Canon as Palimpsest Composition

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//-->Canon as Palimpsest: CompositionStudies, Genre Theory, and theDiscourses of the HumanitiesDavid BrauerProfession 2005begins with a series of essays titled "The Future of theHumanities." Without exception, the authors contend that literary stud-ies must reaffirm, or in some cases reassert, its connection with the hu-manities in order to retain viability for the foreseeable and distant future inAmerican higher education. In the words of Robert Scholes, the humanitiesserve to "[remind] us that we have a responsibility to the great works ofthe past and to those students who may benefit from coming to know andappreciate them" (9). While they stop short of proclaiming that primarytexts of literature would share the level of "first order discourse" that manyin English Studies afford to theory, these voices insist that the humanitiesmust remain viable in higher education and that we must emphasize themin our scholarship, our teaching, and even in our evaluations for tenureand promotion. They offer no long-term prescriptions as to the curricularor scholarly formulation of the humanities in the contemporary university,but they do set the table for such reflection and discussion.^In this essay I hope to augment the critical reflection on these matterswith a focus on their implications for Composition Studies. Even thoughmany scholars in this field have distanced themselves from literary studies,and not without good rationale and fair-minded intentions, our disciplinemay benefit ñ"om cultivating a relationship with the meta-discipline of thehumanities. When viewed as a set of interacting, historically contexualizeddiscourses, the humanities offers a focus of inquiry that is more broadlycontoured, more open to revision, and more critically accessible than hasbeen recognized by many voices eager for a more autonomous definition ofComposition Studies. Once I have contextualized this point in reference tosome notable voices in the discipline, I will then incorporate genre theory inorder to foster a connection between Composition Studies and the humani-ties. Thus, I hope to answer the call of the essayists mentioned above and inso doing enhance the positions of both fields of academic inquiry.The recent calls for increased pragmatism in pedagogies and curriculumrevision by the likes of Kathleen Blake Yancey and Kurt Spellmeyer wouldseem to offer Composition Studies a decisive identity and direction for futurescholarship and presence in the academy. In her 2004 CCCC Chair Address,Yancey gives most of her attention to what she terms a new "writing pub-lic," a population for whom writing happens primarily outside the academy.Instead of rhetoric, argumentation, or even academic literacy, Yancey offersComposition Smdies37.2 (2009) / ISSN 1534-9322competing definitions of public literacy and the impact of new technolo-gies of writing as the emerging focus for Composition Studies. While herdiscursive context is an academic one, she acknowledges that the writingthat commands the attention of composition professors "seems to operate inan economy driven by use value" (301). She suggests that we adapt to thisnew discursive/linguistic context by changing our curriculum so as to trainstudents to write and translate across multiple mediums, textual, electronic,public, and so on.^ The pragmatism exemplified here would allow the dis-cipline to connect classroom work to real-world emplojmient concerns andwriting contexts, thus signaling a potentially decisive break with both theformalism and modes-based writing pedagogies of an earlier era and theexpressivist pedagogies of recent decades.Yance^s vision offers valuable ways to proliferate the loci of composi-tion studies, and the opportunities articulated in her address offer hope fornew avenues of critical inquiry and pedagogical development. For all of herapparent expansiveness, though, she neglects the aesthetic and imaginativeaspects of rhetorical inquiry and analysis that would complement her morepragmatic ideas. If in fact Composition Studies should pursue a public aca-demic language (see Yancey; Brooks; Gorzelsky), we should remind ourselvesthat the aesthetic offers a meaningful point of entry into the semiotic andepistemological concerns of our discipline. I contend that a renewed focus onthe humanities as a historically situated, rhetorically understood endeavorwould bolster the institutional position and curricular role of CompositionStudies and would provide for a helpful balance to the aforementionedpragmatic turn in much of our scholarship.While many see this turn of events as a welcome liberation from the moreidealistic concerns of literary studies, others have taken note of unintendedconsequences for our profession. In his book Artsof LivingKurt Spellmeyeroffers a wide-ranging analysis of the state of the humanities in the currentacademy.