"[We] can use the tools of criticism and interpretation to understand [new material] evidence and, if needed, to develop new methods to refine our theories and analyses" (12).
But he also mentions a problem with getting that new material evidence; some scholars believe "that dirtying one's hands through actually going to see what was at Troy was something scholars should not do" (15). "Troy" is referenced because Enos is talking about rhetoric and its origins and discovering new facts about it. But anything can be "Troy." A scholar's "Troy" can be an author's archive at a university, or a living person that could provide a wealth of knowledge but who has remained an untapped resource. Enos notes that some scholars would be against this search for new information to be critical towards because some are comfortable with where their research is and where it is going without new physical findings, without true progression.
This is like Plato's "pure" vision of the nature of the solar system that Maxine C. Hairston discusses: "To this kind of Platonic temperament, rhetoric is anathema because it necessarily means becoming involved in all those areas of life that the reclusive mind, which would rather grapple with the abstract than the concrete, despises and fears" (68). In other words, rhetoric demands that you be active rather than passive, progressive instead of static.
Hairston's citation of Arthur Koestler made a vague connection that I wish to define a little more here. It seems to me that, in the study of math and science, you are always building on previous knowledge. Numbers are not very malleable things so you discover, say, an equation, and use it. You can't explore the nature of the equation once it has been explored to the point of making the equation. You use it. You use the equation to find new equations and cut into the earth of mathematicians' Troy.
So we have our "equations" in rhetoric. We have found texts and lessons and applied and examined them. We have looked at what we have of the history of rhetoric so much that it has gone through its stage of alienation and dismissal (and since we're just starting this class, I'm assuming I'll learn exactly where rhetoric is at now, later) so what are/were scholars afraid of? Reading these pieces about rhetoric and its place in education and history makes me wonder what academicians are waiting for or, more accurately, what they fear from this new information. I'm left with these questions because I don't think the articles we've read explain why there was/is a sedentary movement in research (unless I missed it, and if I did, please point it out, it's driving me bonkers).
In his essay "Paradigms and Problems," Richard E Young advances a theory similar to Enos, although the two authors use this theory to slightly different ends. Young writes that "since the beginning of the century, the teaching and researching of composition [has] been guided by what Thomas Kuhn (1970) has called a 'paradigm,' a system of widely shared values, beliefs, and methods that determines the nature and conduct of the discipline." (397) Young uses this theory and his call for more orginal research to advance the need to refocus compsition teaching from the product to the process; however, the same idea could be applied to Enos and the Praxis essays. Both Enos and Young seem to imply that composition instructors had become so entrenched in this paradigm that no one was inspired to change it. This makes sense when you consider that, just like any other tradition, educators were teaching what they and their teacher had been taught. The lack of original research may not have as much to do with fear as complacency. If everyone does something is roughly the same way according to the same theoretical basis, how would we know that it is wrong?
ReplyDeleteI agree that we all tend to follow what has been done before, as we struggle to make sense of an idea. Ideas extending from classic times abut composition have been accepted worldwide as the foundation of composition. doing original resource at first seems daunting, but also the idea seems to open up new doors and opportunities that one might never have though about before. Yet in real life business composition, usually there is some material from an original source. Otherwise it is not considered important enough to bother writing about. Or one might well be needing to persuade an audience about something and need to refer to original reference material to be convincing. I am beginning to think that a new historian approach has a lot of value.
ReplyDeleteI think of a closed reading as the closest we have ever gotten to reading a primary text. But to read Dante in an old form of Italian? To be active instead of passive seems to touch on the writer of an argument to dig into their experience with the text rather than the commentary surrounding it.
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