William A. Covino

Rhetorical pedagogy emerges as a reaction to Expressivist Pedagogy in the 1970s, and the pedagogy posits “self-expressive writing as an unfortunate constraint upon the range of discourses available to student writers” (37). Rhetorical pedagogy uses an historical approach to rhetoric in order to account for many and often diverse purposes of rhetoric, contingent upon “situations and circumstances.” Rhetorical pedagogy, in addition to reinforcing its teaching through historical review, has, over time, undergone revisions to account for feminist and cultural pedagogies which assert rhetorical history as dominated by Western ideals and white males. Finally, rhetorical pedagogy “consists in both more deliberate attention to the history of rhetoric and the acknowledgment that ‘rhetoric’ names a complex set of factors that affect the production and interpretation of texts” (39).

An historical survey of rhetoric prizes the following:

• Sophists: human knowledge as limited and plastic; truth as contingent
• Plato (Socrates): suspect of ideal truth; ethical idealism
• Aristotle: definition of invention (”available means of persuasion”); ethos, pathos, logos; truth as contingent and relativistic; enthymene; contemporary pedagogical turn from reader-based to writer-based emphasis or process over product
• Quintilian/Roman: schematized discourse (Precept, Imitation, Composition Exercise, Declamation, Sequencing)
• Current-Traditional:failure of objectivity, Cartesian rationality, detachment to perceive world in flux; style and delivery; unity, coherence correctness; modes (narration, description, exposition, argumentation
• Twentieth Century: Richards-misunderstandings and remedies; K. Burke-Act, Agent, Scene, Agency, Purpose; Eagleton-psychoanalytic-text as tied to social relations; “good reasons”-”art of discovering and sharing warrantable assertions”; scientific-language as reality-generating/mismatch b/w constructed & actual experience; rhetoric-as-everything; rhetoric as energy attending communication

Despite all these historical contention, rhetoric will never have a settled, definitive definition. It is better to assert rhetoric is “dynamic and interested.” Dynamism refers to shifting contexts and specific circumstances in defining the rhetorical situation and interested suggests “discourse [as it] indicates motives and desires” (48).

Rhetoric is currently undergoing a feminist and cultural/Postcolonial revision, as its history has been Anglocentric and male. Yet, can rhetorical pedagogy as a varied, historical and expansive model survive in an academy that values formulaic learning?