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NEW CRITICAL RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION by Colleen Kay Aycock A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTy OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) May 1985 UMI Number: DP23102 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL U SERS The quality of this reproduction is d ep en d en t upon the quality of the copy subm itted. In the unlikely event that th e author did not se n d a com plete m anuscript and there are m issing p ag es, th e s e will be noted. Also, if m aterial had to be rem oved, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI D P23102 Published by P roQ uest LLC (2014). Copyright in the D issertation held by th e Author. Microform Edition © P roQ uest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United S ta te s C ode P roQ uest LLC. 789 E ast E isenhow er Parkw ay P.O . Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089 This dissertation, written by .Colleen^Ka^^A^cock under the direction of h.QX. Dissertation Committee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re quirements for the degree of Ph.D. E A374- DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dean January 15, 1985 DISSERTATION COMMITTEE Chairperson ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank ny connmittee meirbers and all of those people who graciously consented to interviews. Special thanks go to Luanne Lea, for those first lessons in New Critical practice; Harry Crosby, for his help at the beginning of tliis project; Jim Zebroski, for his dialogues; and Dave Wallace, ny husband, for his support throughout. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNCWLEDGMENTS ................... ii CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS— RHETORIC, LITERATURE, AND COMPOSITION............ 1 II. NEW CRITICAL RHETORICAL THEORY................ 19 The New Rhetoric of I. A. Richards ......... 22 The New Criticism........ 34 III. NEW CRITICAL PRACTICE IN THE CLASSROOM: THE ANALYSIS OF LITERATURE................ 56 The Rhetoric of New Critical Analysis ......... 60 New Critical Analysis as a Philosophy of the Liberal Arts............ 77 Writing about New Critical Principles: The Critical Essay ........ .................. 86 IV. NEW CRITICAL COMPOSITION...................... 99 Its Roots: Tum-of-the-Century Textbook; Rhetoric ... 101 New Critical Composition/Rhetoric Textbooks......... 112 Writing According to New Critical Principles: The Friendly Essay.......... 142 The Composing Process............ 149 V. THE TRANSITION TO MODERN THEORIES OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND PRODUCTION........................- . 163 New Generative Rhetoric ............. 163 New Rhetorical Criticism ................. 169 A New Discipline........................ 180 VI. CONCLUSION: NOTES FROM THE EIGHTIES.................. 192 WORKS CITED 201 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS— RHETORIC, LITERATURE, AND COMPOSITION The New Criticism has been one of the most important educational influences of our time. Virtually all of us who have traveled through freshman and sophomore English, as teachers or students in the second half of this century, have been affected by it. The thirties saw the beginning of a new era in critical theory and practice as well as a new era in rhetorical theory. While a recent history of rhetoric and composition has asserted that the "New Criticism. . Iappeared to have no common ground with the current forms of rhetorical study or composition pedagogy, I believe that these theoretical and practical developments were integrally related. But the elements common to both have yet to be analyzed. And although the New Criticism continued to influence the teaching of freshman composition until the sixties when it became absorbed by interests in classical rhetoric and the development of newer composition theories, its actual influence cm the teaching of writing has never been analyzed. Because the New Criticism has had such a pervasive influence on English departments, one might expect to find New Critical attitudes in the thoughts of some of the key figures of our modern discipline. Yet these, too, 1 have yet to be analyzed. It is the purpose of this dissertation to study the relationship between the New Criticism and the New Rhetoric introduced by I. A. Richards in order to illuminate a particular strand of American rhetorical theory and practice that entered into the stream of composition theory and practice during the middle decades of the century. As a theory of poetics, the New Criticism has been thoroughly explored. Critical studies of the movement during its heyday were Murray Krieger1 s New Apologists for Poetry (1956), John Bradbury's The Fugitives (1958), and Richard Foster's The New Romantics (1962). R. W. Stallman's The Critic's Notebook (1950) is a compendium of statements by its members, and William Elton's A Guide to the New Criticism (1948) is a glossary of terras used by the New Critics. More recent chapter-length reassessments of the movement in the context of modem aesthetic developments are E. M. Thompson's Russian Formalism and Anglo American New Criticism (1971), John Fekete's The Critical Twilight (1977), Frank Lentricchia's After the New Criticism (1980), and Tierry Eagleton's Literary Theory (1983). The influence of the New Criticism on literary education, particularly in the secondary schools, has also been studied. (See Bans P. Guth's English for a New Generation 119733 for a section entitled "The New Criticism and After" and Arthur N. Applebee's Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English [1974] for a section on the "New Critics.") Noteworthy for its thorough examination of poetry textbooks used in high schools is Edgar H. Schuster's dissertation, "The New Criticism and its Influence on the 2 Teaching of Poetry in American Senior High Schools through 1965," University of Pennsylvania (1973). Discussions of the relationship between the New Criticism and rhetorical theory, however, have been rare. Both Richard Ohmann and Walter J. Ong, S. J. have assessed the New Critical movement as a modem academic phenomenon: Ohmann in a political contest (See English in America: A Radical View of the Profession [19763) and Ong in a cultural/historical context. Ong sees the cultural significance of the popularity of the New Critical movement as representing a shift from the agonistic, participatory realm of rhetoric to the speculative, spectator field of academic criticism. (See "Fran Rhetorical Culture to New Criticism: The Poem as a Closed Field," Lewis P. Simpson, ed., The Possibilities of Order: Cleanth Brooks and His Work [1976].) For a more recent discussion of the New Criticism in terms of a far more inclusive subject— the historical continuity and development from an oral culture to a literate culture— see Ong's book Orality and Literacy: The Tecfanologizing of the Word (1982). (The book includes a brief discussion of the New Criticism as an example of "text-bound thinking.") In 1965, rhetoric historian Edward Corbett summarized the effects of the movement in only one sentence in Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student: "The renewed interest in classical rhetoric was given another boost by the vogue of Mortimer Adler's Bcw to Read a Bock and by the post-war popularity of the New Criticism, for both Adler and the New Critics were applying rhetorical techniques to the reading process." This is a key sentence because I believe Corbett is the first of the compositioA/rhetoric theorists to connect the New Critics j with rhetoric. At the same time, his remark is interesting for what it suggests about the author, about modem literary analysis, and ! I about the development of rhetorical theory. In a personal interview, Corbett stated that Adler's practical guide to reading "was one of tie most influential books in my life and in my profession.He first encountered the bock during World War II when he was a marine stationed on the Marshall Islands, and he remembered what a revelation it had been when he realized that he didn't really know how to read. He sees Adler as being part of the early New Critical dialogues cm reading; and in the sense that Adler was practicing discourse analysis, Corbett sees him as engaged in rhetor iced, analysis. Clearly, this kind of rhetorical practice was associated with close reading. Yet to my knowledge, no one other than Corbett has noted the relationships among rhetoric, the New Criticism, and the reading process. In 1969, Corbett returned to this topic in the introduction to his Rhetorical Analysis of Literary Works to discuss more fully how New Critical analyses were like rhetorical analyses: It is significant that when the New Critics emerged into prominence after World War II, they were often referred to as "rhetorical critics" because of their concentration on the verbal strategies of a literary text. It is notable too that three of the most famous practitioners of New Criticism— Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom— were products of Vanderbilt University, where Donald Davidson has done so much to preserve the tradition of rhetoric. As seen in the quote above, Corbett identifies a post-World War II assumption, held, in particular, by the literary establishment— 4 . that rhetorical analysis is a concern of style or verbal strategies. Even today, literary critics such as J. Hill is Miller work under an assumption that a rhetoric of analysis, or "decomposition," is "the study of tropes" as compared to the modern notion of a rhetoric of composition which is the study of purposive writing.^ in fact, Miller says that composition or "writing is a trope for the act of reading... an interpretation of seme part of the totality of what is."*5 For him, writing is an act of interpreting symbols; and, consequently, the two fields are intricately connected. For Miller, skilled writing requires a "prior act of decomposition practiced through reading 7 models of compositions by others." This is one of the major theoretical lines of thinking about the connections among composition, rhetoric, and reading— a line that should be recognized as New Critical in origin. If it is true, as Corbett said in 1965, that the New Critics were using certain rhetorical techniques to read and analyze literature; and, as he suggested in 1969, that their "rhetorical" aspect was a result of their attention to the "verbal strategies of a literary text," then the New Criticism deserves a closer look from yet another perspective. We need to see how the New Critical tradition was connected to an older rhetorical tradition, either as a reaction to or a reaffirmation of that tradition. From this perspective, New Critical literary theory can be examined in the context of a particular development of a modern strand of American rhetorical theory with consequent effects on the teaching of composition. So, my interest in this topic has been foreshadowed by Corbett. It is W. Ross Winterc**d, however, who brings the subject of the relationship between the New Criticism and composition to our conscious attention. While he has stated the need for a study of the effects of the New Criticism on composition/rhetoric, the subject has received only a passing interest among people in the profession. I hope to examine these effects in more detail by looking at the more direct sources of influence during the middle decades of this century. As a place from which to begin the study of the New Critical tradition on composition/rhetoric theory and practice, we need at least a brief idea of what was happening in the field of rhetorical theory and in English education before the advent of the New Criticism in order to get an initial look at how rhetoric, composition, and literary criticism were related. According to Albert Kitzhaber, the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century saw the development of the modern freshman composition course— a hard foroulation of rhetorical categories and 9 • mechanical correctness as the chief aim of composition instruction. By the second decade, the Speech departments had taken into their domain rhetoric as the art of persuasion.^ English departments became increasingly concerned with literary matters, and what was left of the traditional "rhetorics"— essentially males about style— was given to freshman English.^" Edward Corbett notes that "even this kind of rhetorical approach to writing (a late nineteenth-century approach) disappeared from our classrooms and our textbooks sometime in the 1930s: "With the clamor from parents, businessmen, journalists, and administrators for correct gramnar, correct usage, and correct 12 spelling, rhetoric books began to be replaced with handbooks." As a j result, the popularity of usage guides created what has been called • ' • I the "handbook tradition."^ i A reaction to this teaching practice came frcm a newer rhetorical, critical, and semantic theorist, I. A. Richards, leader of a second "great wave" of influence on composition/rhetoric from 14 Harvard's English department. Both English and American pedagogy, he observed in 1936, had fallen into a tragic state.^ Composition had been reduced to little more than the study of the rules of correctness. At the beginning of his Philosophy of Rhetoric, Richards argued against what he saw as pervasive pedagogical preoccupations with the rules of usage and argued, instead, for teaching methods which focused on an understanding of the laws of language, laws he would explain in his new theory of rhetoric. As can be seen here, an interest in composition was at the heart of this new theory of rhetoric. At the same time, it was connected to literary analysis. * The sinple fact that the New Critics were using rhetorical techniques to analyze discourse, particularly literary discourse, doesn't necessarily mean that they were consciously working within a new theory of rhetoric. But the fact is that many of the New Critics* ideas were taken directly from Richards' New Rhetoric; and, as I hope to show, they were working within the context of his theory of discourse. Because the matter will be taken up more fully later, only a brief explanation will be given here of what Richards offered in terms of a new theoretical model for rhetoric. It is a model that deserves to be called "New Critical Rhetoric" for two reasons: so that it can be distinguished fran other work in the field called "new rhetoric," and because it provided a new theoretical context that was adopted by ] a new wave of literary critics, who would, in turn, bring their ideas j back into the teaching of conposition. During the century before the publication of Richards* new philosophy, we can see at least three models of rhetoric in existence. H. R. Weidner describes these models that were present during the scientific and romantic revolutions frcm 1700 to 1850 in his dissertation, "Three Models of Rhetoric: Traditional, Mechanical and vital" (1975). Traditional rhetoric, exemplified by Aristotle's Rhetoric, is modeled upon the structures of the society which it was originally designed to serve. The mechanistic model of rhetoric (also known as "espistemological/ psychological") is exemplified fay George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) in which the rules of conposition and the laws of discourse are based upon the workings of the human mind. The vitalistic model (also known as "Romantic") is exemplified by Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1828) and is, to quote Weidner, essentially "anti-rhetorical.** in that it minimizes the formative effects of society and education fay freeing human creativity from external constraints. In contrast to the socially oriented traditional rhetoric, these two "modem" theories were essentially psychological. Richards' New Rhetoric, that is, his Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) set in the historical context of a revolution in language study, seems to share seme of the elements of the last two models 8 described by Weidner; seme of Richards1 rhetorical techniques are related to more general theories of the mind, it has seme vitalistic characteristics, and it does rail against conventional rules. While i Richards' theory is consistent with new theories of perception, his actual theory of discourse is not based upon how one thinks but upon i how one uses language to make meanings. In a new critical model of rhetoric, the principles of discourse are based not upon mind or society but upon the operations of language— its structures, forms, figures, and sounds. Tb put it another way, expression, or what one says in a text, is not determined by how one uses social values or how one uses the mind but by hew one uses the language. Richards' aim for rhetoric— understanding how words work in discourse— reflected the paradigm shift that was taking place at that time in attitudes about discourse and methods for its study. Students of the English language were moving away from linguistic prescription and moving toward linguistic description as interests in philology gave way to descriptive, structural linguistics. As with the more "scientific" observations of the linguists in this century, literary critics began to move toward a more inductive examination of the operations of language. Literature could be examined with an empirical, descriptive analysis as rigorous and precise as that used by the linguists or other scientists. In 1934, Ezra Pound wrote that The proper MESSED for studying poetry and good letters is the method of cantenporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continued - . COMPARISON of one 'slide' or specimen with another." 9 With its theoretical emphasis on the properties of language and its text-centered analyses, the New Criticism offered, amidst the excitement of discoveries in the material sciences, a new method for 17 understanding and analyzing literary discourse. Using this new focus of rhetoric, I believe that we can determine more accurately hew the New Critics are associated with both rhetoric and oenposition. *Ehe original cast of New Critics was operating, I believe, under this newer rhetorical model rather than an older, traditional model. But a brief note will help to explain how Corbett first associated them with modern composition and traditional rhetoric. When asked in an interview if Corbett remembered when he first connected the New Criticism with the discipline of rhetoric, he responded very definitely. He explained that when he was first asked to teach freshman composition at Creighton, he wanted to do with prose 18 what the New Critics had done with poetry. Reflecting upon this incident, he commented that he should have fallen back on Mortimer Adler. At that time, however, he searched the library for something that would do the sort of thing he mentioned. When he went to the shelves, the very first book he opened was one on rhetoric written by Richard Whately, and at that moment he realized that an entire history of information existed about discourse. So while this incident of his discovery of Whately and historical rhetoric has been made public, the reason for his going there in the first place is really a discovery in itself. It explains historically where the first generation of modems interested in composition/rhetoric were coming from; and more 10 specifically, I think, it explains why Corbett initially associated the New Critics with traditional, classical rhetoric. If we are to examine what happened in composition instruction in the middle years of this century {a time when classical rhetoric, in most respects, seemed virtually to disappear as the guiding discipline), we could say that while a rhetoric of speaking and persuasion had gone out with the speech departments when they separated from English departments, a rhetoric of reading and analysis came in through the back door of literary studies. And this shifting sense of rhetoric, in its movement away from the study of discourse with an aim of persuasion to the study of discourse with an aim of analysis, is of tremendous consequence to the field of composition, especially as it directed us through New Critical assumptions toward a new sense of what writing reflected of social, cognitive, and linguistic organization. In order to define a New Critical Rhetorical tradition, this study will examine how the New Criticism is related to the study of rhetoric— both old and new. Because the New Critics themselves refer to the work of I. A. Richards and occasionally to the work of Kenneth Burke, I will indicate where the theory or method of the New Critics is compatible with that of these two "New Rhetoricians," as they are 19 known. As a result, I am not interested in all of the works of the New Critics nor in New Critical poetic theory as such. To put it very simply, I am concerned only with what the New Critics had to say about texts that may have influenced our ideas about writing and the teaching of composition. The work of certain New Critics will be 11 examined only insofar as elements of their critical theory help to define the New Critical Rhetoric and as their ideas influenced a new ccrnposition/rhetoric pedagogy. Neither am I concerned with all of the New Rhetoricians. I am interested only in how, theoretically, the two fields of interest constrain each other so as to create a particular ccmposition/rhetoric. To this end, I will point to work in the area called "New Rhetoric" that seems New Critical— that is, work which attends to the close analysis of the meaning of a text in terms of its smaller units and its formal strategies, and which tends to point to imaginative literature for its examples. Because of these constraints, a New Critical Rhetoric would include much of Richards1 theory and practice, seme of Kenneth Burke's theory as it was adopted by the New Critics, and sane of Wayne Booth's work, for example. It would exclude the work in rhetoric by such people as Chaim Perelman or Richard Weaver, although Weaver acknowledges his debts to I. A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren in his own conposition/rhetoric textbook. In order to illustrate the New Critical development in a historical context in rhetorical theory, I will indicate what principles of turn-of-the-century rhetoric are used to effect a new method for analyzing discourse, particularly modem imaginative discourse. I will also show how the theoretical and practical applications of the New Critics redefined the classical rhetorical canons of invention, arrangement, and style. Assuming these two things (a new method of analysis and the redefinition of traditional, canons of rhetoric), we can begin to see how New Critical practice 12 affected freshman English as a composition/rhetoric course. To do this, I will examine composition/rhetoric texts of the New Critics to see how New Critical attitudes toward texts influenced what they said about the teaching of composition/rhetoric. This, then, will provide a more specific picture of how New Critical composition is related to the textbook rhetoric at the turn of the century and to the newer composition/rhetoric theories that followed it, particularly in rhetorical criticism and the New Generative Rhetoric. Chapter II will identify a New Critical Rhetoric by identifying the principles of Richards* New Rhetoric that are cannon to the New Criticism. Chapter III will identify the rhetorical principles that are used in the methods of New. Critical analysis to illustrate how New Critical Rhetoric was used in the classroom. Using a specific philosophy of a liberal arts program as an example, we can see how this rhetorical theory defined the arts in the middle decades and influenced the kinds of asignments students were asked to write. Chapter IV will identify the direct influences of the New Critics on composition: (1) the changes in composition pedagogy frcm tum-of-the-century textbook rhetoric, (2) the prose form or type that most easily accomodated New Critical principles, and (3) the ccnposing process that is implied in New Critical attitudes toward texts. In essence. Chapters III and IV will illustrate the two major influences of a New Critical Rhetoric on composition: writing about imaginative discourse and writing imaginative discourse. Chapter V will identify how New Critical principles have been 13 used by some of the stellar figures of the modem discipline of compos ition/rhetor ic. Chapter VI will identify sane of the directions to which the New Critical tradition points in the eighties. The method of this investigation is traditionally rhetorical in that it is aimed at analyzing, through interviews and records of the time, (1) the historical scene which encouraged New Critical methods and attitudes toward texts and (2) the effects of New Critical attitudes toward texts on composition theory and practice. The method is also New Critically rhetorical in that it is an attempt to analyze this tradition by taking a close look at written texts in order to discover (1) the structures of this model of composition/rhetoric and (2) the metaphoric significance of the various relationships between rhetorical theory and literary practice and critical analysis and composition practice. In the context of the kind of "formistic" approach Hayden White takes to analyze the historical imagination, I will approach ny historical subject in a "contextualist" mode. That is, first I will isolate elements within the context of a particular historical field. Then I will identify the threads that link particular phenomena to different areas of the context, a tracing that will end when these threads disappear or converge into the contexts of 20 other events. Central to this research are the texts of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in that their work provides an important, explicit thread connecting the various interests of the English department: critical theory# practical criticism, and composition/rhetorical 14. theory and practice. Brooks is not only an original, critical thinker but a synthesizer of other's ideas; so through his work, we can see how his own ideas and those frcm other critics in the new tradition, such as Eliot, Tate, Bnpson, Ransom, Blackmur, and Richards, were used 21 to effect a practical criticism. Working with Penn Warren, he brought the New Criticism to the classroom in the late thirties and forties and taught a generation of teachers and students how to analyze literature. And in 1949, the two of them turned their attention to rhetoric and composition. Using the Modem Rhetoric as a representative text of New Critical composition theory and practice, it is possible to see hew their New Critical attitudes toward language were translated into composition/ rhetoric and how these New Critical developments altered tum-of-the-century oonpos it ion/rhetor ic. Once we recognize this historical theoretical development in composition/rhetoric, we can better understand how it influenced textbook theory that followed. The two "rhetorics" that Richard Weaver acknowledged as "forerunners" to his own textbook A Rhetoric and Handbook (1957) are: Donald Davidson's American Composition and Rhetoric and Brooks and Warren's Modem Rhetoric, books that he said are part of the "great mass of generally familiar material used in the teaching of college 22 composition upon which everyone draws consciously or unconsciously.” While this study only begins to bring same of the more direct influences of the New Critics to our conscious attention, the fact that the Modem Rhetoric is still being published is testimony to the long-lived influence of the New Critical tradition on American 15 composition instruction Notes ^ Robert M. Gorrell, Patricia Bizzell, and Bruce Herzberg, "Beginnings of Modern Composition Studies: New Criticism," The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing (Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1984} 4. 2 Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (1965; New York: Oxford UP, 1971) 627. 3 _ ' i s ' ■ ■ ■ Edward P. J. Corbett, personal interview, 30 March 1984. 4 Edward P. J. Corbett, ed., introduction. Rhetorical Analysis of Literary Works (New York: Oxford UP, 1969) xxvi. 5 J. Hillis Miller, "Conposition and Decomposition: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Writing," Conposition and Literature: Bridging the Gap, ed. Winifred Bryan Homer (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983) 38-56. 6 Miller 41. 7 Miller 42. 8 Ross Winterowd, "Post-Structuralism and Conposition," Pre/Text 4.1 (1983): 79. See also Edward M. White, "Post-Structural Literary Criticism and the Response to Student writing," CCC 35 (1984): 186-95. ^ Albert Kitzbaber, "Rhetoric in American Colleges: 1850-1900," diss., U of Washington, 1953. (The fact that this particular dissertation remains unpublished, circulated only by University Microfilms, attests to our lack of interest in the history of our discipline until only recently.) James Kinneavy, "Restoring the Humanities: The Return of Rhetoric from Exile," The Rhetorical Tradition and Modem Writing, ed. James Murphy (New York: MLA, 1982) 23. Donald Stewart notes that "The prestige and influence of the Harvard department, with its increasing enphasis on literary-critical scholarship, significantly helped cause the reduction of rhetoric and conposition to second-rate status...." (See Donald C. Stewart, "Two ‘Model Teachers and the Harvardization of English Departments," The Rhetorical Tradition and Modem Writing, ed. James J. Murphy (New York: MLA, 1982) 121. ^ Edward P. J. COrbett, "What is Being Revived?," OQC 18 (1967): 170. 13 For a history of usage in America see Edward Fmegan, Attitudes Tcward English Usage: The History of a War of Words (New 17 York; Teacher's College Press, Columbia University, 1980). 14 The first is described by Donald Stewart (see 7, supra). 15 I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936; New York; Oxford UP, 1965) 3. ^ Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934; New York; New Directions, 1960) 17. 17 . The preoccupation with structural questions was certainly not limited to the American New Critics. One could also point to the work of the Russian Formalists and the French Structuralists. What is interesting to note is the extent to which the American New Critics dominated American thought. The French and Russian texts did not reach a large American audience because they were not translated into English until the sixties and early seventies, a time when enthusiasm for the New Critics was waning. 18 Edward P. J. Corbett, personal interview, 30 March 1984. ^ Corbett, "Revived?" 171. 20 Hayden V. White, Mstahistory; The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore; Johns Hopkins U P, 1973) 1-42. 21 Cleanth Brooks, Modem Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hills; U of North Carolina P, 1939) x. 22 Richard M. Vfeaver, A Rhetoric and Handbook (1957; New York; Holt, 1967) viii. CHAPTER II NEW CRITICAL RHETORICAL THEORY The purpose of this chapter is to bring together the contenporaneous developments in rhetoric and poetics early in the twentieth century in order to tease out a particular strand of American rhetoric that can be identified as "New Critical Rhetoric." To do this I will identify particular theorists, methods of analysis, and theoretical elements associated with both the New Rhetoric and the New Criticism. I will identify those elements of I. A. Richards* New Rhetoric that are important to the New Critics and show how Richards oonstrasts these elements in his New Rhetoric with those of an older tradition of rhetoric. Because Richards' New Rhetoric established a theoretical context in which many of the New Critics operated, we need to define what is meant by old and new rhetoric. A brief summary of the most important ideas of classical rhetoric will provide a useful set of points for comparison with the New Critical Rhetoric. According to Corbett's summary, "classical rhetoric" (and what I will call "traditional rhetoric") is the art of persuasion, a two thousand year history of a theoretical super-structure built upon Aristotle’s Rhetoric.1 The system comprises four sets of terms: 1) four elements of the rhetorical situation: the speaker/writer, 19 the audience, the text, and the world, 2) five canons: invention (the discovery of arguments), arrangement (the organization of the parts); style (the structures of verbal expression, which treat specifically diction, sentence patterns, rhythms, and figures.) (When I use the word "expression" in this text, I will mean what is used in this context— the stylistic expression of the language configurations in the text, not "expressive discourse" which M. H. Abrahms refers to as the critical focus on the 2 "author as generator of the artistic processes." What Ransom means by the "expressiveness" of language is the sense in which language emphasizes itself in the harmony of sound and sense or suggestion and denotation for example.); memory and delivery, canons which became less important in the historical development of written discourse, 3) three types of discourse: political, with its goal of winning assent for an issue to be decided in the future; forensic, with its goal of defending a past action; and ceremonial, with its object of praise or blame and its temporal province of the present, and 4) three modes of appeal: to reason, through the rhetorical devices of the example and the enthymeme; to the emotions of the audience; and to the ethos of the speaker, through the appeals of good sense, goodwill, and moral integrity. According to this description of traditional rhetoric, we could say at the outset that a New Critical Rhetoric seems to focus on only one of the elements in each category. Its focus is on the text and the tools or devices of style (specifically diction, sentence pattern, sounds, rhythms and figures.) It is preoccupied with ceremonial 20 discourse, concerned with grand themes of the present rather than discourse which seeks to persuade an audience to adopt a particular point of view or to be moved to a particular action. And the logic of induction, analogy, and the example are used to the exclusion of the enthymeme. For those of us trained in or influenced by the revival of i classical rhetoric in the second half of this century, it may seen strange, at first, to examine New Critical poetic theory in the j context of a rhetorical theory, since the New Critical focus on the autonomy of a text ignores three of the four traditional points of rhetorical reference: the writer, the reader, and the world. Itie ; writer's intention, the reader's reaction, and the historical moment from which the discourse is drawn or for which it is aimed are considered secondary interests or fallacies in New Critical poetic theory. Furthermore, the New Criticism was not concerned with persuasion, traditionally considered the fundamental aim of rhetoric. In New Critical poetic theory, this first principle of rhetoric would, itself, fall into the category of the affective fallacy— identified in 1949 by Wimsatt and Beardsley as "the confusion between the poem and 3 its results (what it is and what it does)." Ihis seems to prove, at least initially, that the New Literary Critics were not working within a traditional model of rhetoric. So to understand more fully the rhetorical theory that provided the context in which the New Critics worked, I will examine the New Rhetoric of I. A. Richards. The New Rhetoric of I. A. Richards Considered father to the New Criticism and a New Rhetoric, Richards was the philosopher responsible for the idea that the traditional goal of rhetoric as persuasion and its doctrine of effects caused more misunderstanding than understanding about the operations of language. Corbett describes this significance in 1967: Sane people see the roots of a new rhetoric in I. A. Richards's work in semantics and in the works storming from that study. Dissatisfied with the Aristotelianism of Richard VJhately's Elements of Rhetoric, with its concentration on persuasive discourse and its forsaking of a philosophy of rhetoric for a mere set of prudential rules, Richards found a more congenial starting point for his own rhetorical theory in George Canpbell's A Philosophy of Rhetoric. 4 Corbett goes on to say that judging from the particular animus of the work, sane see Richards* work as "anti-rhetorical." Thus the historical characteristic that identifies New Critical Rhetoric is its departure from Aristotelian rhetoric, a departure lasting approximately thirty years in composition studies, until the time when 5 classical rhetoric was reintroduced. Richards' New Rhetoric had essentially inverted traditional rhetorical precepts— its aim, mode, and focus, and its notion of meaning, imagery, ami metaphor— an important inversion for its effects on the practical application of this rhetoric in the areas of prose ocnposition and the critical analysis of literary texts. In lectures given at Bryn Mawr College in 1936 (lectures that would be collected and edited in Philosophy of Rhetoric), Richards defined his theoretical break with the entire tradition of rhetoric g from Aristotle to Whately. He reacted to the aim of traditional rhetoric as the study of the suasory value of language, believing that its preoccupations with dispute served more to blind than enlighten in that the combative inpulse frequently disturbed the judgment. Instead, he believed that a more powerful rhetoric for the modern age would be of a different "mode." It should not be "one of disposing the given and unquestioned powers of words to the best advantage,” or of "generalizations about their effects, generalizations that are uninstructive and uninproving unless we go more deeply and by another route into these grounds" (9). This other "route" for the study of language, both theoretical and practical, would not be a "macroscopic" but a microscopic inquiry which endeavours to look into the structure of the meanings with which discourse is composed, not merely into the effects of various large-scale disposals of these meanings. In this Rhetoricians may remind us of the Alchemists' efforts to transmute common substances into precious metals, vain efforts because they were not able to take account of the internal structures of the so-called elements... .We have to shift the focus of our analysis and attempt a deeper and more minute grasp and try to take account of the structures of the snallest units of meaning and the way in which these vary as they are put with other units (9-10). While Cleanth Brooks defines rhetoric as the management or alignment of words, language, or purposes in order to persuade or affect, he emphasized in a recent interview that the modern writers did not return to classical rhetoric to solve modern problems. Instead, they looked for modem ways to solve modem problems. Inevitably, however, seme problems and solutions will overlap or be repeated. But in his response to the question "What did the New 23 Critics take of classical rhetoric?," Brooks underscored the fact that the modern writer was "not trying to naturalize classical rhetoric to modern times."