A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (8 page)

“English” as we know it will be in decline from about 2020 onwards— as a world language (overtaken by Mandarin) and as a suitable name for the field we are all engaged in. As Bergonzi states in
Exploding English
(1990), it could go on like this for a long time (i.e., in terminal decline), not unified by any theory, fissured, and shard-like … and yet still with an assured place in the school and university curriculum. There is an advantage in such looseness of identity. But perhaps more advantageous would be to remake the subject at school and at university levels, underpinned by a foundation of contemporary rhetoric, and called something
like “communication arts.” Then we could work more closely with filmmakers, website designers, artists, typographers, theatre directors, singers, and musicians—as well as with those who teach other languages—to fashion a subject that truly reflects contemporary culture and that students of all ages will find to be irresistibly engaging, diverse, and empowering … because it is about the means of finding one's identities and exploring one's possibilities socially and politically.

In terms of remaking the subject at school level, the work of Moffett is worth reconsidering as it appears to be prescient in terms of a rhetorical conception of English studies.

The revival in interest in rhetoric the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is perhaps the result of a number of converging vectors: the need for an overarching theory of English studies, embracing fiction, documentary texts, multimodality, and the politicization of discourse; the weakness of “English” in the face of right-wing criticisms and the “back to basics” movement; the confusing conflation of English as a school subject, university discipline, world language, and nationality; and a desire to relate communication studies in general to the long tradition that goes back to pre-Athenian democracy in Europe, rather than see “English” as the derivation of a nineteenth-century split between language and literature studies.

The work of James Moffett (1983), operating within the American tradition, may not have experienced such a sense of a split in English to the same extent. His work certainly sits squarely within a long rhetorical tradition. Much of the rest of the present chapter will be devoted to a consideration of his work and its relevance to the thesis of the book overall.

Ostensibly,
Teaching the Universe of Discourse
(1968) was written as a reaction to the “arhetorical” practice, as Moffett saw it at the time, of sentence combining and embedding. Although sentence combining and embedding were themselves part of a 1960s reaction to the formal teaching of sentence grammar (and have continued as practices up to the present—see Abrahamson 1977; Combs 1976, 1977; Lawlor 1980; Ney 1980; and Stewart 1979 for research on the efficacy of sentence combining; plus more recent systematic reviews by Andrews, Torgerson, Beverton, Locke et al. 2004 and Andrews, Torgerson, Beverton, Freeman, et al. 2004), Moffett bracketed them with decontextualized exercises that had little to do with composition for specific purposes. So the very inception of Moffett's project was, by definition, rhetorical. He wanted to situate English within the tradition of the arts of discourse with their emphasis on function (why), motivation (who), the audience (for whom), the substance of the communication (what), and the techniques available to make that communication successful (how).

The use of the term
discourse
also made it clear that this book was more than a commentary or a prospectus on English as a school subject. In fact, the acknowledgement comes early on in the book that “some ultimate context or super-structure is exactly what English as a school subject has always lacked” (3). For “context or super-structure” we could substitute the term
theory
. But Moffett, with characteristic diffidence and modesty, holds back from calling his project a theory: “you are advised not so much to believe these ideas as to utilize them” (v). However, the book could have been subtitled “notes towards a theory of English” because that is exactly the function it fulfils and has fulfilled since its publication in 1968. Despite the fact that Moffett states that he wanted to “recast into the psychological terms of human growth those familiar but opaque academic elements such as rhetoric, logic, grammar and literary technique” (vii), the project as a whole seems avowedly rhetorical in nature. “Discourse” for Moffett means exchange, conversation, dialogue—in print and action as well as in speech—and the “universe of discourse” is the range of communication in action in the real world as well as in the simulated (but also real-world) space of the English classroom.

Another point of reference for the Moffett project is the relationship between teaching the universe of discourse on the one hand, and literature teaching on the other. In the Foreword to the 1983 re-issue of the book, Moffett defends his apparent exclusion of literature from the original 1968 conception. He declares, “I unwittingly threw off some readers who did not recognize just how much in fact I was dealing with literature or how dear it was to me, so different did it appear to them in the greatly expanded context of the
total
universe of discourse … perhaps I should have indulged myself more” (vii). Again, what Moffett was reacting to in the 1960s was
too
close an association of literature and rhetoric, characterized, for example, by Grierson's (1945)
Rhetoric and English Composition
, which, although it drew the distinction between rhetoric and persuasion (thus distinguishing itself from the Aristotelian position of rhetoric as the “art of persuasion” and re-broadening rhetoric to include informational, descriptive, and creative writing
and
speech), came across as a mini-treatise and argument for
literary stylistics.
In Harold Rosen's copy of Grierson, he has annotated in pencil the point where Grierson recites the what, who, to whom, where, why, and how questions.
¹
Rosen seemingly distanced himself, as Moffett also seems to have done, from the over-literary sensibility, associated with prestige and an élitist take on culture.

