The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric

8. So What's Wrong with Current-Traditional Rhetoric, Anyway?

8 So What's Wrong with Current-Traditional Rhetoric, Anyway? Recent studies of college writing programs suggest that current -traditional rhetoric is alive and well. At least half of such programs in the country-perhaps more-follow its pedagogy. Current-traditional textbooks are still being published; most go into at least two editions, and many enjoy five or six. Advertisements for the more successful textbooks list the names ofas many as three dozen colleges and universities that have adopted them for use in their introductory composition program. At a large institution, where a text is mandated for use by all students and teachers in the required composition course, this can mean sales of six or seven thousand copies a semester. The numbers can be figured in another way. There are an estimated thirty-three thousand composition teachers in this country. I If half of them use current-traditional pedagogy, whether by choice or through institutional mandate, and if each of them is assigned one hundred students (a conservative estimate), something more than a million and a half students are introduced to the principles of cUITent-traditional rhetoric every academic semester. Undeniably, current-traditional rhetoric is a very successful theory of discourse. Surely its very success indicates that current-traditional rhetoric works. My answer to this is simple: yes indeed, it works. But its work does not lie in teaching people how to write. Rather, currenttraditional rhetoric works precisely because its theory of invention is complicit with the professional hierarchy that cUITently obtains in the American academy. Since SUbscription to the methodical memory imposes severe limitations on writing instruction, the only other ready 139 140 The MethodicalMemory explanation for its tenacity is its compliance with certain institutional needs. And its limitations are not only pedagogical; they also inhere in its subscription to an outmoded epistemology. Its continued use raises a serious ethical question as well. I deal with the pedagogical limitations ofthe methodical memory in this chapter and take up the epistemological and ethical questions in the following chapter. Both chapters attempt to answer the question posed by the title of this one. The Intellectual Poverty of Thxtbooks The most influential current-traditional textbooks ever written are among the most pedantic and intellectually poverty-stricken examples of the tradition. I refer specifically to some of the textbooks composed by the "big four." Their combination of success with simplification and prescription should tell us something about the institutional circumstances that generated their textbooks. The members of the big four were all respected scholars; most were well read in logic and rhetoric. Some drew explicitly on the germinal texts of the new rhetoric in their textbooks; others cited their reading in logic and belles lettres. For example, Adams Sherman Hill cited Campbell , Whately, Coleridge, and a number of nineteenth-century logicians in the Principles ofRhetoric. Scott and Denney concluded the influential third edition of Paragraph-Writing with a review of sources that reads like a who's who of current-traditional thought-it includes Campbell, Kames, Blair, Whately, Day, Bain, Boyd, George Payn Quackenbos, Haven, Hart, Adams Sherman Hill, David J. Hill, Clark, Carpenter, Wendell, Genung (106). In his massive texts, Genung quoted nearly every writer regarded as worth reading by educated persons during the nineteenth century. The textbooks composed by all of these writers demonstrated their awareness that they were working in a scholarly tradition with a history. (The exception is Barrett Wendell's English Composition, which presents the principles of unity, coherence, and mass as though Adam had discovered them at work in the Garden.) Nevertheless, the textbooks of the big four seem curiously disconnected from the tumultous intellectual climate that spawned the new rhetoric. They show no interest in debating the theory of mind enshrined there; nor are they interested in discussing the relative claims of empiricism and rationalism, orofany otherepistemology, for that matter. Even more disturbing, they seem similarly disconnected from contemporary developments in psychology, rhetoric, or logic.2 Indeed, a critic of school rhetoric noted in 1897 that "although philology, sociology, and What's Wrong withCurrent-Traditional Rhetoric? 141 psychology stand ready to make contributions of methods and conclusions , students of rhetoric have been much slower than students of more progressive sciences to avail themselves of such aid" (Smyser 141). A tendency toward self-reflexivity became especially marked in the works composed by the big four during the 1890s: Genung's Working Principles of Rhetoric (1900...