Reading Jim Berlin’s monograph on nineteenth-century composition pedagogy (Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges), I recognized one of the struggles I’ve been having with my dissertation—with, that is, the point of it all. Berlin notes that as current-traditional rhetoric took root in the 1880s and 90s, figurative language, which had (almost) always been part of rhetorical analysis, fell less under scrutiny in rhetoric and more under the domain of literature departments—or the growing literary impulse in language departments. Rhetoricians and composition instructors were left, if they wanted to analyze language, with attending to grammar and usage. At the same time, the rise of the elective system nearly abolished the demand for classical languages, long the claim of distinction for the educated class. What replaced this mark of distinction was consistent and standard usage of the prestige dialect (72). And as the importance of prestigious usage filtered into composition textbooks, authors began to prescribe grammatical rules with the “conviction of the scientist, unconscious that they are reporting a class bias, not a physical law” (73).

It’s the degree of consciousness that’s tripping me up. As I explain my dissertation to non-specialists, the standard’s source in class bias is really news; it may even need evidence. But for my dissertation, they’re not my audience. And my audience more or less knows that grammatical standards are largely class markers. Of course, it’s not like non-specialists aren’t influential in manifesting attitudes and passing judgments that participate in exclusion, etc. It’s not even the case that such attitudes and judgments aren’t informed by what these non-specialists have learned in school. Thus, such people operate under the classical (“false conscious”) definition of ideology: “they do not know it, but they are doing it” (as Marx writes in Capital). But since it is the case that language teachers—at least those in the conversations I’d like to enter—know about their responsibilities to dismantle such attitudes and judgments, we would expect the effects of such attitudes and judgments to die out. And yet they aren’t—and if complaints about who can and can’t put a sentence together are any indication, neither is students’ grammar successfully being standardized. So what gives?

[For the William Dean Howells Society at the 2007 American Literature Association Conference. Also, it may help to know that Elsa Nettels was moderating the panel.]

As the Coreys adjust to the knowledge that their son loves Penelope Lapham, Bromfield asks, “what have I done nothing for, all my life, and lived as a gentleman should, upon the earnings of somebody else, in the possession of every polite taste and feeling that adorns leisure, if I’m to come to this at last?” (268). The “this” to which Bromfield Corey has at last descended, of course, is the marriage of his aristocratic family to the nouveau riche Laphams. And Corey’s lament here offers important grounds of distinction between the Coreys and the Laphams: whereas all his life, he has “done nothing,” Silas has worked hard—has done something. Indeed, this distinction isn’t unimportant in the values of the characters. When Corey pays a visit to Colonel Lapham’s office, Lapham by way of praising Tom tells his father: “His going through college won’t hurt him,—he’ll soon slough all that off,—and his bringing up won’t; don’t be anxious about it. I noticed in the army that some of the fellows that had the most go-ahead were fellows that hadn’t ever had much more to do than girls before the war broke out. Your son will get along” (142). So clearly, the difference between the Coreys and the Laphams is predicated upon the distinction between doing nothing and doing something—or, since doing nothing, insofar as it can be thought of as in some sense affirmative, means manifesting leisure: the difference between just being and doing. Certainly, Old Corey’s occupation reinforces this distinction: since “he had plenty of money…It was absurd for him to paint portraits for pay, and ridiculous to paint them for nothing; so he did not paint them at all” (70). In other words, to the extent that Bromfield Corey has an occupation, he is a painter, but one who doesn’t paint.

Here's a rather long summary of Lucille M. Schultz's The Young Composers: Composition's Beginnings in Nineteenth-Century Schools (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois UP, 1999).

Schultz shows us early on that 19th Century (primary, for the most part) education witnessed a number of changes: (1) many more students began attending educational institutions, (2) educators began to think in more sophisticated ways about the cognitive development of children and therefore about ways of educating children, (3) composition instruction really began to occur—whereas previously writing instruction had involved little more than handwriting, parsing, and copying sentences from memory, (4) as a result of 2 and 3, composition for primary school students moved from a focus on writing about abstract topics to thinking about practical topics, (5) which also signals that primary and secondary education were no longer intended for elite students to be trained for further education (for the ministry or law), but rather for citizenship, and (6) “regular practice” (32) became the pedagogical method of teaching composition. Of course, if 1 is a material condition that affected the process, so is the advent of stereotyping and other innovations in printing (between 1800 and 1850 [27])—which made the reproduction of textbooks far easier and cheaper, and hence, more affordable for students. And so textbooks began to proliferate.

