Revisiting Imitation Pedagogies in Composition Studies from a Girardian Perspective

In his 1991 essay, "Innovation and Repetition," René Girard notes that "our world has always believed that 'to be innovative' and 'to be imitative' are two incompatible attitudes. This was already true when innovation was feared; now that it is desired, it is truer than ever." ¹ In making this argument, Girard surveys the transition between a world that embraced tradition and a world that rejected it as unoriginal, a change he marks as occurring due to the shifts in thinking occurring during the time from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. It is his contention in his 1991 article, as in all of his work on mimetic desire, that regardless of our attitude toward imitation and innovation, humans are, have always been, and will always be mimetic creatures, specifically so in our desires. As is well known to Girardian scholars, this contention is explicated in his theory on triangular desire, in which, as he explains, individuals come to their desires through observation and imitation of the desires of those models they emulate. As he explains, "to say that our desires are imitative or mimetic is to root them neither in their objects nor in ourselves, but in a third party, the model or mediator, whose desire we imitate in the hope of resembling him or her." ²

Coming, as I do, from the field(s) of rhetoric and composition, I find Girard's ideas about the dialectic between imitation and innovation particularly compelling insofar as they illuminate some tensions that have played out both in the ancient field of rhetoric and in the (relatively new) field of American composition studies over the last 60-odd years. I propose that it can be particularly productive to use Girardian theory as a way to understand the dialectic between these tensions, especially as they have played out against a larger set of beliefs about the world, the self, and the role of composition in twentieth- and twenty-first-century composition classrooms. Although there has been some treatment of Girard in composition studies, those studies have been concerned more with the relationship between composition students (as imitators) and teachers (as models) insofar as those relationships have potentially been sites of power, authority, resistance, and "violence" (albeit not physical). While I do believe that part of the work of the composition teacher may be to model desirable behaviors for students, my larger concern is with the mimetic relationship established between students and the academic discourse community (and thus with the corpus of works preceding them in any number of academic disciplines). To be even more precise, I am interested in interrogating how Girard's ideas about imitation intersect with and profitably illuminate debates over imitation pedagogy in composition studies.

Imitation in Classical Rhetoric

To understand the place of imitation pedagogy in composition studies, it is necessary to first look at attitudes toward imitation over the long arc of rhetoric's history. ³ Regarding the place of imitation pedagogy in Western educational systems, Muckelbauer notes that "in terms of pedagogy alone, imitation was the single most common instructional method in the west for well over two millennia. From the time of Gorgias until the middle of [the twentieth] century, any student who received formal education at any level was almost certainly subjected to explicit exercises in imitation." ⁴ It was not merely the case that the student of ancient times was expected to be proficient at communicating—rather, the educational system as a whole was seen as a way to ensure that students became good citizens, and, as such, the system was responsible for teaching not just composition but cultural values. To ensure this end, imitation was, as Dale Sullivan explains, "considered an essential pedagogical method," one that "was thought to be a way to impart skill in oratory and, at the same time, to inculcate cultural values." ⁵

Historically, in both literature and rhetoric, the concept of imitation has been understood in two ways, though these understandings have evolved over time. George Kennedy's Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition offers a good...