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January 14, 2005
White's representation of shared assumptions
The need for a rhetor to build an argument on premises shared with the audience is a commonplace in rhetoric. Hayden White brings an interesting particularity to this commonplace when he talks about history as story and emplotment. Plot, he says, is "pre-generic," and he identifies four possibilities: romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire. Story, in contrast, is a fictional/mythic narrative that offers an explanation of past events. (He's working from but extending beyond Northrup Frye here.)
I'm reading Tropics of Discourse intensively, in preparation for teaching it in my graduate course in composition history this spring. (When I teach, I like to choose books that I think will really advance my students' understanding of the field but books that I haven't read well enough, or completely, or recently; that way, I'm fully engaged in the text as I teach it. I hate teaching texts that I'm fully familiar with; too much knowledge-transfer inevitably happens in that situation, instead of co-inquiry. Now, I realize it doesn't necessarily happen: Tom has taught the Iliad dozens of times and is fresh for it every time. It just doesn't work for me.) In Tropics, White talks about how a story is convincing if the historian and his [sic] audience share presuppositions about what plot choices (romance, tragedy, comedy, satire) are available for the topic.
Which prompts me to a new way of thinking about my own work in authorship. Some people celebrate that work; others excoriate it. I've long tended to think of the differing receptions as deriving from different models of education, authorship, and studenthood. But I'm wondering whether they aren't also derived from differing ideas of what plot structures are available for discussions of plagiarism. I find myself a little repelled by most plagiarism stories that are plotted as tragedies. And people who reject my accounts of plagiarism are often specifically repelled by the satiric plot elements, seeing in that a hostility to textual standards: critique (which I would include in the Frye/White category of "satire") = opposition.
Posted by senioritis at January 14, 2005 03:51 PM
Comments
you're a genius.
first i'll read white, so that i can speak on this intelligently, & then i'll come back & do something with that first impression...
Posted by: tyratae at January 14, 2005 07:51 PM
hand me my crown and scept/ic/er, SVP
Posted by: senioritis at January 14, 2005 08:00 PM