Rhetorical Perspective

[Seth L. Kahn-Egan]

I had a feeling this might happen...  See below.

Seth Kahn-Egan
Syracuse University
PhD Student in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric
slkahneg at mailbox.syr.edu
315-423-8042 (home)
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On Tue, 2 Feb 1999, zmaalej wrote:

>     To finish, I would like to go back to Seth's post. When I talked about a
> necessary rhetorical competence parallel to linguistic competence (which I
> borrowed from Orecchioni's _L'Implicite_), I meant a methodology or a
> strategy as Seth is suggesting. However, considering composition as content
> and rhetoric as method makes us guilty of the same mistake early
> stylisticians made when they separated content from form. Wouldn't
> composition here be thought and rhetoric the dress of thought? There are
> cases where you can easily separate composition from rhetoric. But how about
> other cases where the two are, so to speak, fused? Sometimes rhetoric is
> grammaticalized, some other times it is the very thought, not possible to
> dissociate from the content.

As I was writing my post yesterday, I wondered if somebody would interpret
the distinction between method and content this way.  Maybe I need to try
to find a better way to formulate it--since I pretty much expected it, I
must not have made the point I wanted to.

Instead of reading "composition" as content and "rhetoric" as form, what
I'm aiming for is seeing "composition" as the materiality and "rhetoric"
as the operator.  In some ways, I suspect my urge to make this case (to
whatever extent I decide I really want to make it) stems from my
discomfort with the division of process and product in comp. theory.  Some
theories of process pedagogy tacitly (and some not so tacitly) argue that
the end result of process is _by-product_ rather than product.  In other
words, the text that results from the act of composing is incidental.  I'm
not satisfied with this idea.  As a result (and for the sake of time I'm
going to make a huge logical leap here--I'll come back and fill it in
later if anybody wants to know how it happened), I'd rather see
"composition" as what happens as a result of the act of rhetoricizing.  In
other words, the distinction I'm after isn't "form versus content," but
rather "act versus result."

Clear as mud, right?

Seth