* Classical rhetoric did not need to be revived. The new theorists would find new ways to analyze their problems. (Like the new gramnarians who were discarding prescriptive Latin rules as the basis for an English grammar system, the New Critics and the New Rhetoricians were attempting to describe systematically and inductively the relationships between language patterns and meaning in modern discourse.) The new concern, Brooks specified, was with words as words, and the new tools by which to explore the matter were "metaphor, tone, and symbol." It should be noted that the departure from Aristotelian rhetoric was less a matter of conflicting doctrine than it was a shifting attention to matters of textuality and meaning. ; Brooks noted that Aristotle sinply said very little about the kinds of things that interested the new theorists and critics of written texts. According to Richards, the New Rhetoric's foe, ; on the interpretation of language rather than the consequent effect of language— with its study of the smaller units of language in order to learn "hew words work in discourse," an in-depth study of the shifts of meaning as an alternative to the study of the effects of language use— would make possible "a new era of human understanding and co-operation in thinking" (73). The fundamental premise of this theory was the "context theorem of meaning"— a new theory of meaning that, in its practical applications, would redefine rhetoric as a study of social interactions to the study of discourse as figurative expression. Where traditional rhetoric focused on the social context of the discourse, the New Rhetoric focused on the meaning of the text within the context of the language structures of the text itself. This is an important distinction between the two theories. But for now we need to see how the context theorem of meaning affected rhetorical theory. As Richards made clear, the greatest hindrance to an understanding of language (that is, the major fault he finds with traditional rhetoric and eighteenth-century doctrine in particular) was the failure to recognize contextual shifts of sense, that a word's meanings can change depending upon its place in the context of other words. This failure led to other misleading assumptions about the content and form of discourse, listed and discussed below: 1. The myth of the separation of form and content, or the belief that language was the dress of thought, 2. The myth of the notion that metaphor was a "happy extra trick" of language rather than its constitutive form, and 3. The myth of the notion that the qualities of discourse (such as correctness, precision, vividness, appropriateness, expressiveness, and beauty) could be judged as virtues of style, apart fran the context of their use. Assumption 1 According to Richards, the fundamental mistake of previous rhetorical doctrine regarding meaning was the belief that words have meaning in and of themselves, a belief he labeled the "Proper Meaning Superstition." To illustrate this mistaken belief, Richards pointed 25 to an explanation that Berkeley gave of an attempt to understand discourse by collecting "meaning from the whole sum and tenor of [his] discourse, and laying aside the words as much as possible, [considering only] the bare notions themselves..." (4-5). Richards responded to this idea by noting "that we can only 'collect the whole sum and tenor of discourse' from the words." Richards' argument was that meanings were derived from contexts, either "technical" (from recurrent groups of events from experience) or "literary" (from meanings derived from use in actual discourse). In sum, traditional rhetoric had failed to recognize the interanimation of words, hence, the interdependence of meanings, and, consequently, the "universal relativity" of language* This was a tremendous shift in philosophical attitudes toward meaning: from verbal independence to verbal interdependence, forcing a greater attention to the contextual settings of words. (I will underscore the fact that Richards saw language as intertextual— that is, as interdependent among linguistic contexts. We should be careful not to impose upon his theory a more modern view of context as a non-textual entity which seems to have its source in a more socially oriented, classical rhetoric.) In contrast to his organic view of discourse, Richards saw traditional rhetorical attitudes toward language as a mosaic view. Words, he believed, are not stable, concrete elements to be put together to construct a piece of discourse. Discourse is not built by the addition of meanings but by the ways in vfoich meanings come together within textual contexts to determine meaning. The 26 I justification for his context theorem was use: words are serviceable not because they are stable referents to the world, but in that they are ambiguous and can shift their meanings in various contexts of use j - ■ j for various purposes. This was a more flexible and dynamic theory of i language in that it accounted for the shifts of meaning among words within the context of a single piece of discourse. If words take on new meanings from their surrounding elements, then language is continually defining and redefining itself. By implication, however, New Critical doctrine seems a paradox. How is it possible to search for determinate meaning if language is continually reshaping and redefining itself? The irony is solved to a certain degree if one acknowledges that language defines or mates itself in the process of reading, after which one can analyze what has been formed. While Richards acknowledged the existence of independent meanings along with interdependent meanings, the context theorem assumes that independent mealnings are not the norm of language but an extreme occurrence of language. While some words, such as those from technical fields, have fixed or unconditional meanings, they do so only because the contexts for their use are stable, and their meanings result from use in relatively constant conditions. Because of the ambiguous nature of language, a neutral exposition or "pure exposition" is a rare occurrence, a "very special limited use of language* (41). Poetry, at the other end of the scale, depends almost entirely upon its form or texture to provide the context for the meaning of its language. Richards noted that most discourse falls somewhere between these two extremes. These are important concepts to 27 note, because when the New Critics turn their attention to the matter of prose composition, they adopted attitudes about meaning from only one end of the scale. Because they were interested primarily in poetry, they used the idea that texture provides the context for meaning to analyze both poetry and informal expository writing. And thus for the New Critics, context is limited to the suggestions of the textual contact. Richards* new context theorem of meaning suggested a different theory of mind than the one present in seventeenth and eighteenth-century notions of associationism that had influenced rhetoricians such as Lord Karnes in Elements of Criticism (1762). While Richards acknowledged Hartleian Associationism as an ancestor to his own theory, he believed that it offered a misleading view of the construction of meaning, with a naive view of imagery at its core. The problem with the image in this earlier theory was that it was tied to the stimulation of specific senses rather than to whole contexts of perceptions. For him, the image did not stimulate a distinct and accurate impression, but a complex of impressions. That is, images cure not the "stuff of meaning," but vice-versa. Hie point that seems to be made here is that the language determines what the mind will do rather than the mind determining what the language will do as earlier theories had suggested. Richards' evidence for thinking that we perceive images this way is found in the varied interpretations that we may have of a single figure. Perception, he says, is "never just of an it; perception takes whatever it perceives as a thing of a certain sort" (30). Perception is a result of past and present responses, sane times arbitrary ones, to occasions and events. According to the Hartleian idea of perception, the particular impression, or image, was the initial term for perception; in Richards' theory, the "primordial generality" was the initial term, a 8 context which is ushered up to make meaning of the particular. For Richards, perception, which is built upon the general abstraction, grcws by becoming more and more discrete as the abstraction is divided into various sortings or classes of particulars. The mind recognizes resemblances and then searches for disparities by sorting the abstractions into greater differentiations of meaning. Assumption 2 The most important rhetorical principle illuminated by the context theorem was the metaphor. As the "omnipresent principle of language,” Richards believed that metaphor worked through transactions among whole contexts of meaning. Because of this new idea, he believed that the eighteenth-century notion of metaphor had been misconceived in that it limited this operation of language to one transaction only: the comparison or definition of one thing in terms of another, particularly in terms of visual impressions. In that words can draw upon whole contexts of meanings in a metaphorical thought, when words are brought together metaphorically, "there is an immense variety in these modes of interaction between co-present thoughts" (93). To illustrate the various modes of metaphor, Richards divided the concept into two elements: the tenor, or the underlying idea, and the 29 vehicle, the figure of comparison. Eighteenth-century notions of j i metaphor assumed that the vehicle described the tenor without changing; i I it. But according to the context theorem, the "contributions of I vehicle and tenor to this resultant meaning varies immensely." One j sees that the vehicle is not normally a mere embellishment of a tenor which is otherwise unchanged by it but that vehicle and tenor in co-operation give a meaning of more varied powers than can be ascribed to either (100). There are at least four possible inodes of interpretation: We can extract the tenor and believe that as a statement; or ; extract the vehicle; or, taking tenor and vehicle together, contemplate for acceptance or rejection for some statement about their relations, or we can accept or refuse the | direction which together they would give to our living... (135). As can be seen, metaphor isn't limited to one mode only. The new meaning can result from taking the tenor and vehicle together or from any negative implications of either or both. Recognizing the possible effects of the collocation of copresent thoughts actually redefines or changes the meaning of the tenor. It isn't simply ornamented or left unchanged by additional description. To this, Richards adds the meaning that results from the reader's decision to believe in the new meaning or to take action upon it. What he seems to suggest here is that conviction, or belief, is one mode of interpretation— a concept that is lost in New Critical poetics, and, consequently, lost in New Critical Composition when these poet/critics bring their analytical technology into the classroom. Thus Richards replaced the Aristotelian notion of metaphor (as a deviation from the normal mode of language operation and as a mark of 30 genius which cannot be imparted) with a theory that elevated the status of metaphor by making it the fundamental principle of language. ; For him, "a command of the interpretation of metaphors-—can go deeper i i still into the control of the world that we make for ourselves to live ■ j in" (135). But the more specific implications of this notion of i control are left unexplored in these lectures. He does, however, emphasize the fact that all people have an eye for resemblance and disparity because these are the means by which people make greater sense of, or discriminations within, their world. Because metaphor is j the linguistic means by which we make finer discriminations of meaning, it has important implications for a rhetoric of discourse analysis and ocatposition. As the next, chapter will illustrate, the metaphoric process of interpretation is the heart of the interpretive I rhetoric that Cleanth Brooks helped to establish in the literature course which became an important part of the freshman English course. Assumption 3 The context theorem also provided a rationale for judgment. In such a theory, judging a particular language choice is not determined by a single meaning or a proper usage as the handbook tradition had suggested. Abstract questions of correctness, precision, or conciseness are idle and misleading questions of aesthetics unless one asks, "What will it do in its varied incidences?” (86). Thus qualities of discourse can be judged only in terms of the contexts Of their use within a particular text. The context theorem of meaning essentially explains Richards' new 31 I philosophy of rhetoric and accounts not only for his new attitudes and assumptions toward rhetoric, language, texts, style, and metaphor but also those adopted by many of the New Critics; and, consequently, these become assumptions of a New Critical Rhetoric. In brief, they ! are as follows: Rhetoric should provide one with the set of tools by which to understand the workings, and, consequently, the meanings of language. Language is essentially ambiguous, determined by contexts of meanings either literal or figurative. Texts are organic constructs of interdependent meanings, creating unique instances of discourse. Style is functional. Metaphor is the metaphor for this model of rhetoric in that it is the "omnipresent principle of language." To say that this model is anti-rhetor ical because it is nontraditional is to overlook the ways in which the New Rhetoric was conceived. We have in these different historical rhetorics two different attitudes toward the study of texts. Traditional rhetoric views the text as an argument which attempts to persuade an audience. The New Critics view the text as a structure to be appreciated for its design as an object of art in which its structures help to determine its meanings. In New Critical practice, the rhetorical situation is dramatized within the text. (New Critics frequently speak of the persona in the text and the rhetorical manipulations going on inside the test.) For traditional rhetoric, the rhetorical situation exists outside the text, dramatized, or illustrated, by the communication 32 triangle. As this part of the chapter has tried to show, the most inportant i distinction to be made between the old and new rhetorics is the attitude toward effect or response. According to 0. G. Brockett as quoted by Corbett, the New Critical or "internal" response can be distinguished from the "inpressionistic" critical response in that the i impressionistic critic "tends to assume that his response somehow contains the work, (while) the internal critic tends to see the i response as contained in the work." The internal response "is deduced from an analysis of the structures, the relationship of characters, g the implied and expressed meanings, the mood, and similar factors." While the New Critical Rhetorician may acknowledge any external rhetorical situational element (the author, the reader, the world) whenever it is needed to explain the meanings or tone of the work, the focus is always on the text. The traditional rhetorical response to the text is always on the effect of the text on a reader. Its response might include knowledge of other elements in the rhetorical situation, derived from sources of information other than the analysis of structures of the text; whereas in a New Critical model, the rhetorical elements are deduced from the analysis of the structures of the text. Thus New Critical Rhetoric views a piece of discourse as an inscription of these rhetorical elements. In this respect, the text serves as empirical proof of the critical statement, hence the label "objective" analysis. The remainder of this chapter will illustrate hew Richards' assumptions about language and texts are used by the New Critics in 33 their theory and practice. At the same time, I hope to show how the principles and practice of New Critical analysis helped to institutionalize new attitudes toward the traditional canons of rhetoric— invention, arrangement, and style. The New Criticism i Some of the other critics, theorists, and poets closely associated with the New Criticism are Eliot, Empson, Ransom, Brooks, Warren, Tate, and Wixnsatt. TO the extent that the New Criticism was a movement recognized primarily for its "return to the text," it is possible to locate in the theory and practice of the New Critics assumptions about language and literary texts and methods for studying these texts that are consistent with those defined by Richards in his Philosophy of Rhetoric.^ Both criticism and rhetoric have always attended to textual matters; but the study of the "poem qua poem" with its coordinates of semantics and syntax— where statements of the meaning of a text are verified by a method of rigorous verbal and structural analysis— emerges in America in the thirties and forties as a formidable, practical critical movement. To extend the two coordinates identified in Richards' rhetoric into a working definition of the New Criticism, we could say that interpretative criticism, or practical criticism, as it was called, is the study of the literary product as an aesthetic form of communication, textured by the degree to which language structures interact organically among contexts of explicit and implicit meanings 34 within the constraints of the text itself. Fran this definition we can locate important assumptions that are consistent with the aim of the New Rhetoric (which is to determine the meaning of a text) and its mode (which is a close observation of the interaction of its language structures). Thus while the various critics offer different ideas about which language structures are most important, all assume this aim and mode of rhetoric and Richards' assumptions about language, literary texts, and style. This section will describe, in the context of New Critical literary theory and practice, what I consider to be the three most important New Critical preoccupations to be adopted in texts on composition: the autonomous structure, texture, and metaphor. Let me state here the working idea of the last portion of this chapter. A brief history of the New Critics' reaction to earlier critical methods and their interests in modern poetry help to illustrate their attitudes toward language and literary texts, while at the same time they foreshadow or parallel the New Critical Ccmpositionists' reactions to turn-of-the-century textbook rhetoric instruction: that the aim of criticism or composition should focus on understanding the language rather than a focus on moral or social axioms, conventional rules or attitudes, or sentimental or affective expression. Hie New Critics observed how the language was charged with meaning. Specifically, this section will show how the New Critics valued unconventional or novel insights; rich verbal texture of organic interrelationships among structures and meaning; the concrete, presentational over the abstract; and metaphor as the fundamental language principle. Seen in a context of a rhetorical model, these New Critical attitudes would alter the traditional canons of invention, arrangement, and style. i , Textual Autonomy i The New Critics believed that the task of the critic was textual elucidation which entailed a search for the richness of textual meanings through a close study of its language structures. In that the text was seen as autonomous, the study of intention, effect, and history were considered fallacies in terms of the critic's purpose."*"*" This does not suggest that they did not use historical information to aid then in their interpretation of the text. The New Critics' primary interest was in the value of the text as meaning, and not in the value of the text as a statement of historical importance, for example. These fallacies emphasize the new rhetorical aim for discourse analysis: to understand the meanings of a text. The critic reads poetry not to be moved by its beauty, but bo understand the formal strategies that create its meaning. Accordingly, literary discourse is not seen as a social instrument created to affect or celebrate the historically past moment. Only secondarily is the critic interested in any social effect of the literary text. Brooks argues even today that history and affect are a part of any interpretation, but not the 12 aim of interpretation. The text is to be seen as a repository of subtle meanings, newly created, to be pondered over from several, careful readings. Just as Pound had suggested, it is a unique 36 specimen to be apprehended by first-hand observation. Clearly, however, in reacting to the work of historical, humanistic, and Romantic critics at the turn of the century, the New Critics unanimously agreed upon what was extraneous to the modern critical task. The new aim of criticism, like that of Richards' New Rhetoric, should not be an extrinsic analysis of effect— historical, social, political, moral, or biographical— but rather an intrinsic analysis of the meaning that comes from considering all the various interdependent meanings. In this sense, their approach to the text was truly modem. The notion of interdependent elements within the text par ailed the relativistic ideas in modem physics. I will examine only briefly the historical development of their views. The reaction to the nineteenth-century methods of historical. scholarship and the didacticism of the Neo-humanists begins at the turn of the century with Joel Spingarn, who offered a "new criticism" in an address given at Columbia in 1910. There he argued that art was not a social document, historically evolved, which could be tested by ethical standards. In fact, he threw out all of the traditional standards. His focus on the text was to attenqpt to discover whether or not an artist had achieved his intention, an expressive notion which was considered far too extrinsic for critical tastes two decades 13 later. In 1929, I. A. Richards published Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment, the result of an experiment conducted with college literary students reading a collection of thirteen unidentified poems. Their responses, which were meticulously documented in half of the 37 book, led him to declare a literacy crisis. Their responses were erratic, sentimental, stock, and doctrinal— in sum, they were inappropriate for the poem in question. They seemed to be intentional and affective responses, lacking the inductive, or "indirect,* skills ; by which to observe or apprehend the linguistic forms necessary to read and judge poetry. Richards' data led him to posit the need for a "closer study of meaning," of how language works not as a grammar but as a theory of language interpretation (a need that he would fulfill in 1936 with his Philosophy of Rhetoric). By 1933, T. S. Eliot had located what was to become the Mew Critical position, emphasizing not only the detachment of historical and moral considerations but also biographical considerations, when he placed a poem's existence "...somewhere between the writer and the 14 reader." And in 1934 responding to "What is Literature?,* Ezra Pound defined great literature as "simply language charged with 15 meaning to the utmost possible degree." In an article collected in The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation (1935), R. p. Blackmur noted the split that had occurred between the social/historical critics and an identifiable group of aesthetic/textual critics attempting to identify linguistic, semantic, and psychological patterns within the work. Blackmur saw the goal of the critic as "making the pre-conscious consciously available* through the tools of scientific assertion. Analysis was the means by which to make the "pre-conscious" conscious. Yet, at the same time, Blackmur realized that not all meanings were "susceptible of verbal reformulation," (an idea consistent with the "heresy of 38 I paraphrase"). And although analyzable elements can never fully "add | i up" to the imaginative product, the best method for the critic was, he ' believed, to scrutinize the text. He suggested a scrutiny cm two planes (the linguistics of Richards and the psychological patterns of j i Burke) as being preferable to other approaches such as the literary j philosophy of Santayana, the literary psychology and sociology of Van j Wyck Brooks, or the literary or economic histories of Granville Hicks. j Poetry, he reminded us is neither history nor biography but an individuated language form, an "idiom...a special and fresh saying, yj j and cannot for its life be said otherwise...." By the time Ransom formalized the movement in his 1941 publication The New Criticism (five years after Richards had published his philosophy of a New Rhetoric), there ted been a marked shift in critical methods— from deduction to induction, a change from the axioms of taste to the analysis of texts. Ransom begins his j ontological discussion of poetry by echoing the semantic and syntactic elements important to Richards' analysis: The differentia between poetry and prose discourse is not moralism, sensibility or 'expression, * or affections# but structures. The semantics and the syntactics of art together invite the most exacting study if we care to identify them really. Largely responsible for this shift of methods was a change in preference for objects of critical evaluation. Historical scholarship had excluded the modern poets, and the New Critics, many of whcm were poets themselves, felt the egalitarian need to provide readers with a set of tools with which to examine virtually any poetic text, especially those of the complex moderns. The task of the modern poet was to make sense of things in an otherwise chaotic world, to organize language in such a way that it would provide a sense of structure in the art object. The modern critics, as a result, were considerably interested in the modem responses to life and art for which the age had rendered conventional responses useless. Eliot identified this problem as the 19 "disassociation of sensibility." The early part of the twentieth century seemed inevitably chaotic s an industrial lifestyle, a world war, and an economic collapse all reinforced the "non-sense" of life— particularly the notion that contiguous events were not necessarily coherent. Life was complex, idiosyncratic, and contradictory. Common sense was no longer trusted to make sense of the chaos of the modem world. Where form did not exist in life, one could create it in art. One could, through form, shape one's way out of chaos. In The Possibilities of Order: Cleanth Brooks and His Work (1976), Lewis Simpson points to the modern Southerner's need to create a "symbolism of order" within fiction, one that creates an imaginative truth that "intermeshes with reality" providing at least a oontenplative 20 possibility for a true order of human community. Thus in the context of a rhetorical theory, the New Criticism validated and emphasized a "formal," "imaginative truth," one made or created in the text to be recognized by a reader— a truth quite different fran the truth found outside the text from commonly shared community beliefs. This notion of a "formal" truth to be made or determined within the text is consistent with Richards' contextual theory of interdependent 40 meanings. In a New Critical Rhetoric one turns to the interned structuring of the elements within the form in order to make the i context. The textual context, then, becomes the immediate context for determining meaning or truth. (For a theory of writing, this would i mean that one would not turn to the ccnnion topoi or the common places to find substance for one's discourse. If the discourse itself is the place to find meanings, then invention is a matter of "figuring" new, unconventional truths.) Obviously, the modern forms of poetry dananded readers with unconventional habits of reading and thinking. But as Richards had demonstrated in 1929, these readers did not exist. Although Ransom saw early on that an inductive method encourages over-reading, it was championed then for preventing a conventional response by demanding a patient, careful reading of a poem for its intrinsic qualities. Consequently, the new poetics identified the need for a new logic and method. Because modern poetry didn't state its meanings directly, the new logic was one of plur isignation, and its method was one of indirection. In 1947 Brooks sunmarized the situation and the method that it called for: Now the modem poet has, for better or worse, thrown the weight of the responsibility upon the reader. The reader must be on the alert for shifts of tone, for ironic statement, for suggestion rather than direct statement. He must be prepared to accept a method of indirection. The subtitle to The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry points to the key element of the New Critical canon and provides the solution to the literacy crisis as it was conceived then. The means by which modem readers could confront modem poetry and its indirection was through a conscious awareness of the degree to which i j language structures enrich or qualify the meaning of the poem. : j | | Texture j ! i In "Wanted: An Ontological Critic," Ransom expressed the New Critical attempt to establish ontologically a conceptual universe for aesthetic knowledge in a conceptual world dominated by positivism. In j a way. New Critics such as Ransom wanted to compete with science by being equally rigorous, formal, and systematic. In their different approach to knowledge via an aesthetic route, they could beat the positivists at their own game. The New Critics sought to recognize, formally, a dimension of knowledge beyond the abstract and propositional— that of plurisignations and meaningful ambiguities.' Thus this rhetoric made a fundamental logic of dissociation— of disparate elsnents that work together as copresent thoughts in • discourse to create a greater depth of meaning. This tension that created a greater depth of meaning could be seen in New Critical poetics in two important notions: in the awareness of texture (the determinate and indeterminate meanings described by Ransom) and in those language figures essentially defined by their nonlogic or contrast: such as ambiguity, irony, paradox, or metaphor. I will first discuss the notion of texture. Most of the New Critics maintained the distinction between scientific language as literal exactitude and aesthetic or literary language as figural depth, but did so in order to show how sense and intellection worked together to provide a kind of knowledge lost to abstraction alone. As a result of what Ransom calls "qualitative density," art saves us, in its concrete fullness of meaning, from the abstraction of science. He believed that scientific discourse reduces, emasculates and gives "docile versions* of the world, while "poetry intends to recover the denser and more refractory original world which we know 22 loosely through our perceptions and memories." While the New Critics point to the density of figurative implications, the figure 1 that Ransom points to specifically is the concrete image or the icon. Scientific signs refer abstractly and singularly to aspects or fragments of an object which remain constant for logical discourse. They are therefore paraphrasable. Aesthetic signs, which are icons or images, "imitate" the whole of an object and the simultaneity of its many values. Consequently, their particularity is indefinable in that such richness is always out of reach of the paraphrasable. These values serve to restore "the body" from its abstracted parts. Thus for Ransom, language functions to provide us with two forms of truth; the definitive or abstractive and the image-provoking or particular, each illuminating the other. In an earlier belletristic rhetoric, the image functioned to stir the reader's imagination so as to prepare him for the truth. According to this New Critical development, the image, in its rich denseness, can be its own form of truth capable of interacting with an abstract form of truth. But for Brooks, the real question for criticism is whether or not the paraphrasable elements of a literary text have primacy. He, of course, assumes that they are rather the lowest common denominator, 43 the status of which is reinforced in what he calls the "heresy of 23 paraphrase." In this rhetoric then, the abstract truth is not necessarily less credible, it is simply not the whole, irreduceable truth. And according to this logic, the whole, irreduceable truth is indefinable, realized only in the poem itself. As a result, the connections between the literal and figurative or the abstract and those elements that make for rich, dense texture beccme the most important technical study for the New Critics. For Ransom the most profound and elemental aspect of criticism is studying how determinate ideas are enveloped in indeterminate material. Ransom assumes, first of all, a fundamental premise of Richards' rhetoric, that contexts of interdependent structures determine meaning. The important point to be made here regarding a New Critical Rhetoric is that invention is to be made within the text as one encounters meanings or language in the process of either composition or interpretation. Invention is not the gathering of ideas from outside the text to be brought into a form; it is the actual process by which the mind forms meaning within the text through the "figuring" or "determining" of ideas. Invention, or for Ranscm, composition, is the making of texture as the mind struggles to control the determinate and indeterminate forces of language as explained below. For him, the structural complexity of a work is a result of the tension between the logical structure and the particular, iconic signs of poetic texture. Texture is a result of importations from the imagination, of images that make for the body of the discourse. (It should be noted that Ranscm's idea here supports Richards' notion that the image is not a particular, single impression. Pound's famous definition expresses the same idea— the image is an intellectual and emotional context in an instant of time.) Ransom is, of course, concerned with getting at the most fitting context for the particularity within the existing, determinate structure. The contextual overlap that is created when each new detail is added is what suggests indeterminacy. To summarize Ransom's texture-making act, we could say that whenever one works with language, there exists certain conventions such as sound, meter, or meanings which constrain or determine what one does with the language. For example, if a poet has a particular meter in mind, he will fit the meaning to the meter. But in trying to make a fit, the writer finds that the meter can un-determine the meaning and introduce indeterminate meaning or sound. These new directions are not necessarily distractions, and the poet senses when to go with these new directions when he is alive to what is happening in the text. Poetic texture, then, is the "positive indeterminate meanings." Ransom explains the process: But the important state of inde termi nacy comes, in the experiment of composition, when the imagination of the poet, and not only his verbal mechanics, is engaged. An "irrelevance" may feel forced at first, and its overplus of meaning unwanted, because it means the importation of a little foreign or extraneous content into what should be determinate, and limited; but soon the poet ocmes upon a kind of irrelevance that seems desirable, and he begins to indulge it voluntarily, as a new and positive asset to the meaning. And this is the principle: the importations which the imagination introduces into discourse have the value of developing the "particularity" which lurks in the "body," and under the surface, of apparently determinate situations (314). 45 The ontological poet or critic should study at several levels of texture the various properties that make for the depths of these operations in a text. Ransom mentions some of the possibilities. Because in most poems there is a greater interest in meaning than sound, sound will texture the meaning. But the poet can also develop the texture of sound— the metrical variations of Indeterminate Sound from the Determinate Sound structures. Ransom poses an interesting problem for theorists: while we know a great deal about the variations of conventional meter, we know very little about the variations of 24 meaning. There are several suggestions here for rhetorical theory. One of the rhetorical notions that Ransom's theory attends to is that of decorum. The traditional notion of decorum as language or thought befitting an occasion becomes, in a New Critical Rhetorical theory, the fitness or harmony between semantic and phonetic properties or between the meaning and structure of the well-turned phrase. The process of finding the "fit" is an interesting question for ccmpositionists. What is worth repeating at this point, however, is that for either poet or reader rhetorical invention occurs when the text is written; it is the act of making texture, hence determining meaning. Invention is a matter of sensing the aesthetic value of indeterminateness and going straight after it as the veteran poet does. Every introduction of substance into the text has the potential (valuable car distractive) to un-determine what has already been determined. For Ransom's ontological critic and for the New Rhetorician, studying these interactions is to command "a discourse in 46 25 more dimensions than otherwise known.” These additional dimensions of meaning help to define the new attitudes toward invention and arrangement and the relationship between the two. Richards emphasizes in How to Read a Page that "the highest activity of reason is to understand how things hang 26 together,” and how things hang together is an important part of our understanding what they are. This aspect of coherent arrangement, then, is a form of invention. Figuration The tropes of metaphor and irony were theoretically significant to the New Critics because they served to illustrate how metaphoric suggestion could texture the literal statement and give "body” to a work of art. Tate illustrates this point in his final instance of tension in his article "Tension in Poetry." In Dante's second circle, Francesca'a sin is "embodied" in the image of the descending River Fo, a river identified as being near her birth place. By implication, the "pursuing" tributaries of the river are visual images for the "pursuing winds of lust.” Thus Tate concludes that Francesca's sin of lust and her crime of incontinence is "embodied" in an image "that we 27 can both hear and see." As can be seen in this example, figurative suggestion "fleshes out" a text and offers, at the same time, a more subtle depth of coherence. But the rich suggestion of these tropes can invariably force the poet into complexities, the challenge of which for the writer and reader is to hang on to, and eventually control, disjunctive meanings. 47 Brooks explains that j I All of the subtle states of emotion, as I. A. Richards has pointed out, necessarily demand metaphor for their expression. Hie poet must work by analogies, but the metaphors do not lie in the same plane or fit neatly edge to ; ^ edge. There is a continual tilting of the planes; necessary overlappings, discrepancies, contradictions. Even the most direct and simple poet is forced into paradoxes far more often than we think, if we are sufficiently alive to what he is doing. Qxpson explains this tilting of contexts as the effect of ambiguity: "There is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind. Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect, and the machinations of ambiguity 29 are among the very roots of poetry." Ransom's indeterminacies of contextual overlap are ambiguities for Empson. And in the New Critical Rhetoric, the new focus on coherence is in terms of either contextual analysis of language or the ambiguities of language. Irony, Brooks says, is the most general term for indicating the power of the text or for recognizing its incongruities. The power of the imagination as it reveals itself in the balance and reconcilement of discordant elements, of the pairing of like with unlike things, comes from Coleridge. The New Critics saw coherence in terms of the law of "organized heterogeneity," which Wimsatt called the most "profound standard" of literature because it is found "in the human 30 artifact, in the chemical structure, and in the living organism." Suggestion and tension are the Janus faces of the New Criticism. For Tate, they both exist quite literally in the root tension, drawn from intension, the multiple connotations of a term, and extension, its denotative value. 