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February 07, 2005
Master Tropes for Authoring a Discipline
In Maureen Goggin's Authoring a Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition there is a distinct effort by Goggin to mediate between Metaphor and Metonymy. On the one hand, she investigates how a particular editorial decision in a journal functions as a metaphor that "tells us what images to look for in our culturally encoded experience in order to determine how we should feelabout the thing represented" (White 91). She also works to "stress the similarities among the elements" of the various journals as she tries to demonstrate a "formal terminological system for describing [Rhetoric and Composition's] objects" (White 96, 95). Her project is to demonstrate that the editorial choices made show consistent and cohesive trends toward disciplinarity.
However, Goggin is also struggling to account for what White calls the figurative discourse of fields that have not yet defined themselves as disciplines (White 95). Since she is writing a progress narrative and sees disciplinarity of Rhetoric and Composition as a recent development (dating to about 1980 when self-reflexive scholarly articles start appearing), Goggin is necessarily bound to a Romantic emplotment. However, she works to complicate the scholarly work represented in these journals as she stresses the differences or disparities in her findings. It is here (in her studies of geographical regions, gender, rank, etc, that mark the contributions to the journals) that Goggin adopts a metonymic trope.
I would further posit that the Mode of Ideological Implication (if we are to follow White's graphic) is not the expected Anarchist as derived from Romantic emplotment and Ideographic explanation. Rather, it is a Conservative ideology that informs Goggin's work as she is trying to pin down the structures that turn Rhetoric and Composition into an institutional discipline. As White put it, "[A]ll original characterizations of anything must utilize both metaphor and metonym in order to 'fix' it as something about which we can meaningfully discourse" (96).
Posted by trobryan at February 7, 2005 04:50 PM