Free A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric by Richard Andrews

prescient in terms of a rhetorical conception of English studies.
The Work of James Moffett
    The revival in interest in rhetoric the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is perhaps the result of a number of converging vectors: the need for an overarching theory of English studies, embracing fiction, documentary texts, multimodality, and the politicization of discourse; the weakness of “English” in the face of right-wing criticisms and the “back to basics” movement; the confusing conflation of English as a school subject, university discipline, world language, and nationality; and a desire to relate communication studies in general to the long tradition that goes back to pre-Athenian democracy in Europe, rather than see “English” as the derivation of a nineteenth-century split between language and literature studies.
    The work of James Moffett (1983), operating within the American tradition, may not have experienced such a sense of a split in English to the same extent. His work certainly sits squarely within a long rhetorical tradition. Much of the rest of the present chapter will be devoted to a consideration of his work and its relevance to the thesis of the book overall.
    Ostensibly,
Teaching the Universe of Discourse
(1968) was written as a reaction to the “arhetorical” practice, as Moffett saw it at the time, of sentence combining and embedding. Although sentence combining and embedding were themselves part of a 1960s reaction to the formal teaching of sentence grammar (and have continued as practices up to the present—see Abrahamson 1977; Combs 1976, 1977; Lawlor 1980; Ney 1980; and Stewart 1979 for research on the efficacy of sentence combining; plus more recent systematic reviews by Andrews, Torgerson, Beverton, Locke et al. 2004 and Andrews, Torgerson, Beverton, Freeman, et al. 2004), Moffett bracketed them with decontextualized exercises that had little to do with composition for specific purposes. So the very inception of Moffett's project was, by definition, rhetorical. He wanted to situate English within the tradition of the arts of discourse with their emphasis on function (why), motivation (who), the audience (for whom), the substance of the communication (what), and the techniques available to make that communication successful (how).
    The use of the term
discourse
also made it clear that this book was more than a commentary or a prospectus on English as a school subject. In fact, the acknowledgement comes early on in the book that “some ultimate context or super-structure is exactly what English as a school subject has always lacked” (3). For “context or super-structure” we could substitute the term
theory
. But Moffett, with characteristic diffidence and modesty, holds back from calling his project a theory: “you are advised not so much to believe these ideas as to utilize them” (v). However, the book could have been subtitled “notes towards a theory of English” because that is exactly the function it fulfils and has fulfilled since its publication in 1968. Despite the fact that Moffett states that he wanted to “recast into the psychological terms of human growth those familiar but opaque academic elements such as rhetoric, logic, grammar and literary technique” (vii), the project as a whole seems avowedly rhetorical in nature. “Discourse” for Moffett means exchange, conversation, dialogue—in print and action as well as in speech—and the “universe of discourse” is the range of communication in action in the real world as well as in the simulated (but also real-world) space of the English classroom.
    Another point of reference for the Moffett project is the relationship between teaching the universe of discourse on the one hand, and literature teaching on the other. In the Foreword to the 1983 re-issue of the book, Moffett defends his apparent exclusion of literature from the original 1968 conception. He declares, “I unwittingly threw off some