History Bump

How do you see rhetoric generally intersecting with a field like Composition, which continually functions to validate itself (particularly through historical methodology/methods) as legitimate to the university? How do you see Composition (an incredibly interdisciplinary field) as parallel to History, following Levi-Strauss’s claims (in terms of methods)? How do the suggestions White makes about resolving conventional problems of historical theory apply to your research in the field?

White draws upon Levi-Strauss who claims that there exists a paradoxical relationship between “the amount of information that may be covered in any given account of the field and the kind of comprehension that we can have of it” (102). In other words, as he later explains, the more we include, the less comprehension we are of a field, whereas the more comprehension we claim to be, the less we are. Given this claim, how do we make sense of/judge Connors who claims to cover rhetoric of written composition after 1780 in American colleges to the present? Where do you see yourself fitting within this paradox? What kinds of justifications do you establish for delineating particular borders around your work?

White claims that the conflation of prosaic and poetic within a general theory of discourse has important implications for work in history (104). Further, he suggests that a rhetorical analysis illustrates the ways that not only explanation (information), but additionally prescription as to what kinds of attitudes readers should assume before reading which are contained in the figurative elements of the text (105). What kind of attitudes do you think Connors expects you to assume while reading a chapter on gender influences?

Locate a paragraph in Connors “Gender Influences: Composition-Rhetoric as an Irenic Rhetoric” to discuss in class. Attempt to delineate between the superficial and deep-structural meaning Connors constructs as White does.