^ He begins his broadly-focused critique by stating the obvious:the humanities finds itself isolated from the activities and concerns of thelarger society (4). Though he mentions the predictable sociological factors,including the rise of technology and the increasing pragmatism of students'attitudes toward higher education, Spellmeyer blames higher education it-self, arguing that "the academic humanities . . . [has created] a specialized,often rarified knowledge that justifies not only the privileged vantage pointof critical judgment, but tenured positions, research stipends, federal grants,and so on" (6). Instead of encouraging a "direct involvement in the makingof culture" (7), the humanities has removed it to a near vanishing point, withunintended consequences for the most basic and most culturally meaningfulpractices of higher education. Rather than empowering students and, byextension, citizens, the humanities too often removes them from creativeand intellectual means of understanding and improving their world.10Composition StudiesIn the concluding pages of his discussion, Spellmeyer attempts tolink Composition to the humanities through a new core curriculum basedon dialogue, creative investigation, and issues in current culture. Whilethese suggestions do help us to consider innovative means to making the .humanities relevant, they lack two key components. Throughout the manypages of a text dedicated to the humanities and its relevance, Spellmeyernever provides a definition of this key term beyond echoing some of thephrasings of Robert Bellah.'' As such, we are to see the humanities as aterm emptied of meaning yet endlessly contested, simultaneously tradi-tional in reflecting our most trite assumptions about it and progressive inits possibilities. He does take a moment to exclaim that[a] s for . . . professors, we continue to believe—or at least to claim—thata knowledge of Plato, a reading of Shakespeare, a brush with current his-toriography, an immersion in possible worlds theory . . . will somehowenable young Americans to make better decisions than if they had morepertinent information at their ready command. As far as I'm concerned,this is the sheerest superstition. (244)Spellmeyer's point here rests upon a relatively clear distinction between ev-eryday (i.e. "pertinent") genres and the humanities, the latter of which is aset of genres deemed too remote or impractical to serve "young Americans."^But this distinction ignores the innately dialogical character of public dis-courses whereby boundaries between "high brow" and "low brow" texts maybe conceptualized but not easily maintained. While knowledge of so-calledclassic texts may often prove too antiseptic and credulous for its own good,Spellmeyer seems quick to jettison certain discourses in favor of others; thus,he evokes a hierarchical conception of cultural knowledge that does not nec-essarily account for the dynamic interplay among aesthetics, rhetoric, andutilitarianism that we recognize in the genres that we use.In a move reminiscent of Gerald Graff and many others who attempt toproperly historicize modern English Studies, Spellmeyer's institutional andintellectual history goes back only to the beginning of the twentieth cen-tury.^ His bias toward the contemporary and the pragmatic reduces context(cultural, institutional, ideological) to the concerns of the moment and to anunforeseeable future, implicitly rendering Composition as a discipline thatis isolated from History and Philosophy rather than open to their influence.In the curriculum that Spellmeyer champions and describes, the coursesare designed not around texts but around "'dialogues/" inquiries based on"the problems that college graduates might be expected to face in the nexttwenty years or so, not as doctors or lawyers or Indian chiefs, but as ordi-nary citizens" (242). Intriguingly, Spellmeyer references a common culturalsubject position, "ordinary citizens," but his strategy begs a question: areordinary citizens (if such a subject position even exists) always informedCanon as Palimpsest 11and determined merely by ordinary, pragmatic discourses in which theyparticipate frequently?^ The dialogues in question seem relatively flexibleand open-ended, but the context and exigencies are thin, driven more bynewspaper headlines than by the interplay of disciplinary inquiry. While hispedagogical vision is attractive, his view of public genres seems narrowlyf^ocused on current, utilitarian discourses.Spellmeyer's attitude toward Plato and Shakespeare is emblematic ofour profession: in spite of our improved status as a discipline, our embeddedsubject position within the academy ensures a tortured relationship with theintellectual and artistic conversations that have defined us and provided uswith cultural capital to this point and will likely continue to do so. ThoughI concur with Louis Menand that we should not use the humanities as ameans of propping up dominant cultural hegemonies (16), I do not agreethat a reinvestigation of the humanities both as an admittedly open canon oftexts and as evolving cultural practice would indicate that we have somehowlost our ideological nerve. Bruce