Nuts

"If we seem nutty to you, and if we seem like an oddball to you, just remember one thing: the mighty oak tree was once a nut like me." -Glenn W. Turner

The Bain/Hill selection does a good job of linking the study of rhetoric to the study of composition, which, in turn, connects to many of the familiar concepts that modern students of English start learning at an early age.  Bain’s short piece at the end of our selection reads like a glorified stack of vocabulary notecards.  Description, Narration, Exposition, Oratory (or Persuasion), Poetry, and many, many more “key terms” make rapid-fire appearances over a scant three-page passage.  This treatment is admittedly reductive (and just a tad overwhelming).

            However, Bain follows his own prescription by structuring each paragraph—and, indeed, each sentence within each paragraph—logically and cohesively to form Unity (Bain’s capitalization).  It’s astounding to me that Bain’s writing, which seems exceedingly obvious and commonplace to me as a master’s student of American English in the year 2017, revolutionized the future of rhet./comp. studies in his 1866 treatise, English Composition and Rhetoric.  Over one hundred and fifty years later, Bain’s work stands as the foundation for what I referred to as “obvious” and “commonplace” to modern rhetoricians/composers of written language.  Indeed, the introduction to the excerpt from English Composition and Rhetoric distills the historical significance of Bain’s theories, arguing that:

Brief though it is, Bain’s book settles the definitions of the modes of discourse (description, narration, exposition, and persuasion) for future textbooks.  Bain is also responsible for the idea that paragraph unity and topic sentences are important elements of writing.  Through Bain’s followers in the United States—Adams Sherman Hill [who we’re also reading this week], Barrett Wendell, John Genung, and others—these ideas became standard parts of the English composition course. (1143)

I, as an admittedly small sample size, can attest to this assertion that Bain’s ideas are seminal in the modern study of English, which subsumes rhetoric, composition, and all of Bain’s capitalized concepts.  Furthermore, within the category of rhetoric, Bain argues for the importance of “Style in General,” which includes the seemingly unrelated topics: “The Figures of Speech” and “The Paragraph.”

            The figures of speech Bain describes have changed very little since the text’s inception, but the Figures “based on the operations of Intellect, or Understanding” are of special import for rhetorical studies.  “Discrimination, or the feeling of Difference, Contrast, Relativity,” the first Figure, is closely related to concepts of “antithesis or contrast,” and, “the greater and the more sudden the change, the stronger is the effect [on the audience]” (1147).  The second “power,” “Similarity, or the Feeling of Agreement,” is the opposite of Discrimination, and highlights similarities in thought patters between a rhetorician and his audience (e.g., Trump’s appeal to the masses of fearful, xenophobic Americans in the 2016 presidential election).  The third power, “Retentiveness, or Acquisition,” describes the human capacity to create memories based on associations and connotations: feelings over facts.

            Bain closes this excerpt with his proposal and prescription for wholesome, unified paragraphs.  The textual unity Bain advocates is reminiscent of Aristotle’s notion of organic unity, but Bain delves deeper into the particulars and minutiae of paragraph structures; indeed, he lays out—numerically, to avoid any possible confusion—the exact features that each paragraph in an essay should possess, including: Unity, the logical progression of ideas (i.e., “Free from Dislocation”), and a topic sentence.  “The confining of each paragraph to a distinct topic,” Bain concludes, “avoids some of the worst faults of composition; besides which, he that fully comprehends the method of a paragraph, will also comprehend the method of an entire work (1148).  In very Aristotelian fashion and based on a developmental, progressive model, Bain offers a convincing argument for paragraphs as the seed versions of the fully-grown trees that are essays/compositions as a whole.  The whole, for Bain, is greater than the sum of its parts, which is true on each level of the progression from idea-nut to mighty essay-tree.

            

Is There Anybody Out There?

Rhetoric does not—and, indeed, cannot—exist in a vacuum.  Rhetoric is parasitic in two key ways: first, rhetoric depends for its existence on another medium (e.g. politics); second, rhetoric sustains itself dialectically through the relationships between speaker/listener and writer/reader.  Without a listener and/or reader, the rhetorician’s speech and/or writing is meaningless.  As I read Royster’s “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own,” I contemplated the age-old unanswered question, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?”  By “adopting subjectivity as a defining value,” Royster appears to argue that a lonely tree falling in the woods would not make a sound since no subjective entity would be listening (118).  The same could be said for a politician’s speech or any persuasive text: if no one is listening, rhetoric—ever codependent—perishes.  Without an equal and opposite reaction, any initial action dissipates into the void and might as well have not existed in the first place.

            If this sounds decidedly bleak (and I think it does), Royster goes on to complicate matters further by introducing racial relations and the notion of Otherness to the rhetorical picture before offering a solution.  Citing many African American texts and writers, Royster seemingly adds race to the key ingredients that comprise an individual’s “subject-position.”  At a time in U.S. history when the phrase “echo chamber” is being sprinkled like confetti across the political landscape, Royster’s words ring all too true; indeed, when a group of similarly subject-positioned individuals communicate only with one another, an “echo chamber” is formed.  Even an echo chamber, however, implies an audience of some sort, and excises the countless voices of those that go unheard.  This blog post, for example, might never reach the eyes of another human being.  My last post only got 1 view, which I think it was my own, and none of my posts have gotten any comments yet!  Sad!  Compare that to Trump’s millions of supporters, readers and listeners on a daily basis, and you have the foundation for what is truly “messed up” in modern, constantly and socially mediated society.

            Royster’s pseudo-remedy for this problem exists in the (ideally) manageable environment of the classroom where, as a teacher, one can guarantee that each and every student’s voice is heard.  Furthermore, Royster argues that, if one ultimately does gain a wider audience (whether outside or inside their “echo chamber”), it’s imperative to:

 [Keep] our boundaries fluid, our discourse invigorated with multiple perspectives, and our policies and practices well-tuned toward a clearer respect for human potential and achievement from whatever their source and a clearer understanding that voicing at its best is not just well-spoken but also well-heard. (1126)

This quotation highlights just how opposite today’s political rhetoric has become, and that, at an individual level, the possibility for change is always just that: possible.  Furthermore, in order for “interpretation to be richly informed by the converging of dialectical perspectives” as Royster advocates, rhetoricians must actively escape their echo chambers without self-victimization (i.e. self-Othering) (1117).