1 - The open hand: Meet Rhetoric and Composition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
Summary
Why was it necessary to imagine freshman English as separate – as different enough from the other English, or the other Englishes represented in the curriculum, to require a separate professional organization?
David Bartholomae, Chair's Address to the 1988 CCCC Convention (172)So we must keep trying anything and everything, improvising, borrowing from others, developing from others, dialectically using one text as comment upon another, schematizing; using the incentive to new wanderings, returning from these excursions to schematize again, being oversubtle when the straining seems to promise some further glimpse, and making amends by reduction to very simple anecdotes.
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (265)This book is an introduction to a field, an emerging (although over 2,500 years old) and especially exciting (although often technical and service-oriented) academic discipline. Although not everyone would agree that “Rhetoric and Composition” is the best name for this field, it is in some sense situated (most people would agree) at the intersection of the art of persuasion (or “rhetoric”) and the process of writing (or “composition”). Narrowly conceived, this is a field that is predominantly North American, focused mostly on higher education, arising in the latter half of the twentieth century. More expansively, this is a field that extends into every aspect of communication, from the beginnings of learning to the end of life, worldwide, throughout history, perhaps extending even beyond the human species.
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- Rhetoric and CompositionAn Introduction, pp. 1 - 35Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010