A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (9 page)

and sequence of the different categories; but their mutual relationship needs to be represented by such a depiction.

The advantage of the two-way depiction, with the notion of “what is happening” as the basis of the relationship, is not only that various elements of Moffett's emerging theory are brought together, but also that the pattern as a whole, at the whole-text or whole-discourse level at which it operates, is revealed as rhetorical in the positive sense. We must assume a dimension in which the audience is present in every engagement, whether manifested in other people or in terms of an interior dialogue. What is evident, once we have assumed this dialogic dimension, is that “something of every level is found at every other level,” and “likewise, the three main logics—chronology, analogy and tautology—operate at every level” (48). What is more, the fictive dimension (yet another dimension that does not appear in
Table 3.1
) is a matter of distance, too—not of abstraction and generalization, but of degrees of distance from the perceived world (see Pavel 1986). We had to wait until the mid-1980s to have Pavel's full articulation of the degrees of distance in fictional theory to understand the “mythic” dimension that Moffett refers to (48) but does not fully explore.

Part of the limitation that results from a tendency to adopt Piaget rather than Vygotsky is an underestimate, in Moffett's conception, of the powers and discourse faculties of younger children. The often-quoted statement that “whereas adults differentiate their thought into specialized kinds of discourse such as narrative, generalization and theory,
children must for a long time make narrative do for all
” (49, my italics) seems, in retrospect, contradictory and illogical in a model that posits the notion that “something of every level is found at every other level” (48)—and yet we must remember that Moffett's is a model of growth combined with a rhetorical model of the arts of discourse. He builds in a developmental sequence that is flexible, as in the refinements of neo-Piagetians; and, of course, there is the disclaimer that “this whole theory of discourse is essentially an hallucination” and “heaven forbid that it should be translated directly into syllabi and packages of serial textbooks” (54)—which, ironically, it was, in Moffett and Wagner's
A Student-Centered Language Arts Curriculum, Grades K-12: A Handbook for Teachers
(1991), a “companion volume” that was written alongside
Teaching the Universe of Discourse.

So, to what degree does Moffett's work constitute a rhetorical model? The answer appears to be that it is a hybrid—part-psychological, part-rhetorical, but ultimately a series of reflections that can act as the spur to an imaginative, coherent, and engaging curriculum for young people and for teachers designing the best kinds of learning opportunities for them.

What is distinctive and original about the core of Moffett's book is that he posits drama and speech—what is happening—as “central to a language curriculum” (60). This would not be news to the long tradition of rhetoric, which had its (Western, at least) origins in pre-Athenian public speech and drama. But it
is
news to the hundred years of Scottish and American tradition for which Bain (1871) strikes the keynote at the time when the tradition in England was abandoning rhetoric for the study of literature (and thus leading to an unhealthy split between literature and language study). Bain's categories of narrative, argument, and description
in writing
have formed the template for successive curriculum formations in English, right up to the present. Yet again, the emphasis on speech and drama at the heart of the English project would not be news to those who were advocating speech in the 1950s and 1960s in England (see Hard-castle et al., in press) and who helped to transform, gradually, primary and secondary classrooms into places where talk was valued as a means to learning.

The case for drama is well made by Moffett: in essence, it is primitive, accessible, the “first … verbal art to come into being” (64). What is not fully acknowledged is that it is highly framed. Despite its connections with play, drama is one of the arts of discourse that is consciously framed; and framing is a key act in rhetoric. It might be said to be the agent of rhetoric in that without framing, there is no meaning. Let us reveal this connection between framing, rhetoric, and drama more slowly, and then come back to the place of drama in Moffett's universe of discourse. It is clear that framing operates in theatre: there is an edge between the performance by the actors and the space in which the audience sits or stands. That line or frame can be transgressed, but the transgression, for whatever function, is always consciously made. There is also framing in time in that a play lasts for a particular amount of time, during which there is a suspension of disbelief (unless you are watching Brecht or Brechtian-style theatre) or, more positively, a willingness on the part of the audience to engage with the fiction. So formal theatre is highly framed in space and time, and also institutionally in that it involves going to a theatre; it is a social occasion. But even informal theatre, carried out on a street or in a small show by children for parents and friends (and thus close to play) is framed by space and time. There may not be a curtain or even a line on the ground, but the performance is separate from the current of everyday life and demands a different kind of attention. See
chapter 7
for further exploration of framing in rhetoric.

The point about this diversion into drama and rhetoric is that Moffett's conception is deeply rhetorical in the sense that dialogue and exchange are at the heart of the English project, but the additional dimension or act
of framing is underplayed by Moffett. It would fit well with his overall conception, but, like much of the book, the ideas flow sequentially but not always systematically.

Another connection between the conception of speech and drama at the center of English activity is Moffett's statement “I am asking the reader to associate dialogue with dialectic” (82). Bypassing the nuances and complexities of the etymologies here, the connection between dialogue in everyday discourse and the oppositional, ideological dimensions of dialectic is an important one in terms of abstraction, and specifically with regard to argumentation (which, as a mode of operation in a rationalist universe, is closely allied to the rhetoric of persuasion, but also of clarification, defense, exposition, and delight). What Moffett is implying, I think, is that everyday exchanges, however seemingly insignificant, are indicative of larger dialectical moves: the to-ing and fro-ing of everyday exchange is like the puntal and contrapuntal rhythms of dialectic. Moffett does not expand on this connection, but it is fairly clear that everyday speech has all the hallmarks of drama and dialectic in more consciously framed worlds: the dramatic/dialectic level informs everyday speech and provides the humanist framework within which discourse operates. From thence, the natural curriculum movement is from dialogue to vocal monologue to written monologue and then on to the other forms of written discourse. In English curricular terms, it makes sense, is exciting, and is difficult, for students to make those transitions. In cognitive psychological terms, the sequence is Vygotskian. In rhetorical terms, the addition of speech and drama to the panoply of written forms that derive from Bain—and the demonstration of the connection of speech and drama to those written forms—is a brilliant move that reconnects “English” to the rhetorical tradition, remaking rhetoric for the needs of the contemporary English classroom.

Embedded (a key term for Moffett, even though he was reacting against sentence combining and embedding) in the chapter on drama and speech is a section on “Rhetoric.” At first, Moffett seems to see rhetoric as “the ways in which a person attempts to act on another” (115). It appears that he thinks that “the tremendously important art of manipulating other people”—let's call this, less negatively,
persuasion
—“is the genesis of rhetoric” (115). But as the argument progresses, it becomes clear that rhetoric is seen as a verbal and nonverbal means of exchange and making things happen in the world: “acting on others through words is merely one aspect of the larger rhetoric of behaviour” (115). What is contemporary about this conception of rhetoric is that it acknowledges the multimodal. Speech and writing (the verbal modes) are seen as mixing
with other behavior or modes, and only later are they separated out to be taught as individual and seemingly distinct arts. So in drama, Moffett sees rhetoric in action: a rhetoric of persuasion. Such a conception of rhetoric is Aristotelian (“the art of persuasion”), which tends to put emphasis on one of the specific functions of rhetoric rather than on its myriad forms. If we adjust the notion of persuasion to include a wider range of communicative functions (entertainment, description, exchange, etc.), we could recast rhetoric as the “arts of discourse” and thus marry Moffett's conception of the centrality of speech and drama more happily to his conception of rhetoric … and indeed to the tenor of the book as a whole, with its emphasis on the “world of discourse.” One of the key links that Moffett makes, however, is to suggest that the seemingly distinct written forms in the English curriculum are all intimately related to the basic spoken and dramatic forms and motivations. The following passage crystallizes the argument:

Although we enter school already with a rhetoric, it is of course naïve and drastically inadequate to later communication needs. The function of the school is to extend the rhetorical repertory and to bind messages so tightly to message senders that this relation will not be lost in transferring it to the page. What is too obvious to notice in conversation must be raised to a level of operational awareness that will permit this transfer. (116)

Moffett also, by “binding messages to message senders,” re-emphasizes one of the main unspoken themes of his book: that there needed to be a rebalancing of the productive arts (speaking, writing, making) with the receptive ones (reading, listening). It is likely, in the literary-influenced English curriculum of the first part of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, that the productions of school children might always seem second best to those of published “writers” and that the culture is one of deference rather than of coproduction. We still suffer such a deferential curriculum and set of practices now: reading gets more research and policy attention than writing; English teachers are trained by their degrees as advanced readers but not as advanced writers; and even in the age of Web 3.0 and beyond, the authority of the teacher is deemed greater than that of the learner. There is thus a politics of the English curriculum and its relative balances that is implied by Moffett's book, but not fully made explicit. The nearest we come to it is in the wonderful paragraph at the end of the chapter on drama, in the section titled “The Drama of the Classroom,” which focuses on pedagogy:

Instead of creating constant tension between the social motives of the student and his own motive to teach the ‘subject’, the teacher would
do better to acknowledge that his [sic] own intellectual pursuits are framed by dramatic relations between him and the world, and to recognize that this must be true for his students as well. Since discourse is ultimately social in origin and function, it seems a shame to fight those forces that could be put to such excellent use in teaching the subject. (119)

For social and dramatic, we could use the term
rhetorical
, as long as we recognize that the rhetorical is intimately tied up with power and thus, more broadly, the political. This “broader discursive context” (186), which Moffett argues is necessary to put the sentence in its place and for the development of narrative in the English curriculum, is the underlying thesis on which the book is based. This thesis is the beginning of a “global rationale” for English, “the lack [of which] has obstructed the alignment of means and ends and obscured the unity of the field” (211). In relation to the teaching of writing, Moffett advocates an environment in which writing is seen like speech, as a dialogic exchange within and beyond the classroom, largely between the teacher and his or her pupils, but also with wider communities and audiences. The alignment of writing with speech and drama gives it significance and function, even within the simulated spaces of the classroom. Although the answer to Moffett's call on the teaching of writing came partly from the creation of the National Writing Project in the United States in the early 1970s, with its emphasis on building up the confidence and repertoire of teachers in writing, there is still a long way to go in persuading authorities, at least in England, that developing teachers as writers is key to improving the quality of students' writing (see Andrews 2008a).

Moffett's focus on discourse and rhetoric is one way of working toward a global rationale for English as a school subject (and indeed, English as a university discipline). The twenty-first-century interest in rhetoric, as discussed by Green (2006), for example, echoes much of what Moffett was proposing. As noted previously, Moffett is characteristically modest about the scope of his argument; that modesty, with its eye very firmly on practice and possibilities in the classroom, is partly what makes the propositions attractive and usable. And yet a global rationale
is
needed for the epistemological, social, and pedagogical practices that constitute “English,” which continues to fissure as a subject and discipline. Such a rationale is needed because (a) we are literally now experiencing global awareness under the heading “English,” which covers a wide range of practices and orientations; (b) “English” seems a misnomer for much of what goes on under its name; (c) multilingualism is the norm worldwide;
and (d) drama, media work, and multimodal perspectives all sit under the umbrella term. As Green (2006) suggests, neither “literacy” nor “new literacies” are the terms under which the range of practices can gather. Partly this is because these terms have been asked to do too much. Instead, he proposes rhetoric “appropriately reworked, as providing a new organising principle for English teaching” (11). That reworking means more than a reworking of classical rhetoric for the present times. Such reworking would need to take into account that making persuasive speeches in public forums is only one small part of what rhetoric might be used for in the twenty-first century; and, furthermore, that the prescriptions, manuals, and
progymnasmata
(exercises in which genres were modeled and then imitated) of Renaissance rhetoric are no longer appropriate.