Like most everyone else who routinely engages in that singular pedagogical experience called �Fre... more Like most everyone else who routinely engages in that singular pedagogical experience called �Freshman Composition,� I have spent my career searching, quite in vain, for the �perfect� approach to teaching that class. Perfection being, as it is, a hard thing to come by in the dull sublunary realm of academe, I have adopted and abandoned far more freshman �rhetorics� than I can count. My experience having convinced me, argumentum ad ignorantium notwithstanding, that the perfect text simply doesn't exist, I nonetheless concluded years ago that the closest approximation to such perfection lies in the direction of �classical� rhetoric, the classical world being, as it is, the origin of the study of rhetoric. I fail to see how one can teach �rhetoric,� freshman or otherwise, without passing through pedagogical territory first cleared by Aristotle, Quintilian, Erasmus, and the like, any more than one can teach physics without covering the ideas of Galileo, Newton, and Kepler, even if these luminaries are never mentioned by name. So, I wish to teach �classical rhetoric� to my freshmen. But what exactly does that mean? It is, after all, a term that covers quite a lot of ground, and is thus subject to a number of interpretations. As treated by some texts, for instance, it becomes a history or philosophy class, recounting the development of public discourse from antiquity through modern times, and highlighting the theory and practice of such �great men� as Cicero, Socrates, and the Apostle Paul. Other texts adopt a �handbook� approach, treating classical rhetoric as a collection of Greek and Latin terms that, when correctly applied to words, create interesting verbal special effects (e.g., synecdoche, metonymy, anadiplosis, and other such words that fall trippingly from the tongue). For all their virtues as histories or handbooks, however, neither approach is remotely practical as a freshman �rhetoric,� for neither provides students with tools that are transferable even to other college classes, much less to their communication experience outside of academia, and it is, after all, practical tools which the average incoming freshman most needs. The impracticality of most classical rhetoric texts is not merely frustrating to the classically minded freshman comp teacher; it is highly ironic, as well, given the concretely pragmatic nature of classical rhetoric as it was taught in classical times. What I seek for my freshmen is an approach that is genuinely classical in both substance and in spirit. I want a freshman rhetoric that will ground students in the rich 2500-year history of rhetorical theory, yet be as practical and useful to them in their various language �projects,� from history essays, to formal job interviews, to casual conversations, as a 100-piece Black and
... of an h before the pronoun it, although characteristic of some rural Southern dialects, non... more ... of an h before the pronoun it, although characteristic of some rural Southern dialects, nonethe-less strikes the ear of a Southern reader (particularly those of us who live in Appalachia, where hit is a familiar feature on the dialectal landscape) as strangely inauthentic, for even ...
William Faulkner's famously troubled Harvard freshman Quentin Compson has fascinated readers for ... more William Faulkner's famously troubled Harvard freshman Quentin Compson has fascinated readers for decades, due in large part to the simultaneous universality and singularity of his character. Most readers can identify to some extent with his late-adolescent angst, yet at the same time cringe at the suicidal extremes to which he carries it. As his friend Spoade remarks, Quentin may elicit "not only admiration, but horror" (167). Seeking out a source for the precise manifestation of this anguish, however, is a more complex and interesting proposition. One might, of course, look for some autobiographical origin (Spilka 452), with certain aspects of Quentin's character reflecting Faulkner's own personal interests and experiences, but aside from some similarities in geography and temperament, the actual details of Faulkner's life offer little basis for the extremes to which Quentin's misplaced idealism carry him. More fruitful as a possible source for sources is the literary work of other writers, where pathologically hopeless young and mostly male idealists abound. Previously suggested literary models for Faulkner's tortured character include Hamlet's Ophelia (Campbell 53), a character from Balzac's "The Old Maid" (Horton 59), Joyce's Stephen Dedalus (Spilka 454), Doestoevsky's Raskolnikov (Weisgerber 240), and a host of others. To this long list, I'd like to add yet another compelling candidate. The German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann's short story "The Golden Pot" ("Der Goldne Topf ") features a college
Like most everyone else who routinely engages in that singular pedagogical experience called �Fre... more Like most everyone else who routinely engages in that singular pedagogical experience called �Freshman Composition,� I have spent my career searching, quite in vain, for the �perfect� approach to teaching that class. Perfection being, as it is, a hard thing to come by in the dull sublunary realm of academe, I have adopted and abandoned far more freshman �rhetorics� than I can count. My experience having convinced me, argumentum ad ignorantium notwithstanding, that the perfect text simply doesn't exist, I nonetheless concluded years ago that the closest approximation to such perfection lies in the direction of �classical� rhetoric, the classical world being, as it is, the origin of the study of rhetoric. I fail to see how one can teach �rhetoric,� freshman or otherwise, without passing through pedagogical territory first cleared by Aristotle, Quintilian, Erasmus, and the like, any more than one can teach physics without covering the ideas of Galileo, Newton, and Kepler, even if these luminaries are never mentioned by name. So, I wish to teach �classical rhetoric� to my freshmen. But what exactly does that mean? It is, after all, a term that covers quite a lot of ground, and is thus subject to a number of interpretations. As treated by some texts, for instance, it becomes a history or philosophy class, recounting the development of public discourse from antiquity through modern times, and highlighting the theory and practice of such �great men� as Cicero, Socrates, and the Apostle Paul. Other texts adopt a �handbook� approach, treating classical rhetoric as a collection of Greek and Latin terms that, when correctly applied to words, create interesting verbal special effects (e.g., synecdoche, metonymy, anadiplosis, and other such words that fall trippingly from the tongue). For all their virtues as histories or handbooks, however, neither approach is remotely practical as a freshman �rhetoric,� for neither provides students with tools that are transferable even to other college classes, much less to their communication experience outside of academia, and it is, after all, practical tools which the average incoming freshman most needs. The impracticality of most classical rhetoric texts is not merely frustrating to the classically minded freshman comp teacher; it is highly ironic, as well, given the concretely pragmatic nature of classical rhetoric as it was taught in classical times. What I seek for my freshmen is an approach that is genuinely classical in both substance and in spirit. I want a freshman rhetoric that will ground students in the rich 2500-year history of rhetorical theory, yet be as practical and useful to them in their various language �projects,� from history essays, to formal job interviews, to casual conversations, as a 100-piece Black and
... of an h before the pronoun it, although characteristic of some rural Southern dialects, non... more ... of an h before the pronoun it, although characteristic of some rural Southern dialects, nonethe-less strikes the ear of a Southern reader (particularly those of us who live in Appalachia, where hit is a familiar feature on the dialectal landscape) as strangely inauthentic, for even ...
William Faulkner's famously troubled Harvard freshman Quentin Compson has fascinated readers for ... more William Faulkner's famously troubled Harvard freshman Quentin Compson has fascinated readers for decades, due in large part to the simultaneous universality and singularity of his character. Most readers can identify to some extent with his late-adolescent angst, yet at the same time cringe at the suicidal extremes to which he carries it. As his friend Spoade remarks, Quentin may elicit "not only admiration, but horror" (167). Seeking out a source for the precise manifestation of this anguish, however, is a more complex and interesting proposition. One might, of course, look for some autobiographical origin (Spilka 452), with certain aspects of Quentin's character reflecting Faulkner's own personal interests and experiences, but aside from some similarities in geography and temperament, the actual details of Faulkner's life offer little basis for the extremes to which Quentin's misplaced idealism carry him. More fruitful as a possible source for sources is the literary work of other writers, where pathologically hopeless young and mostly male idealists abound. Previously suggested literary models for Faulkner's tortured character include Hamlet's Ophelia (Campbell 53), a character from Balzac's "The Old Maid" (Horton 59), Joyce's Stephen Dedalus (Spilka 454), Doestoevsky's Raskolnikov (Weisgerber 240), and a host of others. To this long list, I'd like to add yet another compelling candidate. The German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann's short story "The Golden Pot" ("Der Goldne Topf ") features a college
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