48 New Critical judgment is based upon the cohesion or the ideal balance of these forces. Ransom notes how a particular Wordsworth poem suffers a loss of coherence from the poet's preference for metrically selected noble-sounding words. Tate argues, too, that the New Critic should weigh equally the meanings of intension and extension. He says thats "The remotest figurative significance that we can derive [should] not invalidate the extensions of the literal 31 statement." Wimsatt judges theories and schools of poetry in the same way. For exairple, Romantic theory exaggerates the concrete, and the Neo-classic theory, the moral or the universal truth. "Neither of the extremes," he says, "gives a good account of art and each leads 32 out of art." This helps to explain the New Critics' preference for metaphysical poetry, "poetry of many-sided meanings," which, as Walter Ong explains, "in cultivating strange conceits is boasting its non-logical nature and making all the more demands on 'texture' for its unity. For outside the poem the far-fetched carparisons are 33 awkward and meaningless.” For the New Critics, then, texture and textural tension are important concerns, and this emphasis is carried over into New Critical oarposition/rhetoric in the analysis of literary models. In the New Critical Rhetoric, effectiveness is a result of coherence— of the dramatic tension of possible meanings finally determined to make a coherent whole. In that the poem was seen as a structure of resolutions and balances— harmonizations developed within a temporal scheme— the New Critics found Kenneth Burke's notion of dramatic action a useful idea for an analysis of form based upon the 49 psychological nature of man's satisfactions. Art, Burke says, is an "appetite," the emotional curves of frustration and fulfillment. Using this notion. Brooks clarifies his own idea of the essence of poetry: the poem can be thought of as a drama, "something which 34 arrives at its conclusion through conflict." In this sense, metaphor is the figure of this dramatic conflict. It is a comparison which always includes an element of tension leading to discovery or revelation, and as a result of this discovery, the apparent disjunction of elements seem to cohere. To summarize, then, what all of the major figures used by the New Critics (irony, wit, paradox, ambiguity) have in common is their ability to evoke alternative interpretations— discrepancies of meaning beyond demonstrative logic— and this is important not only as a device of richness or accuracy of meaning but as a conflict-structure essential to the body, coherence, power, and drama of the work. In this rhetorical system, communication depends upon the degree to which one can recognize and control the rich implications of structure or texture. We can conclude by saying that in this rhetorical theory, because of the organic nature of the text as described above, form determines meaning, making the two inseparable. If we assume that implicit meanings or connotations create particular contexts that envelop a determinate meaning in an unparaphrasable texture, then we assume that each text is unique— that structures in one context will not mean the same thing in another. Hence, when the style is altered, the form is altered, and the meaning 50 is altered. The New Critics helped to establish a radically new concept of style, and it is this concept that has influenced a great many classroom practices, especially as it acmes through New Critical practitioners or stylisticians such as Monroe Beardsley. In terms of the traditional rhetorical canons, the inseparability of form and meaning should bring substance back to rhetoric, conflating the canons of invention and style that had been separated by the Ramistic split of logic and rhetoric. Because devices such as symbol, paradox, metaphor, irony, and image not only are responsible for the depth of meaning of a text but are also its principal structuring devices, style becomes the omnipresent canon of New Critical Rhetoric, conflating all others and turning traditional rhetoric inside out where one looks at style to get at meaning rather than meaning to get at style. Because form is meaning (or as Richards says, metaphor is an inventive act creating thought itself), it subsumes invention. Invention is not a matter of finding what to say but discovering what language can mean. And in that figures are used as global devices of structure, it is difficult to distinguish style from arrangement and, consequently, invention. For Burke, style is the "complex wealth of minutiae"; disclosures, 35 contrasts, aphorisms, restatements, ellipses, images, sounds, etc.. But in that style also "is the organic panposition of all the elements of tone, diction, meter, metaphor," something more than figures of speech or qualities of discourse. Brooks boldly asserts that "Style is 36 not an isolable quality of writing; it is writing itself." And 51 these New Critical Rhetorical notions had a profound effect upon freshman English: in the practice of literary analysis and in the composition/rhetorics that appeared in the classroom. Notes Edward P. J. Corbett, Rhetorical Analysis of Literary Works (New York: Oxford OP, 1969) 2 Corbett, Rhetorical Analysis xvi. 3 William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe Beardsley, "The Affective Fallacy," Sewanee Review 57.1 (1949), and "The Intentional fallacy," Sewanee Review 54.3 (1946). * Edward P. J. Corbett, "What is Being Revived?" CGC 18 (1967): 171. See also Daniel Fogarty, Roots for a New Rhetoric (1959; New c York: Russell, 1968) for the theoretical comparison of the newer rhetorics of Richards, Burke, and the general semanticists with Aristotelian rhetoric. 5 Corbett, "Revived" 171. ® I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936; New York: Oxford UP, 1965). All further references to this work in this chapter are noted in the text. ^ Cleanth Brooks, personal interview, 25 June 1984. 8 This concept is more fully defined by Gertrude Buck at the turn of the century. She believed that metaphor was not an ornament of language but a vital process and natural expression of language. She felt that a two-part anatomy of metaphor disregarded its nature as a living figure; and as a result, she believed that rhetoricians had failed to go back to an earlier conceptual stage of metaphor-— to the simultaneous presence of two images in what she considered to be a more primitive unity of consciousness. She credits the notion that all terms are originally general to Muller, Science of Thought, c * According to the modern psychology of her time, Buck concludes that consciousness "grows by successive differentiations into greater and yet greater distinctness of outline and richness of detail." Her study. The Metaphor— A Study in the Psychology of Rhetoric, is published by F. N. Scott, 5 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The Inland Press, 1899): 7. ^ 0. G. Brockett, "Poetry as Instrument," Rhetoric and Poetics, ed. Donald C. Bryant (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1965) 24, as quoted in Corbett, Rhetorical Analysis xxi. ^ American Scholar, "The New Criticism," 21 (1951) 221. This recorded discussion was held at the heme of editor Hiram Haydn on August 22, 1950. Present were William Barrett, Kenneth Burke, Malcolm Cowley, R. G. Davis, and Allen Tate. Responding to the question, "Does the term 'the New Criticism' have a definite and specific meaning....” Allen Tate replied, "Yes,...to the extent that it 53 describes a particular return to the literary text, along with a revolt against historical scholarship— against the kind of thing represented by the PMLA." ^ While most people refer only to the other two, I have included history as one of the major fallacies because: (1) these three were those "ulterior purposes of literature" identified by Blackmur in "A Critic's Job of Work," first printed in The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation (1935) and (2) it represents one of the elements in the communication triangle of rhetoric. 12 Brooks, interview. 13 J. E. Spingam, Creative Criticism: Essays on the Unity of Genius and Taste (1911? New York: Holt, 1917). 14 T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1933). 15 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934; New York: New Directions, 1960) 28. 16 R. P. Blackmur, "A Critic's Job of Work," Criticism: The Foundation of Modern Literary Judgment, ed. Mark Schorer, et ad. (New York: Harcourt, 1948) 322. 17 Blackmur 314. 18 John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941) 292. 19 See Robert Wooster Stallman's discussion of this "one basic theme in modern criticism" in "The New Criticism," Critiques and Essays in Criticism: 1920-1948 (New York: Ronald Press, 1949) 488-506. 20 Lewis P. Simpson, ed., introduction. The Possibilities of Order: Cleanth Brooks and His Work (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P, ^1976) xix. We are reminded by Simpson of Brooks' sustained devotion * to William Faulkner's "Old South," representing an order of truth established by the imagination of an artist and recreated in the contemplation of the "skilled reader." 21 Clean th Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, 1947) 76. ^ Ransom 281. ^ Brooks, Well Wrought Urn 201. Oil Speech act theory has addressed a part of this question, but a great deal could be learned if rhetorical studies would address the 54 problem at this microscopic level. 25 Ransom 302. 2 6 I. A. Richards, How to Read a Page (New York: Norton, 1942) 240. 27 Allen Tate, "Tension in Poetry," Reason in Madness; Critical Essays (New York: Putnam's, 1941) 79-81. 28 Brooks, Well Wrought Urn 9-10. 29 William Elton, A Qiide to the New Criticism (1948-1949; Chicago: Poetry, 1951) 12. 30 W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., "The Structure of the 'Concrete Universal' in Literature," Criticism: The Foundation of Modem Literary Judgment, ed. Mark Schorer, et al. (New York: Harcourt, 1948) 318. 31 Tate 72. 33 Wimsatt 396. 33 W. J. Cng, "The Meaning of the New Criticism," The Modem Schoolman, 20 (1943): 205. 34 Brocks, Well Wrought Um 203-4. See especially the reference to Burke and Langer in the footnote. See Kenneth Burke, Cciunterstateroent (1931; Berkeley: U of California P, 1968) 462, 131-3, and 142. 35 Burke, "Lexicon Rhetoricae," Counterstatement. 36 Cleanth Brocks and Robert Penn Whrren, Fundamentals of Good Writing: A Handbook of Modem Rhetoric (New York: Harcourt, 1949) 334. 55 CHAPTER III NEW CRITICAL PRACTICE IN THE CLASSROOM: THE ANALYSIS OF LITERATURE “...the text, the poem, lies etherized upon a table." — Porter Perrine, 1948 If we think of a rhetorical system as a solution to a special problem, then the problem that determined the need for a New Critical Rhetoric was the literacy crisis apparent in the English rla.<wmrm and on the political scene during the thirties and forties. Precipitated in large part by I. A. Richards' study, the literary critics convinced a generation of teachers that people simply could not read with a critical eye for the implications of meaning. Although Richards had produced a Practical Criticism in 1929 to solve what he saw as the problem, the more practical task yet (creating college textbooks to train teachers and students in the method of New Critical reading) was not taken up until 1936 when Brooks began a textbook series, collaborating with J. T. Purser' and R. p. Warren in An Approach to Literature, with Warren in both Understanding Poetry (1938), and Under standi nq Fiction (1943), and with R. B. Heilman in Understanding Drama (1945). By 1948, Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon McKenzie could say as editors of the college survey text on criticism, Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment, that of criticism written 56 about the source, the form, or the end of art, "...the second has been the great contemporary concern...."1 By the same date, William Elton could say that the New Criticism ted "achieved a singular triumph: its O methods [had] been widely adopted in the college teaching of poetry." World War II brought the theoretical and practical precepts of this criticism into relief against the political and educational needs of the American public. In 1939, Mortimer Adler railed against the schools and colleges for failing to teach people how to read, a skill equated with the "distinctively human life of reason."1 He comments on the timely social need for close, critical reading: "In the life of unreason that is now upon us, you can use such [reading] skills to see through the propaganda of conflicting White Papers and around neutrality proclamations, and even to read between the lines of the 4 too-brief war communiques." His practical guide. How to Read a Book (1940), sold 60,000 copies its first three months in print making it one of the few books of its kind at that time to reach the top of the New York Time's Bestsellers List, a fact made even more astounding when we consider that this was still during the Depression, it gave the public the hope that lucidity, reason, and freedom were at tend if one would only subject oneself to the methods of rigor: "Liberal education.. .not only makes men of us by cultivating our minds, but it frees our minds by disciplining them. I shall try to show you that the art of reading well is intimately related to the art of thinking well— clearly, critically, freely."^ Although most of this book is given to the reading of exposition rather than literature, his many textual references to Richards pay a theoretical debt to what he sees 57 as a solution to an American literacy crisis. Critical, dispassionate intelligence defined this new literacy# and the "hcw-to," practical methods for getting at this understanding became a popular subject for Americans. In his retort to Adler in How to Read a Page (1942), Richards agreed that education had been misguided, but he believed that Adler had not gone to the root of the problem. Richards believed that Adler's reading recipes inplied that there could be a right reading and a single meaning. This was, of course, precisely what Richards had reacted against in his theory of language. In this retort to Adler, he stressed the fact that language is by its nature ambiguous, carrying within its statements many meanings in order to accommodate a variety of purposes. The goal for reading should be to understand how it is we choose from among the variety of meanings by understanding what difficulties stand in the way of these choices.® With such public support for reading skills and a disciplined attention to meaning (in terms of bestsellers and public discussions about education), it is not surprising that a critical rhetoric (a close reading of the text) became widely adopted in the classroom by the late forties. This chapter attempts to do three things: The first part of the chapter will identify what kind of language investigation was going on in the literature course and identify what made it so attractive to English teachers. If the New Critics were using traditional rhetorical techniques or principles to analyze discourse as Corbett has noted, then what were they? The previous 58 chapter has identified the New Critical attitudes toward language and literary texts, specifically demonstrating how they valued metaphor; the concrete, presentational; rich verbal texture; and novel insights. Because of these values, they were exploring a new rhetorical depth of figurative meaning. So, in the context of a rhetorical theory, this would make their search seen new. In that they vised the tools Brooks identified (metaphor, tone, and symbol) to unravel the deeper levels of inplicit meaning in a text, it was new. This section will attempt to illustrate that the New Critics were not simply trope hunting at the surface level of the text, but were using the aim of the New Rhetoric (to understand meaning) together with its fundamental language form (the metaphor) to analyze poetry. That is, their analysis of meaning meant that they would be making meaning through metaphor. While most rhetoricians associate the New Critics with specific tropes, they fail to see what other rhetorical principles were used in their analysis. Those principles of style that they inherited from an earlier rhetorical tradition were unity, coherence and emphasis, principles cited in the Modern Rhetoric as basic principles of organization. I will identify and illustrate the New Critical aesthetic method by looking at what they do, as viewed from their classic textbook Understanding Poetry, a book that, according to Arthur Applebee, was "the single most important influence in transforming such critical theory into classroom practice." I hope to illustrate here how this critical rhetoric (the search for the meaning of a text from a close analysis of its language structures) was also a generative, 59 constructive rhetoric (in the sense that in order to distinguish subtleties of meaning, one has to mate subtleties of meaning). A close look at the method will, I hope, illustrate how the rhetorical method became the poetic "message," in the sense that one constructs the message by first analyzing the parts and then suggesting, through an act of wit, how the parts relate. The use of a New Rhetoric to understand poetry explains, in part, how the freshman rhetoric course in the twentieth century became a course in literary criticism. The second part of this chapter will show how the focus on the object of art was used to define a philosophy for the liberal arts. This philosophy can give us a sense of how composition was used in the classroom to write about literature and bcw the methods of New Critical analysis were used to define a progressive curriculum. The third part of this chapter will discuss the first of two essay types of composition which were influenced by the New Critics: the critical essay and the friendly essay. Chapter IV will take up this second influence in composition theory and practice. The Rhetoric of New Critical Analysis In order to understand the New Critical methodology, we need to reemphasize what its search was essentially about. To repeat an assumption from chapter one, it was a search for the meaning of the text through a close study of its language structures. A brief digression is needed to clarify a New Critical premise regarding the nature of language structures since a great deal of recent attention has been given to the ordinary/literary language dichotomy and what Mary Louise Pratt has called "the poetic language fallacy." In Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (1977), an attempt to extend a theory of speech acts to the analysis of literary texts, Pratt argues against the ordinary/extraordinary language distinction that she sees as the essence of both Russian Formalism and Anglo American No# Criticism.® But in the context of modem concerns, many theorists fail to see what language distinctions were actually at the heart of New Critical theory as it came to be practiced in America, especially as it was introduced by New Critics interested in rhetorical and semantic theory. The fact is that many of the New Critics' theoretical assumptions were consistent with Pratt's thesis— that literary discourse must not be viewed as a special kind of language possessing unique intrinsic properties but rather as a particular function of language use. The distinction mads by the New Critics was not between poetic and non-poetic language or any intrinsically poetic language structures but between literary and nonliterary aims of analysis. What makes their work New Critical is what they do with intrinsic structures of the text. For Richards, metaphor is a conventional device of all communication, not a special "literary" language device. Its act of dislocating meaning from its ordinary "familiar" sense is not an act peculiar to literary language; it is the heart of language as an act of communication. Additional support is to be found in the premise underlying Understanding Poetry: that poetry is aligned with ordinary language, and that it is similar to other kinds of verbal activities 61 Q such as speeches, sermons, television programs, gossip, and so forth. In Modem Poetry and the Tradition (1939) , Broo]cs emphasizes an important New Critical distinction in his reaction to: "(1) the assumption that some things are essentially poetic and (2) that the intellectual faculty is somehow opposed to the emotional. Brooks explains the differentia by saying that there is no special collection of words which are poetic; the poet makes the language poetic then "the right context is made to glow with meaning. So the only way the language is seen as "extraordinary" is in the context of the critic's search for dense, rich contexts of meaning. Note Murray Krieger's assessment of this distinction: ...in transforming the poetry-science dichotomy of the romantics, the new critics were anxious to grant that the language of the two is essentially the same. There are no peculiarly poetic words as there are no peculiarly poetic objects. Hie difference between science and poetry was rather established in terms of the complexities of the poetic context.1 As a group, the New Critics agreed that what was central to all discourse was the matter of information. Their point was that the notion of information had been too narrowly defined by the sciences to include only explicit information, which would exclude those human relations of value and feelings. (While Ransom noted the differentia between poetry and prose to be structures, he was referring to structural density, the play between determinate and indeterminate meanings.) The New Critics sought to validate a more extensive definition of information beyond the literal and offer a method of studying those forms of "experience [that] elude[s] the statements science can make” (21). 62 The essential dualism, then, was not between literary and ordinary language structures as such but between ordinary and scientific meaning. In the early sixties, W. K Wimsatt summarized the major achievement of the New Critics: "It was a hard fight for criticism, at one time not so long past, to gain recognition of the 13 formal and inplicit at all as a kind of meaning." This distinction between scientific and literary/ordinary meaning in terms of density, however, did have its analogy in rhetorical forms and purposes. Richards identifies plain expository prose (which is good for scientific aims) as "not highly condensed, content to make one statement at a time and proceed by more or less explicit logic from one group of ideas to another."14 "Literary" prose, it is assumed, would be the analogue to this plain prose: highly condensed, making more than one statement at a time by a more implicit logic. Brooks and Warren, however, try to avoid, at least theoretically, the fissure between the scientific and the ordinary/poetic. They begin their text Understanding Poetry by illustrating how the language of scientific truth (of facts, or "pure" information) cannot help but imply the personal experiences of feelings and attitudes. Behind what the scientists were saying in their most pure formulaic statements were implied interpretations, and it is the particular task of the literary analyst to identify these implications of value and emotional coloring in poetry as well as prose where the implications may be less dense. The practitioners of New Critical theory were, obviously, interested above all in "implicatures"? for if one could not get at 63 the duplications in literature, one could never get beyond mere translation. Language structures are not limited to surface propositioned content? surface forms also refer to the "deeper structures" of meaning, the tangible forms of subtle, complicated, inplicit meanings. I point out these distinctions for two reasons. First of all, if we are to understand the historiced development of a classroom method, we need to see it in the context of the language distinctions of its time. And secondly, we need to understand the relationship between structure and meaning in order to understand the New Critical methodology. The point is that exposition could be, and was, analyzed with the same techniques and assumptions about language as an object of art. Of course the more "literary prose" was more amenable to a New Critical analysis, and this was the form they preferred to teach. As classes during the sixties show, it was often difficult to distinguish the creative writing class from any other writing class. In both, students analyzed the "craft" of writing. To examine the actual method of analysis, we could ask, "What skills could the classroom teacher draw upon to get at both the implicit and explicit information in a written, aesthetic text?" Or we could ask, from the student's point of view, "What kind of critical thinking tools are needed in order to write a critical composition?" I will first offer a logic of the method, and then illustrate it with only a few examples, since most of us have never known any other "practical" method of analyzing poems. By focusing on the nature of the text defined in the previous chapter, I hope to show that the New Critical method of analysis drew upon a special set of rhetorical 64 tools for the analysis of poetry— the new tools that Brooks identified as metphor, tone, and symbol. The more traditional logical methods of analysis were not useful for their task. The tools that were most useful for making sense of what may appear on the surface to be incoherent were such things ass repetition, restatement, apposition, clustering, ellipsis, symbolism, enjambment, microcosm, contradiction, or paradox. Thus New Critical interpretation is based upon an inductive logic, the "evidence of the senses" in which bits of evidence are collected and juxtaposed in order to draw a conclusion. Any meaningful relationship that contributes to the "total" significance is valid. Wimsatt*s "concrete universal" illustrates the logic: one gets at a universal meaning through the concrete particular. The New Critics arrived at their conclusions (at the aesthetic truth or theme of the text) from the evidence of the senses, as constructed from the careful synthesis of all of the parts or formal determinants such as images, sounds, rhythms, ideas, contrasts, or connotations. The aesthetic truth of the text, the single-most profound thought, was derivable from all of the fine discernments of implicit suggestion and the resolution of any contrasting ideas. We might say that the New Critical aim was to interpret the text by locating what Eliot had called the "objective correlatives"— a series of objects, events, or situations in the text that evoke particular feelings or emotions in a reader. Or to use Richards' metaphor as an analogy, the goal was to discover the relationsh ips between the vehicle and the tenor of a poem. 65 By assuming the polysemous interaction of elements, this aesthetic logic demands a close reading, which means several readings of a text. One begins by attending to the literal, explicit meanings in the text (of words, statements, and questions) using familiar tools of coherence: grammatical relations, causation, demonstration, etc.. At this level, the reading locates the poem's explicit, dictionary realm of information. Then one notes the "formal" language features— rhythm, sounds, stresses, and so forth. The "real meaning" of the poem comes from another level of reading. One works, but not necessarily in this order, from the surface features of the poem to the inside, through the surface to what Adler had called "reading between the lines." One begins an analysis of the deeper structures by identifying or describing particular language features. At this level, the poem cannot be explained as such, but we can see what it is, that is, we can describe it. As Wimsatt explains, "A poem, on the other hand, not only says something, but is something. 'A poem,' we know, 'should not mean but be.' And so the poem itself especially invites description."^ Its foregrounded texture, then, determines its meaning. •Hie actual analysis involves the comparison of the nature and the arrangement of various language features in the context of possible meanings in the text. As a result, one must use his imagination to discover the underlying meaning of the text. And it is this imaginative "leap" to uncover the meaning of the poem that made this method so popular in the classroom, it was a challenging, creative, 66 dynamic approach to literature; and as such, it is an interesting paradox that New Critical Rhetoric used an "analytical" method to “generate" meanings. While it has been a theory consciously recognized for its analytical value, its practice has not yet been fully realized for its generative or constructive value. We look now to the analysis of the parts. What are these structures that cause the poem to "be," and how do we describe them? Brooks and Warren identify four major featural elements: "the human events, the images, the rhythms, the statements" (xiv). Interestingly enough, these elements represent those same theoretical concepts mentioned in the previous chapter: the drama, the icon, the implications of language structures, and the idea— literal and contextual. (And looking ahead to composition types, these elements seem to correlate with drama, description, narration, and exposition.) As difficult as they may be to isolate, because of the inter connections of language, the student is encouraged to point out these features for the purpose of analysis. While some critic/teachers chose to emphasize one or more of these elements without integrating them, these characterize the kinds of things that were being examined. An important note here is that the idea of the poem may be none other than the sensual apprehension of an object or experience. While one reads for the drama of the moment— establishing a speaker and a reaction to an event or situation— one also reads at a critical distance, which allows the concrete to be read as an idea. The drama is the idea; the showing is the telling and so forth (an idea important to New Critical Composition). "The Main-Deep," by James 67 Stephens, is one such poem that is purely presentational, proving a New Critical point that a poem does not have to have a didactic purpose. The poem merely presents the idea in the sense of movement of a great wave: The Main Deep — James Stephens The long, rolling. Steady-pouring, Deep-trenched Green billcw: The wide-topped. Unbroken, Green-glacid, Slow-sliding, Cold-flushing, On— on— on— Chill-rushing, Hush-hushing, Hush-hushing... (85) Note hew Brooks and Warren use the four elements mentioned above in their explication: ...with the line 'Ort-on-on* we get an impression of increased speed, an impression not only from the words but from the additional accent in the line (no other line has more than two accents) that implies the hurry and piling up as the billow approaches. Further, this stanza gives a reference to the temperature of the billow, 'cold flushing,' and 'chill-rushing,' as though on its nearer approach the spectator could almost tell the coldness of the water, something one could not think of in connection with a distant wave. (85) The only idea that exists in this poem is an effect of the wave in its natural process of building up and then receding. There are any number of feelings which might be suggested by the expectation of the movement and its fulfillment. Although this experience could 68 certainly be extended to other aspects of life, there are no tangible elements in this poem that point specifically to any other ideas. The poem does not directly or literally suggest any extension of meaning. The meaning simply lies in the craftsmanship of the poem and not in an affective or didactic response of the reader. The poem is "presented," and the student notes how the language reinforces the idea of the wave's movement. The student must be able to describe the language and any impressions created by the images. For this poem, she must be conscious of such things as verse metrics and the concept of onomatapoeia. To analyze this particular poem and others New Critically, the student must already have a repetoire of stylistic, rhetorical tools adequate to meet the needs of each poem encountered. Note the kinds of questions Brooks asks of Donne’s "A Valediction," representing a fairly typical analytical assignment. The focus here is on tone, implication, and the relationships among structures: Write an analysis of this poem, taking into account the following topics: 1. The tone of the first two stanzas. 2. The implications of the imagery in the last four stanzas. (For instance, hew do the associations one ordinarily has with compasses tend to give an impression of accuracy and conviction to the conclusion of the poem?) 3. The use of enjambmerit. 4. The use of alliteration and repetition. 5. The metrical situation in line 25. 6. The relationship of the various images to each other (306). In addition to the more "technical" tools, students must become adept at describing how the language is used, to illustrate such things as how the "compasses tend to give an impression of accuracy , and conviction," or to quote another illustrator of the method, how "a ripple of unimportant syllables come together in a suitable 16 breathless way." Other textbook authors suggest that they need to be able to see how the language is simple and straightforward, or complex, heavy, pedantic, ponderous, light, solemn, grave, or sardonic, or describe the images as seen in particular words as fanciful or extravagant. One notes especially all repetitions as well as any changes that occur. But one never notes anything, description, pattern, repetition or change, without indicating its effect in the poem. These descriptions of language are the only "impressions" that the student is allowed. The effects are always noted in terms of reinforcement or relation because the stresses of language indicate or determine the stresses of meaning. The next step, then, in the analysis after description is noting the relationships among the elements, hew language structures interact to stress significant elements in the poem. The point is made clear by Josephine Miles: "Poetry is not by definition committed to indirection; rather it is committed to the extra focus, the stronger direction and enforcement given by its characterizing nature...."^ The principle is clear— it is the rhetorical principle of emphasis that defines the poetic. Brooks and Warren explain that this emphasis is a result of the poet's selection. Poetic images are not 70 the same as images in reality simply because they have been plucked from the real world to appear as images focussed in poems. Because of this "selected" emphasis, all of the elements appear in the poem for a purpose, but one that is yet to be known. Because of this potential relevance, the explica tor must survey a number of combinations of things, asking questions such as how does a particular sound reinforce the event, rhythm the character, image the scene, connotations the idea, and parts the whole? One is reminded of Ian Watt's extensive analysis of the first paragraph of The Ambassadors, a syntactic analysis that illustrates how the first paragraph represents the 18 "novel's essential center." The qualifications of meaning are innumerable as sane students of the method are painfully aware. Illustrating the point is an excerpt from the explication of one of Frost's poems by Brooks and Warren. It is taken entirely, yet poignantly, out of context; We have not yet finished the poem. We still must account for the woodchuck (367). The most important question by which to analyze the method is this: How does one get at meaning through descriptions of the text? Or asked another way. How are the featural elements raised to the level of symbolic significance? They are raised through coincidence and identification. The reader notes how sound complements, reinforces, or emphasizes sense, rhythm, reason, etc.. For exanple, in two lines by Robert Burns, the protracted sensation of one image becomes identified with a sensation from another image, emphasizing and reinforcing it. 71 The white moon is setting behind the white wave. And time is setting with me, O! Brooks and Warren explain: The placing of the cry at the emphatic position of a line-end implies that the speaker had scarcely realized the full force of his own statement until he had made it. The lingering rhythm caused by the position of the exclamation at the end of the second line coincides with the fact that the poet sees in the natural scene a representation of the pathos of the passing of Time and of his own life (17). To this I would add that in other contexts, the "0“ could be determined to mean anything from a startled surprise to a melancholy reflection. By placing it in this particular context at line’s end, it becomes, more appropriately, a reflection. This helps us to see that the formal elements of a text do not necessarily carry a meaning in and of themselves. The reader uses these formal elements to illustrate a reinforcement or complementation of meaning. That is, in the context of the "other" literal elements in the poem, the formal elements help to determine meaning. According to Richards’ theory that we need to stud/ the connections of meanings, we can see how various iconographic elements work in the poem. Because the mind seeks to connect contexts of meaning, the iconographic elements of the moon match those characteristics of the abstract notion of time. The overlapping of the contexts of meaning makes the moon a poignant, physical reminder of the passage of time. This desire to connect meanings is the desire to make metaphor. The imaginative leap that the reader of this poem is asked to take from the concrete image to the abstraction is like the leap that the student explica tor must take at the level of 72 description. Consider, as an exanple, the following explication of part of a speech by Macbeth: ...We are to see that the broken rhythms and the tendency to harshness of sound are essential to the ocmnunication that Shakespeare wished. For instance, the piling up of the s sounds in the second, third, and fourth lines help to give an impression of desperate haste and breathless excitement. The lines give the impression of a conspiratorial whisper (16 & 17). Here the language is described according to the "broken rhythms," "harsh sounds," piled-up s sounds; and frcm these descriptions, the student must infer yet a further description. These sounds and rhythm are like "desperate haste" and "breathless excitement," those of a "conspiratorial whisper." In this exanple, the reader is to intuit a harshness of sound that implies a kind of desperate excit&nent. At the point in which he extends this "excitement" to locate a "conspiratorial whisper," the student is not merely "surrendering" to the whole meaning of the poem as it exists, but is generating his own metaphor from the description of the passage to stand for the meaning of the poem. A symbolic comparison has been constructed that is not literally a part of the text, but one that necessarily fits it. The language forms of the poem generate a metaphor for the tone of the passage which is symbolically extended to form the meaning of the poem. Thus all three of the modern principles Brooks mentioned have been used to explore the modern problems of poetry: metaphor, tone, and symbol. One escapes conventional thinking through the discovery and use of metaphor, which to the New Critics meant thinking more clearly and stating things more accurately. Note Brooks' comment cm Marvell's 73 unconventional comparison of lovers to parallel lines: "The geometrical figure gives a sense of logical inevitability and finality to a relationship which is usually considered irrational— a sense of even mathematical order to a relationship usually considered 18 chaotic." The student must not only be able to understand the metaphor of the lovers and the lines, but be able to transcend its literal use in the poem— to see the metaphor as a f igural microcosm for the total, hence unified, meaning of the poem. The metaphor, then, enables the reader to go beyond or transform the conflict of meanings, or ideas which seem inconpatable by ocnmon logic, to discover a more complex, accurate and unified meaning. Both at the descriptive level and the imaginative level, the student is making metaphor; and it is the act of metaphor-making that characterizes this aesthetic logic, defining both poetic coherence— the integration of the parts— and the poem's unity— the total effect frcm ideas and intimations. The reader discovers the meaning frcm the relationships among the parts of the text. Using Richards' terms we could say that the poem is a metaphor, the surface features of the poem representing the vehicle and the deep meaning its tenor— all accessible to the careful reader through the rhetorical techniques identified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as unity, coherence, and emphasis. In terms of the new analytical psychology in which it operates, the poem is a metaphor of the universal condition of human beings. Like the dream in Freudian psychology, the poem is a form crafted frcm the creative well springs of a deeper, intuitive logic— a logic that we know only through the analysis of its objective 74 features. 