Kimball defines a contemporary academicmanifestation ofartes liberalesas "prescribing the reading of classical textsprimarily in order to develop critical intellect" (219), a definition that doesnot emphasize writing but does generally align with the liberatory pedago-gies of English Studies. Karen Fitts and William Lalicker have called for a"symbiosis" between composition and literature as enabling a "reconstitution"of the curriculum (428). Their scholarship challenges the binary oppositionbetween the twofields,but their focus on disciplinary hierarchies limits theirattention to pedagogy. Building on their argument, though, I look to voicesfrom within the academy but outside the traditional discursiveterra firmaof scholarship in English Studies.Robert Proctor'sDefining the Humanitieshad its initial publication dateover a decade before Spellmeyer'sArts of Living,yet the former anticipatesthe latter and its own internal problems in uncanny ways. Whereas thelatter proves an exercise in epideictic rhetoric, the former offers sustaineddeliberative rhetoric in its most important passages.^ A professor of Italianliterature and language. Proctor begins his text by acknowledging openlywhat traditionalists seem loathe to admit, that the "humanities" as a term hasbeen emptied out, not merely by specialization in the disciplines and persis-tent anxieties about tradition in higher education but also resulting from abreak with the Greco-Roman tradition in the West fomented by Renaissancehumanists. Bruce Kimball argues that the ongoing disagreement about whatconstitutes a humanities-based education stems from a millennia-old conflictbetween orators, who favor education based on its perceived intrinsic value,and philosophers, who favor education based on its perceived use value.'Proctor attempts to break this impasse by offering a realistic accounting ofthe intellectual history of the West that reveals not continuity but disjunction;paradigmatic shifts in epistemological, religious, and cultural assumptions12Composition Studieshave proven the norm over the last two millennia rather than the excep-tion. Rather than imitate conservatives in romanticizing the past or imitateprogressives in relativizing it. Proctor suggests a third possibility:The tradition of classical education, which began in the Renaissance andflourished in Europe and America until the end of the last century, is gonenow. How should we react to the death of this tradition? We can eithermourn it and try to hold on to it, or we can see its passing as a liberationand as an opportunity for us to appropriate the past in new ways. I preferthe latter, (xxviii)Another reprisal of the Great Books approach to general educationpaceAllan Bloom and William Bennett will not do. That approach assumes,quite falsely, that texts from the past speak plainly and unproblematicallyto contemporary readers. Proctor explains: "[The Great Books approach toeducation] encourages students to think that they can read Homer withthe same frame of mind that they read Tolstoy or Shakespeare because allgreat writers, no matter when they lived and wrote, were struggling withthe same basic questions. They weren't" (192). While Proctor ascribes toa predictable reading list as embodjdng the building blocks of a humani-ties canon, he also emphasizes the historicity of texts in ways familiar toscholars in English Studies and Rhetoric and Composition. Proctor seestexts as historically-determined and responsive to exigencies, deriving fromparticular assumptions and serving specific cultural roles. They are not sim-ply declarative or artistic statements to be accepted without question orcritique but are symbolic actions that serve rhetorical and epistemic ends,allowing the audience to negotiate the interplay of mundane, abstract, andeven traumatic experiences.In developing his main critique of contemporary approaches to thehumanities. Proctor asserts that methodology has become an end in itself tosuch a degree that debate over pedagogy has all but eclipsed any sustainedquestions of content choices and textual reception. His solution? Moreattention to hermeneutics, historical context, and the contingent, variantstrategies of approaching the same questions and problems in different eraswill help to provide balance and more imaginative possibilities for researchand pedagogical praxis. Such engagement of a historical and discursiveOther will offer a context for understanding our own hermeneutical idio-syncrasies and blind spotsvis-à-vistexts from the past. In Proctor's words:"The whole point of studying the history of the humanities is to arrive atan understanding of this deterioration which will permit us to see whywe can no longer read and teach the ancients the way our ancestors did"(173). His definition of the liberal arts will likely prove a bit narrow forthose associated with English departments, as he focuses on the works ofGreeks and Romans exclusive of the tradition of literature written in theCanon as Palimpsest 13 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]