In her second chapter, Shultz complicates the traditional history of composition instruction (as represented by Crowley and Berlin) that recognizes Richard Green Parker and George Payn Quackenbos as the important figures of 19th C. composition pedagogy. While it's true that those figures dominate the pedagogical landscape, they barely alter traditional instruction (from 18th C. British rhetoricians like Blair, Smith, and Whatley and their grammar school adaptations like John Walker’s Teacher’s Assistant), whereas pedagogues like John Frost, Charles Morley, and F. Brookfield move beyond an insistence on (1) memory of rules and grammar—emphasizing instead actual practice in writing, (2) limited estimations of children’s capacities—wherein memory and imitation was all students were thought capable of, and (3) a refusal to recognize composition other than “exposition, argument, and narrative [“classical stories rather than stories that would emerge from the writer’s life”].” As compensation, these authors taught no rules—or taught rules only after students gained practice in writing; offered assignments and prompts that asked for description of objects and scenes—a kind of demand that recognized young students’ adjusted levels of development; and began to ask for personal expressive writing.

Steven Mailloux. Rhetorical Power. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

I’ve taken to describing my project as asking the following question: when we look at realist and naturalist novels that are aware of the importance of grammar in class mobility, what rhetorical power do these novels have? It sounds catchy (I think), and it anchors my project in a rhetorico-literary tradition, but it certainly shouldn’t be modeled on Mailloux’s book, as the latter is not so much invested in describing or exhibiting rhetorical power as it is in providing rationale (among rhetoricians as well as literary scholars) for rhetorical contributions to discussions about novels and about the discipline of literary studies. And yet this last, insofar as it provides a rationalized methodology, is precisely what is useful about Mailloux’s work, as well as the explanatory potential of its terms like “rhetorical hermeneutics” and “reception history.”

Mailloux’s first section (comprising two chapters) articulates his rationale of a rhetorical theory (not to say Theory), by describing the first of these terms, and historicizes three twentieth century disciplinary formations (philology, formalist New Criticism, and reader-response criticism); this historicization occurs under a rhetorical aegis because “rhetorical hermeneutics” involves “theory and rhetorical histories” (18). With particular reference to a literary disciplinary genealogy, we must see that (and how) each new iteration of theoretical approach to reading was not only a response to what came before, but also to particular political contexts outside the discipline itself.

Just after her marriage to Curtis Jadwin, Laura spends her days reading and waiting for Jadwin's return home from work, so they can read together in the evenings (189-90). In the afternoons before her husband's arrival, Laura "rarely—for she had not the least interest in social affairs" attends "teas or receptions" (190). What's curious about this fact is that the narrator has spent the last several pages describing Laura's less-than-satisfied attitude toward the monstrous house bought and remodeled for them by her husband. It is, of course, the remodeling that annoys Laura—and it is only after a trip abroad, in which she acquires some furnishings and art for the new home, that she finally "succeeded in fitting herself to her new surroundings" (188). In this moment, The Pit exhibits for us the class differences between Laura's new-moneyed husband and herself (though she's more petit- than established bourgeoisie). So it's no surprise that immediately after this moment we get a comparative analysis of Laura's and Curtis's tastes in novels. What's less clear is why, since Laura doesn't like to be social or to entertain, she cares what her house looks like. But this subsequent analysis is a reminder that Laura has always been a consumer of bourgeois literature and an indication that the observer for whom Laura must make her house tasteful is herself.

James Aune. Rhetoric and Marxism. Boulder: Westview, 1994.

In the United States, of all countries, no party could intelligently expect to carry its point without first winning over to its ideas a majority of the nation...
* * *
It was not till a rearrangement of the industrial and social system on a higher ethical basis, and for the more efficient production of wealth, was recognized as the interest, not of one class, but equally of all classes, of rich and poor, cultured and ignorant, old and young, weak and strong, men and women, that there was any prospect that it would be achieved. (Looking Backward: 2000-1887, 193)

Although there's something bizarre about opening one's writing by citing one work and immediately quoting from another, there's a strange appropriateness to doing so in this post. Jim Aune's claim in Rhetoric and Marxism is that if we try to identify Marxism's own "nuclear contradiction" (Aune takes the term from Alvin Gouldner), we can see the absence of rhetoric – its understanding of audience, appeals, and persuasion – as the fundamental cause. This isn't a surprising absence, given Marxism's emergence in an antirhetorical historical moment, but its result was "an implicit theory of language and communication that was an unstable mixture of romantic expressionism and a positivist dream of perfectly transparent communication" (143). And thus if we want to learn something about Marxism's failures (note that the book is haunted by the events of 1989), we need to take note of its lacunae, specifically its traditional refusal to adequately theorize mediation. The problem of alienation thoroughly troubles Marxist theory – consider workers' separation from the product of their labor, the human alienation from her species being, the very denial of the centrality of this "humanist" element in the division between the early and late Marx (or between Marxism and Humanism), the gap between theory and praxis, and what Aune cleverly terms the contradiction between "struggle and structure" (i.e., where's the place for agency if history is more or less determined?). Mediation is thus the need – and rhetoric just the remedy.