'The New Critical method, then, made use of critical, descriptive skills as well as artistic, imaginative skills; and these two things— the melding of humanism and empiricism— made it attractive for the classroom. As Applebee indicates, this approach to the teaching of English won "immediate favor" in that "the goals were precise and limited; the content was dear; and the philosophy indicated a 20 continuing concern with the needs of the student." But this "favor" should be qualified. Edgar H. Schuster found that the New Criticism had very little impact on high school students and teachers even 21 though by 1957 it had had a tremendous inpact on college students. He hypothesizes that the number of high school teachers trained in New Critical methods while in college must have been small. There are two simple, but convincing, facts that seem to explain his conclusion. One is that while his research was limited to the study of high school textbooks, we know that certain college textbooks such as Understanding Poetry or Sound and Sense were used in senior English or advanced placement courses where the New Critical techniques most likely would have been used. As early as 1940, the Language Committee of the School and College Conference on English, in a response directed primarily at college preparatory groups, formally recognized Richards’ definition of meaning and the line of analysis that has been associated with this attention to meaning— the close reading of a text in terms of its contextualized meanings and its structure and design. The Ccraoittee suggested the following educational goal: that a curriculum for English include both a close reading of texts (the 75 expansion of a work of art) and the analysis of tests using the precis 22 (the contraction of a work of art). However, this national pedagogical guide may have fallen on deaf ears, because of a second fact that may explain Schuster's finding— that by the time of an NCTE report issued in 1961, 49.5% of high school English teachers had not been English majors in college and consequently were not likely to 23 have been exposed to the New Criticism. We do know that instructors familiar with the New Criticism found the method extremely portable for the English dassrocm. James Kinneavy recalls that it was its practicalities that so immediately enamored him with the method. In an interview, he cannented playfully, yet sincerely, that he remembered the very day he learned of the method when he was teaching in a rural area in the Southwest; and he knew then that "there was a place for the New Criticism in 24 Bernalillo, New Mexico." Ironic as it is, this approach to literature didn't require an extensive library of texts. Secondary, critical texts and historical or biographical information were nice but not necessary for a method that valued intensive reading for a depth of knowledge rather than extensive reading for a breadth of knowledge. It could be adopted intoediately in virtually any place in the United States, especially in areas where extensive collections of books were not readily available. Neither did it require the study of lengthy texts. In fact, the innumerably ccmplex possible relationships among the elements of the poem did not invite analysis of lengthy works. It was a method most conducive to the study of short poems. Students could keep the whole 76 immediately in mind and in front of them while working on the concrete details. Snippets of poems were seen as symbolic pieces or microcosms of the larger text. If samples of the text represented the essence of the whole, then one only need focus intensely on the features of a key sample for their logical suggestions of the whole (a rationale that turn-of-the-century compositionists used to study paraphraphs instead of whole texts). The method was not only a practical one for the teacher, it was clear, tangible proof of what he could do in the classrocm. At the Eighth Yale Conference on the Teaching of English in April, 1962, Wimsatt noted that it was a way to earn our salt as teachers. When a student asks for the meaning of something in the text, "We are lucky, ...not simply that we have a chance to teach the class something— (but 25 also to earn our salary in a clear and measurable way." This security in a teaching method so tangible and measurable may have been the most important force that kept the attitudes and methods of the New Critics with us for so long. New Critical Analysis as a Philosophy of the Liberal Arts While Schuster did not examine course syllabi to locate any practical influences of the New Criticism on high school teaching, they would have been important sources of information for his project. TO examine the influence of a New Critical tradition on ccrnposition, it would seem helpful if we could locate such a source for this more specific purpose. It would be especially interesting to locate a 77 syllabus from someone closely identified with the modem discipline of composition so that we could see what specific influence New Critical practice exerted over several of the language arts— literature and composition— in both pedgagogical theory and practice. Such a representative text does exist, one written in 1957, the year that Schuster had declared that the influence on high schools had been small when the influence had been so great in colleges. While teaching upper-division courses in philosophy and theology at St. Michael's College in Santa Fe, James Kinneavy was asked to help draft a program of English for use in the high schools of the Christian 26 Brothers in the New Orleans-Santa Fe district. Looking back on this publication, he said that he bad applied there virtually everything he 27 knew about communication. As a result, this document remains an encyclopedia of teaching strategies in use at that time and a document that illustrates at a very practical level those attitudes about literature, composition, and teaching strategies that had been encouraged by earlier professional committees such as the CEEB. When asked to teach college at Western State in Gunnison, Colorado, Kinneavy began work on a theory that could be used from the freshman level through upper-division courses. In doing this, he said that he "made new" his work on the Program of High School English, redrafting it with a keener interest in theory and history. This work was to become A Theory of Discourse (1971). Thus the transitional work of the Program is very important in that it gives us a look at the practical application of New Critical principles for a program that included both literature and composition, and it gives us an insight 78 into the genesis of a text that would later became one of the most important theoretical works in the new field of composition. A brief lode at Kinneavy's graduate training will give us an I insight into the two major influences on his work in the liberal arts, j Kinneavy entered Catholic University in 1949, a watershed year for the i subject of this paper, (it was the year that Brooks and Warren published the Modern Rhetoric, the year that Ezra Bound received the j Bollingen Award, the year that an article on the New Criticism as a 28 movement was first published in the English Journal, and the year that Archibald MacLeish became the 10th holder of the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard.) We can see that. Kinneavy began an important, formative part of his career during the thick of New Critical adventures. He became a New Critic with "a full 29 influence of Aristotelianism because of Craig La Driere." In the "Introduction to Literary Theory" course that La Driere taught, Kinneavy encountered, before it was published, M. H. Abrams' theory. (The theory had been worked out at Harvard.) While more Aristotelian than Abrams, La Driere had, without question, an affinity with the New Criticism. As one of the key contributors to A Dictionary of World Literature (1943), La Driere was responsible for its major article on form. Among his other contributions to this work are those articles on prosody, poetry and prose, the scientific method, expression, 30 voice, fitness, correctness, and rule. (On a more personal note, La Driere visited Ezra Pound every week when Pound was at St. Elizabeth's in Washington D. C.) La Driere combined an interest in the New Criticism with an interest in classical theory. Kinneavy recalls that 79 he always tied the New Criticism to anything in the history of 31 literary or rhetorical theory that would fit. Thus a formal training in contemporary literary theory rooted in Aristotelianism served as a major part of the background for Kinneavy's work in composition theory and pedagogy. Unis training in both rhetoric and poetics from La Driere is echoed in the philosophy and practical organization of the high school language arts curriculum. What is important to note is that for this publication, Kinneavy says that he "very consciously.. .grafted 32 rhetoric, as a tradition of liberal arts onto the New Criticism." The fundamental New Critical view of language— that language could be made to make an object of art— pervades the entire work of the program. The basic philosophy of the program for which Kinneavy was responsible emphasized the use of language and hence focused on the techniques of the "arts of language." The four "linguistic minima” upon which this philosophy is built are: (1) the four language processes or the modes of language— reading, writing, speaking, and listening; (2) the three aims or purposes of language— scientific, rhetorical, and poetic; (3) the four types or forms of composition defined by either one or several voices— narration, exposition, drama, and discussion; and (4) the four elements of the ccmnunication process— expressor, receptor, language sign, and reality. The three aims of language, taken from the trivium of the classical liberal arts program, are the most important elements in this program. As stated, "Since these three aims are exhaustive, WE CAN JUDGE OF THE EFFICACY 80 OF A LANGUAGE PROGRAM insofar as it ACCOUNTS FOR THESE THREE AIMS of language in its schedule" (1). Thus Kinneavy built a program which j represented both classical rhetorical notions and modern New Critical ; poetic notions. While the three aims represent those language studies of the classical trivium, the scientific and poetic aims are defined New Critically within the program. (It should be noted that Kinneavy*s personal contribution was the philosophy for the program. The program design, however, illustrates what kind of assignments are in keeping with this philosophy, even if he wasn't directly responsible for them.) As defined in the philosophy, the aim of dialectic is "to convey truth"; and this gets translated into the program's assignments1 as information which is scientific, factual, and inpersonal. The aim of poetry is "to make an object of art" which is defined as the "formality of pattern in the art object" (3). The aim of rhetoric is to persuade an audience, and its form is defined in terms of the classical appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos. While his notion of rhetoric is not that of Richards or Brooks, the influence of New Critical analysis does affect Kinneavy's attitude tcward composition. The entire program seems designed to give students an analytical understanding of the forms of these three functions of discourse. In this program, we see a very early account of classical rhetorical theory merging with New Critical theory. Kinneavy also uses the four elements of communication which Abrams identified in the communication triangle (with the text in the center) and organized into a theory of the arts where 1) expressive 81 theories orient the work to the artist, 2) mimetic theories are oriented to the universe, 3) objective theories are oriented to the text itself, and 4) pragmatic theories are oriented to achieve certain effects on an audience. Kinneavy uses a similar correspondence to define the philosophy of this curriculum. Rhetoric emphasizes the receptor, poetry the sign, and science reality. The remaining element, the expressor, is the core of the psychology of the student assumed throughout the work. What is new in this model at the time is the grafting of the classical trivium onto the elements of the modern communication triangle. Another important element of the philosophy is the notion of a progressive curriculum, that is, a curriculum based upon skills developnent. And when we ccnpare the order in which the skills of reading and writing about literature are identified or assigned, we see an interesting correlation between these skills and the order of skills used in the method of New Critical analysis. The literature or reading program is designed as a sequential development of activities frcm a precritical enjoyment of literature to a critical enjoyment expressed in the apprehension of form. One reads first for enjoyment, then for paraphrased content, and then for the structure of the art object. This approach to literature is based upon "several presuppositions" about the New Critical reality of literature and about the psychology of the student: that the student's reading skill is determined by the degree of critical appreciation he can demonstrate, and that this critical appreciation or enjoyment is determined by form. The fact is that all other aims of discourse that 82 might serve literature are subordinated to the New Critical aim: ...the approach assumes that the primary value of a literary object is artistic, and that any other value it embodies, whether of truth or morals or science, etc., is secondary. To teach literature as a search for these secondary values is, in the opinion of those who sponsor this syllabus, to distort the nature of the reality which the literary object is. Therefore the primary concern in these lessons is to discover the structure of the object under consideration and to appreciate it. This is the first presupposition behind this program (11) . Kinneavy* s statement leaves little doubt about the influence of New Critical thinking on the development of the reading program. Analysis of form becomes the justification of the appreciation of literature, and it is this analysis in writing that becomes half of the composition assignments in the program. In examining composition assignments which analyze literature, we see a progression or development among the four grade levels from scientific analysis to aesthetic analysis— frcm the apprehension of information to the apprehension of pattern and form. In the first two years, students work to extract information about content, paraphrasing lyrical poems or making stories out of poems, for exanple. The freshman year of writing is devoted to extracting information, deciphering logical organization, and writing in clear, grammatical English. By the time the student is a senior, she is mastering the critical essay, that of the aesthetic analysis of literature. The student writes not only about the Aristotelian topics of the interrelation of character, plot, theme, or setting, but writes predominantly on New Critical topics such as the relationships among elements of style and structure and meaning, i.e., the relationships 83 of imagery, symbolism, unity of impression, sound structures, or other formal devices of structure, to meaning. Like others who were influenced by the {Jew Criticism, Kinneavy was most influenced by the New Critics' detailed approach to the text. While he acknowledges the importance of metaphor, irony, paradox, and ambiguity, for him, the heart of New Critical analysis was the analysis of imagery. He still recalls one of his graduate papers on the ruin imagery in Dryden's "All for Love." The significance can be seen also in the selection of his dissertation topic: a study of three contemporary theories of the lyric. So it is not surprising that imagery analysis is at the heart of the analysis of poetry that we see in the high school program. While the progression of skills among assignments relating to the production of writing (rather than the analysis of written compositions) is difficult to determine, there is a noticeable move I frcm the personal or informal modes (in exposition, the "friendly essay") to more critical responses. Even in this early developmental stage, however, we see remnants of New Critical values. Descriptive writing focuses on the "single instantaneous impression." By the end of the junior year, the student attempts to write poetry by focusing on technique. The following assignment indicates hew this act of creative writing is structured analytically: "Technique: Get a topic, basic idea, basic image pattern, and determine the rhythm and rhyme. Then, stanza by stanza, work it out" (65). (Writing the short story probably depended upon similar formal criteria.) While these instructions seem rather bald, the point to be made here is that 84 structures, ideas, and meanings are determiners of language, and that through these oontraints one creatively "works out" a composition. Hie teacher is not responsible here for explaining how to work it out because that comes frcm the determining forces of language. This sounds very much like Ransom's ideas. In the curriculum, the senior year of writing is devoted to research reports, business letters, and original oratory in terms of the aims of science and rhetoric, while the poetic aim is satisfied by a character sketch and twelve weeks on the critical analysis of literature. The development of writing skills thus seems to move from a personal response and apprehension of factual information to a personal response in an analytical, aesthetic apprehension of structure and form. What is evident here is that the critical analysis is considered the most important composition under the rubric of the poetic and possibly the most important for all aims of language (possibly valued above the research report and original oratory). The literary critical analysis does seem the most advanced point in the development of the syllabus in terms of writing skills. So while Kinneavy does see writing in terms of both writing consciously or critically about the aims of the arts (scientific, rhetorical, and poetic) and writing creatively for the aims of the art, these two purposes for composition illustrate what was happening in the field in general at the time. More often than not, whole courses were defined in terms of one of these two attitudes toward composition. It is significant that while Kinneavy was tremendously influenced 85 by Brooks1 textbook series on literature (three of the four books reccmnended to the teacher for reference in the Program are the Understanding series), he was not familiar with the Modern Rhetoric. Steeped as he was in classical rhetoric, it is not unlikely for him to have overlooked it. Nevertheless, the emission of this direct influence does help us to see that the New Critical influences on conposition came frcm one of two sources or directions: New Critical analysis of literature or New Critical principles applied directly to the principles of prose composition, this last influence to be taken up in the next chapter. Writing About New Critical Principles: the Critical Essay Because of the popularity of the New Critical literary analysis, freshman English courses during the early sixties, for the most part, used literature to teach writing. As a result, the critical essay became the most important form of exposition used in the study of composition. Guides to this form of writing began to be printed and their continued popularity is attested to by reprintings in the seventies. See, for example, B. Bernard Cohen's Writing About Literature (1963), Edgar Roberts' Writing Thanes About Literature (1964), and Sylvan Barnet's A Short Guide to Writing About Literature (1968). (By the time John Trimble's book Writing With Style [1975] was written the guide to writing critical essays had been reduced to one chapter.) Of these early textbook writers, Bernard Cohen was the one author 86 who had consciously recognized the theoretical relationship between reading and writing in teems of the writing process. Reading was not simply subordinated to the act of writing, it was part of the process itself. Critical reading was an act of "Pre-writing." This title for his first chapter is significant for several reasons. One is that it formally recognized the act of pre-writing as early as 1963, and in doing so helped to institutionalize a "stage" attitude toward composition and a method of teaching composition that would call for the New Critical Rhetorical analysis of readings as a stage preceding writing. It is also significant in terms of theoretical comparisons: the metaphoric act of reading involved in the nature of this critical act is the similar metaphoric or analogical act that D. Gordon Rohman and Albert Wleeke use to define the concept of pre-writing in 1964. The two concepts of pre-writing are similar if one ignores the subject of literature in the one and focuses, instead, on the method. Pre-writing for Rohman and Wleeke is that stage of writing .iat occurs then a person transforms a subject, through the process of analogy, 33 into his own categories of thought. The first chapter of Cohen's book focuses on the skills of a disciplined analysis of texts that are assumed to "help the student in 34 ■ . approaching the writing process." As a result, its organization mirrors the characteristic topics of Richards' Rhetoric and the practical analysis of the New Critics. It "stresses such problems as the difference between literal and analytical reading, the importance of context, the relevance of figurative language to analysis, and the validity of multiple interpretation of a work" (i-ii). The 87 explanations for these ideas are familiar: analytical reading "requires closer attention to the suggestive power of words, the relationship of details, and the totality of meaning that emerges frcm them," "interpretation is based on a study of context," a pattern of images or metaphors become symbolical "by the process of cumulative effect," and "In either prose or poetry, then, the implications and relationships of the direct and inplied metaphors that are employed by the author can contribute to a deeper understanding of the work and , can, in addition, supply material for an interpretive essay." This last point is more than an "addition"; it is crucial to the ccuposition. Hie two most important points about the writing act discussed in these texts involve the notion of rhetorical stance and the making of the thesis argument. While Cohen does not specifically support the intentional, fallacy (because he explores the relationhip between biographical research and literary analysis later on in the book), he explicitly supports the affective fallacy in terms of the writer's rhetorical stance. (He has a specific section on this fallacy.) Hie writer should "take his stand" and support it by using examples frcm the text. The writer should be distant enough frcm the piece to analyze it "objectively." Although he acknowledges the appeals that literature makes to the imagination and its powerful ability to engage a reader, he demands that the writer became disengaged frcm the effect so as to analyze the text at another cognitive level. He says, "Subjective involvanent can blind a reader. It can lead to a blocking of the thought process" (26). Yet, paradoxically, it is the 88 subjective, suggestive implications of the text that allow the student to make the metaphoric leap necessary to determine a thesis. The act of pre-writing is precisely the shaping of inferential insights through this metaphoric process. The problem of finding a thesis is the foremost significant problem of writing a critical analysis. The element common to the good thesis statement examples that Cohen uses is "relationship." The focus is almost inevitably on the metaphoric or symbolic relationship between form and idea, where the specifics of one determine the other. For exanple, one doesn't say, "Eudoxa Welty's style is effective" or "I will deal with the structure of...." One talks about Imagery related to decay and disillusionment or the juxtapositioning of suggestions of cold and warm to establish an irony in characterization. Cohen explains why a particular exanple is good: "This statement defines the relationship between technique and structure and also provides guidelines for the organization of the interpretive essay" (39). Finding the thesis is not just the first step of the writing process, it is a microcosm for the five steps Cohen lists of the entire writing process: 1) planning a theme or thesis, 2) collecting related notes, 3) breaking down the theme's generalizations, 4) locating representative support, and 5) inter preting the details. The Critical analysis, like the thesis statement, is an interpretation. Even though John Trimble's text is more recent, it shows the continuation of a line of thought that was basically New Critical. He is equally interested in showing the student how to find a thesis. 89 Along with such topics as "thinking well," "openers," "middles," "closers," "diction," "revising," or "proofreading," "how to write a critical analysis," is considered one of the "Fundamentals" of writing in the table of contents of Writing with Style (1975). Yet it strikes us as even more important because it is not parallel with the other "fundamentals." A conversation with a hypothetical student organizes his guide on "how to" compose this expository form. David has been "hearing the phrase 'critical analysis' for years now but no one has 35 ever bothered to explain to him precisely what it involves." (It seems that David had not read the other guides published ten years earlier. By 1975 this mode of composition had become commonplace yet had not become internalized by all students.) The problem was that David had been writing a plot summary instead of a critical analysis (the bane or "heresy" of the English teacher for this form). Trimble explains that one shouldn't summarize or recapitulate the facts but rather explain the how, why, and what of the effects of the literature. Here, again, we see the paradox of the affective fallacy. The details are used only to demonstrate the thesis assertion: "In other words, it is their larger significance that always concerns you, not the details for their own sake. They are illustrations of something— a recurring pattern, a character trait, or whatever." It is significance at a level beyond the literal words on the page— metaphoric, or symbolic— that defines the thesis. For Trimble, also, writing the critical essay depends upon one's ability to use the method of New Critical analysis. The thesis is the overall meaning— the discovery of the text's pattern, the discovery of 90 that "something" always mentioned in composition texts attempting to describe this process of composing. Trimble has David ask the logical question: "...how do I cone up with that 'genuinely interesting, gutty thesis' you talk about? I always have trouble thinking up things to write about" (26-27). Here Trimble hits directly upon the main problem of composing the New Critical analysis. Hie thesis is an enigma. While it is the entire argument for the analysis, if the student cannot generate an interpretive thesis (the metaphoric leap previously discussed) then locating a thesis is virtually inpossible. Hie thesis remains unidentified in the textbook guide and is unidentified by the writer until she actually creates it from a textual analysis. For these tacit reasons, most textbooks spend a great deal of time working with the problem of thesis making. Neither an abstract discussion of a thesis of a set of exanples would seem useful if, quite literally, the thesis depends upon a specific text and a specific reader drawing a unique point of significance. By understanding the process at work in the analysis of a text— the abstract analysis of the parts and the amalgamation of disparate elements and values that it reinforces— we can better understand the origins of the injunction to "be original, fresh, and interesting." Trimble offers three suggestions for writing this analysis. First, he suggests that the student ask "how" and "why" questions. "They are more intrinsically interesting than what questions because they are interpretive rather than dryly descriptive" (27). What makes this reading exciting, he says, is that the questions help the reader 91 "to see clearly what before he had seen only dimly, if at all" (27). The surface details cure unimportant, significant only in the way that they suggest what can be seen only "dimly" without a close analysis of form for the deeper structures of meaning. "And thinking out answers to such questions makes for exciting writing because it involves discovery." Obviously, Trimble recognized what was important in the analytical process applied New Critically to texts: the act of discovery. The second suggestion is to pay close attention to the form of the work. Note the New Critical assumption: "You may assume that very little is accidental in a poem" (27). The writer examines juxtapositioning, repetition, contrasts, ironies, symbols, and images. One looks at the characters for their "verbal signatures in their speeches." His third suggestion is to use the present tense. This is interesting in that New Critical Rhetoric appears to work in a timeless state of the present moment in its disregard for the past or the future effect. He concludes with three working assumptions: (1) Assume that the reader is well-informed. (What I think this means is that we are to assume as a commonplace that the reader is a New Critic interested only in a New Critical analysis of the written text.) (2) Assume that the reader will be bored with commonplace perceptions. (It seems that conventional wisdom is to be seen as a distraction.) (3) Assume that the reader prefers an argument and that he wants 92 to see "you courageously crawling out on an interpretive limb" (29). (The New Critical argument is a well-shaped, novelly suggested, creative assertion about a writer's technique rather than a conventionally supported position about a writer's ideas or values, for exanple. In the New Critical argument, the reader doesn't want to be moved toward a point of solidarity about beliefs or truths with the writer, but rather wants to be outwitted— entertained by interesting comparisons about structures of discourse.) While this "limb climbing” may have been exciting to the students who were successful New Critical interpreters of literature, able to make discoveries through metaphoric reasoning and then present them non-metaphorically, it may have been part of the reason why so many students entered and exited the composition course with such anxiety or abject fear of writing toward such heights. To summarize the characteristic features of this form of writing, it could be said that the critical analysis is an argument for a thesis demonstrated by concrete support from the careful reading of the text. The thesis is the result of a metaphoric suggestion of particular meanings and forms within a text. Concrete support for the thesis includes the thesis statement of meaning and a statement of the significance or effect of the text on a reader, frequently generalized into a thane about the condition of mankind. The irony here is that what we were asking the students to locate, in very personal ways, before it could be generalized or intellectualized, was essentially considered a fallacy frcm the outset. It would have been difficult for the student to determine a thesis if the instructor believed quite 93 literally in a rhetoric of meanings apart fran a rhetoric of effects. Because of the injunctions "be distant" but "be original," a reed, disjunction existed between the writer's rhetorical stance and the making of an argumentative thesis. Notes ^ Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon McKenzie, eds., introduction, Criticism: The Foundation of Modem Literary Judgment (New York: Harcourt, 1948) ix. 2 William Elton, A Guide to the New Criticism (Chicago: Poetry, 1951) 3. 3 Mortimer Adler, How to Bead a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education (New York: H. Wolfe, 1940) viii. * Adler vii-xi. 5 Adler ix. Adler suggests the following process for the close reading of expository texts: analysis, interpretation, and then criticism. Such analysis consists of looking at the restated classifications of meaning, the relationship of the parts, the problem to be solved, any important propositions, arguments, solutions, and any failures by the author of misinformation, illogical statements, and incompleteness. For literary texts, he would analyze unity, complexity, organization, plausibility of the poetic truth, and stirring imaginative intensity. (These rules are restated on pp. 266-268 and 314-315.) ® X. A. Richards, How to Read a Page (New York: Norton, 1942) 10. ^Arthur N. Applebee, Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: a History (Urbana, XL: NCTE, 1974) 163. 8 Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977): Theoretically, there is no reason to expect that the body of utterances we call "literature" sould be systematically distinguishable from other utterances on the basis of intrinsic grammatical or textual properties. Nevertheless, the belief that such a distinction could be made and could give rise to an interesting and adequate definition of literature underlies nearly all of the language-based intrinsic or formalist criticism of this century, from Russian Formalism through Prague School poetics and Anglo-American structuralism to present-day French literary semiotics, (xi) To the extent that New Criticism encourages a poetic/ ordinary language split and the concept of a linguistically autonomous literature, it too may be considered susceptible to the arguments I have proposed to refute these dogma, (xv) See also Stanley Fish, "How Ordinary is Ordinary Language?" The Authority of Interpretive Cocununities (Cambridge: Moro, 1980). I would argue that the New Critics were not simply describing the poem 95 as a piece of language. I would add that the New Critics, such as wimsatt and Beardsley, did not see implicit meanings as an extension of explicit meaning as Fish says about their views. The relationship of the two is reciprocal, with each determining the other. 9 Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry, 3rd ed. (New York: Holt, 1960) 21. All subsequent references to this textbook are noted in the text. 10 Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hills: ; U of North Carolina P, 1939) 10. 11 ! Cleanth Brooks, personal interview, 27 June 1984. 12 Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry (Minneapolis: u ; of Minnesota P, 1956) 97. 13 W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., "What to Say About a Poem," reduced version of a paper read before the Eighth Yale Conference on the Teaching of English, New Haven, April 14, 1962 and reprinted from College English in What to Say About a Poem and Other Essays (Chanpaign, IL: NCTE, 1963) 6. The article explains and illustrates the literal translation and description of a poem. 14 I. A. Richards, Basic in Teaching: East and West, Psyche Miniatures General Series (London: Kegan Paul, 1935) 107. 15 Wimsatt 7. ^ Josephine Miles, "Reading Poens," reprinted from the English Journal in What to Say About a Poem 16. 17 Miles 16. 18 Ian Watt, "The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors: An Explication," Contemporary Essays on Style: Rhetoric, Linguistics, and Criticism, ed. G. A. Love and M. Payne, (Glenview, IL: Scott, 1969) 266-283. ^ Brooks, "Metaphor and the Tradition," in Modem Poetry 13. 20 Applebee 159. Edgar Howard Schuster, "The New Criticism and Its Influence on the Teaching of Poetry in American Senior High Schools Through 1965," diss., U of Pennsylvania, 1973, 184-185. He notes an article in the Nation, March 9, 1957, in which sixteen leading college English teachers and writers cited the predominant interests of their students as literary criticism, pointing especially to Understanding Poetry and to the New Critics in general. 22 Language Committee, Report given to the School and College Conference on English, April 1940, reprinted by the Ccramission on English, Freedom and Discipline in English (Princeton. NJ: CEEB, 1965) 25-32. 23 Michael F. Shugrue, English in a Decade of Chance (New York: Pegasus, 1968), p. 91 in which he quotes the results of the 1961 NCTE report. The National Interest and the Teaching of English. 24 James Kinneavy, personal interview, 1 December 1983. 25 Wimsatt 3. 2 6 Christian Brothers New Orleans-Santa Fe District, Program of High School English (Lafayette, LA: Cathedral High School, 22 August 1957). All further references to this work appear in the text. 27 James Kinneavy, personal interview, 7 March 1984. 2 8 William Van O'Connor, "A Short View of the New Criticism," English Journal 38 (October 1949). 2 9 Kinneavy 7 March 1984. 30 Joseph T. Shipley, ed. A Dictionary of World Literature: Criticism-Forms-Technique (New York: Philosophical Library, 1943). 33“ Kinneavy 7 March 1984. 32 Kinneavy 7 March 1984. 33 I am indebted to James Zebroski for pointing out the close proximity in time and the connection with the use of metaphor in Rohman and Wlecke's process model of pre-writing activities. See D. Gordon Rohman and Albert Wlecke, Pre-Writing: The Construction of a Model and Applications for Concept Formation (East Lansing: Michigan State U, U.S. Office of Education Cooperative Research Project No. 2174," 1964). (ERIC: ED 001273) The problem that they saw in composition at the time was students' lack of language and logic skills. Interestingly enough, the logic they turn to is of creative transference: the transference of an old category of perception to a new situation which requires abstracting the features and patterns they have in common. The process of this concept formation is broken into three activities Which sound remarkably New Critical: 1) attention to the particularity of events, 2) attention to the personal sense of what is real (of experiencing the drama of an event), and 3) the transference of the known structures of an event to a new object. The model is drawn from reports of discussions by writers and psychologists on the creative process. The creativity comes from the novel arrangement of the old, and discovery from "groping" around a subject until one discovers what he is looking for. R a h m a n ' s "hedonic 97 response" is very much like Ransom's advice that if you get the feeling you are going in the right direction, go with it. The three activities of this creative thought process can be examined in corresponding pre-writing activities: journal writing, meditating, and the making of analogies. But in their experiments with students, they found that not all were successful with each of the stage activities (especially with the metaphoric or analogic activity). Their theoretical model of the pre-writing process included a movement through the act of thought transference. A great i deal of attention still needs to distinguishing the nature of the j metaphoric act involved in personalizing structures during the process of ocmposing. B. Bernard Cohen, Writing About Literature (Chicago: Scott, 1963) 11. All further references to this work appear in the text. 35 John R. Trimble, Writing With Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1975) 25. All further references to this work appear in the text. CHAPTER IV NEW CRITICAL COMPOSITION In an article written by Joseph Denney in 1896, "Two Problems in Ckmposition-Teaching," we see the various purposes for which literature was used to teach ccuposition at the turn of the century. One of the questions Denney asks is whether ...the interpretative reading of English classics may not take the place of practice in English oonposition... .We are told that we have only to teach pupils to read with penetration and spiritual insight and the power to write well will cane to them of itself.1 As seen here, the dominant attitude toward literature at the time was Neo-Humanistic: the reading of literature was seen as a means by which to widen "the intellectual horizon and inform the spirit," and thus it o was considered a tool by which to teach composition. A second use of reading in the conposition course was "for discovering literary 3 structure." Apprehending organization and re-stating it (a skill by which contemplation trained the powers of selection and abstraction) was considered an exercise in rhetorical analysis. Of these two uses of literature to teach composition, it is easy to see that when the New Critics turned their attention to composition, they adopted the second approach— the rhetorical analysis. But because Brooks and Warren called their rhetoric "Modern," we need to examine same of the more specific ways in which 99 it differed from the conventional textbook rhetorical analysis at the turn of the century and in the early decades of the twentieth century, i I Therefore, the question that guides the research in this chapter is this: How did New Critical attitudes toward language and texts (discussed in the previous chapters) determine what Brooks and Warren, ; or other New Critics, saw as Fundamentals of Good Writing? To begin to answer this question, we need to examine the field of composition and the textbooks popular at the turn of the century where historians like Richard Young and Donald Stewart locate the origins of the paradigm that has been called current-traditional rhetoric/ 4 composition. By comparing the values, beliefs, methods, emphases, and exclusions of Brooks and Warren’s Modern Rhetoric to the values and emphases in turn-of-the-century, composition textbooks, we should be able to distinguish much more carefully what was going on in oocrposition/rhetoric during the middle decades of the twentieth century. These distinctions should help to identify the origins of at least some of the current values and practices in that rather motley and inconsistent collection of maxims and practices that we call modern composition. The similarities between the New Critical and the traditional paradigms should help to answer, in part, a question posed by Donald Stewart in his opening address at the 1983 Conference on College Gcnposition and Communication regarding the survival of current-traditional rhetoric in modem pedagogy. We could say that one of the reasons it appears to have survived is that certain elements of this tradition were adopted by New Critical composition/ rhetoric. 100 The first section of this chapter will offer a brief review of traditional textbook rhetoric at the turn of the century so that in a subsequent section we may locate those attitudes toward language, principles of discourse, and particular language forms that the New Critics interested in composition selected from traditional textbooks. The second section will identify seme of the more important New Critical adoptions of and adaptations to the traditional textbook carposition/rhetoric. The third section will describe the kind of essay that best accommodates New Critical principles; and the fourth will identify some of the implications of New Critical attitudes for the writer's composing process. Its Roots: Turn-of-the-century Textbook Rhetoric In addition to Young and Stewart, we owe our understanding of nineteenth-century American rhetoric to such scholars as Albert Kitzhaber-— for his unpublished work, "Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900" (1953), the most encyclopedic treatment of textbook theories, sources, interpretations, and trends during the second half of the nineteenth-century; Ronald Reid— for his work on Harvard's Bolyston Chair; and, more recently, James Berlin— for his study of 5 Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges (1984). The textbooks most frequently associated with this period were those by Adams Sherman Hill, John Franklin Genung, Barrett Wendell, William Cairns, Fred Newton Scott, Joseph Villiers Denney, and Gertrude Buck.