connors “Gender Influences” in Composition Rhetoric

Conners, Robert J. “Gender Influences: Composition-Rhetoric as an Irenic Rhetoric.” Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997: 23-68.

“argue that composition-rhetoric (especially in its Consolidation and Modern forms) is based in very deep cultural changes in nineteenth-century America” (24) Changes in composition-rhetoric come from the huge shift in college from one gender to coeducation in the nineteenth-century

“To use a term popularized by Walter Ong, rhetoric was a quintessentially agonistic discipline, concerned with contest. It was ritualized contest, yes, but contest nonetheless. Argument and debate are verbal agonistic displays, and as Ong has argued, ritual contests of all sorts have been central to Western culture for as long as we have recorded history” (25).

[this reminds me of the rhetorical analysis essay I read in English 310 as an undergraduate on the argument as war metaphor. I’ll have to look into that.]

Ong’s book Fight for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness posits that “important elements of human behavior have been unconsciously informed by the radical insecurity and status needs of males, and that agonistic self-display has been the resulting constant tendency” (25).

Post 1870 this “oral, argument-based, male-dominated education” became more “interiorized, irenic, negotiative, explanatory” (26).

27 – reiterates that classical rhetoric was about antagonism. In fact, Aristotle used agonistikos to mean “fit for athletic contests” and “fit for debating.” Greeks compared rhetoric to athletics; Romans compared rhetoric to war.

32 – when the study of rhetoric split between letter writing and preaching (Middle Ages), women were allowed to be in the private world of letter writing, but not in the public sphere of preaching

36 – not a single woman prior to 1800 defined herself as a rhetorician

44 – “four major changes in rhetorical education: (1) the gradual change of student-teacher relationships in rhetoric/composition courses from challenging and adversarial to developmental and personalized; (2) the shift from oral rhetoric to writing as the central classroom focus; (3) the shift from argument as primary genre to a multimodal approach that privileged expostion; (4) the decline of abstract subjects for writing and the rise of more personal assignments.”

52 – during nineteenth century focus shifted from oral rhetoric, which became called “elocution,” to written discourse

52-54 – argues that this shift was, in part, to keep women out of the public, agonistic sphere of oral rhetoric, to protect them in a way

[as I was reading this, I was disappointed because I was looking for a shift in written composition, or a discussion of gender and written composition, not oral rhetoric, but then I got to this:]

p. 62: “The modal approach to composition became so much a standard that by the 1890s it had begun to spin off whole specialized approaches to writing in a single mode. The first of these, though not ultimately the most popular, was argumentation. This ‘new’ argumentative [63:] rhetoric received its definitive textbook treatment in 1895, when George Pierce Baker and Henry Huntington published their Princples of Argumentation. Baker’s ‘argumentation’ as explained in his book was, however, a far cry from the older rhetorical agonism. Like the intercollegiate debates already mentioned, Baker’s idea of argumentation conceived of it as completely logical; his announced first princple book was to train students to think. ‘No man can escape thinking,’ runs the first sentence of the text, ‘Herein lies the importance of argumentation for all men’ (1). For Baker and his followers, argumentation was not so much argument as it was an escape from teh swamp of illogical personalism created by overreliance on the narrative and descriptive modes. Above all, Bakerian discourse avoids personal display. ‘Argumentation is not contentiousness,’ ran the first major head in Principles, and the book was devoted to Baker’s definition of argumentation as rational presentation of persuasive facts, analysis, brief-drawing, and development of evidence. Ethos and pathos were completely subordinated to logos.”

65: argues that “public display of extrapersonal knowledge is agonistic, as every serious player of Trivial Pursuit knows well. Even if such fact-based discourse is not explicitly argumentative, it has as part of its agenda the serious display of the self….Personal interests and personal confession have to do with these contests only tangentially….Thus, for me, display of extrapersonal information has always been part of the contests of selfhood, and traditional college expecations and assignments allowed for – even demanded – those display behaviors.” He is referring to oral rhetoric, but I think this might be true for written composition as well. Isn’t written composition (okay, I mean academic writing) public discourse?

66: “With the advent of Modern composition-rhetoric, rhetoric became less contestive and more interiorized, even personalized. This anti-agonistic trend is more clearly seen in the contemporary pedagogical form of composition-rhetoric usually called the ‘writing process’ movement, which since its modern inception in the mid-1950s has grown to become an important moral and methodological force in writing pedagogy, the first deliberate and conscious attempt at turning composition-rhetoric into a truly irenic rhetoric.”

[irenic means “promoting peace”]

I think this will be helpful for the revision of the historical part of my literature review.