Emancipatory Movements in Composition: The Rhetoric of Possibility

PREFACE

Once we were slaves wnyyh µydb[ Now we are free ˜yrwj ynb ht[ —“Avadim Hayenu,” A Passover Song For two nights during the Hebrew month of Nisan, Jews celebrate the holiday of Passover by conducting a Seder. This ritualized ceremony is organized by a Haggadah, the text used to narrate the story of Exodus. Since childhood, Passover has remained my favorite holiday—which should not be surprising, since this holiday is strongly pedagogical, rhetorically designed to have its participants engage in dialogical discussions about ethics, history, culture, and theology. Even as an adult, I am drawn to the rich narrative—the dramatic reenactment of slavery, the gripping tale of a close escape, the celebration of long-awaited freedom— demonstrated through two nights of ritualized eating, storytelling , and song. I am also captivated by Passover’s metaphoric quality, Passover as the synecdoche for freedom, a yearly tale about the possibilities of resistance, a narrative of emancipation. The Passover narrative suggests that human beings need to experience oppression—even if it is only relived mythically—in order to understand our social responsibility to counter and resist those forces that seek to dominate, repress, and disempower individuals . Further, such storytelling aids us in recognizing that xi P R E FA C E oppression is protean, taking shape in myriad forms, but most commonly recognizable as poverty and illiteracy. For those of us who teach writing, identification with the oppressed, the powerless , has become a pervasive concern, and such empathy has taken on its own narrative quality within the disciplinary boundaries of rhetoric and composition. While there are numerous conversations—scholarly critiques and public debates—about the continually evolving discipline of rhetoric and writing instruction, it seems to me that recent conversations in the field regarding the inclusion of emancipatory politics and pedagogy have coalesced around four key areas: neosophistic rhetoric, cultural studies, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies. These categories are by no means exclusive, and composition has come to embrace multitudinous perspectives, ranging from queer and film studies, to eco-composition, business , and technology. I am suggesting that it is, in fact, these subject areas that have, for the past ten years, dominated and influenced both the theoretical and pedagogical perspectives of rhetoric and composition. The purpose of Emancipatory Movements in Composition: The Rhetoric of Possibility is to explore these four approaches by examining each of them as influenced by independent disciplines possessing unique theoretical and pedagogical objectives, and to consider the historical infusion of these disciplines into rhetoric and composition. Simply, this book has three objectives. The first is to critique the interdisciplinary roots of rhetoric and composition (which absorbs and reconfigures these other disciplines within the environment of the composition classroom), and to study how these disciplines are shaded by the umbrella of critical pedagogy. Second, this investigation explores the emancipatory objectives of these four other disciplines and their influence in shifting the current of rhetoric and composition theory and pedagogy . Third, this project analyzes the research on and pedagogical ethics of including emancipatory politics in the classroom, particularly as manifested, most recently, through service-learning and ethnographic research. Chapter One, “Dissoi Logoi: Neosophistic Rhetoric and the Possibility of Critical Pedagogy,” addresses how, in the past ten years, rhetoric and composition has devised pedagogical and thexii Preface oretical models based on reconfiguring sophistic rhetoric. Scholars such as Susan Jarratt, Thomas Kent, Jasper Neel, and Sharon Crowley have argued that sophistic rhetoric may be a useful pedagogical tool for helping students understand the nature of argumentation and the indeterminacy of language. This neosophistic rhetoric, many suggest, may offer contemporary compositionists a more fluid and malleable way to teach writing. Sophistic rhetoric takes into account notions of dissoi logoi, contradictory positions, and the use of mythos, or narration, as formidable rhetorical strategies. Furthermore, the pedagogical revival of sophistic rhetoric appears to be a useful paradigm shift for theorizing the emancipatory objectives of cultural critique. Feminist composition scholars (Susan Jarratt and Dale Bauer) contend that sophistic rhetoric augments feminist rhetorical strategies, since the sophists had a keen understanding that in order for persuasion to be effective, the rhetor needs to consider historical position and antilogike, an emphasis on contradictory positions. Chapter Two, “Cultural Studies and Composition: Ethnographic Research as Cultural Critique,” provides an historical overview of the field of cultural studies as it emerged in Britain during the 1950s and examines how the initial ethnographic studies which emerged from the Birmingham Centre...