® Their textbook prefaces speak clearly to many of the 101 theoretical and practical issues of the time. From among these authors, Berlin identifies two composition/rhetoric theories: one previously mentioned— "current-traditional rhetoric"— as seen in the work of Hill, Genung, and Wendell, and another representing a new romanticism as seen in the work of Scott, Denney, and Buck. These two traditions, however, are not as distinct in the textbooks as the theory would suggest. Implicit in the textbooks, at least, are assumptions of both. For exairple, the canon of style is treated mechanistically in these books, we can assume that the canon of invention is treated romantically when it is omitted in these practical manuals, that is, when the author feels it cannot be subjected to systematic description because it is seen as a matter of the writer's individual powers. It is, I believe, because of a romantic assumption about composing that these texts seem mechanistic. Ironically, it may have been the romantic assumptions in the belletristic tradition that caused rhetoric/composition to take cm this mechanistic cast. This is an important point for my study because it locates the origin of a composition pedagogy that focuses explicitly cm the mechanistic elements of style while drawing implicitly on other vital elements of composition. Because the period at the turn of the century has been explored by rhetoric historians, I will comment only briefly on hew rhetorical theory was narrowed to mean a theory of composition. Because of English departments' preoccupations with written, literary discourse at the turn of the century, oratory was essentially abandoned. The paradigm had shifted from a rhetoric concerned with the methods of 102 persuasion to a rhetoric concerned with the effects of literary expression, a paradigm in which literary critics adopted for their analyses primarily the stylistic tools of the former rhetoric. Mass literacy after the Civil War also encouraged universities to focus their attention on the mechanics of the written word. Harvard's admission exam in 1874, requiring correct spelling, punctuation, gramnar, and "expression," illustrates the beginning of a concern for grammatical precision and correctness, one that would continue to narrow the field of rhetoric instruction toward the end of the century 7 to the more superficial aspects of composition. According to Hull's definition, the art of rhetoric had become the art of "efficient communication." A look at Harvard will illustrate what was happening in the field in general, as the discipline narrowed. There the advanced rhetoric courses were reduced to specific levels: a junior level course in argument and a sophomore level course in the four inodes. By 1894, the study of rhetoric had been narrowed even more to an introductory, required course in composition. Hill's textbook, The Principles of Rhetoric, used at Harvard, indicated what the freshman level course was designed to include. Reduced to the study of style, it listed as its chapter heads, words, sentences, and paragraphs. The dominant focus of Hill's text was on linguistic propriety, the proper use of words, sentences, and paragraphs. Of the five qualities of style that determine "proper" use (correctness, clarity, force, unity, and ease), correctness or purity was the most important, on which (according to Genung) all other qualities of style were based. Hill's text is 103 exemplary of the extreme narrowing of rhetoric in textbooks to principles of formal and stylistic decorum, omitting, in particular, the matter of invention. Genung's introductory composition textbooks maintained a more comprehensive scope in that they were divided into two sections to include the sophomore and junior level topics of invention (which were the literary types of description, narration, exposition, and argument and advice on the training of the "literary" mind through self culture) as well as the freshman level topics of style (the qualities of style as adjustments to an audience). They illustrate, nevertheless, the reduction of rhetoric as a discipline to rhetoric as an introductory freshman writing course of rhetorical principles based upon sentence unity and organization. What characterizes American rhetoric of the 1890s at the most general level is the move from the study of rhetoric as an art of persuasion in general to the study of rhetoric very narrcwly defined as a practice of composing where one studies the mechanics of literary expression— the pleasing effects of style upon an audience. It made use of theoretical, abstractions to explain only the practical elements of writing, which meant the study of the principles or rules of language in matters of style, decorum, and readability. Thus rhetorical theory became synonymous with a theory of ocoposition that very narrowly defined composition as well (witness the interchangeability of the terms "rhetoric" and "composition" in titles of texts at the turn of the century). The dominant focus of this ocnposition/rhetoric was on language organization in contrast to a 104 focus on the social or motivational functions or uses of discourse. As a result, the study of rhetoric began to look more like a grammar of rhetoric—-of isolatable, formal features of coherence and economy— than a rhetoric of causes or social effects. In addition to understanding the contraction of the discipline and the resulting equation of rhetoric with composition, it is important to recognize what happened to the aim of rhetoric when it shifted to the study of stately writing. Drawing as it did upon faculty psychology, turn-of-the-century rhetoric simply compartmentalized the aims of rhetoric. Turn-of-the-century interest in the belletristc aims of egression (the Horatian aims of teaching and pleasing) were added to the traditional aim of rhetoric (persuasion), making the aims of composition consistent with the mental functions identified in faculty psychology: informing, pleasing, and influencing. We could summarize the important changes in rhetorical theory regarding invention and style at the end of the ninteenth century by saying that invention and style became "practical" concerns. Invention was no longer the search for or the location of the "matter" or arguments of persuasion, but the search for the "manner" of literary expression in terms of effective order and force. According to Genung, who had treated invention both romantically—-assuming that genius cannot be taught— and mechanically, the mechanical "feeder of invention" was observation and meditation upon liberal information found in good writing. The writer was encouraged to read good literature for a wealth of information and for 105 its ability to stixnultate thought about great ideas. For the student, practical meant useful, and for the teacher it meant communicable— that which was amenable to systematic description and rule. Anything that was spontaneous or that must be discovered must be left to the individual or the individual occasion. Genung saw tropes, for example, as "spontaneous and unlabored modes of expression"; and, consequently, the new textbooks abandoned the lengthy classical lists 8 of tropes because they were impractical. These lists were abandoned theoretically because of this association with invention and the Ranantic assumption that they were the result of spontaneous, individual powers. The vital element of invention was the "inspired inpulse," and such impulses could not be systematized, and hence could not be taught. However, those elements vital to the effect of the composition could be systematically explained. What was effective or "moving" for the reader was the writer's craftsmanship; and this craft could be recorded, systematized, and taught. Because writing was only concerned with the practical or teachable, rather than with any innate, individual power, Genung acknowledged that of the three stages of invention— finding material, sifting or selecting material, and ordering material-only the principles of ordering are "most 9 susceptible to treatment in a textbook." These principles were the organic laws of invention— laws he acknowledged from Ruskin to be connection, force, and order.10 Here we see the origin of the vital principles of invention that were adopted by the New Critics. One of the effects of considering order as an organic law of invention is 106 that the traditional rhetorical six-part theme for oratory (or its counterpart today— the five paragraph essay) was replaced theoretically by the organic essay, a form which was reinforced by New Critical rhetoric. For Genung, the highest mental training was the training of the man of letters. Lost was the classical "good orator" maxim that had been supported through the Renaissance by sermonic rhetoric. One didn't have to be virtuous to be good, one's compositions merely had to be accurate, orderly, and imaginative. Ethos, for the most part, was redefined in terms of craft and invention. The good writer was the imaginative writer. But what is inportant to reemphasize, because it will be changed by the New Critics' theory of language, is that one's inventiveness was not a matt®: of choice but a matter of individual endowment. The fact that Genung thought that seme writers think according to concrete facts, some in spontaneous figures, and some in abstractions illustrates the attitude toward composition at the time that aspects of language such as concretion, abstraction, or figuration were mental traits peculiar to individuals rather than cannon language tools available to all writers. If we emit the rhetorical concerns of the individual occasion and the location and selection of material, we can see how the traditional concern of rhetoric— finding the available means of persuasion— was altered to an analytical concern for locating effects of the language on an audience. Rhetoric became an "applied" science where only mechanism could be taught because it could be examined concretely in the textual product.11 As a result, the method most suitable for this 107 kind of instruction was the use of literature to illustrate the systematic principles of force. Genung reminds us that although many principles are evident in the concrete, not all are communicable; and as such, they belong to the art of criticism rather than the "art of constructing." Seme of the exarrples he identifies of these incommunicable, impractical elements are the more subtle matters of literary taste, rhythm, fancy and allusion— products, he says, of a "minute discipline." Ironically, only fourteen years later, some of these inconmunicable, critical elements became objects of study in Genung's Working Principles of Rhetoric. By 1900, the Practical Elements of Rhetoric had been "reproportioned* as he says, "into the line of scientific literary study," where composition as an art of production became even more "critical." Compare Genung's definition of rhetoric in 1886 to the one in 1900: [1886] ...the art of adapting discourse, in harmony with its subject and occasion, to the requirements of a reader or hearer .*2 [1900] Rhetoric is literature, taken in its details and impulses, literature in the making. Whatever is implied in this the present work frankly accepts. Its standard is literature; it is concerned, as real authorship must be, not with a more grammatical apparatus or with Huxley's logic engine, but with the whole man, his outfit of conviction and emotion, imagination and will, translating himself, as it * were, into vital and ordered utterance. It is in this whole man that the technique of the art has its roots. While the shift was from a "readership" to an "authorship," Genung*s composition maxims were still based upon the principles of readability and economy. To summarize the details I have mentioned in this historical 108 development/ it could be said that by the turn of the century, in English Departments, rhetoric had been reduced to a lower-division practical course in carposition. The methods for its study were either mechanical (a study of "good use," verbal and grammatical rules) or literary (a critical analysis of the principles of effective or interesting writing). Those rules of usage and selection that could not be made on the basis of standard use or grammaticality were frequently determined by the principles of unity and force that governed longer units of expression. For exaitple, one should maintain a particular voice for the sake of consistency, or one should avoid the passive construction because it was considered weaker than the active voice. These "rules," however, were subject to the exception of emphasis which could justify the breaking of a rule if it had been used intentionally for effect or force. For the most part, a focus on practice limited theoretical rhetorical principles to textbook treatments of the principles of selection and combination. Thus the turn of the century marks the beginning of a "textbook" rhetoric in America, of a practical, critical rhetoric of expression— a study of "ordered utterances" in an interrelated system of connection, order, and force so as to produce an effective text which could be economically read. Textbook borrowings from Hill, Genung, Wendell, Scott, Newcomer, and Pearson continued into the second decade of the twentieth century. Their material was consolidated into doctrine that can be seen in such textbooks as A. Howry Espensade's Ten Essentials of Canposition and Rhetoric {1904 and revised in 1913) His table of contents 109 summarizes this doctrine: the units of study were the whole composition, the paragraph, the sentence, words and phrases; the principles at work at all-.levels were unity, coherence, and emphasis; and the goal was to expose the student to the principles of clear and forceful expression. Thus the five qualities of style were translated into the very goal of writing and its major principles. The assumption for pedagogy was that the knowledge of these principles and the recognition of them in literary examples would help the student to produce dear and forceful expression. A look at Brooks and Warren* s table of contents tells us initially something about what doctrine of the turn-of-the-century tradition is continued {for example, the study of unity, coherence and emphasis, four kinds of discourse, paragraphs, sentences, and words). It will also tell us what overt features of the New Criticism were translated into the study of writing and incorporated into textbook rhetoric (metaphor, tone, texture, the integration of form and content, and reading as an act of critical thinking). These are the "new ideas" that I think Brooks and Warren were referring to in their prefatory letter to the first edition of Modem Rhetoric: ... the study of linguistic behavior which has been carried on during the last twenty-five years— the discoveries and recoveries made in criticism, in semantics, and in related fields— ought to yield something of significance to the teaching of English composition. It is easy to see how the turn-of-the-century critical rhetoric provided the backdrop for early twentieth-century literary-critical 16 analysis. As a study of written ccnposition, it did not study the "romantic," "psychological" origins of a text but rather the mechanics 110 of the text itself and the rather "mechanical" effects cm the audience in terms of readability. It took a systematic look at the principles of internal combination and unity that were thought to have an effect upon the reader, of which the most important principle was emphasis. Where rhetoric texts at the turn of the century used literature to illustrate language principles and rules. New Critical texts used these rhetorical principles as tools to explain the meanings of poetry. Ihe point should be clear that the New Critics had not turned to history, biography, or social theory as an informing science but rather to rhetoric, adapting late nineteenth-century principles to their theoretical and practical needs. As a development of turn-of-the-century composition/rhetoric, New Critical ccxnposition/rhetoric maintained the study of written expression as a scientific literary study, and examined the smaller units of language even more closely. In New Critical ccnposition theory, however, the aims of discourse, adapted from faculty psychology and a rhetoric concerned primarily with readability, were presented as types of discourse subsumed under the single aim of understanding, set in the context of the newer interests in symbolic, Gestalt psychology. Invention became a concern of arrangement, and both were seen as matters of internal combination within an organic essay. What is noticeable is what is dropped from early twentieth- century conposition/rhetoric. 'Hie handbook preoccupation with the standard rules of usage had been exchanged for theoretical or philosophical explanations of how language worked. The idea of 111 figuration had changed. And the ethical appeals of the force of conviction and will became dramatized, formal appeals of emphasis. New Critical CempositioivORhetoric Textbooks One of the myths that this research hopes to dispel is that the New Critics were interested only in poetics. While it may be true as Gorrell et al. state that "By the 1940s...the separation in English departments between literary study and the teaching of writing was so canplete that academics committed to literary study could easily ignore the writing program," evidence does not support the idea that 17 the New Critical theorists ignored writing instruction. Whatever their reason— their own interests in composition, appeals from publication houses for composition textbooks, or departmental pressures to teach basic writing skills to a different body of students during and after World War II, some of the most influential New Critics did write ccnposition textbooks, importing many of their new theoretical attitudes toward language into these texts. Two years after the publication of The New Criticism, John Crowe Ransom published A College Primer of writing (1943). The text reacts to the usage/handbook tradition of the early twentieth century, and it clearly shows the influence of his New Critical ideas cm a pedagogy of composition. As such, it is an interesting companion to the work in 1949 by Brooks and Warren, who incorporate many more of the principles of an earlier rhetorical tradition into their ccnposition text. Together, these two texts give us an interesting picture of the direct 112 influence of New Critical ideas can instruction in freshman composition. Like other books written in the early part of the twentieth century, the table of contents of Ransom's book illustrates the pruning of elements important in composition to matters of punctuation, sentence structure, and composition. His method of teaching these elements, however, reflects a distinct reaction to the handbook method of listing rules. Because of his abstract reasoning about the structural principles of punctuation, he sees his text as respresenting a new philosophy about language and a new philosophy for its instruction. He says that his approach is not arbitrary but rather scientific or theoretical. He hopes that the student will 18 regard language as a "vital and not as a mechanical process." Therefore, he does not name and list sentence errors or proper uses of language. Instead, he illustrates how language is used in both professional essays and student essays. The point of view is that of the writer engaged in actual composition rather than of the reader/teacher engaged in correcting mistakes. For example, the student learns how to punctuate when she wants to stop a sentence, separate coordinate elements, make lists, use parentheticals, or omit words. The purpose is "to show the organization of the stream of words into phrases and sentences," (32) reflecting the needs of both reader and writer. This shows a change in eciphasis from the need to manage materials for the sake of readability to the need to manage materials for the sake of the idea. Ransom's new philosophy attended to how things are constructed. 113 He saw composition as an art which puts things together (the forming of ideas and the constructing of a text); and while he acknowledged that the whole comes before the parts, he saw both as faulty, incomplete constructions in the early stage of a text. This emphasis on the process of writing in which the composition becomes increasingly determined by its realization in language is something | that might be expected from Ransom, considering his ontological principles of literary corposition in The New Criticism where form determines content. The various types of composition in his textbook (definition, explanation of process or mechanism, report, letter, essay, argument, etc.) "represent special occasions or purposes of composition, and have their own conventions, which help in determining the kind of content to write into them* (81). Thus the conventions of i form determine content, and this is one of the hallmarks of New Critical Rhetorical theory. That is, what determines content is not primarily the writer's stock of knowledge, the writer's intention, or the expectation of a reader, but the discourse form. One simply doesn't learn the form (a mechanistic approach), but one becomes keenly aware of the constraints of form on content as one writes (a New Critical approach). The fundamental duality or "ambiguity" of composition that Ransom discusses is a direct application of his New Critical ideas on composition. He says that the two elemental modes of language and hence of composition are structure and texture. The scientific makes sense or has an argument and is the basic structure of discourse. The literary provides the basic details of discourse. He does not suggest 114 that the two can be mutually exclusive inodes of discourse. He very carefully notes that all discourse fundamentally says something. But in considering the "literary" values of a piece of discourse, "we like to sense the actual density of the materials, and we keep in our discourse a great deal of detail that encumbers the argument, though we would not have the argument obscured and lost" (85). This literary quality gets into discourse "naturally, subtly, and in many different degrees" (86). And while discourse is an exercise in both modes (analysis and conposition), the "imaginative" mode of composition is the more difficult. With the New Critical emphasis on imaginative detail, it is no surprise that Ransom devotes a section of the text to the provision of content— what he defines as copious, rich, dense detail. Content is not to be found outside the text and brought into it and arranged. Instead, the writer discovers content by using a "writer's sensibility" during the actual act of composing. And "it is the revelation of this content that makes a piece of ooirposition exciting" (86). Ransom says that the veteran writer has no "immense stock of knowledge" (a clear departure from turn-of-the century rhetoric and Aristotelian rhetoric) but is "skilled in sensing and finding the kind of knowledge that the strange topic will offer" (87). There are two points here that remind us of New Critical ideas. Without belaboring the topic of the composing process, which will be discussed in the next section, we can say that the writer is urged to select a new or strange topic for writing and to write with texture in mind. Fluent writing, according to Ransom, is a flow of knowledge, "the intimate 115 substance of the topic that flows through [the writer], and makes the copious stream" (88). And it is important for the writer to "take possession of a field that looked foreign to [his] range of interests at first" (91). Ransom's idea of conposition at least addresses the notion of interest, an idea dropped from most mechanistic pedagogies because it is impossible to formulate a rule for interest. There are other New Critical twists to the traditional conposition advice as a result of Ransom's shifting the point of view from the reader to the writer. Topic sentences, for example, are not only useful to the reader but to the writer as well— as mnemonic devices reminding the writer of the propositions that have been written. Thus Ransom wants us to see that theoretical notions regarding readability serve the writer as much as the reader, an uncommon notion in composition texts then as well as now. Because of this enphasis on the writer. Ransom seems less "formalistic" than what our stereotypic view of the New Critic might have him be. For exanple, he does not recommend the formal outline. While it is presentable "formally," it lacks vitality and substance. In New Critical terms, the formal outline would be nothing more than the paraphrasable matter or structure of the real essay which is a construct of form determined by texture and would have to follow not precede the essay. His pronouncement is clear: the outline is "cold, thin, and 'academic' in the worst sense.... [It] inhibits effective writing, and is the worst tactical error that is committed in ccnposition courses" (101). Representing stock arguments, it does 116 not allow for the student's making the topic his own which would reflect a focus of the writer's experience or imagination. While it may allow for the hard facts, it does not easily incorporate what Ransom identifies as dialectical detail (the complexities and refinements of the argument) or imaginative detail (the vivid presentation of remembered or imagined feelings— the most advanced type of writing). Hie writer's finishing of the whole (the outline) before the details "may have a deadly effect upon the paper even though the [former] is also brought up to a handsome state of finish" (100). The extended definition and the short essay are the only essay forms Ransom discusses in any detail in the text. His rationale for examining these two forms is that they are flexible and comprehensive and provide the student with the problems of finding fresh, interesting, copious content. So in 1943, from the perspective of this modern writer, we see a New Critical emphasis in composition on understanding the principles of language rather than the memorization of rules of proper usage, an emphasis on the vitality of copious content, and the dual, ambiguous processes of composition— of personal, imaginative detail and complex, refined arguments. While Brooks and Warren also react against the handbook tradition, they use many of the ideas from an earlier rhetorical tradition of composition instruction. They admit that their Modern Rhetoric "...will seem in some respects quite conventional and even old-fashioned."19 In many ways, this textbook is quite similar to Genung's working Principles of Rhetoric (1900) . And a glance at 117 Young's list of overt features of the Current Traditional Rhetorical paradigm would indicate the similarities between New Critical 20 Composition and the turn-of-the-century paradigm. Although Brooks and Warren are not concerned with grammatical correctness or the proper use of language, both the turn-of-the-century and the New Critical tradition use literature to teach composition, are concerned with the practical analyses of texts, enphasize four forms of discourse, employ the doctrine of unity, coherence, and emphasis, reduce rhetoric to a study of style and its effects, and, because of the vitalist assumption of the writer's individual, creative uniqueness, reduce invention to the systematic study of arrangement and organization. This list identifies the more mechanical elements of the two traditions, but it does not identify, however, the vital elements of the older tradition that were retained by the New Critics and brought into a new focus as a result of different assumptions about language and mind. That is. Young's list overlooks what turn-of-the-century rhetoricians identify as the vital, characteristic properties of form that the New Critics used to turn invention into a concern of language and thought. These were the vital principles of order and force that the New Critics used to examine the deeper meanings of a text. What was fundamentally new in New Critical Ccnposition/Rhetoric was the importation of New Critical attitudes toward language and the elevation of an "artistic" logic into composition instruction. Brooks and Warren's text the Fundamentals of Good Writing, or its shortened title, the Modem Rhetoric, was, in fact, modem in the sense that New 118 Critical theoretical descriptions of texts and a New Critical method of interpretive analysis had been brought into the composition classroom. The focus of New Critical interpretive analysis on the deeper meanings of the text, discovered through an analysis of how literal ideas are qualified by, or determined by, suggestive ideas is the same focus found in the Fundamentals. Brooks and Warren's rhetoric offered tangible exanples of hew New Critical literary analysis could be used to explore and analyze virtually any written discourse product because language brings both thought and feeling to bear in virtually any form of discourse. Ibis analytical, interpretive rhetoric could be used to teach the principles of composition by using the same principles successful in the interpretation of literature to analyze informal, expository essays. That is, one takes a close look at particular language structures (texture, figures of speech, patterns of arrangement, rhythms, sounds, emphasis, and so forth) to see how meaning is determined. The student of composition is to be a conscious craftsman, the role models for which are writers and critics such as Ransom, Brooks, and Warren. Brooks and Warren respond to their theoretical purpose twenty years later: We remain convinced.. .that the best way and quickest way to learn to write well is not through a process of blind absorption, or trial and error, or automatic conditioning, but through the cultivation of an awareness of the underlying logical and psychological principles, an awareness to be developed in the double process of constantly analyzing specific examples and constantly trying to write against a background of principle. To look at the matter in a slightly different way, the student learns to write by coining to a deeper realization of the workings of his own mind and feelings, and of the way in which those 119 workings are related to language, The double process of composing was the interaction of composing and analysis, emphasizing the writer's mind and the language of the text. Thus the New Critics exchanged a theoretical look at the effects of language on an audience for one concerned with the affects of language. In order to illustrate the more important differences between New Critical doctrine and turn-of-the-century doctrine, the next section will examine how the notion of "craftsmanship" was interpreted by each tradition— what principles of the craft of writing were adopted from the turn of the century and how they were adapted to a New Critical Rhetoric. I hope to illustrate (1) how the vital elements of order and force were adopted, (2) hew the two characteristics of language— thought and feeling— were incorporated into the existing aims of discourse and modes or forms of invention, and (3) how figurative language was foregrounded. In short, this section will further illustrate a change in the philosophy of composition-— from the nineteenth-century study of the effects of discourse aimed at analyzing readable, trenchant prose upon a single reading, to the study of the profound, imaginative elements of discourse discovered through several, careful readings. The Discourse Situation It is interesting to return to Genung's two definitions of rhetoric because Brooks and Warren incorporate them both. For Brooks and Warren, writing is fundamentally a matter of traditional rhetoric 120 (as an analysis of the elements in a discourse situation) and a rhetoric of literary composition (as an analysis of the structure of a piece of literary discourse). They introduce their original text in much the same way as Genung did in 1886 with the idea that a rhetorical understanding of discourse considers the medium, the subject, the occasion, and the relationship between the writer and the reader. But for Brooks and Warren, the consideration of the reader depends upon whether the occasion for discourse is seen as practical or imaginative. One of the reasons that it seems that their text spends more time on imaginative composition than practical rhetoric is because according to their definition of practical, they are not required to spend much time on audience. "Tone" is the principle of composition that gives most consideration to an audience or reader, and it is an important concept in their textbook. Audience is defined according to their own distinction between "practical" and "imaginative" discourse, and this distinction explains, I think, why so little attention in this text is devoted to the reader. According to their text, practiced, discourse (which is argumentative discourse) is aimed at a specific audience, and imaginative discourse is aimed at the universal audience, an audience in which the only tangible member is the writer. In imaginative writing, the only audience the writer need convince is herself. And since Brooks and Warren spend a great deal of time on the imaginative elements in the various forms of discourse (exposition, narration, and description) the tangible audience for which is the writer, they "seem" to give litle attention to the 121 reader. Their textbook foregrounds the writer's text and seems aimed fundamentally at understanding literary or imaginative discourse. Order and Force Because of this foregrounding of the text as the most inportant element in the rhetorical situation, Brooks and Warren state that the study of writing should "first, and finally, [be] concerned with the nature of [the] complete utterance...therefore, be first 22 concerned with general problems of organization." The organization of discourse is the overarching concern, a concern not unlike that at the turn of the century. For Genung specifically and other late nineteenth-century theorists in general, rhetoric was a.matter of settling "unitary and distributive relations": the two directions for invention are "ooncentrative" (a single controlling theme) and "distributive" (the outline or points of the theme and their amplification). "Every composition," he says, "from the phrase onward, with all its conponent parts and stages, is an organism, wherein every part derives vitality from every other, and all are subservient to one unity of 23 inpress ion." Here we see the roots of New Critical Rhetoric in that part of turn-of-the-century rhetoric which is vital is tic: in the concepts of organicism, unity of impression, and amplification. After the outline structure of the discourse has been made, Genung says that it must be clothed in "rounded fulness of life," in a "fitting body of 24 explanatory, illustrative, and vivifying thought." The anplification is the final meeting ground of invention and style. He 122 says that it is the most vital process in all of oonposition because it is where the spirit of the work is acting, trying to awake vigor, vision, and emotion in the reader. It is the "glow of composition." Because the New Critics were fundamentally interested in two things in a literary work— the patterns of interdependent relationships among words and the reinforcement of a dominant impression— it is easy to see why, when Brooks and Warren wrote a text on rhetoric, they adopted (though it may not have been conscious) many of the elements of the practical rhetoric established at the turn of the century. The one great theme of both rhetorics was that writing was a matter of order or organization, and its three vital, interrelated principles were unity, coherence, and emphasis. But what Genung and others thought were vital for the effect of the work on the reader, Brooks and Warren considered vital to the meaning of the text. Brooks and Warren use these important principles, just as Wendell, Genung, or other late nineteenth-century theorists do, to explain two cardinal principles of style: clarity and force. They announce that the second problem of composition, after defining a central idea, is to develop that idea "clearly and forcefully." When a writer has a central idea and a series of connected thoughts, his prose reflects an organized mind; and this, in turn, helps him to organize his subject in such a way that it can be read efficiently by a reader. Not only does forcible discourse guide and stimulate the reader's attention, it also reflects the writer's impression of a subject. So while the stress on the cardinal principles of clarity and force (and the secondary principles of 123 unity, coherence, and emphasis) makes the writer’s task one in which materials are managed for the benefit of the reader, the more important emphasis is on the writer's "craftsmanship." The emphasis seems to be on what these principles can do for the meaning of the discourse rather than what these principles can do to help the reader. What we see here, I believe, are the theoretical roots of a shift in the use of the five qualities of style to explain perspicuity to a use of these qualities of style through invention to explore the meaning of a text. Considering the importance of the qualities of clarity and force to both theories, there is a noticeable emission by Brooks and Warren in the discussion of force. For Genung, force is the vitality "added" to the intelligible statement. Force is the enrichment of thought through diction (concrete and evocative), arrangement (unusual order, condensed, epigranmatic statement, or stress of a contrasted element), 25 and conviction. The force of diction and arrangement are perhaps the most important topics for New Critical Composition, but it is Genung's most important element of force that is missing from Brooks and Warren's discussion, that force "based upon emotion and will." Fran Genung's definition of rhetoric in 1900, of the "outfit of conviction and emotion, imagination and will," Brooks and Warren turn only the imagination "into vital and ordered utterance." In their attention to the imaginative faculty, they overlook conviction and will as integral aspects of language, meaning, and composition. But this is consistent with New Critical theory where the critic is not necessarily interested in the will of the writer or the conviction of 124 the reader but father in the imaginative, dramatized "spirit1 * of the text itself. The reader may react to a text with tremendous emotion or will, but these reactions never explain the text. The forcefulness of a text is more a matter of a poignancy that can be identified through the images and language of the text. Meanings are the result of imaginative constructs rather than moral convictions. Genung says that when a writer realizes vividly the truth of what he says,...(his language) becomes intense and fervid; he has a deep conviction of its importance, and so it becomes cogent and impressive.... Genuine force cannot be manufactured: if the style has not serious conviction to back it, it becomes contorted; if it has not a vivifying emotion, it becomes turgid. Force is the quality of style most dependent on character. The point is that for Brooks and Warren force is dependent upon the dominant impression, the force of selection, and arrangement. While the text can reflect these genuine qualities, the cogency of a text is not dependent upon the author's convictions. For imaginative writing in particular, this aspect of force is one that a "crafted" art overlooks as fundamental. The ethical appeal of character is conspicuously absent in an art that measures dominant impressions in terms of "characterized," "objectified" ideas. For both the reader and the writer, the will has been significantly intellectualized, its presence seen only through the reader's machinations of form and content or the dramatizations of the writer. The Aims and Moles of Discourse While Brooks and Warren use the four nineteenth-century forms of 125 invention— the various organizations of thought— they change the order of presentation frcm description, narration, exposition, and argument to exposition, argument, description, and narration. Although these forms had already been reordered at Harvard by Harry Shaw in his A 27 Complete Course in Freshman English in 1940, it is Brooks and Warren who justify their reorganization in terms of the difficulty of the task or skill, a significant change of attitude frcm turn-of-the- century texts where writers such as Genung thought the progression should be frcm "simple observation or imagination" to the "exercise of 28 thought.” Because of the New Critics* assumptions about language and the humanistic principles they incorporate ("We are more than information," which includes the realm of the sensations, emotions, and value judgments), "...writing good description in prose is perhaps 29 even more challenging than writing lucid exposition...." So from this line of influence, description becomes the most emphasized and complicated mode of exposition. The student is encouraged to write imaginative exposition. Brooks and Warren elevate aspects of the descriptive form of discourse to topics of fundamental concern for discourse and language use. The distinctions between scientific descriptions and motives and artistic descriptions and motives can be found in the turn-of-the- century rhetorical texts under discussions of description. In The Principles of Rhetoric (1895), Hill distinguishes between the artistic and scientific aim of discourse. (The writer) should not, howawer, dwell on details as such: he should not invite attention to this or that part, unless it is a characteristic part, a part that represents the 126 whole. This kind of description, as distinguished in purpose frcm scientific description, may be called ARTISTIC, as distinguished in method, it may be called SUGGESTIVE.