Blogging Pedagogy

In "Invention, Part I" I elaborated an invention strategy that emphasizes experience and juxtaposition. What I failed to do, however, was to provide an overview of more canonical (pun, pun) conceptions of invention. In this post, I would like to use the occasion of reviewing two contemporary textbooks, Elizabeth Stolarek and Larry Juchartz’ Classical Techniques and Contemporary Arguments (Pearson/Longman, 2007) and Catherine G. Laterell’s ReMix: Reading + Composing Culture (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010), to fill that void.

  Invention:

Inventio is the first of Aristotle’s five canons of rhetoric, the subsequent four being memoria (memory), pronuntiatio (delivery), dispositio (arrangement), and elocutio (style). In their Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee define Invention as “the part of rhetoric that helps rhetors find arguments” (36), but their decision to include six chapters under the heading of “Invention” suggests the breadth of the process. They begin with a discussion of kairos, the timeliness of an argument, but also, with regard to invention processes, an indicator of the role of experience, quotidian or otherwise, in generating ideas and inquiries. Crowley and Hawhee then move on to Cicero’s stasis theory and Aristotle’s topoi, both of which represent relatively conventional methods of arriving at an argument in composition classes. But they also include the analytical tropes of ethos, pathos, and logos, suggesting the role of reading/analysis/interpretation in determining one’s own arguments.

In summary, I would say that Crowley and Hawhee demonstrate the significance of cultural, daily, and communal experience in juxtaposition with those of others and, in particular, how they are articulated in speech and writing.

Classical Techniques and Contemporary Arguments:

For the most part, Stolarek and Juchartz offer conventional invention strategies, including using pro/con grids and brainstorming in the context of “Examining Argument Through Dialectic and Induction” (chapter 3), as well as Cicero’s stases, freewriting, and mapping in the context of “Writing Inductive Essays and Mediated Arguments” (Chapter 4).  But I want to attend here to a sometimes maligned technique included in this textbook: stylistic imitation. Though the authors include line-by-line stylistic imitation assignments in the context of teaching rhetorical situation and strategy, my own use of similar assignments suggests that imitation can often lead students to more self-consciously approach the invention process itself.

Stylistic imitation requires a kind of blend between rhetorical analysis and literary close-reading as it asks the students to identify their “sense” of the passage’s or text’s style as a first step and then to move on to interrogate the text for how and why the text reads like it does. Once they answer those how and why questions and they identify a different context, but similar situation, they can dig more deeply into the syntactic, figurative, grammatical, and other stylistic elements as they’re forced to copy the sentence structures to apply to their particular situation.

For example, in the first weeks of my Rhetoric of Southern Rock course, we spend a lot of time introducing the Deep South and arguments made about it, one of which is W.E.B. DuBois’ "Of the Black Belt" in The Souls of Black Folk. In that descriptive essay, DuBois moves from North to South and then from East to West in rural Georgia, describing the depredation and dilapidation such little towns have incurred since Reconstruction. For the stylistic imitation assignment, I ask the students to think of an abandoned landscape or a place to which they may have returned after many years and to select a related passage in the essay that they can imitate on the level of structure. Overwhelmingly the students enjoy the assignment, and they often comment that it was more difficult than they originally thought to copy someone else’s style. At the end of the imitation, I ask them to reflect on the assignment, why they made some of the choices they did, what they notice about each rhetorical situation, and how they had to reconsider themselves as composers. Even at this early stage in what is usually an intro-to-rhetoric class, students will remark that they had to shift some syntactical unit to accommodate their different situations, or they will comment on the author’s extensive use of adjectives, prepositions, etc.

In line with my own idea of invention, then, this practice encourages students to begin thinking of themselves as writers in juxtaposition to other writers or communities of writers. It also encourages them to begin thinking about how their own experiences inform how they write.

In accordance with the conventional approaches and “classical techniques” mentioned above Stolarek and Juchartz boil invention down to "idea generation," a move that enables them to make the following caveat about writing’s recursivity:

While early rhetoricians may have seen invention as the first stage of developing an argument, contemporary composition theorists believe that idea generation can occur at any stage of writing…Some students resist suggestions to generate more ideas once they’ve begun writing their essays. These students may prefer processes that develop in linear patters. But writing is often very messy…Your willingness to re-see and rework something that you may consider already completed is central to becoming a good writer. (160)

We have all probably made some variation of this statement in teaching revision. Indeed, it highlights the need to more reflexively attend to invention as a component of revision, even if we don’t necessarily agree with the simplified "idea generation" definition these authors offer.

ReMix: Reading + Composing Culture

In many ways, this text is the polar opposite of CTCA. It doesn't, for example, refer explicitly to rhetorical principles as rhetorical principles, kneading them instead into a more contemporary and popular lexicon. Invention in this text, therefore, is always implicit; however, ReMix's conceptual framework is basically founded on the juxtaposition (re-mixing) of experience and cultural artifacts from a variety of media. In other words, invention--at least as I think of it.

In the "Introduction for Students" Latterell identifies the three guiding principles of the book:

(1)[...] as a participator in culture, you are already equipped to investigate it; (2) [...] the things that are closest to us--that we most often take for granted--are most worthy of investigation; and (3) [...] behind these artifacts of everyday life are collective assumptions that shape and reveal a culture's thinking.

This last emphasis on collective assumptions, what Stolarek and Juchartz might call commonplaces/topoi, frames the text's major methodological component. So, in "Reading and Thinking Like a Cultural Critic: Four Steps," two (and perhaps three) of the four relate to teasing out the "cultural assumptions" undergirding the artifact. Step 2, for example: Identify Cultural Assumptions; Step 3: test assumptions by considering context. The possible third is Step 1: Ask Questions.

ReMix thus begins with one of the most difficult analytical elements to impart to students: identifying an argument's warrants. But in the subtitles to its seven sections--Identity, Community, Competition, Romance, Entertainment, Nature, and Technolog--the author uses questions in the secon-person that demonstrate the text's goal of incorporating the students' experience into their evaluation and analysis of "cultural assumptions." In other words, the whole text could be seen as an extended engagement with processes of invention, demonstrating, as S&J do, its recursivity and role in the composing process.

I personally haven't used ReMix in one of my own classes, but I think at least portions of it might be really useful for getting students to more self-consciously and self-critically analyze the arguments around them.