After reading Karen Kopelson’s “Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition” (CCC 59.4), I was even more excited that Derek called for a carnival on the article. Kopelson’s article inquires into the “pedagogical imperative” that graduate students feel: the real or imagined (or both) pressure to have a pedagogical turn in their dissertations. She uses this to question the divides in the field of rhetoric and composition (theory v. practices, rhetoric v. composition) and asks that “we make a concerted, collective effort to release ourselves from the pattern reflected here [in her essay]: from the pattern of producing so much scholarship about ourselves, from the pattern, which is perhaps our rhetorical inheritance, of attempting to determine what our current and future intellectual work is as a primary facet of our intellectual work” to a pattern of “making other, more innovative and far-reaching forms of knowledge” (775).
I largely agree with some of Kopelson’s arguments: rhetoric and composition should not just be the study of what happens in first year composition and how we should teach it. The pedagogical imperative limits our scholarship — if we pull from our rhetorical tradition, we understand that rhetoric is much larger than first year composition. I think our field is diverse and smart enough to handle both dealing with teaching writing in the college setting and understanding how texts “teach” and people and institutions teach and learn literacy practices outside of colleges. In response to Kopelson’s article, I’d like to turn to pedagogy as a term, before discussing her disciplinary concern about “borrowing” theory.
Pedagogy. As might be clear from my previous paragraph, I still do think of rhetoric and composition as a “teaching subject,” to echo Joseph Harris. This is because I think the concerns of pedagogy are not limited to just the college (or school) classroom. Henry Giroux, in his cultural critiques and discussions of schools, refers to the pedagogy of texts: how and what a certain movie teaches, for example. What is the pedagogy of Ghost World? he asks (to paraphrase) in The Abandoned Generation. I think scholarship in rhetoric and composition is often discussing pedagogy: how does one learn literacy practices? How does this text teach certain ideological beliefs or practices? When we in the field use the term pedagogy to solely discuss the composition classroom, I think we miss pedagogy in other cultural settings. Certainly, this broader definition of pedagogy runs the risk of watering the term down too much, and I’m also not arguing for a larger “pedagogical imperative” that asks for a “pedagogical turn” at the end of a book that makes the scholarship explicit about pedagogy. What I am saying is that I think pedagogy, broadly defined, is a thread that holds rhetoric and composition together.
Borrowing theory. Kopelson and the graduate students in her survey are concerned with borrowing theory from other fields, rather than conceiving and making our own: “we are still primarily importers only, consumers, an ‘interdisciplinary’ field […] with little or no interdisciplinary influence” (768). Jim Brown has questioned the term borrowed in his post:
But such an argument assumes that there is such a thing as an “unborrowed” theory. When Zizek mashes together Lacan (psychoanalysis), Kierkegaard (philosophy), Damasio (cognitive science), and Melville (novelist) in The Parallax View, is he not borrowing? What theory is not “borrowed”?
I too think that chastising Rhetoric and Composition for so much “borrowing” is problematic. Kopelson asks the always repeated “What is rhetoric?” and repeats a graduate student’s question, “what’s not rhetoric?” Isn’t Zizek already a scholar of rhetoric, asking questions about destinations of letters? Isn’t Derrida already a rhetoric scholar in asking what are the effects of using “the animal” in singular form (in “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” which I just read a few days ago)? Isn’t Butler a rhetorical scholar, exploring performatives? I suppose we could say no, Zizek is a post-Lacanian psychoanalyst, or a Marxist philosopher, or both; Derrida is a deconstructionist literary critic and philosopher; Butler is a gender theorist. I choose these three perhaps because they’re convenient — it seems obvious to me that they’re dealing with rhetoric in many areas of their work. How is drawing on one of these three theorists “borrowing”? Perhaps it is both borrowing and not borrowing? Kenneth Burke, perhaps the most influential rhetoric scholar besides Aristotle, is often seen as a literary critic. Does this make us “borrowing” his work? I don’t think so.
Because of our supposed penchant for “borrowing” instead of “creating” theory, Kopelson is concerned that rhetoric and composition doesn’t have import into other fields. We’re aren’t published in Critical Inquiry or Cultural Critique (768). Clancy is critical of this, noting that it sounds like a “I wish I were taller” complaint. She also notes that rhetoric and composition work does get cited in other fields:
Do you think people in social studies of science, history of science, and philosophy of science don’t read and cite Alan Gross and Jeanne Fahnestock? Do you think people in medical anthropology and women’s studies don’t read and cite Susan Wells and Mary Lay Schuster? And hello, Stanley Fish? Even my work has been cited in related fields. There are plenty of other examples.
To which I might add Kathleen M. Hall Jamieson’s and Carolyn Miller’s work in genre and rhetorical situations, and probably more if I thought about it longer.
I would like to see more rhetorical work incorporated in other fields, because I think it would make those fields stronger. At CCCC last spring, Rosa Eberly mentioned that Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics would be stronger by incorporating research and theory from rhetoric, for example. I feel I am too new to the field to know this, but how many scholars working explicitly in rhetoric and composition do get published outside of our top journals, in other field’s top journals? One of our top “theoretical journals,” JAC, includes articles from folks not explicitly in rhetoric (Giroux and interviews with Zizek, for example, though I think they are rhetoricians). How many people explicitly working in rhetoric and composition publish in journals devoted to philosophy, for example? I imagine that women studies journals probably have a fair amount of rhet/comp scholars publishing in them, but what of other fields?
Kopelson, Karen. “Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition.” CCC 59.4 (June 2008): 750-780.