-^ For Hill, scientific description is used to convey information, and artistic description (in which the reader*s attention is focused on characteristic detail) is used to “affect the imagination, produce 31 illusion, [and] to give pleasure." It is interesting to note frcm these comparisons hew the artistic and scientific aims of discourse have surfaced historically. In Hill's text, they cure virtually buried in the topic of description and represent two modes of a particular aim of faculty psychology. For Brooks and Warren, these inodes of description have become language characteristics of all discourse. They make the dichotomy between the objective and subjective use of language an important topic of the entire theory, and codify it in the table of contents. And for Kinneavy, they are two of the three exhaustive aims of discourse— the artistic being the most important in a liberal arts program in 1957. If we compare the aims and modes of these writers, wa see that for turn-of-the-century writers, narration and description represented a particular, artistic reality, and exposition and argument dealt with general, scientific truths— an exanple of the Romantic separation of head and heart. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, the New Critics reacted to this language separation in literature, and so it is not surprising to find Brooks and Warren mixing these forms in an integral way, bringing together the expository form of discourse with the narrative and descriptive forms of discourse. The forms of discourse are a complicated mix of fundamental 127 faculties— of organizing thought and creating thought through the suggestiveness of language. While Hill distinguishes between artistic and scientific description. Brooks and Warren introduce the distinction between objective and subjective discourse only to show that these distinctions are a linguistic aspect of all of the modes; and their interrelations make a complicated set of ratios of discourse 32 forms and emphases. For exanple, they distinguish between technical, expository description and suggestive, expository description. As a result of these fine discriminations, purposes and methods become a complicated and somewhat taxing set of categories for the writer. And it may have been because of these complications that later ocmpositionists only remember the initial distinctions between objective and subjective language and not the complicated interrelationships of modes and purposes. Nevertheless, while Brooks and Warren didn't discard the forms of discourse brought into rhetorical theory through faculty psychology, they did make fundamental those two elements of language that represent the fundamental dualities in a newer psychology— those mental functions associated with Jungian thought: thinking and feeling, sensing and intuiting, perceiving and judging. In fact, the first chapter of the third edition of the Modern Rhetoric which introduces rhetoric is aptly titled: "Language, Thinking, Feeling, and Rhetoric." Man is referred to as the "symbol-making creature" that creates both concepts and attitudes. Language frames meaningful relations in that writing is both "thinking-out" and "feeling-out," and hereafter we shall, see these same symbolist notions in the work of 128 Ann Berthoff who openly sounds her debts to Cassirer and Langer. For Brooks and Warren, the forms of discourse are ways of thinking about the world but thinking about it New Critically. The forms are symbols of the world— its systems, its drama, its depth, and its factions. And in only one sense, they maintain the mechanics of an old faculty psychology but redefine its functions. The old faculty psychology had been traded for a new symbolic/analytic psychology (rooted in Freud and Jung) where one interprets reality not for the purposes identified by faculty aims (of pleasing, influencing, or informing) but for the purpose of understanding— an interpretation of symbolic dramatizations of experience. Because of the combination of these organizing forms of discourse, imaginative writing could be defined as a complex system to be understood as a statement about life or experience (exposition) defined or expressed in terms of its drama (narrative) and depth of texture (description) . . While the Modem Rhetoric treats three of the modes— exposition, narration, and description— New Critically, that is, as imaginative discourse in which one analyzes such things as dominant impression or texture, for example, it, treats argument as practical discourse concerned with the persuasion of a specific audience. The treatment of argument is inconsistent with other treatments of form. For exanple, in the first edition, the writers return to a more traditional rhetoric (and in the third edition, specifically, to Aristotle's Rhetoric and the "three modes of persuasion") to organize their discussion. In the chapter on argument, we find a great deal of attention to logos (the fallacies, the syllogism, the statement of the proposition, evidence, and so forth) and a lesser amount of attention to ethos and pathos. The authors turned to logic to describe the formal characteristics of argument rather than to their own aesthetic logic, reinforcing, I believe, genre distinctions between practical and literary texts. An approach more consistent with their other discussions might have been one which analyzed examples of argumentative/persuasive language in terms of the affective uses of language— -the use of connotations, symbols, diction, tone, sentence and paragraph rhythms, and induction to analyze persuasive language— the kind of analysis found in Richard Altick's Preface to 33 Critical Readings. While Brooks and Warren's discussion of imaginative discourse is set in the context of the newer rhetorical theory, their discussion of argument returns to a mare traditional rhetoric. For Brooks and warren's newer theory, language "is at the very 34 center of the life of thought and the life of feeling." The first edition of the Modern Rhetoric introduces these two elements as fundamental purposes or intentions {scientific and artistic or subjective and objective) alongside the organizing forms of discourse. Brooks and Warren stress the point that the subjective response— as ordinary language, full of rich, evocative, complex qualities— is not only a virtue instead of a vice, it is the primary experience of all reality. And it is with this reality (reader/ writer's interpetation— an inner, private, artistic, imaginative response to immediate experience) that language instruction must deal. Therefore their book seems to emphasize, in ways that their rhetorical 130 predecessors did not, the importance of the personal and suggestive for all discourse acts. Note in the following excerpt how the principles of analysis, concrete exairples, suggestion, and difference are the criteria for determining the controlling aim of an expository topics Before you undertake any piece of composition, you should try to frame the real subject, the central concern. You do not write about a house. You write about its appearance, the kind of life it suggests, its style of architecture, or your associations with it... .You do not write about goodness. You write about the different views of goodness which have been held by different societies or religions at different times, about the Christian idea of goodness, about the goodness as exempliied by people you knew about, or about the definition of goodness you personally accept. You must search your own thoughts and feelings to find your true subject.35 It is with the elevation of the value of concrete suggestion that we see admonishments against the general. Hie student is to avoid the general subject, abstract words, general qualities, conventionally approved interpretations, and the rehash of generally accepted arguments. The "true subject" is concrete. That which is general is vague, dull, and irrelevant. Conventional ideas are identified in the book as "mossy growth." Brooks and Warren's explanation is that "generally accepted ideas and respectable attitudes" lack "dramatic ' ‘ 1 resistance." The reader knows what to expect and is therefore bored. One of the most important New Critical influences on composition is the notion that the different idea, the contradiction to the general or normative idea, is attractive. Thus in their composition/rhetoric, Brooks and Warren elevate the concept of subjectivity to an aim and mode of discourse, and they 131 tapicalize the notions of texture, dominant impression, metaphor, and tone as "Special problems of Discourse" so that they become principles of entire discourse structures rather than traditionally classified as features of style or diction under a particular form of discourse, such as description. Because the elements mentioned are elevated in importance, these principles are coterminous with the fundamental organizing principles of discourse (unity, coherence, and emphasis) and the forms of discourse (exposition, argument, description, and narration). Clearly what each of these newly emphasized features (texture, metaphor, tone, dominant impression) have in common is an emphasis on the figurative or suggestive element of discourse which is the key to a "full-bodied" discourse. Figurative Language The New Critics use many of the intrinsic properties of style discussed in turn-of-the-century composition texts (for example, the notion of organicism, the use of figurative language, or the distinction between connotation and denotation). But the significant theoretical difference for the New Critics was that one did not study how the principles of composition were adapted to an audience but how truths could be packaged by a writer and presented to a reader. In tum-of-the-century theory, the virtues of style were based upon ■ease"— those principles that would help the reader to read the text with as little mental effort as possible. For example. Hill says that 132 "A style that is never enlivened by a figure becomes tedious;a style 37 that is all figures is bewildering." For Hill, some writers present themselves in plain language, sane in pictures, and some in imaginative language. Because of this attitude, his advice to the writer is this: "A writer who knows to which of the classes just named 38 he belongs, and acts accordingly, will not go wrong...." For the New Critics, as for a whole generation who had come under the symbolist influence of Cassirer, the use of figurative, imaginative language was set in the context of a different theory of mind. The use of figures was not based upon either the reader's or the writer's limited capacities but rather the unlimited, human capacities of each to make meaning. Because of the New Critics' enphasis on meaning as derived from both content and figuration. Brooks and Warren introduce to composition/rhetoric a new theoretical understanding of style and the function of figurative language in discourse. New Critical discussion of the effective and ineffective use of metaphor seems initially to reinforce turn-of-the-century rhetorical thought on the subject. Because lively prose is "better," metaphor is inportant for its ability to invigorate prose. The rules for its selection are contextual consonance— harmony and necessary stress— in sum, organic and forceful relation; and as such, it becomes a vital element of discourse. But because late nineteenth-century theorists believed that style was the manner in which matter was expressed, they saw figures of speech as means merely to enhance or to enforce thought. The only 133 reason, Hill says, for using some thing other than literal language was for this additional illustration, explanation, or enforcement. Considering metaphor as a "poetic trait," Genung explains its utilization in description: "...the poetic traits that appear in a portrayal are as practical as they are ornate; their elegance is their utility."39 The New Critics, on the other hand, viewed metaphor with a different sense of utility: as a figure of meaning, one of the writer's practical devices of expression, used to understand reality rather than simply to enhance or to ornament it. As Brooks and Warren would continue to say in their text years later, "It often represents not only the most compact and vigorous way of saying a thing but also 40 the only way in which the particular thing can be said at all." Metaphors are not "sugarplums," Brooks and Warren tell us. They are the best means for intimating a mood and implying a shade of meaning, and as such are a symbol of the revelatory and constitutive nature of language. The main reason for using metaphor is to be able to express feelings and attitudes and to bring together disparate ideas to form novel ones. Through their discussion of and emphasis on metaphor. Brooks and Warren encourage teachers to see language as an instrument for the expression of thought and as an instrument for discovery— for the creation of new thought. For the new composition textbook authors, the use of metaphor is more than a manner of expression benefitting economy, elegance, and force; it is essentially the thought or meaning that becomes the force. The most significant element of change from the traditional 134 paradigm to the New Critical paradigm is this notion that the figure 41 helps to create the thought. Writing is the act of moving toward the refinement of meaning, toward greater distinction and differentiations of meaning; and because of this, all of the suggestive forces of language, in addition to metaphor, "figure" in the meaning. Diction, for example, is the choice of the exact word over an acceptable synonym, because the connotative suggestion is part of the total meaning. Similarly, in a theory of meaning, emphasis and the movable modifier, for example, allow for the best placement of language for the most precise meaning. What seems to have happened, as witnessed in some of the later composition texts, is that these categories of style (metaphor, tone, connotation, etc.) sure seen as virtues of style rather than as concepts in a theory of figurative meaning or invention. That is, they are seen as classifications of language to be learned and used for their own sake rather than for what they might do in a meaningful context. The one New Critical concept, however, that survives in modem textbooks retaining its original theoretical context is emphasis, and it is discussed later in this chapter. There is yet another aspect of metaphor that takes Brooks and Warren in a significant direction away from the traditional rhetoric of effective expression. The traditionalists had turned to Herbert Spencer's law of economy as seen in "Philosophy of Style" (1852) to 42 explain attention and readability. This law states that there is just a certain amount of mental power available for processing the text: a part goes to recognizing and interpreting the language 135 symbols, a part to arranging and combining the images, and the remaining part for realizing the thought. "Hence, the more time and attention it takes to receive and understand each sentence, the less time and attention can be given to the contained idea, and the less vividly will that idea be conceived," explains Cairns. Considering such a law of economy, ambiguity becomes a fault, and we can find such an admonishment in Cairn's bold-typed rule: "The mind is greatly confused and mental energy is wasted if language is used that is 44 capable of two meanings." It is true that Brooks and Warren state that there can be "no idle words," "no waste motion, no loose thread left hanging, nothing 45 left over." But by the very definition of language as capable of multiple meanings. New Critical Rhetoric turns this rule of readability on its head.4^ Richards tells us that language is by its very nature ambiguous, and thought cannot be fully received unless a great deal of attention is devoted to the careful study of its suggestions. Spencer's philosophy of style is based upon what he calls the "secret" or general law of effect: the economy of attention. His notion of force was based upon the reader' s limited mental energies. But of course Richards' new philosophy of style is not based upon the same law of effect. Using the mind as a point for comparison, we could say that Richards' new law is one based upon mental appetite rather than mental fatigue. A reader is satisfied with prose that makes fitting or interesting connections among ideas, and she could use virtually unlimited mental energies to make these connections 136 (which sane modern texts require). Richards indicated in 1935 that one of the things a teacher could do for the student is to point out examples of the "good ambiguity," that ambiguity which is a merit to 47 the text. But any finer distinctions or uses of this idea are left unexplored. And there does seen to be a discrepancy between what students were encouraged to do theoretically and what they did in actual practice— an idea which will be considered in later chapters. A comparison of the uses of metaphor illustrates the differences between these two philosophies. For Spencer, a good metaphor is one which presents its ideas clearly and economically. For Richards, it is one that is provocative. The new law for style, then, is the creative, thought-provoking balance of statement and suggestion. This is not a rhetoric in which prose is necessarily to be apprehended instantly on a first reading. Thus the New Critics had a different view of figurative language because their theory was set in a different theory of mind: for the New Critics, the mind was an unlimited source of symbolizing activity in writing; for the earlier theorists, the mind was limited in its capacity to attend to meanings. This different attitude toward the figurative element of discourse affected the notion of texture and amplification. New Critical Composition texts encouraged the writer to select those characteristic details that supported the central idea or maintained a single point of view, the dominant impression. In turn-of-the century rhetoric, one wanted to select a few telling characteristics so as not to violate the principle of economy. But in Brooks and Warren's text, the criterion for the selection of details 137 is based upon the potential for qualifying the literal structure. Using Tate's term, the criterion for selecting details would be for an "intensive" value rather than for an economical or vivid value. What the New Critics did for cctrposition theory was to shift the focus of the fundamental reason for studying rhetorical principles of language— a shift frcm the disposal of meaning to the structures of meaning, and from the writer's point of view, from the inspired word to the interpreted word. A Rhetoric of Readings In addition to their theoretical differences from turn-of-the- century rhetorical theory (the use of metaphor as a fundamental principle of language, the fusion of style and content— emotion and intellect, the elevation of the subjective, and the introduction of the concept of rich verbal texture), the New Critics changed the very character of composition textbooks. In their zeal to reduce theory to a minimum, they radically condensed rhetorical doctrine to matters of topical importance such as unity, coherence, emphasis, metaphor, dominant impression, texture, and analysis. Gone are Genung's 125 rules (ironically a violation of Spencer's principle of economy) that were at the heart of his rhetorical theory. Brooks and Warren follow the principles they espouse. Doctrine is epigrammatically condensed to allow for a greater number of examples. In dropping the generalizations, they dropped the handbook. Their interest was not in "proper" expression, but "contextual" expression. Brooks and Warren's 138 generalized rhetorical doctrine was not organized around rules or models of discourse forms but around a "tissue of examples"— a text made as unique in its many readings as writing itself. The handbook became the readings, and the rules of language were exchanged for interpretations of language where the student learned to intuit the principles of discourse or at least ferret them out from the examples. Where readings at the turn of the century were pre-writing activities used as food for thought, for the New Critics they were used as food for technique. These New Critics offered, as well, a new textbook method. In a manner similar to the way that Brooks and Warren taught literature teachers how to read poetry through their textbook explications, they taught composition teachers and students how to read and analyze imaginative compositions. Because of Brooks and Warren's belief in the complexity of discourse structures, in such things as the degree of implications and the resolution of contrasting elements, textbook readings were "to be exhaustively analyzed." These readings should be "more than read," and the authors emphasized that this should be "the integral part of the course. For then, language was a complicated set of codes and symbols to be studied "intensely" in its particular setting. The assumption for composition is that if the student were sensitive to the techniques of other authors, he would be sensitive to them in his own prose. So while Brooks and Warren maintain the focus of a turn-of-the- century rhetoric of coherent arrangement, they meld this rhetoric with their literary preoccupations with the innuendos of textual richness. 139 According to the inplications in the textbook, skilled readers become skilled writers by clearly discerning or analyzing discourse samples for general principles of order (unity, coherence, and enphasis) and 49 particular shades of meaning. This demands a close inspection of the smaller units of discourse and the text of "appropriate organization" to see if the parts or sugestions fit harmoniously into the whole. Hie teaching method sought to discipline the thought processes, and this demanded that readers and writers make fine discriminations among meanings in the text. For example, one of the most overt reasons for the elaborate analysis of the types of discourse is to train students to discriminate among forms. One of the paradoxes of their method is that while it is wholly analytical, it elevates the importance of imaginative, suggestive, and synthetic reasoning. This paradox can be explained if we understand what makes this model of composition seem vitalistic in relation to the tum-of- the-century vitalistic model. Turn-of-the-century composition/ rhetoric was concerned with proper expression and the New Critical compos it ion/rhetor ic with contextual expression in which the qualities of style and the rich, dense suggestions of the text help to determine the meaning. For the earlier rhetorical paradigm, the vital source of meaning was assumed to be in the author, in the author's breadth of knowledge acquired frcm reading or frcm inspiration. What is vital to the New Critical paradigm is the imaginative suggestion of meaning that comes frcm the language itself and its juxtapositionings as the text is being constructed. The author is the manipulator of the powers of language, shifting and arranging its forms until she 140 recognizes the best or most imaginative combinations of meaning. In both paradigms, language rules or techniques are analyzed mechanistically; that is, essential patterns or traits are identified systematically. But for one rhetorical system, the vital element is associated with the author, and for the other, the vital element is associated with the mechanism itself. Thus it is important for the student to analyze readings for their implications. For example, in a passage from Melville's "The Encantadas,” one notes a sense of loneliness, ruin, and desolation 50 which characterizes the islands. One examines the order of the passage for its accretions of meaning: from associations with images of the "used-up," frcm phrases which imply— and other phrases which echo— ideas of ruin, punishment, and sin, and frcm sound reinforcements of similar ideas— in sum, all of those details that suggest and reinforce a dominant mood or impression. In this way, the New Critics' close textual analysis of poetry was carried over into the pedagogy of composition. And in this respect, one could substitute the Modem Rhetoric for Understanding Poetry in the composition class, because the methods for studying both texts were essentially the same. The essay type most amenable to the New Critical analysis of dense, rich contextual expression was the informal, "friendly* essay, a form which tends to look more like imaginative writing than many other forms of expository prose. Writing According to New Critical Principles: The Friendly Essay The informal, or friendly, essay, a form reflective of the "fireside rhetoric" of the nineteenth century, is that prose type most suitable for studying and producing prose in light of New Critical values. Genung describes this kind of essay as having the "freedom 51 and seeming waywardness of private conversation." He characterizes it by its suggestiveness and "packed connotations of style." The most representative authors of the genial essay, according to Genung, are Montaigne, Addison, Steele, Lamb, Bacon, and Emerson. An early twentieth-century composition text which explains the theoretical use of this form of rhetoric is Essays and Essay Writing (1929), edited by Bernard L. Jefferson (Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Chairman of Freshman Rhetoric at the University of Illinois at Urbana). According to Jefferson, this prose form reflects the leisured conversations of re-lived, reflective experiences. In general the form is short, sophisticated, artistic, close to the personal letter, and expository. It is organized by great civilizing themes such as courage, truth, time, gifts, important journeys, etc.. (We are reminded that the New Critics were also interested in great themes about humanity.) Jefferson underlines the fact that these essays are not like the great Victorian essays of Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, Huxley or Arnold, for example, who were "reformers and advocates of systems which were regarded of the utmost importance for 52 the solution of problems of the day." The essays he collected were 142 written by men of other "moods," J ...men who either momentarily or permanently withdrew from the turmoil of the living present, and who in the quietude of their studies or by the friendly glow of their firesides gave graceful expression to feelings and reflection detached from the immediate upheavals which threaten almost every age. Montaigne shut up in the tower-1 ibrary to which he retired to reflect and to write is representative of them (xi). Jefferson shows a preference in his collection for writers such as Bacon, Cowley, Addison, Lamb, Franklin, Emerson, Poe, Lowell and Howells, representatives if only "for moments in their careers... if not in the bulk" (xii). These writers didn’t actually withdraw from the concerns of society: they were critical and reflective, pondering over, rather than acting on, life's experiences. But their rhetoric did make use of the pleasant fireside conversation instead of the contentious public forum. The characteristics of this form of rhetoric deserve a closer examination. While we see the "minds of interesting men unfolding themselves in various engaging moods," (xii) Jefferson tells us that they have been self-effaced, as though anyone oould have written the essay. This is an interesting point* For the New Critics, the writer's voice is dramatized in order to be "realized." Brooks says that for the essayist as well as for the writer of fiction, the writer may find it helpful to "objectify and dramatize the 'I* who speaks, not at all to disguise or suppress his personality, but ratter to realize that personality more fully."53 The writer doesn't "intrude his own personality into the scene: his relevant emotion is absorbed into the scene itself."5^ The intentional fallacy is a criterion for composing. Thus style reflects not only content but also the dramatic character of the observer/writer. The text provides a "characterization" of the author. The ethos of the writer, Jefferson says, is one of certainty; the writer is direct and assertive, yet is not a strenuous advocate of reform. The writer is guided by curiosity, not alarm or precaution, and is genuinely warm and human. The external characteristic of the essay, Jefferson notes, is its brevity (roughly 2-20 pages). The style "ocmes of itself" (381) while the writer is in the mood and mastery of the theme. It is a writing of recollection, therefore of allusions, amplified illustrations, concretions, and quotations, and its arrangement is something like a sonnet sequence. It is graceful ctnd full of colloquial ease. There exists a certain directness from intense feelings, and a "knack of saying with apparent spontaneity even old things in fresh and original ways" (381). And it is frequently startling by sudden appositeness. An interesting paradox about this form of New Critical composition is that while it doesn't claim to be contentious rhetoric, this form does have an "embedded" dialectical quality to it because of the value it places on originality and novelty. And in this sense, it seems to dramatize the situation in traditional rhetoric. Jefferson notes that "One of the frequent roles of the familiar essay is to challenge the truth of a generally accepted proposition and to take the side which few men take" (370). He explains that there is a certain pleasure in following the ingeniousness of an opposite opinion. He quotes an exanple of an interesting topic which takes the negative side of a generally accepted proposition: "a bully is always 144 a coward." Again we see the importance of paradox or irony; here it is elevated to the controlling topic of the composition. The other forms of this essay type are: character portrayals, dreams, and recollections, forms in which one looks into the heart and writes. It is easy to see how the informed or familiar essay accommodates New Critical principles. Its aim is reflective rather than effective, and ' it consists of personal, spontaneous original thoughts frcm a detached historical perspective. We have discussed what New Critical Rhetoric took from turn-of- the-century textbook rhetoric (the four forms of discourse; unity, coherence, and emphasis; scientific analysis; and a managerial interest in language) and what it did not take (it did not take the same definition of style or invention or force and figuration). Seme of the important ideas taken from Romantic or fireside rhetoric were the importance of narrative/descriptive writing, amplified illustration, a surprising turn or innovative twist to the ccmmon topic, a pleasant, quiet tone, and direct and vivid presentation. New Critical interest in composition was in a rich and full interpretation; and, consequently, this essay form emphasized notions such as the dominant impression, texture, and the creative, personal imagination. A more recent composition textbook illustrates the importance of the informal essay when composition instruction is focused on style, structure, and meaning. Style and Structure (1972), by David Rankin, shows the influence of Francis Christensen, with whom he studied while at the University of Southern California, and who, in turn, was 145 influenced by the New Critical tradition (an influence that will be examined in the next chapter). Rankin's book is perhaps the best example of how New Critical influence shapes a modem textbook. His text spends six of eight chapters discussing principles of style in the informal or personalized essay of report, showing the student how to manage language in order to shape meanings on the page. Only the last chapter is devoted to "arguing" and "explaining." The principles and lessons of each chapter seem a catalogue of New Critical ideas, all of which are examined in the informal, "friendly" essay. The first principle to be emphasized is that syntax (the interplay of words) and diction (the accurate selection of words) determine meaning. Whenever one changes the arrangement of words, the words themselves, or the focus, one changes the meaning. Style is a matter of selection— of information, suggestiveness, and emphasis: "All the words in a sentence and their arrangement within a sentence 55 contributes to its style and meaning." The principles are bom out by a kind of linguistic/rhetorical contrastive analysis. One is given both the original example of a piece of prose and a revision in which certain elements of style (diction, syntax, or emphasis) have been changed so that one sees how meaning is altered by the variation. This same principle is used to make the same point about style, arrangement, and meaning in Brooks and warren's Fundamentals. The first lesson of composition in Rankin's tact is "creating a dominant impression," one of the key ideas of Brooks and warren's text and of the informal essay. The dominant impression is the writer/reader's sense of what is important. It is the principle of 146 selection and significance: one selects detail or texture that will suggest the dominant impression. Most of the book is spent discussing how sentence structures can produce meaning through principles of emphasis and the positioning of sentence modification. A great deal of the work becomes sentence combining, but with the emphasis on that the various combinations can mean through their stylistic variations— a distinction lost in most current sentence combining manuals. This great attention to matters of emphasis and meaning was, of course, seen in Brooks and Warren's textbooks. (It has also been taken up in forms other than informal essay writing, interestingly enough in business textbooks where we would expect to see lessons on 56 the plain style. ) The basis for the selection of detail or texture in Rankin's textbook is the writer's response to personal experience. The reader he has in mind here is the writer— what strikes the writer as significant is the only criterion for writing to an audience. One isn't trying to change an opinion but rather express a point. What the writer is trying to do is to make sense of perceptions; and when he does so, writing becomes an act of discovery. He manages and arranges matters of experience by putting life at a distance. The informal essay is one of suggestive description where the writer attempts to get inpressions or tones (qualifications of literal material in terms of attitude) from what is said, through evocative, dramatic imagery, figurative language, descriptive detail, or structural implications. (Consider Winston Weathers' idea in "The Rhetoric of the Series" [1966] that a two-part series gives the ! 147 impression of certainty and finality; a three-part series, an inpress ion of the normal or logical; and more parts, the impression of ; abundance).. These suggestions are the ways in which content {which < i suggests "remembered qualities") gets "said" in an informal essay. Because sane abstract ideas as well as emotions are so complex "that the language has no exact terms for then," figurative language becomes ; the only sufficient means for making these ideas known. The writers whom Rankin draws upon are those people who describe things in novel ways, who show in order to tell, and whose styles make use of the principles discussed above. Their forms are short descriptive essays of social criticism. As exanples for his analysis, Rankin examines texts from such writers as Ernest Hemingway, James Agee, Edward Abbey, Thomas Farrell, Mary McCarthy, Dylan Thomas, and Saul Bellow. In order to learn how to get these principles into one's prose, the student analyzes written examples of other writers to see what their style says about their purpose or ideas. As in a critical analysis of a piece of literature where one examines meaningful images, structures, figures, or symbols and is mindful of tone or "overtones,” a writer of compositions, who is trying to make her prose as richly suggestive as possible, must ask similar questions about style and meaning in her own writing. She might ask: What details should be selected and in what order should they be presented? What words best convey suggestions of tone? Should a series of perceptions be put into a sequence of clauses or sentences? Hew will information be integrated? What image or figure will convey the dominant inpression? The goal of this form of practical writing is not to j persuade or convince or establish a point but to create a particular tone through texture. In The Essay; Subjects and Stances (1974), a treatment which excludes the critical and historical essay, Edward Corbett summarizes the nature of the familiar essay and its use in the > composition class: The familiar essay, perhaps more than any other prose form, allows for the combination cf the objective and the subjective kinds of writing, of the imaginative and the utilitarian types. In a sense, the familiar essay is the prose equivalent of the lyric poem— short, unified, and compact, conducive not only to the transmission of the writer's view of the "reality" outside himself but also to the expression of the writer1 s emotions and personality. As Brooks and Warren say in Fundamentals of Writing, their concern is to follow "the prose of a mind which is arranging its world, by delicate adjustments and careful discriminations, into a perspectived co pattern." The Composing Process This act of following a mind making delicate adjustments and discriminations informs both a pedagogy of composition and a theory of composing. we are reminded at the beginning of the Fundamentals that the place to begin studying the writing process is at the end, with the completed utterance. This is, of course, the place where reading and analysis begin, and this illustrates the "critical" approach to the teaching of composition— that of "conscious reflection." One learns to ccnpose by analyzing or reading. In "Teaching Style: A Possible 149 Anatomy, ■ Winston Weathers suggests that teachers draw upon the wealth of material offered by the "creative analysis of texts" rather than 59 the materials found in "classical and subsequent rhetorics." He recognizes that the knowledge of stylistic principles must be turned into performance if it is to be significant to the writer, and to do this, he defines an "exercise" program based upon models. First, the student learns to recognize stylistic characteristics or patterns in the writing of others. Secondly, the student discusses the specific use of particular patterns and the use of then in general. Thirdly, the student composes the pattern using content that the student selects. Weathers comments that from these " transformational exercises" students can "decline" virtually any piece of discourse through all possible styles. The process in this pedagogy is: recognize, copy, understand, and imitate creatively. And it is interesting that Weathers quotes Edward Corbett as giving "great support to this method in his Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student."^ This is also the inductive method used by Kinneavy in A Theory of Discourse. Kinneavy explains the method in the discussion of the first form of discourse: "With the anthologized essay as a focus, then, the characteristics of the various kinds of reference discourse will be examined....It is hoped that a careful presentation of the theory will enable the student to analyze reference discourse and to produce sane such discourse himself."^ The student mist be both a writer and a critical reader of his own text, and this is the "double process" that underlies the problem of OQBposing in a New Critical paradigm. It is a process that emphasizes the constant alternation of the writer/reader ' s attention to natters of limitation—-of the limiting aspect of the whole,, its unity and coherence, for example— and to matters of suggestion— of the parts that make the whole, the particular parts that express or suggest the "total thing." This alternation of critical attention to suggestion ana limitation defines the composing process discussed below. Murray Krieger offers a theory of the poet's creative process, reconstructing it frcm New Critical, vitalistic assumptions; and it is interesting to compare what he ascribes to the poet with the process that has been implied for the writer of imaginative, expository discourse in the textbooks by Ransom and Brooks and warren. For both Krieger and the New Critical ocmpositionists, the writer does not begin with any preconceived idea if the idea is contextually created and contingent upon or determined by form. The text is an evolving context with each part modifying or constructing the whole. As Krieger says, the writer begins with ...a vague impulse, a vague scmething-he-wants-to-say; but this need have little relation to that his work finally will say. It seems to be something new to him, something unique and important. He cannot say precisely what it is, or else his poem would a! ready be written. 