A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric

A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric

Richard Andrews

First published 2014

by Routledge

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Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A theory of contemporary rhetoric / edited by Richard Andrews.

pages cm

I. Rhetoric. I. Andrews, Richard, 1953 April I — editor of compilation.

P301.T48 2014

808—dc23

2013025572

ISBN: 978-0-415-50355-6 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-12902-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

No book on the communication arts can be the work of a single author, and I wish to acknowledge the voices and influences that have helped me to forge the present book. These include my Linguistics tutor at Oxford, Avril Bruton, whose weekly one-to-one sessions gave me an insight into the discipline that was so different, and yet so closely related to the literary studies that took up the rest of my week; Gunther Kress, whose generosity in recognizing the closeness of rhetoric to his own project of the exploration of multimodality and social semiotics has been a lasting inspiration; Paul Prior, whose work on rethinking rhetoric has been a great influence; and Brian Street, Viv Ellis, Wayne Sawyer, Terry Locke, Terry Eagleton, Lilie Chouliaraki, Myrrh Domingo, Sally Mitchell, Mark Reid, Peter Medway, Michael Simons, and Jude Fransman have all contributed in their different ways. I am grateful to Clifford Siskin and Leslie Santee Siskin of New York University for their generosity in involving me in The Re:Enlightenment Project; to David Kirkland of New York University for a public lecture at the Institute of Education London in May 2012 and conversations at the Institute of Contemporary Arts about rhythms of justice in hip hop and everyday textual practices; to Stephen Boyd Davis and Martina Margetts at the Royal College of Art, London, for organizing the symposium “Representing Research Knowledge” in February 2012; and to my fellow presenters: Mine Dogantan-Dack, Anna-Marjatta Milsom, and Michael Hohl.

Colleagues at the Institute of Education continue to provide a climate for learning and intellectual exploration: Carey Jewitt and Andrew Burn in the fields of new technologies and media in relation to rhetoric; colleagues in English and Drama, including John Yandell, Anton Franks (now The University of Nottingham), Gillian Anderson, Anne Turvey, Morlette Lindsay, and Theo Bryer; those in English as a second and world language: John O'Regan, Siân Preece, Amos Paran, Catherine Wallace, John Gray, and Lin Pan; support at senior levels especially from Chris Husbands, Michael Reiss, and Mary Stiasny; colleagues at the Centre
for Holocaust Education (Stuart Foster, Kay Andrews, Paul Sammons, et al.); the Centre for Research and Evaluation in Muslim Education (Farid Panjwani, Idris Mears, Farah Ahmed, Ibrahim Lawson, Arshad Ali, et al.); the International Centre for Intercultural Studies (Jagdish Gundara, Jack Peffers, and Bob Ferguson); heads of department in Sue Rogers, Jacek Brant, Ann Phoenix, Marjorie Smith, and David Gough; and the Centre for Research and Development in Catholic Education (Gerard Grace, et al.); as well as colleagues at the Institute of Ismaili Studies, especially Fayyaz Vellani, for illuminating conversations about the relationship of discourse to faith, civilization, and culture. I wish to thank particularly Julia Douetil for commissioning the sonnets on reading that appear in
chapter 9
. Colleagues at New York University's Steinhardt School have been an inspiration, too: Mary Brabeck, Jim Fraser, Gordon Pradl, and Joe Salvatore. I would also like to thank Manjit Benning, Sarah Smith, Rachel Shaw, and Eve Wade who, through their diligence, hard work, and unerring support, have enabled me to work on this book during my tenure as Dean.

I am grateful to Tony Burgess, Jane Miller, Wayne Sawyer, and the editors of the journal
Changing English
for permission to reproduce and rework “Moffett and Rhetoric” in
chapter 3
from volume 17:3, 251–60 (September 2010); and to Geoff Barton, Geoff Dean, and Gary Snapper for permission to revise a short contribution to a special issue of English
Drama
Media
on the future of English (June 2011), issue 20, p. 17.

