Free A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric by Richard Andrews Page A

readers who did not recognize just how much in fact I was dealing with literature or how dear it was to me, so different did it appear to them in the greatly expanded context of the
total
universe of discourse … perhaps I should have indulged myself more” (vii). Again, what Moffett was reacting to in the 1960s was
too
close an association of literature and rhetoric, characterized, for example, by Grierson's (1945)
Rhetoric and English Composition
, which, although it drew the distinction between rhetoric and persuasion (thus distinguishing itself from the Aristotelian position of rhetoric as the “art of persuasion” and re-broadening rhetoric to include informational, descriptive, and creative writing
and
speech), came across as a mini-treatise and argument for
literary stylistics.
In Harold Rosen's copy of Grierson, he has annotated in pencil the point where Grierson recites the what, who, to whom, where, why, and how questions. 1 Rosen seemingly distanced himself, as Moffett also seems to have done, from the over-literary sensibility, associated with prestige and an élitist take on culture.
    Finally, although rhetoric had been revived in the United States through the work of Burke (1966, 1969), Booth (1961), and Corbett (1998), the audience for these works was largely in higher education. In Burke's case, the arguments were made for rhetoric as symbolic action; in Booth's, for an understanding of narrative as rhetoric in literary studies; and inCorbett's, as a primer in classical rhetoric for undergraduate students' composition.
    In summary, then, as a starting position for what Moffett was trying to do in 1968, we can say that he was running against currents of the time that were emphasizing either expressive or literary or technical approaches to English teaching and that his effort was to find new ground for the construction of the beginnings of a theory of
school
English, based on human intellectual, cognitive, emotional growth and on a broader, more contemporary, more generous sense of rhetoric than had been current.
To What Degree is Moffett's a
Rhetorical
Model?
    It should be clear from the opening of this chapter that by
rhetorical
I mean “pertaining to rhetoric” in the positive sense, rather than suggesting that Moffett's position is the result of posturing, or that the “model” is itself mere gestural politics within the English field. The source of Moffett's reflections on language development is deeply rhetorical in that it establishes “the ultimate context of somebody-talking-to-somebody-else-about-something” (5) as a level at which it is necessary to make sense of discourses within the English classroom. While it may not have been until 1971 and Kinneavy's attempt, in
A Theory of Discourse
, to establish the approach as theoretical, it is Moffett's achievement to have provided the basis for such a theory.
    If “somebody-talking-to-somebody-else-about-something” is the
sine qua non
of discourse, its definition is “any piece of verbalisation complete for its original purpose” (10–11). The nub of Moffett's model then follows: “What creates different kinds of discourse are shifts in the relations among persons—increasing rhetorical distance between speaker and listener, and increasing abstractive altitude between the raw matter of some subject and the speaker's symbolization of it” (11). At the heart of the rhetorical model, then, is dialogue (the word derives from the Greek meaning
through
the spoken word, rather than two people speaking). In most cases, the dialogue does involve two or more people, and this is the way Moffett interprets it. In fact, for Moffett, the existence of two or more people in dialogue is the starting point for discourse: the formulaic version is more accurately “somebody-talking-
with
-somebody-else-about-something.” It is this move to the dialogic (in the contemporary sense of that term) that is at the core of Moffett's conception and use of