62 As the writer composes, he must feel what is right or wrong for his "yet inexpressible impulse." This is the writer's "sensibility" mentioned in Ransom's composition text. Because Ransom was both a writer and a teacher of writing, he moves between his observations about what a writer actually does and his prescriptions about what a writer should do. Clearly, however, the underlying assumptions for 151 his maxims are based upon what he does as a writer and as a critic of his own writing. Ransom suggests that as soon as the writer begins to study a subject, he can and should start writing. The student should begin to write what Ransom calls "provisional fragments," spontaneous responses to "items that seem to demand to be written up."^ One writes toward "some feeling of urgency." It may be that the only way that this urgency can be described is as an "interest." This is the process of notetaking— of noting details in life that seem to be of some interest. Ransom says that when these fragments grow into a consistent tone, then one enters the stage of systematic composition. The point is, however, that one should be writing as one is discovering a subject, before the "original mood of exploration" is * 54 spent. Ransom discusses the inpulse of exploration in relation to the concept of determinate and indeterminate meaning in The New Criticism. One of the most important elements in Ransom's idea of composing is the idea of indeterminacy, and I think it has some very interesting implications for invention and the composing process. He foregrounds an element of composing that has received little attention from modem ccmpositionists— the heuristic nature of salient features of style and meaning. Using Ransom's theory of poetic composition to inform the composing process involving any text, we could examine the "double process" of the relationship between determinate situations and indeterminate imaginings which envelop and develop the body of the discourse. The writer's composition doesn't have to begin with a specific idea or plan. According to this theory, it would be 152 I impossible to begin with a clear idea in most writing situations. Kit ! I the student could begin with either a determinate idea or an I indeterminate idea. With the first, the writer may have a clearly defined idea or purpose in mind, but the introduction of specific I texture into the composition works to un-determine the idea or alter the purpose in various subtle degrees. (In their power of suggestion, i details work to un-determine ideas and purposes as well as determine 65 them.) For those assignments using the friendly essay, the writer begins with only a vague, indeterminate idea, and the introduction of materials help to determine these ideas and purposes. In Krieger * s summary of the New Critical composing process, the writer1s thoughts remain undefined until after they have been submitted to language, "For the act of expression is the precise idea."66 Therefore, "As the poet creates, he discovers what it is he . j 67 is creating." Thus one does not start with an intention; one ends with it when it is fully realized in the text: At each step he meets his problem, creates anew, in light of ; what he has discovered about his creation thus far. And it is not until he has completed the work that, in the spirit of the spectator or critic, he can learn what his idea, his artistic intention, really has been. But he may prefer to believe that the poem is merely an embodiment of what seems to him to have been a thoroughly lucid original idea. TO the extent that he is an artist he will be— happily- mistaken; and if he persists in this belief, it will remain for the critic to show him what he has really done.68 The existence of an originating idea is only an illusion: the idea has been created in the process of writing the text. One finds a recent concrete example of this process in Joan Didion's explanation, "Why I Write," in Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations (1984). She 153 writes "entirely to find out vhat (she's) thinking, what (she's) 69 looking at, what (she sees) and what it means." Her ejqoerienee with a New Critical approach to literature while at Berkeley during her undergraduate days is obvious in that she says j that she could "locate the house-and-garden imagery in The Portrait of ; a Lady as well as the next person." Didion specifically says that she 1 is fascinated by imagery, and she defines herself as a "writer" absorbed by "arranging words on pieces of paper" (6). What Didion calls "the grammar in the picture" is of "infinite power" (7). The power is in the interplay of texture and pattern or the selection of details and their arrangement. She explains the process and illustrates it as follows, using examples from her own novels: To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position ; of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind.... The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you or tells me, what's going on in the picture (7). She mentions lines that appear halfway through A Book of Gcmmon Prayer but were written during the second week's worth of work, long before she could explain how they fit into the vhole. She explains how the work suggests ideas which determine the direction it will take: ... the necessity for mentioning a name, and the name "Victor," occurred to me as 1 wrote the sentence: "I knew why Charlotte went to the airport" sounded incomplete. "I knew why Charlotte went to the airport even if Victor did not" carried a little more narrative drive. Most important 154 of all, until I wrote these lines I did not know who "I" was, who was telling the story, I had intended until that that the "I" be no more than the voice of the author, a nineteenth century omniscient narrator. But there it was: "I knew why Charlotte went to the airport even if Victor | did not. i I knew about airports." This "I" was the voice of no author in my house. This "I" was someone who not only knew why Charlotte went to the airport but also knew someone called "Victor." Who was Victor? VSra was this narrator? Why was this narrator telling me this story? Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel (9-10). This composing process in which one discovers meaning and structure through the suggestive, determinative, and dramatic powers of language, explained theoretically by the New Critics and explained practically by contemporary authors, is one used by Brooks and warren to explain the making of a composition. It also explains Brooks and warren's inductive approach to notetaking and the composing of the research paper. The student is asked to make notes of what strikes her as interesting. She may not see the immediate importance of the material, but it may work for some point after it has been analyzed. Most importantly, it nust fit into her research paper in some comprehensible pattern, the relationships of which are crucial. How one handles the relationships among pieces of information is what makes for a new or original report. "Your paper should be more than a tissue of facts and quotations from your notes. It should represent your handling of a subject and not a mere report on what other writers have said." The paper should be balanced, fluent, well- 155 proportioned, fully rounded, unified, and coherent, with an emphasis on matters according to their scale of inportance. Hie research report is as well formed as any other New Critical composition. It is easy to see how such modifying pressures of language and context, or the balance and emphasis of ideas not yet fully realized until the end of the composing process, makes for a pedagogy of writing in two ways: in the analysis of finished products or in the admonishment that to learn to write one must write. It is pedagogically critical and analytical, the talk of specific effects within a finished product. Ihe problem of generating writing rather than analyzing writing remains peculiar to the writer*s handling of material or so complex in terms of the interrelation of language use, discourse functions, points of view, or image concatenations as to became vholly impractical for instruction. What the student does learn to value in the writing process is discrimination, subtlety, precision, conciseness, and wit. What the teacher learns to value is clear, coherent, graceful, and interesting prose— but above all— well-formed, well-disciplined prose in which no word is idle. In Brooks and warren's own comments in their rhetoric text: "Perhaps the best illustration of such complete integration of the parts with the vhole would be a great poem such as Donne's "The Canonnization' or Keats's 'Ode to Autumn,*" final proof that the principles of poetry were rhetorical principles that could be extended 71 to expository prose. It seems clear that for the New Critics the best prose is poetry. Notes Joseph V. Denney, "TVio Problems in Composition-Teaching," a paper given at the joint conference of the Michigan Schoolmaster's Conference and the Association of Teachers of English of the North Central States, Ann Arbor, Michigan, November 27, 1896; reprinted in Contributions to Rhetorical theory, ed. Fred Newton Scott, 3 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inland Press, 1899) 1. 2 Denney 3. 3 i Denney 3. 4 Richard Young, "Paradigms and Problems: Needed Research in Rhetorical Invention," Research on Composing: Points of Departure, ed. Charles R. Cooper and Lee Odell (Urbana, H>: NCTE, 1974) 29-47. Donald Stewart refers to this paradigm in his 1983 address to the Conference on College Composition and Ccntnunication. ^ Albert Kitzhaber, "Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1950-1900," diss., U of Washington, 1953. This text has been the major source of information on the nineteenth century for other historians. See Donald C. Stewart, "The Nineteenth Century,” in The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric, ed. Winifred B. Horner (Columbia, U of Missouri P, 1983); Edward P. J. Corbett, "What is Being Revived?" OCC, 18 (1967): 166-72; and James A. Berlin, Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1984). Ronald Reid, "The Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory, 1806-1904: A Case Study of Changing Concepts of Rhetoric and Pedagogy," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 45 (1959): 239-57. ® For Adams Sherman Hill, Harvard's Bolyston Chair, see specifically The Foundations of Rhetoric (1892; New York: Harper, 1897) and The Principles of Rhetoric (1878; New York: American Book Co., 1895). For John Franklin Genung, at Amherst, see specifically The Outlines of Rhetoric (1893; Boston: Ginn, 1901), The Practical ElefiSnts of Rhetoric (Boston: Ginn, 1886), and The Working Principles of Rhetforic (Boston: Ginn, 1900). For Barrett Wendell, see English Composition (New York: Scribner's, 1891). For Fred Newton Scott, see The Principles of Style (Ann Arbor, MI: Register Publ. Co., 1890), and Scott and Joseph Denney, Paragraph Writing (Boston: Allyn, 1893). For William B. Cairns, see particularly The Forms of Discourse (1896; Boston: Ginn, 1909). Kitzhaber refers to these first four as the "Big Four," writers of textbooks in the last half of the nineteenth century who made a distinctive break with the older British rhetoricians. The transition can be seen at Harvard when Hill's book replaced Campbell's. 7 See Kitzhaber 57-79 for a discussion of the developing interests in mechanical precision as seen from Harvard's entrance 157 requirements from 1872 through the Harvard reports of 1896 which document work in the English department there over a period of twenty years. o Genung, Practical Elements xi-xii. 9 Genung, Practical Elements 218. ^ Genung, Practical Elements 218. Ideas from Ruskin's "Two Baths." Genung, Practical Elements xii. 12 Genung, Practical Elements 1. 13 Genung, Working Principles vii. 14 A. Howry Espenshade, Ten Essentials of Ganposition and Rhetoric (1904; Boston: Heath, 1913). As seen by his title, ocnposition and rhetoric had merged by the twentieth century. 15 Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Modem Rhetoric: With Readings (New York: Harcourt, 1949) xiii. ^ We are reminded that Richards was considering problems of language and language analysis ("how words work in discourse") as rhetorical problems in Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936). Robert M. Gorrell, Patricia Bizzell, and Bruce Herzberg, The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing (Boston: St. Martin's, 1984) 4. 18 John Crowe Ransom, A College Primer of Writing (New York: Holt, 1943) iv. Additional references to this work in this section are noted within the text. 19 Brooks and Warren xii. 20 It is worth quoting Young's definition of the overt features of the paradigm and the vitalist assumptions that he says they draw frcm the Romantics: The overt features, however, are obvious enough: the emphasis on the composed product rather than the composing process; the analysis of discourse into words, sentences, and paragraphs; the classification of discourse into description, narration, exposition, and argument; the strong concern with usage (syntax, spelling, punctuation) and with style (economy, clarity, emphasis); the preoccupation with the informal essay and the research paper; and so on. Vitalism, with its stress on the natural powers of the mind and the uniqueness of the creative act, leads to a 158 repudiation of the possibility of teaching the composing process, hence the tendency of current-traditional rhetoric to become a critical study of the products of composing and the art of editing. Vitalist assumptions became most apparent when we consider what is excluded from the present discipline that had earlier been included, the most obvious and significant exclusion being the art of invention. Although Young attributes "this system of beliefs" called "current- traditional rhetoric" to Daniel Fogarty, it should be made clear that Fogarty's interest in the "current-traditional rhetoric" was in distinguishing classical rhetoric from the newer rhetorics of Burke, Richards, and the general senanticists, not in amalgamating the two. So it would seem that Young's overt features would not include any influences that may have come from Richards. When Richards refers to the "old" and "new rhetoric," he is referring to the British rhetoricians vho influenced the American textbook rhetoricians as compared to his interests in language and meaning. 21 Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Modem Rhetoric, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1970) vii. 22 Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Fundamentals of Good Writing: A Handbook of Modern Rhetoric (1949; New York: Harcourt, 1950) 11. 23 Genung, Practical Elements 268. 24 Genung, Working Principles 458. 25 Genung, Practical Elements 33-7. 26 Genung, Practical Elements 37. 27 Harry Shaw, A Complete Course in Freshman English (1940; New York: Harper, 1945). 28 Kitzhaber 172-73. 29 Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Instructor's Manual for Modern Rhetoric, 4th ed. (1970; New York: Harcourt, 1979) 3. 30 Hill, Principles 254. ^ Hill, Principles 281. 32 Brooks and Warren, Fundamentals 30-6 and 42-57. Richard D. Altick, Preface to Critical Readings (1946; New York: Holt, 1960). Altick' s original publication was one of the early textbooks cm critical reading, emphasizing denotation, connotation, diction, logic, sentence rhythms and arrangements, and tone. 159 34 Brooks and Warren, Modem Rhetoric, 3rd ed. 6. 35 Brooks and Warren, Modern Rhetoric, 1st ed. 13. 36 Brooks and Warren, Instructor's Manual 6-7. 37 Hill, Fundamentals of Rhetoric 197. 38 Hill, Fundamentals of Rhetoric 193. 39 Genung, Working Principles 497. 40 Brooks and Warren, Modem Rhetoric, 4th ed. 273. 41 Kitzhaber notes the exception to the mechanical notion of metaphor in the theoretical dissertation of Gertrude Buck at the University of Michigan, 1898. Although the results of her work are published by F. N. Scott in Hie Metaphor— A Study in the Psychology of Rhetoric, 5 (Ann Arbor, MI: the Inland Press, 1899), they had little impact on the field. 42 Herbert Spencer, "The Philosophy of Style," The Philosophy of Style, Together with an Essay on Style by T. H. Wright, ed. Fred N. Scott, 2nd ed. (Boston: Allyn, 1892). 43 Cairns 29. A modem version of this can be found in E. D. Hirsch's The Philosophy of Composition (1977). His readability principles for writing are based upon a principle of reading known as rapid semantic closure. This principle is based upon the cloze test, which ocmesfran Gestalt psychology, and tests perception of pattern completion. The notion of rapid closure and the econany of the reader's attention places Hirsch in a direct theoretical line of nineteenth-century rhetorical theory. In contrast, the New Critics would say that the text is not closed— if ever— until the reader has contemplated all of the significant metaphors, images, connotations, rhythms, and tones of a given passage. Certainly the New Critics would say that readers often search for ways to "close" the text which seem on the surface to open it; consider paradox, for example. 44 Cairns 31. See also his definition of lucidity: "It is opposed both to ambiguity, or the fault of having two ore more possible meanings, and to obscurity, or the fault of yielding no idea without study cm the part of the reader." 45 Brooks and Warren, Instructor's Manual 2. 48 I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936; New York: Oxford UP, 1965) 40: "But where the old Rhetoric treated ambiguity as a fault in language, and hoped to confine it car eliminate it, the new Rhetoric sees it as an inevitable consequence of the powers of language and is the indispensible means of our most important 160 utterances— especially Poetry and Religion." Brpson was to explore these nuances of meaning in Seven Types of ambiguity (1947). 47 I. A Richards, Basic in Teaching; East and West, a Psyche Miniatures General Series (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Go. Ltd., 1935) 93. 48 Brooks and warren. Modem Rhetoric, 1st ed. xvi. 49 Brooks and warren, Fundamentals 315. 50 Brooks and Warren, Fundamentals 42. 51 Genung, Wbrkinq Principles 596. 52 Bernard L. Jefferson ed., Essays and Essay writing (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1929) xi. Additional references to this work in this section are noted within the text. 53 Brooks and Warren, Fundamentals 454. 54 Brooks and Warren, Fundamentals 451. 55 David Rankin, Style and Structure (New York: Harcourt, 1972) 19. Such an example is Walter Well's textbook Communications in Business (1977), a book which in its second edition, along with the work of other New Critics, I believe, influenced the handbook lessons of Joseph William's Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (1981). 57 Brooks and Warren, Fundamentals 442. eo Edward P. J. Corbett, The Essay: Subjects and Stances (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1974) xx. 59 Winston Weathers, "Teaching Style: A Possible Anatomy," Rhetoric and Composition: A Sourcebook for Teachers, ed. Richard L. Graves (Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden, 1976) 332. Weathers 332. 61 James L. Kinneavy, A Theory of Discourse (1971; New York: Norton, 1980) 75. This is consistent with the report issued in 1963 by the Commission on the English Curriculum of the N2TE that the "course on rhetoric or composition helps [the student] to generalize and objectify his reading experience, pointing out to him what he might otherwise learn more slowly by himself." See Willard Thorp, John S. Dickhoff, Brice Harris, Paul Roberts, and Donald C. Bryant, "The Undergraduate Education of the Future Teachers of College English," The Education of Teachers of English: for American Schools 161 and Colleges, ed. Alfred H. Grcmmon (New York: Appleton, 1963) 528. 62 Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1956) 69. 88 Ransom 108. ^ Ransom 109 . 65 j g g , According to Ransom, the veteran poet can follow what he calls "positive indeterminacy," and the same may be true for any experienced writer. But this does not mean that the inexperienced writer can c discriminate the positive contributions of suggestive ideas from the more distractive ones. Using such a theory, occposition pedagogy would have to be concerned about the student v£k> could not find anything determinate in addition to the one who would find all ideas indiscriminately determinate. Using Ransom's terminology from The New Criticism, we might want to examine the "syntax" of composition (the logical progression of ideas) and the "dystax" of composition (the digressions and antithetical moods and emotion) (69-74). 'Ehese New Critical ideas suggest interesting questions for research. Wa might want to consider these questions from two points of view: the composer's and the teacher/reader's. For example, what is involved in the dystax of the teacher/reader? 66 Krieger 72. 67 Krieger 72-3. 68 Krieger 74 69 Joan Didion, Essays and Convesations, ed. Ellen G. Friedman (Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1984) 6. Additional references to this work in this section are noted within the text. 70 Brooks and Warren Fundamentals 507. 71 Brooks and Warren, Instructor's Manual 2. CHAPTER V THE TRANSITION TO MODERN THEORIES OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND PRODUCTION New Critical assumptions about texts and methods for their study were taken up in two specific areas in the late fifties and early sixties: in stylistics and in rhetorical criticism. Edward Corbett noted in 1967 that "the most impressive and most advanced development in the so-called 'new rhetoric' had occurred in the area of style or, as it has come to be called, stylistics."1 In addition, he noted that 2 stylistics was "rapidly approaching sane teachable form." We can credit Francis Christensen for making this particular development of the New Rhetoric applicable to composition pedagogy. New Generative Rhetoric Francis Christensen's description of oonposition at the sentence and paragraph level in 1963 developed out of the new linguistic interest in style and structure. Yet interestingly enough, hxs description has been called a "rhetoric," even though Corbett has said that What makes attention to style peculiarly rhetorical is same attempt to relate the stylistic features not only to other formal and material elements in the work itself but also to the ethos of the author and to the effects the author is seeking to produce in an audience....A critic becomes 163 "rhetorical" when he tries to stew that the choices from among the available options were made in reference to subject-matter or genre or occasion or purpose or author or audience— or seme combination of these.* Christensen was aware, however, that his rhetoric of the cumulative sentence and the cumulative paragraph considered only structural properties and not other rhetorical properties. "Rhetorical," as it is used here, includes the relationship between stylistic features and "other formal and material elements in the work itself." Christensen defines a granmar as “maptping] out the possible" and a rhetoric as that which "narrows down the possible to the desirable or effective." According to these categories, his rhetoric is really more of a grammar. Yet this rhetoric of the sentence was new in the sense that it was not drawn from the older school grammar of the sentence (which defined categories such as the complex sentence) or an older rhetoric of the sentence (which defined principles such as emphasis, or structures such as loose, periodic or balanced). His categories and principles of composition (the addition of free modification to base clauses) were new. His method was new— with its principles based upon "a close inductive stud/ of contemporary American prose" to see how language is used (xiii). And his notion of practical was new in that he believed composition could and should be taught as a generative process rather than by the analysis of literature, a notion which leaves the student to intuit rules about prose style and to guess as to how they might apply to generate discourse (2—3). "Our courses," he says, "with their tear-out workbooks and four pound anthologies are 164 elaborate evasions of the real problem" (25). I would like to point out here that his New Rhetoric was a new practical application (possibly a grammar) of New Critical Rhetoric for the teaching of composition. This is an important development in New Critical Composition because it did not solely call upon the analysis of literary exarrples to teach the principles of oonposition, particularly those elements involved in writing the "friendly" essay. It was a new focus at the syntactic level of discourse. Like most of the first generation of modern oonposition theorists who had been introduced to the methods of the New Criticism, Christensen's own background in literature and language was historical. He says of this experience: "It was all historical, and it all looked backward, as if the origin or source accounted for everything— whether a sound or a sonnet, its source— not its structure, not its significance, not what one could do with it" (4). Just as the New Critics had reacted against historical scholarship, Christensen was anxious to develop a different scholarship for composition using the newer scientific, objective approaches to language: "My second contact, through those papers representing twentieth century structural linguistics, cut the cord and set me free, or so it seemed to come to a real understanding of language and how it functions" (6). His new methodological apparatus (though not his structures) was that of immediate constituent analysis, where levels of the sentence are distinguished by partitioning discourse by pairs down to the smallest level of constituents. While seme of his grammatical bools 165 were borrowed from the new language structuralists, his descriptive values or principles are those same ones valued by the New Critics. Note the similarities with New Critical values in David Stevens' general assessment of the popularity of Christensen's "generative rhetoric" in 1967: This interest stems in part from Professor Christensen's felicitous, even exciting, choice of materials (especially v in the essay on sentence rhetoric), his formalistic methodology, which has the strength of objectivity and does . not exclude semantic classifications, and his demonstrations which persuade us his work has genuine relevance to the teaching of accurate communication, in which talk of "picturing actions and objects" and of "developing" and "supporting" discursive writing (exposition, argument, persuasion) is familiar terminology.6 Christensen's four principles of composition illustrate the influence of New Critical attitudes toward language, especially regarding the movement of language, the meanings of language, and the texture of language. His rhetoric seans a gramnar of New Critical Rhetoric in that it attempts to study sentence development in terms of the following: (1) personal, subjective impressions, (2) the movement of language as the mind is probing implications of meaning, (3) levels of meaning as dense, rich texture, and (4) sentence modification as texture for the idea in the base clause. these principles govern both the sentence and the paragraph in that the base clause serves as an analogy for the topic sentence of the paragraph. The first principle, attributed to John Erskine, is as follows: "The foundation.. .for a generative or productive rhetoric of the sentence is that oonposition is essentially a process of addition" (26). The two constituents are the base clause, which begins the 166 idea, and the modification, which extends or defines the idea through the writer's "immediate observation" and his personal "sense impressions." The second principle is the direction of movement which is backwards toward the base clause where modification serves to explicate or exemplify the base clause, representing the ebb and flow of the mind. Unlike the periodic sentence in which the idea is represented as "conceived, pondered over, reshaped, packaged, and delivered cold," the cumulative sentence represents the "mind thinking." "The main clause ... exhausts the mere fact of the idea; logically, there is nothing more to say. The additions stay with the same idea, probing its bearings and implications, exemplifying it or seeking an analogy or metaphor for it, or reducing it to details" (28). "To bring in the dimension of meaning," he says, "we need a third principle— -that of levels of generality or levels of abstraction" (29). The fourth principle is that of texture. The additions of modification prevent threadbare writing by making the prose seem "dense" and "rich." "The situation," he specifically notes, "is ideal for teaching diction— abstract-concrete, general-specific, literal-metaphorical, denotative-connotative" (35). In a summary comment of the use of these principles in the classroom, we get not only his emphasis but also a New Critical feel for the principles: "In our classes, we have to work for greater density and variety in textures and greater concreteness and particularity in what is added" (30). To make a point, the writer gives the image "the degree of particularity his purpose requires and his sensibilities and experience permit[s]" (47). Christensen * s 167 "rhetoric" is built upon the values of accurate communication, objective observations, the writer's sensibilities to language and experience, concrete exenplifications of fact, and dense, rich prose j texture. Like the New Critical compositionists Brooks and Warren, his ; theoretical emphasis is on narration (an analogy drawn from the linear movement of the sentence) and description (the representative mode of observation). And like them, Christensen argues that these structures are the same language structures used in exposition and, for that matter, poetry (42). In another comment from Stevens, we recognize the importance of the objective correlative in this new, generative process of composing. Thus Christensen shows us how the verbal structures identified by the New Critics and the New Critical poets can be used to teach expository composition: ...as (Christensen) analyzes the attempt at adequate communication, his eye on the process of how the writer ; objectifies in formal and structural features of composition the cognitive and psychological responses (or "content") he would evoke in the reader. ‘ In looking at a paragraph as a metas tructure of the cumulative sentence Christensen mentions two values: It is a natural way to help students feel their way through the paragraph they are writing and give them the density of texture, the solidity of specification, so many of them woefully lack....it merely raises to the level of a conscious operation what every competent reader does automatically as his eyes scan the lines of the page. ..(75). So while the principles are not entirely new (for in them we hear echoes of the New Critics), what is new is the specific "way to help students feel their way through" sentences and paragraphs, the "generative act" of writing discussed only theoretically by Ransom and other New Critics. Thus Christensen offers an objective set of grammatical structures which incorporates the symbolic, figurative diction of metaphor and image for getting at the meaning which the writer seeks to communicate to the reader, an analytical structure, but one which he recognizes for its generative power. New Rhetorical Criticism I By the spring of 1957, the influence of New Critical theory, i methods, and values became apparent in speech departments when the journal of Western Speech devoted an entire issue to "Criticism and Public Address," guest edited by Ernest J. Wrage of Northwestern University. What can be seen in these articles is a shifting theoretical focus from the author and the audience to the interpretation of the speech itself with the adoption of New Critical methods by which to interpret the speech. Eleven years later, the essays of this Wrage symposium were still considered important enough to the field to warrant reprinting them, along with several new essays, in Essays on Rhetorical Criticism (1968), Thomas R. Nilsen, editor. What had originally brought these authors together was a feeling that the historical approach to texts among rhetorical critics was inadequate, an interesting parallel to the attitudes of the New Critics. Thus these rhetorical critics turned to the intrinsic analysis of speeches. In "Extrinsic and Intrinsic Criticism" in this collection of essays, W. Charles Redding argues that as late as 1949 the standard method of rhetorical criticism had been to apply 169 o "rhetorical criteria to materials derived from historical research." The most developed of the historical methods was the biographical approach to oratory, an approach which had been modeled after Work in the more "established" departments of English. While the authors in this collection recognized the importance of studying a speech in its historical context, in which the speech is seen as influencing a public in a specific situation in time, they sought to restore the spoken text per se to a central position. While Redding admits that "...a cxsnmunication instrument designed to influence men in a place and in a moment of history— cannot permit a direct application of the 9 New Critics* arguments to rhetorical criticism," most rhetorical criticism, nevertheless, had slighted a close analysis of speech content, especially style. Rhetorical critics who did focus on the text and who could be used as models were such critics as Marie Hochmuth Nichols and Edwin Black (who, in his book Rhetorical Criticism [1965], had attacked the "effects" doctrine). Redding's point is that with a focus on effects, the critic tends to become an historian or biographer rather than a rhetorical critic (an exanple of the affective, intentional, and historical fallacies of the New Critics applied to rhetorical criticism). The new rhetorical critic, on the other hand, was more interested in interpreting the meanings and implications of a speech. The speech was seen in terms of its explicit content and the social values that it embodied or implied. Redding urged critics to locate new tools for intrinsic analysis, and he saw the analytical approach of the New Critics as one source of these new tools. He explains what a content analysis is: 170 Content analysis, as a research technique applicable to the study of public address, is typically a close, sentence-by-sentence (or even word-by-word) scrutiny of oral ! or written discourse for the purpose of determining what kinds of "meanings" the words may represent. It is really a semantic analysis of symbols.... ® i Robert D. Clark, in "Literary and Rhetorical Criticism," suggests ! the following skills and ideas of the New Critics that oould be used by rhetorical critics: (1) a close reading of the text? (2) from Kenneth Burke, the idea that form is a dynamic quality "that cannot be 1 apprehended in the recognition and labeling of the several parts. Nor ; is it sufficient to append a discussion of the effect of the cration, if effect, as is so frequently the case, is judged upon historical evidence rather than upon analysis of the relation of the formal content to the effect"; (3) from Ranscrn, the idea of the logical and digressive elements of texture; and (4) from Richards, the idea of metaphor as representing whole contexts of meaning.^ Authors in this collection refer specifically to Richards, Burke, Brooks, Empson, and Tate. In English departments, the subject and practice of rhetorical criticism was taken up by two people interested in composition/ rhetoric— Edward p. J. Corbett and W. Ross Wintercwd. As mentioned earlier, Edward Corbett clearly associated the New Critics with rhetoric as early as 1965, pointing out that the terms used by the New Critics (such as stance, voice, tone, textures, 12 attitude, ambiguity, tension) were old rhetorical concepts. This might lead us to believe that the New Critics were really old rhetorical critics. However, if they were, Corbett's book. Rhetorical 171 Criticism of Literary Works, would have been another bode on the New Criticism. The fact that he connects the New Critics with rhetoric may obscure the more subtle distinction that I believe he is making between the New Criticism and traditional rhetoric. In a personal interview in 1984, Corbett acknowledged that while he had said the New Critics were using rhetorical tools, he didn't 13 want to suggest that they were rhetorical critics. As I have shown, the New Critics were using certain rhetorical concepts, but their use of them was new: in their emphasis, their definition, and the context of their use. If they had been rhetorical critics in Corbett's sense of the word, the New Critics would have favored what he calls "occasional literature"— "literary works...prompted by contemporary events or concerns of seme political or social import.. .and which tend toward satire, didactic essays and poetry, problem dramas, propaganda 14 novels, parables, exempla." We know, however, that New Critical interests tended more toward the analysis of informal essays and metaphysical and imagistic poetry. It deserves to be repeated that the New Critics were operating in a different theoretical rhetorical context than the traditional one that Corbett has discussed. The New Critical aim was not a traditional rhetorical one: to persuade an audience to change an attitude or to take seme course of action. As discussed in an earlier chapter, the New Critics considered effect only as something inhering in the text, not as something which resulted from the text. So while Corbett very lucidly explains New Critical methods, his interest and focus for rhetorical criticism is more traditional than 172 New Critical „ We are reminded by W. C. Redding, in the Nilsen edition, that "The traditional view among rhetorical critics, regarded by many as an axiom, had been that public address must be studied and evaluated ultimately in terms of a single overriding criterion: the 15 effect of speaking upon specified audiences." In Corbett's definition of rhetorical criticism, this traditional view still holds: the imaginative aim is subordinated to the pragmatic or utilitarian aim— that is, rhetorical structures are appreciated more for that they do than for what they are. He explains: When rhetorical criticism is applied to imaginative literature, it regards the work not so much as an object of aesthetic contemplation but as an artistically structured instrument for ocmmunication. It is more interested in a literary work for what it does than for what it i s . - * - * * W. Ross Winterowd, on the other hand, shows what kind of rhetorical criticism is possible with a text-centered approach influenced by the modern rhetoricians. His 1965 composition text Rhetoric and Writing indicates his interest in I.A. Richards on the matter of style and Kenneth Burke on that of form; but we get an encapsulated picture of how these two modem rhetoricians influenced his early ideas about the meaning and form of a text in his 1972 publication "The Realms of Meaning: Text-Centered Criticism." Instead of the traditional rhetorical aim for his rhetorical analysis, Winterowd examines the text for what it is (even though he says that what it does can be included in what it is). We recognize the New Critic here in that meanings are explained in terms of particular verbal structures. Winterowd's work in this article is consistent with other New 173 Critical attitudes toward texts, yet these ideas are used in novel ways to define a new application for New Critical Rhetorical analysis. Like the new rhetorical critics in the speech department, Winterowd is concerned with what the discourse embodies; and to the extent that the meanings of the text reflect social values that an audience accepts or rejects, the words in the text become the objective representations of, or metaphors for, effect. In this article, Winterowd argues, like Richards, that the study of rhetoric should include both an intrinsic and extrinsic analysis of the text, but that the new focus should begin with the text itself. He says that rhetorical criticism has traditionally circumscribed the text rather than delve into its meaning. What Winterowd identifies as the "rhetorical motive" of discourse (understanding meaning) and the rhetorical method for its analysis (an in-depth study which demands a "minute analysis" of form as opposed to what he calls the "big picture view") are the same points made by Richards. In adopting Richards' new focus, Winterowd realigns rhetoric with literary criticism. The place to begin the study of both is at the text itself. The realignment does two things: first, it expands the study of literary criticism to include effect, and secondly, it offers traditional rhetoric a new method by which to determine effect, and hence changes the philosophical attitude toward effect. Winterowd speaks of this "existential relationship" as such: "Once the critic begins to discover— by penetrating deeply— hew the text itself works, he wil l also begin to discover hew the text works existentially on an audience."