Finally, although rhetoric had been revived in the United States through the work of Burke (1966, 1969), Booth (1961), and Corbett (1998), the audience for these works was largely in higher education. In Burke's case, the arguments were made for rhetoric as symbolic action; in Booth's, for an understanding of narrative as rhetoric in literary studies; and in
Corbett's, as a primer in classical rhetoric for undergraduate students' composition.

In summary, then, as a starting position for what Moffett was trying to do in 1968, we can say that he was running against currents of the time that were emphasizing either expressive or literary or technical approaches to English teaching and that his effort was to find new ground for the construction of the beginnings of a theory of
school
English, based on human intellectual, cognitive, emotional growth and on a broader, more contemporary, more generous sense of rhetoric than had been current.

It should be clear from the opening of this chapter that by
rhetorical
I mean “pertaining to rhetoric” in the positive sense, rather than suggesting that Moffett's position is the result of posturing, or that the “model” is itself mere gestural politics within the English field. The source of Moffett's reflections on language development is deeply rhetorical in that it establishes “the ultimate context of somebody-talking-to-somebody-else-about-something” (5) as a level at which it is necessary to make sense of discourses within the English classroom. While it may not have been until 1971 and Kinneavy's attempt, in
A Theory of Discourse
, to establish the approach as theoretical, it is Moffett's achievement to have provided the basis for such a theory.

If “somebody-talking-to-somebody-else-about-something” is the
sine qua non
of discourse, its definition is “any piece of verbalisation complete for its original purpose” (10–11). The nub of Moffett's model then follows: “What creates different kinds of discourse are shifts in the relations among persons—increasing rhetorical distance between speaker and listener, and increasing abstractive altitude between the raw matter of some subject and the speaker's symbolization of it” (11). At the heart of the rhetorical model, then, is dialogue (the word derives from the Greek meaning
through
the spoken word, rather than two people speaking). In most cases, the dialogue does involve two or more people, and this is the way Moffett interprets it. In fact, for Moffett, the existence of two or more people in dialogue is the starting point for discourse: the formulaic version is more accurately “somebody-talking-
with
-somebody-else-about-something.” It is this move to the dialogic (in the contemporary sense of that term) that is at the core of Moffett's conception and use of rhetoric. This is not the rhetoric of a single orator expounding to a passive audience; it is the rhetoric of exchange.

Moffett's conception has more in common with Vygotskian notions of social constructionism in the making of meaning and the development of thought than with Piaget's notion of an autonomous biological entity
being gradually socialized. And yet it is the Piagetian idea of increasing
abstraction
from the particular that provides the structuring of Moffett's proto-theory, particularly as Moffett believes “that development of symbolic expression depends on nothing less than general mental growth” (18). This is not the chapter in which to debate further the cognitive psychology allegiances of Moffett's thinking (he seems to tend toward Piaget, as suggested also by the diagram on page 68 that has the “biological” as the “largest or most universal context” for determining the individual's language), but it is worth noting that the peculiar concoction of his model is one between dialogism on the one hand and abstraction on the other. It is as if elements of Vygotsky and Piaget are combined, from different perspectives. If we associate rhetoric more closely with Vygotsky and public discourses, Moffett makes the connection between
two
planes: between the
I-you
dimension of “talking with someone …” and the
I-it
dimension of “… about something.” The notion of abstraction emerges from the
I-it
dimension. Abstraction is not the aspect of the conception that we will pursue in the rest of the present chapter. Rhetoric is more interested in the
I-you
perspective.

Nevertheless, the process of abstraction in Moffett leads us to a deeply rhetorical place: the classification of types of discourse based on the dual perspectives of the distance between people in the
I-you
relationship and the abstractive distance between particularities in space and time at the lowest level of verbal abstraction and generalities and theorization at the highest levels. To compress the argument and with a self-acknowledged “tautological transforming” (35), the formula comes out as demonstrated in
Table 3.1.

This formula, once it is arranged as a curriculum sequence, sees drama as the lowest level of abstraction and the starting point for all discourses and educational exchange. The natural move is upward from there to narrative, and thence to exposition and logical argumentation. I have rearranged the categories to depict the relative levels of abstraction. But the movement is also the other way: higher categories subsume lower ones and frame or bring meaning to them. Hence the arrows move in both directions. I stress that this arrangement, and the addition of the arrows, is my take on Moffett and not his own representation of the relationship

Table 3.1
A Two-Way Approach to Moffett's Levels of Abstraction

what may happen — logical argumentation — theorizing
what happens — exposition — generalizing
what happened — narrative — reporting
what is happening — drama — recording