70 Select, Narrow, andAmplify 71 were many textbook authors who were his contemporaries. Alexander Bain was conversant with associationism by virtue of his professional ties; his textbooks also demonstrate that he had read Campbell and Whately carefully. By the late years ofthe nineteenth century, however, textbook authors relied on Bain, Day, and other current-traditional authors more consistently than they did on Campbell or Whately, although these two authors were cited well into the twentieth century. Nor did textbook authors draw on new developments in rhetoric, psychology, or logic, preferring instead to retain the textbook model of invention. By the early years of the twentieth century, only minor adjustments were being made to what had become, by that time, a fairly monolithic set of prescriptions for invention. Most twentieth-century authors preferred to imitate the late nineteenthcentury texts that historians now characterize as marking the high point of current-traditional thought. In 1905, Ashley Thorndike wrote in the preface of his Elements of Rhetoric and Composition that nearly all textbooks of rhetoric then in use were indebted to the works of those authors who have since been designated the "big four" of currenttraditional thought: John Franklin Genung, Adams Sherman Hill, Barrett Wendell, or Fred Newton Scott and Joseph Villiers Denney. I And in College Composition (1929), Raymond Woodbury Pence noted that Genung's Working Principles ofRhetoric (1900), "although nearly thirty years old . . . remains the most complete and authoritative treatment of rhetoric we have" (xiv). Pence also cited Scott and Denney as authorities for his treatment of the paragraph. Wendell was cited as an authority by Mervin James Curl in a 1931 revision of his Expository Writing (1914) and by Cunningham and Cushwa in Reading, Writing, and Thinking (1943). Wendell's English Composition was itself reprinted in 1963.2 And so on. During the eighteenth century, as well as the early part of the nineteenth , professors of rhetoric and composition were, for the most part, either clergymen or gentlemen of leisure who were hired by the college president to pass on to their students the best that had been thought and said in Western culture. For example, the second occupant of the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric at Harvard was John Quincy Adams, who drew on his knowledge of classical texts, as well as on his participation in public affairs, as bases for his lectures on rhetoric. (Adams stepped down from the rhetoric chair to assume other duties). But the gentleman professor disappeared along with the classical curriculum. After the Civil War, a new elective curriculum was gradually 72 The MethodicalMemory put into place in American universities, and the place of the universal scholar was taken over by the specialist, who had spent many years of study-often abroad-to learn his craft. This was true in every academic...