An earlier version of
chapter 8
on multilingualism and rhetoric was given as a paper at the 4th Institute of Education-Beijing Normal University conference on education in Beijing, October 2012. It appeared in the conference papers:
Papers on Equity and Quality in Education
, Vol. 3, 419–35. I wish to acknowledge Yan Fei, Pan Zimeng, and Jin Tinghe, as well as the doctoral students named in the chapter, for allowing me to use their work.

Part of the chapter on framing was written in Cannes in 2012 at the summer home of Nicky Stanley, in Théoule-sur-Mer. Thanks go to her generosity for giving Dodi and me a few inspirational days there as a break from London.
Chapters 5
and
10
were written in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. My debt to Dodi Beardshaw, David Andrews, Zoë Briggs, and Grace Andrews remains huge.

Parts of
chapters 6
and
13
appeared in the inaugural lecture series published by IOE Press. I am grateful to Jim Collins and IOE Press for permission to reprint extracts from that lecture.

Chapters 11
and
12
owe much to colleagues in the Centre for Multimodal Research at the Institute of Education: Gunther Kress, Carey Jewitt, Andrew Burn, Caroline Pelletier, Di Mavers, Jeff Bezemer, Myrrh Domingo, and Sophia Diamantopoulou; and also to a seminar held at the Institute in December 2011, led by Caroline Haythornthwaite. In
particular, I wish to acknowledge the generous input of Mary Hamilton, Lesley Gourlay, Rose Luckin, Mary Lea, Robin Goodfellow, David Barton, and Chris Jones for helping me move to a notion of textual practices as a way forward for thinking about literacy/literacies. I have also had engaging discussions with Marianne Lagrange at Sage, London, on transformations in the world of publishing and am grateful to her for her generosity and support.

The book draws on a number of research projects:

Arts Council/Photographers' Gallery/Artec grant for photography and digita2 arts in the curriculum, 1994–7

Arts Council grant to establish fellowship in “Framing Visual and Verbal Experience,” 1995

Arts Council grant for visual literacy research, May 1997

Arts Council/Institute for International Visual Arts grant, July 1997

Economic and Social Research Council, Research Seminars competition: Dialogue and Communities of Enquiry in Elearning in Higher Education: June 2004 [award reference: RES-451-26-0314]

Economic and Social Research Council, Research Seminars competition: New forms of doctorate—the influence of multimodality and e-learning on the nature and format of doctoral theses in Education and the social sciences. July 2008 [award reference: RES-451-26-0629]

I wish to thank Linda Bathgate, Naomi Silverman, Kayley Hoffman, and Julia Sammaritano at Routledge New York for their willingness to support this theoretical excursion; to Katie Carney for her excellent project management work; and to Routledge for publishing its precursors:
Argumentation in Higher Education
(2009) and
Reframing Literacy
(2010). Thanks must also go to the publisher for the reissue of Rebirth of
Rhetoric: Essays in Language, Culture and Education
in 2011.

For the purposes of this book, I have defined rhetoric as the
arts of discourse
.

Most of the time we are unconscious of rhetoric. The arts of how to construct speech, writing, painting, sculpture, architecture, and other forms of cultural expression are real, but they are a means to an end: communication. Even the design of a building, or of a bridge, is intended to allow for human traffic and communication. These designs have, as their prime mover, the social: the need for people to communicate with each other, sometimes for its own sake and at other times to make things happen.

The unconsciousness of rhetoric is evident. We talk to each other over breakfast. The social event or
schema
is time-limited, habitual, ritualistic. If we wish to widen the boundaries of rhetoric, we could say that the very layout of the breakfast table is rhetorical. More usually, we would confine rhetoric to the discourses that happen over breakfast: plans for the day, how one felt on getting up, some silences. The exchanges (if there is more than one person) are part of the rhetorical dynamic. If a single person is sitting alone, the rhetorical exchanges may still take place in thought, or even in uttered speech. But there is unlikely to be any conscious shaping of the utterances for particular effect.