^ Thus he illustrates how the extrinsic or rhetorical 174 effect of the text is determined by the intrinsic analysis of the text, making the study of effect a study of meaning. Winterowd* s New Critical roots are evident in his images of the dense texture of a piece of fiction. The text is a "jungle of meaning," and the critic's job is to hack through this jungle. Another interesting image is of the critic "moiling around" in the text, a vivid suggestion that meaning is everywhere. And perhaps the best "sense" that we can get of this idea of the meaning of the poem is from the image or metaphor that Winter cwd has captured. His definition of the poem in these metaphors is very much like Tate's description of the problem of critical approach. In "Strategy and Sight," Tate says that "the...quagmire awaits us from whatever direction we come upon it,, the direction itself and the way we tumble 18 into the mud remain very important." We also see Winterowd's New Critical roots in the importance of the "explication of form" in 19 understanding the effectiveness of a text. Essentially we get two perspectives on form in Winterowd*s articles the critic's explication or analysis of form and the author's idea of the generation of form. His discussion of this second perspective (that form "emerges," is "worked out" or ocmes to life and that "forming" is an "exploratory journey" with an element of surprise and a unified view of life) is strikingly similar to the New Critics* attitudes toward the structure of a text and the act of composing. Winterowd's discussion of Kenneth Burke's conposition of Toward a Better T.ife is, perhaps, one of the best illustrations of the New Critical idea of the writing process, an illustration which 175 simultaneously explains why the informal essay was such a practical form for New Critical principles. He quotes Burke's attempt to make a working outline of this novel before writing any chapters. However, these traditional workings out of plot, character, setting, and the like failed to get at what Burke saw as the crucial construct of the novel— the six characteristic features of our lives: lamentation, rejoicing, beseechment, admonition, sayings, and invective. As a result, Burke said that he reversed the process, emphasizing the essayistic rather than the narrative, the emotional predicaments of (his) hero rather than the details by which he arrived at than— the ceremonious, formalized, "declamatory." In form the resultant chapters are somewhat like a sonnet sequence, a progression by stages, by a series of halts; or they might be compared to an old-style opera in which the stress is laid upon the arias whereas the transition from one aria to the next is secondary... (400). This sonnet sequence reminds us of the same notion of form identified by Jefferson in 1929 in his analysis of the structure of the informal essays. Rather than a matter of linear transitions connecting different ideas, the coherence of this text is more a matter of "stress," to use Burke's term, in which the emphasis or reinforcement of the "significant features" determines a dominant , impression. As Winterowd states, this is "a form in which themes get stated, modulated, transmuted, and restated," (400) a point which is similar to the idea of form inplied in Brooks and Warren's New Critical analysis of poetry, fiction, and informal, imaginative essays. Using Burke's own continents, Winterowd describes the composing process, repeating the same key points described by Ransom, Krieger, 176 and Didion. This is the confessing process of actual writers and artists at their trade. Winterowd's passage is worth a requoting for the similarities: ...the process of "forming" a work of fiction is generative. When he sits, pen in hand...the writer is about to start an exploratory journey, the terminus of which he realizes at best vaguely. What he comes up with ought to surprise him— as well as his readers. In any act of creation there is something of the wonder that E. M. Forster felt when he said that his characters came to life and gained a volition of their own. One of the joys in writing a novel, then, is to wonder what those damn fool characters will do next. * 7 Under the artist’s fingers, the construct comes to life, "pre-prograimung" its own intricate workings out and adjusting those programs every page— every line— of the way. But the final triumph of any work of literature is the sense that it gives of a unified view of life (400). In addition to a New Critical explication of form (the close attention to matters of the text to understand its meaning) and a vitalistic approach to form from an author's point of view, Winterowd introduces another element crucial to New Critical Rhetoric—-the metaphor. The significance of the metaphor for form and organization from the interpretation of the Burke example is evident: where the structure or details suggest other details, the organization or coherence becomes more a matter of "This reminds me of..." or "That is like this..." than "As a result of that then this..." or "The effect of that is this...." The form seems concentric rather than linear. Another use of metaphor by Winterowd is, however, quite original in the sense that the metaphor is the means by which intrinsic meaning (the formal and referential meanings within a text) becomes extrinsic meaning (which is "situation oriented" and temporal— what a text says to an audience at a given time). Winterowd states that there are at 177 least two worlds of referential meaning in a text, the author's and the reader's. According to him, "referential" "inplies something in the text that refers to something outside the text in the real world, an equation of stimulus and response" (402). Meaning in this sense is "subjective," "internal," and "personal." Because the reader canes to a text with a particular, personal world view in search of the author's world view, identification with the author's view ("understanding") requires a certain degree of empathy in which the reader becomes the persona in the drama of another world. In this way, metaphor describes the act in which the reader canes to know the author's view of the world. Winterowd concludes that "...all works of fiction— probably all instances of discourse— are metaphorical in that they mediate between the author's view of the world and the reader's view of the world" (402). The idea that "instances of discourse" are of a metaphorical nature is certainly a more comprehensive notion about metaphor and texts than any dealt with by the New Critics. It opens up new directions for examining theoretically the critic's roles which, according to Wintercwd, is to "bridge the gap between the island of you and the island Of me” (402) : the nature of the reading act and the nature of the composing act. In.Wintercwd*s hands, Richards' notion of the "interanimation of words" becomes the interanimation of other "rhetorical" contexts of meaning. Thus it seems that Winterowd uses the metaphor, a concept so very important to New Critical analysis, to explain the rhetorical situation outside the text. The new rhetorical critic must analyze and empathize, and both of these processes are generative. Wintercwd 178 tells us that "When these two mystic entities (the fiction constructed by the author and the fiction constructed by the reader) ocme together, they constitute the new thing that is known as perception" (404). In terms of perception and a "new thing," the act of making meaning of discourse is fundamentally metaphorical. The rhetorial act described here is an act of making metaphors—-of seeing the extent to which that world outside of poetry is also in poetry. Thus Winterowd uses the New Critical, inductive approach to the text to illuminate other elements in the rhetorical situation, the author and the world, for example. For now, it is enough for this project to say that while both Corbett and Winterowd approach the text in a modern way as opposed to a more traditional way; that is, they work from the text to the outside instead of outside to the text, their approaches are different. Corbett's New Critical leanings are illustrated in the fact that he acknowledges that the text can be "readings" of those elements in the rhetorical situation (inscriptions of meanings about the author and history, for example). Yet his rhetorical analyses are more traditional than Winterowd's. Corbett would examine those elements of the text that exist for the purpose of manipulating an audience. The difference between the two theoretical views is a result of critical intention. Both tell us a great deal about art, rhetoric, and the world; and while there may be overlap in what they reveal (as Winterowd says, an analysis of what something is may say a great deal about what it does) there is still a fine distinction between the two. For the rhetorical critic, the discourse analyst, 179 and the ccrrpositian instructor, what is inportant is the recognition of the approach toward the text; because, New Critically speaking, the manner of the approach determines, in part, what it is that we are examining. As Tate said, the way we tumble into the mud is very important. A New Discipline Since the 1960s, what we call the modern discipline of composition has been influenced by a nuxrber of scholarly directions. As Janice Lauer has said, this "dappled discipline" has had a multidisciplinary cast. Some of the most visible strains of scholarship into the nature of written discourse and its production have developed from transformational and tagmemic linguistics, empirical research in education and psychology, and, perhaps most significantly, from the re-emergent discipline of rhetoric. As I have attempted to demonstrate, the major influence from the rhetorical tradition was a complicated mix of classical/traditional rhetoric and New Critical rhetoric. The transition, then, to the modem discipline of composition is that period of time when teachers of freshman English began to see themselves as teachers (and then as scholars) of rhetoric and composition instead of teachers of literature. While the transitional pioneers, or first generation composition scholars such as Christensen, Winterowl, Corbett, and Kinneavy did not consciously foreground a New Critical Fhetoric in their new theories, they did bring their New Critical attitudes about texts into their discussions of rhetoric and the teach ing of 180 ! conposition. While most of these theorists saw themselves as scholars of a classical rhetorical tradition, their practiced, roots were New Critical. That is to say that they used the scholarship of a classical tradition, but they relied on the mechanics of New Critical practice— the intrinsic analysis of texts and an interest in the explication of form and its relationship to meaning— to revitalize traditional rhetoric as an inportant foundation for the modern discipline of conposition. What each of these theorists drew upon from the New Critical tradition was the vital element of form. During their early careers, these theorists supported the notion of the centality of the text in the discourse situation. And they sought to understand discourse by understanding the vital relationship between form and the other elements in the discourse situation which they irrported from traditional rhetoric. For example, Kinneavy was interested in the relationship between form and purpose; Corbett was interested in the relationship between form and effect, and Winterowd was interested in the relationship between form and meaning. Purpose, function, and effect were some of the elements that these theorists used when they applied their knowledge of the classical tradition to discourse analysis. And thus the analysis of form was one of the most inportant elements that fed into an effort to formulate a modern composition/rhetoric based upon classical rhetoric. In addition to the various elements that were examined in connection with form, these theorists' interests in texts were of a much larger scope than those of the New Critics. The pioneers of the 181 modern discipline were interested in the theory of discourse# in general, not simply in the practical analysis of certain aspects of individual texts. Winterowd announces in his early influential book# Rhetoric and Writing (1965) that rhetoric is a "serious study" 20 concerned with more than practical applications. And he also comments in his collected essays that the article "The Realm of Meaning" was a "counter-statement," "reflecting what was at the time of its publication [his] growing dissatisfaction with rhetoric as represented by the Quarterly Journal of Speech and, to a certain 21 extent, by Philosophy and Rhetoric." The domain of investigation for these new theorists was greater in scope than the New Critics *, for it was not limited to literary texts, and it was cane that they saw as distinct from that in speech or philosophy departments. But it was, nevertheless, a rhetoric of discourse analysis# the main assumption of which was that discourse is "text-oriented." And it was this domain of investigation that became a new theoretical field of investigation for those interested in conposition. Clearly, Kinneavy's Theory of Discourse represents this new domain of investigation. He says that his theory is exclusively directed to discourse analysis— a stud/ of "a possible structure of 22 discourse as a discipline." His search includes an historical and philosophical foundation for a theory of discourse which correlates the aims or purposes of discourse with the modes (or meanings) of discourse. In New Critical analysis, the forms within a text determine the meaning of the text. Kinneavy sees the modes as "determined" (to use 182 23 his word) by the aims. While the concept of aim or purpose may reflect his background in classical rhetoric, his idea of aim is influenced by New Critical thought. The main criterion for aim is derived neither from the author (an example of the intentional fallacy, he notes) nor the effect (an exanple of the affective fallacy). Given a particular situational and cultural context, the aim is embodied in the text itself, in its form, the determinants of 24 which are organization and style. To summarize, what Kinneavy sees as the major part of language study is the study of the characteristics of a text which both embody and generate its effects. What characterizes this particular strain of the modem discipline is the search for the nature of the text and its effects through a close analysis of its formal structures. And this search establishes a scholarly or theoretical foundation for the practical study of discourse production. It is possible that these pioneers in the field of conposition believed that a New Critical focus was too narrow for conposition instruction, including only the writing of critical essays and informal essays with a literary-imaginative cast to them, because one of the most significant importations to the new discipline was their interest in a more "utilitarian" prose. Corbett sees a functional distinction between literary and utilitarian discourse and argues even today that the course in freshman writing ought to get at the skills of exposition. He sees the literary text as self-contained and the expository or referential text as a social text. Because of this distinction, he argues that 183 literature can be a subject matter, but not a model, for production in 25 that the elements of style are essentially different. As a result of oar preoccupation with the distinction of genres (albeit a valid one), we may have discarded a great deal of theory that could have been used for a general theory of composing. I have said that the rhetorical strain that runs through the modern discipline of composition is a result of a complicated blend of classical and New Critical rhetorical theory. An exception to this blend can be found in the work of Ann Berthoff. While Berthoff has been an figure in the field for several decades, her work has been circulated widely in published form only recently. Her work is contextualized by philosophers and teachers such as Pierce, Langer, Cassirer, Friere, and Ashton-Warner. But more importantly, it foregrounds New Critical thought; and, consequently, she represents a direct line of influence from the New Critics. And, as a lead essayist in many of the conposition journals, her discussion of the forming power of language has helped to revive an interest in the explication of form as it applies to the composing acts of writers. Probably because Ann Berthoff doesn't distinguish, at least theoretically, between practical and literary texts (that is, she attempts to locate those elements common to all forms rather than those elements that distinguish forms), she is able to identify a general theory of composing which emphasizes the power of the language and the writer's imagination. And consequently, her work, as it has been collected and published in Forminq/Ihinkinq/Writinq (1978) and The Making of Meaning (1981) reclaims not only a theory of the 184 imagination for a theory of composing, but also many of the elements of a New Critical tradition that were obscured by a strain of influence in composition theory and pedagogy more interested in the revival of classical rhetoric. While her theory of cxsnposing is complemented by ideas from philosophy and education, the heart of Berthoff's work illustrates hew she stayed within the New Critical Rhetorical tradition, working through many of its implications for a theory of conposition and composition pedagogy. As a result, she does not come to the conposition classroom with a linguistic or grammatical theory, a physiological theory of the mind, a behavioral response or skill theory, or a traditional theory of rhetorical inodes or models, but with a theory of interpretation of New Critical origin— that explains the aspects of oonposing as critical acts of metaphorical thinking. Her thirty years in the teaching profession indicates that she entered the field during the heyday of New Critical practice. Certainly, the influence of Richards and the New Critical tradition on her work is all-pervasive: she explicitly acknowledges that we have most to learn from Richards. Probably no other modern composition theorist has used Richards* rhetorical theory so thoroughly. Her theory of the forming power of the imagination and her philosophy of language as a symbolic form are the foundations of her ideas about the composing process and composition instruction. Berthoff *s philosophy of composition is more complex than the following list of her basic assumptions suggests. But my purpose here is simply to illustrate some of the more inportant influences of New 185 Critical thinking on her theory of mind, language, and the oonposing act. Her discussion of rhetoric, meaning, language, mind, and form originates in Richards' work in that she views rhetoric as the study of meanings in context? the "interanimation" or the mutual contextualization of words as the dynamic quality of meaning; and the philosophy of language as a speculative instrument, hence a theory of the imagination based upon the heuristic nature of language. In her theory, language is instrumental, symbolic in form, and heuristic by nature; the mind is an active agent, seeking connections and relationships; reality is chaotic; and writing is a form-making act which shapes chaos into meaningful patterns of significance. As a result, she sees metaphor, like Richards, as central to the study of meaning. Ft>r Berthoff, both reading and writing are fundamental acts of interpretation— acts, I would add, of New Critical interpretation. That is, the study of the interpretive acts of mind is a study of hew the mind recognizes and creates, through language, the symbolic shapes or fonts of meaning. Language is emphasized as being the instrument by which the mind shapes and ccnminicates ideas and experiences. To apply the study to a theory of conposition, Berthoff must "reclaim the imagination" as the central constructive power of all discourse. And the most inportant implication of this idea for conposition is that it does not separate critical from creative reading, and hence, critical from creative writing. The "craft* of the two is fundamentally the sane in that both reading and writing represent a search for form. For Berthoff and the New Critics, meaning is complex and organic. 186 The first suggests to her that the process of writing is much too complex to be accounted for by particular skills. Because the meaning-making act is too complicated to be known exhaustively, the goal for research on writing should be the apprehension of structures, a complex matter in itself, but one that she believes to be a more useful approach than a skills approach. The second notion (that meaning is organic— dynamic, unstable, and shifting according to various contexts) leads Berthoff to the premise that invention is the essence of writing because it is the organization and structure of thought. It is the symbolic, organizing, and suggestive power of language that enables a writer to see and to articulate relationsh ips; hence, it is the essence of both critical writing and creative writing. Therefore, writing is invention, and invention is the discovery of form which conflates the traditional rhetorical canons of invention, arrangement, and style in an attempt to understand the processes of reading and writing. Like Richards, Berthoff speaks of the misconception of language and applies her philosophy of language to instruction. She says that we do not pour language into rhetorical forms or models. Instead, we make form through language. The vitalism in her theory is the heuristic power or nature of language as an instrument for the discovery of relationships among thoughts. Like Richards, she sees the metaphor as the quintessential figure or model for the meaning- making act of discovery called writing. Metaphor symbolizes the heuristic power of language for the imagination— for the discovery of relationships among seemingly different ideas. As the quintessential 187 symbol of the symbolic power of language, the metaphor is one of the key, practical tools in the composition instructor's chest of teaching strategies. If we believe that language is a speculative instrument, then metaphor, as the juxtapositioning of ideas, is one of the most inportant devices for discovering or generating relationships among thoughts. Die image is also a useful form, insofar as we use images to think with, they are powerful tools for contemplative writing. Berthoff's idea of the generation of discourse begins with the use of sentence fracynents and apparantly random lists of words or images. She calls these are "proto-discourse structures" in that they are potential structures of thought— the seeds of statements, questions, and relationships among ideas. Thus, a Mew Critical interpretive approach to writing assumes that language generates a conposition as compared to a more traditional rhetorical approach which suggests that social assumptions generate a conposition. This does not suggest that both are not inportant to a conposition; I am simply suggesting that a New Critical interpretive theory will emphasize different conponents for a theory of invention. Berthoff's discussion of what we should teach in the conposition course echoes Ransom's ideas on the subject. Like him, Berthoff repeatedly states that we should not tell students that the writing process begins with an outline. Because the outline is a form representing the more ocnplete shape of an idea, it appears only after chaos has beam organized. Her idea that language gives us a way into and out of chaos echoes, I believe, Ransom's notion of the use of While Berthoff remarks that we should teach students 188 to tolerate "ambiguity," Ransom more aggressively encourages the writer to use this aspect of language as a heuristic device for further exploration of form. As Berthoff suggests, the text can unfold in either predictable ways or surprising ways. It is this unfolding through language that makes the process a vital one. What Ann Berthoff is reclaiming in the 1980s, then, is a New Critical tradition, a set of attitudes about language and the interpretation of texts that can be applied to all genres of texts in a more consciously and carefully articulated theory of composing. As a result, her work extends a tradition begun by Richards, Brooks, Warren, and Ranscm, developing it in yet newer ways through practiced, applications for the teaching of conposition. In essence, she is not reclaiming something that has been totally lost— witness the continued publication of the Modern Rhetoric and the fact that the first generation of conposition scholars in the rhetorical tradition kept it alive in their tacit assumptions about texts. But in so doing, they dropped some of the aspects of that theory and never explicitly applied the theory to student writing. As a result, Berthoff is reclaiming what was never fully developed for conposition theory. Notes ^ Eduard P. J. Corbett, ed., introduction. Rhetorical Analysis of Literary Works (New York: Oxford UP, 1969) xxvi. ^ Edward P. J. Corbett, "What is Being Revised?" QQC 18 (1967): 171. — 3 Francis Christensen, "A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence," GQC (1963), "Notes Toward a New Rhetoric: I. Sentence Openers," and "II. A Lesson from Hemingway," CE (1963). 4 Corbett, Rhetorical Analysis xvi. 5 Francis Christensen and Bonni jean Christensen, eds., Notes Toward a New Rhetoric: Nine Essays for Teachers, 2nd ed. (New York, Harper, 1978) 134. All subsequent references to this work will be cited in the text. ^ David R. Stevens, "Concerning ’ Generative' Rhetoric," CCC 45 (1967): 173. 7 Stevens 173. 8 W. Charles Redding, "Extrinsic and Intrinsic Criticism," Essays can Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Thomas R. Nilsen (New York: Random, 1968) _ , . ^ Redding 104. 10 Redding 108. ^ Robert D. dark, "Literary and Rhetorical Criticism," Essays can Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Thomas R. Nilsen (New York: Random, 1968) 65-66. 12 Corbett, Rhetorical Analysis xxvii. 13 Eduard P. J. Corbett, personal interview, 30 March 1984. 14 Corbett, Rhetorical Analysis xxii. 15 Redding 104. 16 Corbett, Rhetorical Analysis xxii. 17 W. Ross Winterowd, "The Realms of Meaning: Text-Centered Criticism," QOC 23 (1972): 399. All subsequent references to this work will be cited in the text. Allan Tate, "Strategy and Sight," The Hovering Fly and Other 190 Essays (1949; Freeport New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1968). 19 W. Ross Winterowd, Composition/Rhetoric: A Synthesis (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, Forthcxsaing), ms. 165. 20 W. Ross Winterowd, Rhetoric and Writing (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1965) xii. 21 Winterowd, Oannposition/Rhetoric 165. 22 James L. Kinneavy, A Theory of Discourse (1971; New York: Norton, 1980) 29. ^ Kinneavy 30. 24 Kinneavy 49. 2* » Edward P. J. Corbett, "How Literature Might Be Used Fruitfully in the Conposition Classroom" (a paper given at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Conposition and Communication, New York, 30 March 1984). 191 CHAPTER VI CONCLUSION: NOTES FROM THE EIGHTIES In the preceding chapters I have re-examined what the New Critics said in the historical context of the discipline of rhetoric to give a new reading, and, consequently, a new weight to New Critical theory. First, I have traced the course of the New Critical tradition from its departure from nineteenth-century Aristotelian rhetoric along with its borrowings from tum-of-the-century ocnpos it ion/rhetorics, to the point at which it converged with classical rhetoric. Secondly, I have argued that the New Critical tradition had a far more significant role in the founding of the modem discipline of composition, at least in the practice that was adopted by the major figures, than we have hitherto acknowedged. Reasons why the New Critical influence has waned since the early seventies seem fairly obvious. With the 1971 publication of Janet Ehiig's The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, the paradigm in composition/rhetoric shifts to process and away frcm the text. In light of this shift, we may have thought that the New Critics were too "product" oriented. However, underlying their clever analyses of texts was a dynamic theory of interpretation involving the interactions of mind and language suitable for use in understanding how meanings are made in all genres of texts. Aid in their 192 hermeneutic— their instructions for how to read a page, as I. A. Richards put it— we find the seeds of the more vital aspects of conposition. In any case, when the "product paradigm" was exchanged for a "process paradigm," we overlooked just how process oriented New Critical rhetoric actually was; and because of this, we failed to see the theory's potential as a model of text production, namely how the critical act of interpretation was related to the creative act of composing. Because the shibboleth of conposition theory became "process, not product," a New Critical rhetoric of reading nay have seemed inappropriate for a rhetoric of writing; and consequently, New Critical assumptions were never fully recognized in the process paradigm. But among its more lasting effects on the study of discourse in the twentieth century was the assumption that language is epistonic and the assumption for critical practice that a text, as an inscription of meaning, can be analyzed by a dose attention to linguistic detail. Thus the New Critics' contributions to modern rhetorical theory, made in large part through their critical practice in literature and conposition courses, were enormously inportant: in their view of language as constructive and in their view of language as rhetorical transactions among words. Once the tradition was carried into the new discipline, it converged with numerous approaches to rhetoric and composition as well as with larger cultural and philosophical exchanges. And while it is virtually impossible to tease out of these exchanges any specific New 193 Critical influence, it is possible to suggest directions to Which the New Critical tradition points. Three strands within the New Critical tradition seem to point to, or converge with, work in the eighties: ( 1) in the "scientific" analysis of texts, (2) in a rhetoric of reading, and, (3) in what has been a continuing thread since the New Criticism, a vitalist tradition of conposition. The New Critics left a "scientific" legacy in their method— a very systematic description of syntactic, stylistic, and semantic elements of a text. We still examine texts very carefully, using our descriptions as "objective" evidence for our intuitions about discourse.^ Thus the New Critical tradition merges with the modem "scientific" attention to facts of language. And as a stylistic rhetoric, New Critical practice lives on in linguistic studies. Yet while the New Critics used a "scientific" approach, pointing to various patterns of connection among the formal elements of the text, their descriptions ultimately pointed back to the response of the reader. The New Critics ware not {like the structuralists or the linguists) "removed" from their observations. The New Critical rhetoric, as a system, pointed to a semantics of language where the interpreters inductive, personal "formations" of the thesis or theme of a text constituted the very meaning of the text. And a postmodern rhetorical perspective helps us to recover this aspect of their practice that points to the reader/writer's involvement in the process of composing. The role of the reader in the interpretation of a text has been a significant element in the modern view of discourse in both theories 194 of composition and reading. And implicit in the New Critics* analysis of the relationships among style and meaning is a tremendous interaction between language and the reader and language and the writer. The "making of meaning" or "conposition" through cues of language has been an inportant modem concern of reading and writing, and theorists in both fields have been interested in how these two 2 acts of conposition are related. New Critical notions about how meaning is determined by a reader ! do find a place in our modem theories, but they are included in these i theories in much broader, and more explicitly rhetorical, ways, largely because we have expanded the New Critic's notion of context. In Ransom's work in particular, we see how the language of the text can work to determine or undetermine the meaning of a text. By placing his ideas about the constraints of language on meaning in an ' interactive theory involving writers, readers, and texts, we can see how meaning can be determined and undetermined in more than one direction. Ihat is, we can see not only how the language of the text can determine or undetermine meaning as the reader reads through the text, but also how the reader can determine or undetermine the meaning of the text from the reader's experiential knowledge of the world outside the text. When we address the idea of how the writer projects meanings through a text to be determined by a reader , our theoretical guest becomes more intricately complex and challenging. Thus New Critical theory not only has a place in a theory of reading that informs a process paradigm, but a rhetoric of reading, interestingly enough, is precisely what some ccnpositionists have 195 drawn upon recently in the effort to develop a transactional paradigm for composition, a paradigm which brings both the writer and the reader together with the text. Both Ross Winterowd and Louise Phelps view the text as a mediator between writer and reader in the 1 communicative situation; and, consequently, the text resurfaces again 3 in importance, but in a different context. Thus a rhetoric of reading joins a modern day hermeneutics, but as a true rhetoric. And this has important implications for the discipline of composition. It places the practice of discourse analysis in a theoretical context of rhetorical transaction, encouraging us to think about how texts develop and function in rhetorical situations.^ For example, we might ask, in what ways are contexts and patterns of meaning created by writers so that these meanings can be understood by readers? What conventions of style, language, or texts are involved in the "forming" of texts? Bow does language, audience, or the writer’s experience lead the writer to "form" texts that will, in turn, lead readers to significant interpretations? And again we address the salient features of style or form, the notion of symbol, and the idea of tone, but in a new context. The New Critical tradition converges not only with broader rhetorical perspectives in the field but also with rhetorical perspectives which focus more specifically on the figures of style. In that the New Critics were preoccupied with the notion of metaphor as "formal" knowledge and as the omnipresent principle of language, the tradition participates in a continuing dialogue on the 196 relationship of style to rhetoric taken up by the poststructuralists. i , The European tradition of rhetoric as metaphor central to conception can be seen in the work of Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, and Paul de 5 Man. It is left for future historical research to identify the contributions of the American tradition to this more global historical development. Suffice it to say here that, to a certain extent, this i tradition is kept alive in America by Frank D'Angelo, who connects the rhetorical topoi to the traditional, canons of invention, arrangement, : and style and to fundamental cognitive processes.^ The American New Critics did have a theory which would allow us to recover style as "productive" or constructive and as rhetorically significant; we simply mistook it for a trivilization of style. And this takes us to a third strand of New Critical ideas that points to modern thought. Since the New Criticism, there has been a continuing theme of vitalism in composition theory— an ongoing motif of the interaction of the imagination with language. Ann Berthoff operates theoretically and consciously in this tradition, and others, such as Peter Elbow and William Coles, operate practically in this tradition. Yet many oompositionists are quite unaware of the vitalist tradition in which they operate. In the belief that a oonposition oomes solely from the imaginative impulses of the writer, it has been a tradition often misinterpreted as being anti-intellectual. But a vitalist theory is more than a theory of the imagination. It acknowledges the role of mind and language in the act of creativity. By foregrounding language in their theory/ the New Critics made language heuristic. Thus a very 197 important strain of modern composition can be traced through a vitalist tradition back to the New Critics, and, through Cassirer and Langer, on back to the Romantics. Finally, a theory of composition car invention that is related to language and to the language that the writer is producing is, perhaps, one of the most important legacies of the New Critical tradition. And in many repects we have come full circle in our history with the realization that implicit in a rhetoric of composition is a rhetoric of reading. 198 Notes For example, implicit in Mina Shaughnessy's seminal work for the.,.late seventies and early eighties. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing (1977), is a methodology that seems "New Critical." Shaughnessy's interest in errors was not in the rule as such but in the description of the pattern of error made by the student. She assumes that language patterns in a student's text represent significant meanings about the author and the author's linguistic environment. In order to help the student, the teacher must be able to intuit the significance of these "patterns" of error. The close attention to patterns of language is particularly noticeable in the field of discourse analysis in general. 2 The work of Ann Berthoff in this area has already been discussed. A recent anthology addresses the relationship. See Winifred Bryan Horner, ed., Composition and Literature; Bridging the Gap (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1983). See also Anthony Petrosky, "From Story to Essay: Reading and Writing," 00C 33 (1982) 19-36. These two interests have also converged through studies of cognition and psycholinguistics. Reading specialist Frank Smith (Understanding Reading, 3rd ed. [1982] and Psycholinguistics and Reading [1973]) has turned his attention to written composition in the publication Writing and the Writer (1982). See also Louise W. Phelps' "Cross-Sections in an Emerging Psychology of Composition," Research in Composition and Rhetoric: A Bibliographical Sourcebook, ed. Michael G. Moran and Ronald F. Lunsford (Westport, CP: Greenwood Press, 1984). 3 For W. Ross Winterowd, the text as product is re-established in that he sees the text as a set of "endophoric" and "exophoric" instructions from a writer which the reader can follow to create meaning. Endophoric instructions create cohesion and coherence in a text, and exophoric cues point to the reader's knowledge of the world. In Winterowd's work with Dorothy Augustine in "Speech Acts and the Reader-Wri ter Transaction" (1984), we find again the amalgamation of New Critical and classical rhetorical thought embedded, hence reconstructed, in the context of a modem theoretical development of rhetoric and composition. In "Dialectics of Coherence" (1984), Louise Wstherbee Phelps' interactive theory of reading involving both texts and readers reconsiders New Critical principles of mind and language (but principles which are evident in many other philosophical perspectives as well) in a contemporary theory of discourse which emphasizes the construction of meaning as flow and design. Here again. New Critical principles seem a part of, or at least consistent with, ideas found in different theoretical contexts. 4 In this light, Patricia Bizzell sees rhetoric (as opposed to more scientific cognitive studies) as the central discipline for research in composition. She says that "Composition studies should focus upon practice within interpretive communities— exactly how 199 conventions work in the world and how they are transmitted." See i "Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing," Pre/Text 3.3 (1982): 213-43. ! 5 This tradition is discussed briefly by James Kinneavy in "Contemporary Rhetoric: Introduction, Definition, and Boundaries," The ; Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric, ed. Winifred Bryan Homer, (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1983) 167-213. j Kinneavy notes an important source on this subject: Girard Genette, "La Rhetorique Restreinte," Figures III (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972). 6 See particularly his more recent work "Rhetoric and Cognition: Toward a Metatheory of Discourse," Pre/Text 3.2 (1982): 105-19. WORKS CITED Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. 1953. New Yorks Norton, 1958. Adler, Mortimer. Hew to Read a Books The Art of Getting a Liberal Education. New Yorks H. Wolfe, 1940. Altick, Richard D. Preface to Critical Readings 1946. New Yorks HOlt, 1960. Applebee, Arthur N. Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: A History. Urbana, IL: NOTE, 1974. Barnet, Sylvan. A Short Guide to Writing About Literature. 1968. Boston: Little, 1971. Begnal, Dana, Office of the Dean, Arts and Sciences, Harvard t&iiversity. Letter to the author. 23 Septecber, 1983. Berlin, James A. 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