reject-o-rama

Inspired by--and in direct imitation of--Rebecca Moore Howard, I decided to add to the list of really fucking good panels that have been rejected by CCCC. The panel (the entire proposal for which is pasted below) included me and two highly regarded scholars whose research has garnered international attention and national awards. We even had a first-timer, which used to help a proposal, because CCCC used to be interested in attracting new voices. But I think that's no longer an issue because the conference has gotten so big.

I've been using this rejection as a comfort to many of my current and former graduate students who do high-quality historical work and whose proposals did not get accepted either (when I was in grad school, one of my professors mentioned elsewhere in this post whose initials are CG also got a proposal rejected and she broadcast that widely, which was very kind of her). RMH raises some excellent questions about the value of data-driven research in the field, and I wonder if the value of historically grounded or rhetorically inflected research isn't going the same direction where CCCC is concerned. (It's hard to tell which of those aspects tanked our proposal, or if it was something else altogether.) Of course when Cheryl Glenn was program chair a few years ago, things were different, but she values both rhetoric and history. My panel with Jeffrey Walker and Janet Atwill on history not only got accepted, but it got scheduled for a huge room, which was sweet. Is it worth waiting around around for CCCC to appoint a program chair like Glenn again?

I'm not sure it is. The next time my membership is up for renewal, I'm going to have to think long and hard before sending in so many dollars. In the meantime I'll be giving the journal and the conference program extra scrutiny, because my decision to reconsider my membership isn't just fueled by ressentiment, but by a real question about the organization's commitments and my own.

Animals, Figures, and Letters: Activities in Ancient and Medieval Classrooms

 One-sentence description:

 In an effort to re-enliven the history of rhetoric and writing instruction, this panel investigates the role of animals, figures, and letters in ancient and medieval classrooms.

 Ancient and medieval classrooms were lively places, places where students were encouraged to stretch their imaginations and their lung capacities. This panel will examine ancient and medieval texts and practices and the pedagogical theories embedded in them, with an eye to what they might tell us about rhetorical education, past and present. 

 Speaker 1 will join the recent wave of attention given to ancient school exercises called progymnasmata. Thanks in part to J. David Fleming’s recent exhortation to embrace the “very idea” of these exercises, the progymnasmata are finding their way into classrooms and textbooks (D’Angelo, Crowley and Hawhee). This small but discernible shift in practice might usefully be accompanied by careful scrutiny of the exercises themselves, their history, their sequence, and their often striking content. Why, for example, are the progymnasmata crawling with animals?

 Students working in this tradition usually began by composing fables about animals, but they were also, later in the sequence, asked to compose as animals, to write in the “voice” of, say, an ape interested in forming a city with fellow apes. I propose to examine the prompts that ask students to compose as animals. If, as Fleming (quoting Murphy) argues, the point of the progymnasmata was to “‘become rhetorical,’” then the exercises’ more peculiar features might tell us a bit more about what exactly that means. For starters, the prompt to compose as animals helps to infuse early rhetorical education with more than low-stakes fictitious play; the animals, rather, function more generally as an other—an other to humans, and uniquely, an other to children. A look at animals in these ancient school exercises begins to expand rhetoric from the art of observing the available means of persuasion to, more generally, an art of becoming someone—or something—else.

Speaker 2 will examine ancient classroom instruction in figures and tropes.  Despite strong reevaluations of their role and cognitive functions (J. Fahnestock), the rhetorical figures and tropes still occupy a marginal place in the teaching of composition. However, if judged by modern standards, the handbooks of late antiquity and the medieval period show a disproportionate amount of attention to the figures: in Rhetorica ad Herrenium they take up a fourth of the discussion, Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria devotes two entire books, and the Greek compilation of composition texts On Invention attributed to Hermogenes substitutes the discussion of the role of the epilogue in composition with a discussion of the figures and tropes.

What value did the ancient teachers find in the figures? In this paper I will argue that, aside from investing the figures with argumentative content, the ancients used them to teach discourse rhythm as well as an imaginary (or real) reciprocity between the student and his peers. Figures such as antithesis, dilemma, circular expression, period, pneuma, and “stretching” were used to get the student’s ear accustomed not only to a rhythmical measure in his own compositions, but also to elicit response in peer-to-peer competitions.  

Speaker 3 will reconsider the role of model letters in medieval classrooms. Medieval teachers inherited the grammatical and rhetorical pedagogy of antiquity and adapted it to their own needs. While the system of the progymnasmata was not preserved intact, for example, many of the individual exercises continued to be employed in medieval classrooms. Letters replaced speeches as the target genre for composition instruction. This paper argues that the model letters found in most medieval textbooks on letter writing resemble classical declamations in several respects. Their structure is modeled on that of an oration, their style presupposes oral presentation, and their typical pairing almost certainly reflects a continuing tradition of classroom disputation. The performative and controversial rhetoric of such letters will be demonstrated through oral delivery of several short model letters with their responses.

 Each paper, then, seeks to make an innovative contribution to existing histories of writing instruction. It is the panelists’ collective hope that reconsidering such active and engaged classroom practices stands to re-enliven our own.