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Following my experiences
in the first term and rethinking and reworking approaches for
the second term, I have rather tentatively determined that since,
as we all know, Aristotle was addressing a still dominantly oral
culture, his interest in rhetoric had much to do with the processing
of information: with ordering and arranging quickly-on one's feet,
literally-whatever the speaker knew to the greatest effect for
the speaking situation. Or, to look at it another way, his interest
in rhetoric was generative, in the as-it's-happening and the cognitive
shaping that results from rhetorical attention (even though, arguably,
he might not have thought of it that way). As the study of rhetoric
evolved and became more text-oriented in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the perception of the value of rhetoric, and the interest
in it, shifted to structural issues-to the form manifested in
writing. Now, the problem that I anticipated (and recalled from
my University of Maine teaching days) was that rhetoric can be
perceived as strictly structural, strictly an attention to relatively
static form.
And it seems to me
that what we should be after, or what I want in teaching, is a
dialectical relation between Aristotle's generative sense of rhetoric
and the 18th and 19th century rhetoricians' and grammarians' structural
sense of it. I don't have all this worked out, by any means, but
I sense that if students can perceive how the oral-generative
aspect of Aristotle works and can translate that into the formal-structural
problems in written texts, their writing will take on the richness
and depth that we seek.
(continued...)
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