Dana Anderson. "Questioning the Motives of Habituated Action: Burke and Bourdieu on Practice." Philosophy and Rhetoric. 37:3 (2004). 255-74.

How does one account for unconscious action in Burkean dramatism? Given that Kenneth Burke's humanism—he defines humans as "the symbol-using animal"—draws a sharp distinction between action and motion ("things move, persons act"), how do we begin to describe motive when actions effect unintended purposes?

These are precisely the questions that drive Dana Anderson to Pierre Bourdieu in search of an explanation for habituated action. In fact, Anderson shows that for Burke actions don't really have to be conscious to be analyzable—they simply have to be purposive. In other words, what we want to know is how we can wrest purpose from the agent’s ability to anticipate the outcome of her act.

But what is meant by purpose is nearly as unclear in Anderson’s article as it is in Burke (take A Grammar of Motives, for instance, wherein Burke lumps agency and purpose together—unlike his separate discussions of scene, agent, and act—a peculiar grouping, given that agency and purpose basically equate to means and ends). By purpose, do we mean intended effects (as in when something is done “on purpose”)? Or do we mean simply results (as in when something is done “to no purpose”)? If we mean the former, then clearly intention or consciousness is at issue. And if we mean the latter, we might instead need to distinguish between unintended, unforeseeable, and counter-intentional consequences. Anderson does not attend to this ambiguity of purpose. However, instead of seeing this non-attendance as (merely) a blind spot in Anderson’s essay, I think we should see it as an untapped potential.

Wai Chee Dimock. "Class, Gender, and a History of Metonymy." Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations. Ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore. New York: Columbia UP: 1994.

Dimock begins by historicizing Marx's "epistemology": deeming it tinged by an Enlightenment faith in metonymy, in the belief that if we can know a part, we can generalize to the whole. Thus, Marx's materialism draws on that posited by Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, meaning it enjoys "epistemological certitude" because the material is perceptibly verifiable. What Marx really had was "corporealism," which explains why society or community was for him like a body whose members were like parts serving a specified purpose for the whole.

I hesitate at this point because it isn't clear to me that by calling the community a "body," Marx is being metonymical rather than metaphorical. Nor is it clear to me that my distinction matters, except that generalizability is not at issue in metaphor as Dimock demonstrates it to be in metonymy.

In any case, if the social is a generalized extrapolation from what could be known about the individual body (and if Dimock's right, she catches Marx(ism)'s flip side of liberal individualism's coin) and, thus, the social is a body with corresponding parts, classes are essentially identities because they are merely names for characteristics "in" the bodies of their members. Dimock sees, in this preposition, traces of metonymical thinking, and thus the historical contingency of Marx's theorization of classes.

Walter Benn Michaels, "Plots Against America: Neoliberalism and Antiracism." American Literary History. Summer 2006. 288-302.

Michaels continues his project, begun in The Shape of the Signifier, not of pointing out the incoherency of identity-based antiracism (that was Our America) but of observing the "political attractiveness" of "our commitment to the primacy of the subject position" (300), a commitment very much in the service of (neo)liberal capitalism. The texts which open up his critique are Philip Roth's Plot Against America and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, both of which are antiracist statements, but the difference between which is that the former (for Michaels) exaggerates American anti-Semitism at a time when antiracism is the (public) norm, whereas the latter "was, in its time, not only a brave gesture, but a critical and commercial failure" (295-96).

O'Hara, Daniel T. "Class," Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

This morning, I finally got around to reading Daniel O'Hara's contribution to this useful collection. O'Hara wants to offer two (or one-and-one-half) interventions in the ongoing discussion about class as an object of literary-critical studies. First, he thoughtfully suggests we analyze our own class positions as academics—that is, the classes within our field, as well as our field's relation to other classes. O'Hara's gesture of turning a critical eye back on ourselves isn't unique (Phil Barrish finishes his first book, American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995, by applying the Bourdieuean mode of analysis, which he supplements throughout, to representative literary-critical discourse of the 20th century; hence, the "-1995"). But O'Hara's analysis does produce some interesting results, such as an explanation of why fads of critical models reproduce themselves—in bad faith since they operate to the detriment of the vast number of graduate students: