A long, rambling narrative of my research projects

What follows is, as promised above, a long, rambling narrative of my research interests, as represented in my major projects. If, for whatever reason, you’re interested in the narrative of articles, consult my equally long and rambling narrative of my articles.

[I can’t remember the title of my dissertation] (1985-1987, unpublished and unpublishable)

While teaching argumentation, I became enamored of various pedagogies, theories, and poems that describe ways that people with strikingly different ideas can argue together (Brandt et al, The Craft of Writing; Wayne Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent; Jurgen Habermas, “What is Universal Pragmatics?”; Adrienne Rich, “Transcendental Etudes;” William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”). I came to wonder, for reasons explained elsewhere, how well those methods worked on issues about which there was almost no agreement. Because I had come to realize that environmentalism is a topic where one hits major premises immediately, and where differences in policy preferences result directly from those different premises (basically whether one thinks that humans were given the world to use up or maintain), it seemed to me that applying those various methods of collaboratively conflictual rhetoric to a particularly unproductive environmental debate could point toward how to argue productively under even the most difficult of circumstances. So, I studied the early twentieth century debate over the damming and flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in the Yosemite National Park, hoping to do one of two things: ideally, applying the rhetorical theories would enable me to describe how participants could have achieved a better outcome by using a different approach to rhetoric; at the very least, the rhetorical theories would describe exactly what went wrong and why. While the rhetorical theories helped with the second, they didn’t help with the first. That is, while one could say that John Muir’s preservationist argument was excluded by the instrumental rationality of the conservationists (in Habermas’ terms), or that the debate was skewed by the motivism of dam proponents’ rhetoric (in Booth’s terms), or that preservationists argued on the quality locus and the conservationists on the quantity locus (in Perelman’s terms), none of those descriptions implied recommendations. Muir had an intransigent audience who refused to take him seriously, and none of the approaches to rhetoric really explained how he could have persuaded the intransigent to listen.

Voices in the Wilderness: The Paradox of Puritan Rhetoric (1990-1997, published 1999 U of Alabama P)

For a few years after filing my dissertation, I tried to turn it into a book. I eventually realized it was essentially the kind of magnum opus that takes a scholar a lifetime to write. So, I followed the advice I often gave (and give) my students and I narrowed my focus in order to be able to work in greater detail.

One thing that had struck me in my research on the Hetch Hetchy debate also came up in my teaching: that people often make a virtue of being so intransigent that they are unwilling to listen. And this ethos was often expressed by someone who self-identified as “a voice crying in the wilderness.” So, the obvious logical step was to figure out the history of that concept, at least in American culture. And that led me right back to the seventeenth century New England puritans.

What I discovered was a paradox. The American Puritans are generally credited with founding American democracy yet are also conventionally portrayed as rigid, authoritarian, and repressive. There is something to be said for both views; they were, in many ways, democratic, but, in as many other ways, profoundly hostile to the kind of discourse necessary in democracies. That is, they required and repressed dissent, individualism, open debate, critical thinking, free speech, and skepticism. They criticized and demanded conformity, deference to authority, and respect for tradition.

My goal in the book was to investigate that paradox. I tried to do so with a conceit that didn’t work especially well. I began with a dichotomy that is so pervasive in rhetoric and composition as to be a cliché—between dialogic and monologic approaches to discourse. I then tried to collapse the distinction by showing that the monologic discourse of the puritans actually had dialogic impulses and threads, while the dialogic rhetorics so popular now have moments of monologism.

The Harbrace Sourcebook for Teachers of Writing (1997-1998, published 1998)

Meanwhile, back at the office, I was teaching first year composition (aka “fyc”), teaching people how to teach it, and intermittently directing fyc programs. And I loved it. I never worked out the time management issues of administration—I always felt that directing comp was like standing in a batting cage with the ball machine set maniacally high—but I did love talking to people about their classes. Then, thanks to a very friendly book rep, I had the opportunity to pull together my favorite articles on the teaching of writing and write mini-essays on various topics. While there are serious problems with the end product (having mainly to do with the number of articles that could not be included and the lack of opportunity to revise my mini-essays), the process was fun.

Deliberate Conflict: Models of Democracy and the Teaching of Argument (1997-2002; forthcoming 2004 Southern Illinois U P) This book was also great fun. Returning once more to the question of how to argue productively, I argue (productively, I hope) that many of the arguments in composition about pedagogy are really disagreements about political theory. Thus, for instance, people argue about whether to include personal writing in courses on argumentation because they disagree about whether the ideal democratic public sphere is liberal or deliberative. That latter disagreement is never acknowledged, however, so it can’t be pursued (notice that I say “pursued” and not “resolved”—my hope is to increase, rather than reduce, the number of open disagreements in composition studies.)

I describe six different models of the democratic public sphere, summarize the major controversies regarding each, and briefly note the pedagogical implications. Because the manuscript was way too long (I had to cut over a hundred pages, which was only slightly more painful than simply chopping off fingers would have been), the final version does not talk about pedagogy in as much detail as I would have liked, and Hannah Arendt gets short shrift, but some of that material is finding its way into articles, so perhaps it will all work out.

Tentative title: Les Fleurs du Mal in Antebellum Rhetoric (begun 2001, expected completion 2006)

[I’ll leave this description here, and then put in the description of what the book actually turned into. I think it might be helpful for graduate students-the intended audience of all this blathering–to understand how weird the process of writing a book in terms of how far away you end up from you thought you’d be. With each of my book projects, the final version was what I thought would be one or two chapters, or, in this case, even less.]

When I was working on the Deliberate Conflict book, I came to think that the next book would be a historical study of late eighteenth century philosophies in which I would discuss more and less helpful ways to interweave “pathos” arguments into public argument. As I began to work with material from the late eighteenth century, however, I found antebellum political discourse presented a troubling complication for my argument in Deliberate Conflict.

In that book I came down very hard on the side of agonistic rhetoric, arguing that a democracy of difference (bad term, I know, but accurate) is best served by the anti-foundational, skeptical, contingent, and highly pragmatic approach implicit in agonistic (sometimes called “neo-classical”) rhetoric.

The complication is that the antebellum public sphere was filled with people trained in neo-classical rhetoric, but it didn’t seem to do much good: they couldn’t have a decent argument about slavery. From the early 1830’s (when South Carolina first started threatening secession over the issue) the country was slouching toward war, yet almost all the best minds of at least two generations were spent, not trying to find political solutions to the many obvious problems presented by slavery, but ways to keep the topic off the public agenda.

And the heroes of the piece—ranging from privileged and powerful figures like John Quincy Adams to marginalized and even demonized figures like Angelina Grimke and Frederick Douglass—turn out to be foundationalists. They rejected slavers’ attempt to construct knowledge, define social reality, and control language by insisting upon certain truths: whatever they may claim, and however they may want to see themselves, slavers raped and tortured slaves and broke up slave families whenever it was convenient to do so.

Having just begun on this project, I really don’t know what to make of the complication. I am starting by looking first at the southern rhetorical tradition—what was it? Was it perfectly good rhetoric used in a bad cause? Or was there something about that flowery language use that was actually evil?

And, whether proslavery rhetoric was good or bad, what about the rhetoric of people like Buchanon, Webster, and others whose strategy was to appease slavers? Was their pragmatic approach to discourse something tragic that precluded a political solution to slavery, or something fortunate that happened to postpone the inevitable war until there was adequate political and economic support for the Union forces to win?

Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus [U of Alabama Press, January 2009]

Here are the last three paragraphs of the book:

Slavery was a discursive and ideological construct, as in the often capitalized hypotheticals that people pro- and anti-slavery rhetoric–the Happy Slave, the Woman, the Slaveowner, the sneering overseer, the cunning abolitionist. The relation between this discourse and reality is very hard to describe. There may have been happy slaves, cunning abolitionists (John Brown comes to mind), some overseer may have sneered, and there were women and people who “owned” slaves. In the case of the cunning abolitionist, the rhetoric may have created the reality; in the case of the others, the rhetoric and reality were disconnected (or only randomly connected). In some situations, the rhetoric did correspond to reality, but the wrong one. What I mean is that proslavery rhetors like Duff Green accused others of doing what he was doing (such as engaging in alarmist sectionalism, being fanatical); these accusations were not true of the people whom he accused, but they were true. Proslavery rhetors regularly (and quite successfully) projected their actions onto their opponents.

In some ways, then, the rhetoric was the opposite of reality, but the assertions (that abolition was impossible without race war, for instance) were repeated so often that they came to construct a kind of reality. Inaccurate as a description (or prediction) of history, they were, however, of profound significance, serving as the premise for actions that constituted brute (and sometimes brutal) facts. In other words, like Ayers, Cooper, Freehling, Ratner, Stampp, and others, I am arguing that the Civil War was not economically, militarily, or even politically inevitable, but was the consequence of rhetoric. Rhetoric, instead of opening up options, served to shut them down. Unlike some of these historians, however, I am not arguing that “both sides” were at fault. This was not a case of evenly matched irrationality, or two sides making a fight, or paralleled fanaticism. As in various other cases, the tendency to muddle “fairness” with blaming both parties misleads us. While I think the most useful ways of describing the conflict involve multiple valances (such as the distinction between those who were opposed to slavery in the slave states versus those who were opposed to its spreading), one must, at least, describe three sides in this debate: the oppressors, the resisters, and the compromisers. To hold the resisters responsible for the behavior of the oppressors is to rationalize the oppression. Whether, or how much, the compromisers should be held responsible is something I still don’t know.

I would argue that Ayers’ formulation of the relationship is accurate: “The Civil War was caused neither by the mere existence of slavery nor by the twists and turns of politics, however, but rather by catalysts that emerged in the two or three decades before the war began” (238). Proslavery rhetoric scapegoated abolitionists, and that scapegoating was politically useful, but it was also tragically consequential. Proslavery rhetors succeeded in creating certain consensual understandings of slaves, slavery, race, and abolition. Abolitionists did not promote race war or call for insurrection, and they certainly engaged in rhetoric less personally insulting and irrational than the proslavery rhetors, yet a consensus was created that they behaved badly, thereby provoking slavers who had to defend themselves. The vague hope that a nicer abolitionism would have prevented war is part and parcel of the long tradition of demonizing open conflict, putting the responsibility for conflict on the dissenters who call attention to the injustice, rather than on the people who protect and promote the unjust system. As long as the oppression is grounded in consensus, the conflict will seem to arise the moment someone complains. That the consensus itself was entrenched in conflict is hidden by the curtain of vague hopes about civil social change. The consensus that was achieved by proslavery rhetors was not just about slavery, nor even just about race. It was about manhood, and authority, and education, and political action. It was about authoritarianism, about an authoritarian political and legal structure, and a public discourse of epideictic and war. The extent to which proslavery rhetors succeeded at generating a consensus that the slavery debate was an issue of southern manhood and ingroup loyalty is the extent to which they, and not abolitionists, made war inevitable.

The Erotics of Outrage

I expect to have a full draft of this project in June of 2014. (Which would be a bit of a slowdown for me, but I’d like that.)

In this book, I intend to argue for renewed scholarly attention to the theoretical and practical problem of demagoguery. Demagoguery is a practical problem in that it garners votes and political power; it is effective. It is a theoretical problem for scholars of rhetoric in that trying to articulate definitions of demagoguery seem to fall into either a hyper-rational formalism (so that all emotional appeals are demagogic) or a crude means-end realism (so that demagoguery is effective rhetoric on the part of people whom the critic thinks is really bad). By beginning each chapter with a rhetorical moment that much traditional rhetorical theory has trouble explaining (that is, methods of rhetorical analysis that emphasize the rhetorical triangle), the book will try to explicate moments of troublingly effective hate-mongering.

At this point, I have two chapters drafted. The first indicates my definition of demagoguery, one that relies neither on emotionalism nor populism. The second is an attempt to bring research from social psychology into rhetoric and composition (people in rhetoric and communication are more familiar with this work). Then, I would like a theoretical interlude, discussing people like Agamben, Ober, and Arendt. Then, two more chapters on specific moments, and a theoretical interlude on Habermas and Toulmin. Then the conclusion.

Small Changes: Sources and Resources for Writing Program Administrators (co-edited with Reinhold Hill and Virginia Pompei Jones, begun 2002, expected completion 2003)

[This book project never happened. Presses discovered two things: 1) people in rhet/comp tend not to buy books, and 2) collections don’t sell well. We gave up on it. I’m leaving it here, just so that people know that everyone has really good and valuable projects that fizzle.]

Speaking of misunderstandings, there is another one that interests me. It’s a convention for Directors of Composition to feel that upper administrators are boneheads, and maybe they sometimes are, but that was not the case at U of Missouri. Yet, the compositionists’ interactions with them were often mutually frustrating failures to communicate, yet among people of intelligence and goodwill. Perhaps most frustrating was that the essays, articles, chapters, and position statements that I thought conclusive on various issues were completely meaningless and totally unpersuasive to people outside rhetoric and composition. The challenge of this collection is whether we can put together essays on some of the most important issues in writing program administration that are persuasive to people outside of rhetoric and composition.

Possible future projects

Logic for compositionists

Originally, the Deliberate Conflict book was going to have a chapter or two on logic, but that was necessarily abandoned when it became clear that explaining models of public discourse was complicated enough for two books on its own. The connection between the two topics was simply that I think in both cases discourse in composition studies is hampered by our partial understanding of other fields—and “partial” in both senses of the word.

Just as many disagreements in rhetoric and composition are truncated because we don’t acknowledge (and, quite possibly, are not even aware of) the underlying disagreements about political theory, so they are muckled because of incomplete understandings regarding Reason, reasons, and reasoning.

Much of what we say in articles and textbooks is based on assumptions about reasoning and argument that were either long ago rejected or never even adopted by specialists in logic and argumentation—e.g., the notion that emotions and logic are necessarily opposed, or that the Toulmin model accurately describes argumentation, or that syllogistic reasoning is foundational, or that fallacies are formally different from logically valid arguments, and so on. My hope is not to persuade teachers of argumentation that there is a single model promoted by specialists in logic and argumentation that we should adopt, but, on the contrary, that there are really interesting debates going on in those fields. Incorporating more from those debates might enable us to have some interesting arguments about what we do and should mean by reasons and reasoning.

The Rhetoric of John Quincy Adams

Given the way that the research on antebellum southern rhetoric is going, I may end up writing a book just on the proslavery rhetors and the doughfaces who appeased them without the space to talk about the rhetors like Adams who opposed them. So, if I can’t have a chapter on Adams, I may end up having to do a book about him.

Adams is interesting for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that he is one of a small number of authors of treatises on rhetoric who were also major political figures. Thus, he is both a theorist and practitioner of deliberative rhetoric. That’s interesting, not because it means that his theories are tremendously different from traditional advice (they aren’t), but because one can check his theories against his practice. Adams’ advice is fairly conventional (although I could quibble about just how conventional), so the fact that he sometimes followed it and sometimes didn’t suggests ways that the advice we continue to give should and shouldn’t be followed.

Argumentation Reader

I have no interest in writing a textbook, but I’ve often had people who’ve read my theories about teaching and argument say that they’d like to see more about my practice. What, exactly, would a course that emphasizes agonistic, but not antagonistic, rhetoric look like? Some day I’d like to answer that question by putting together a reader. It would look something like the following (in no particular order):

• Thomas Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence” and John Lind’s “Reply to the Declaration of Independence”
• Federalist and anti-federalist essays on the issue of a standing army
• Thucydides’ “Mytilenian Debate” from History of the Pelopponesian Wars
• Antony’s speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Cicero’s “First Phillipic”
• Conflicting Congressional testimony from hearings on the Internet anti-pornography legislation
• Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and the clergymen’s letter to which he was replying
• The exchange between John Irving and Andrea Dworkin in the book review section of The New York Times
• Selections from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women and Thomas Taylor’s Vindication of the Rights of Brutes
• A selection from Gandhi and Orwell’s essay on Gandhi
• Washington’s speech at Delaware and his speech persuading his soldiers to lay down their arms
• Selections from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (on what the north should do about ex-slaves) and James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village”
• Cicero on exordia
• Selections from various national and international papers on the bombing of the pharmaceutical plant
• Ad for “golden rice” and analysis of statistics
• Various visual images (cartoons and ads) from the William Jennings Bryan presidential campaign