![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
Debates regarding higher education's relevance and responsiveness to societal exigencies have in the past three decades resulted in the development of programs with leitmotifs such as “service learning,” “problem-based learning,” and “civic engagement” (e.g., “Scholarship on Teaching and Learning,” McNair Scholars, etc.). A recurring theme in these enterprises has been the emphasis on honing students’ capacity for criticism. And while this faculty is valuable, it may be ultimately insufficient for students’ active and productive problem-solving and concrete engagement. Heuristically employing Giambattista Vico's rhetorical pedagogy, this essay investigates a programmatic effort to respond to this overly critical orientation. I explicate a formal parallel between the criticism launched, on one hand, by the Intellectual Entrepreneurship Pre-Graduate School Internship at the University of Texas at Austin against public research universities, specifically the elimination or reduction of structural and instructional ambiguity and prioritizing of criticism, and, on the other hand, by Vico against Cartesian skepticism, specifically the critical teaching methods generated therein. I thus articulate a model of invention as taught through practice, and advocate a pedagogy based on this revitalized invention, demonstrating its utility in students’ realities.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Quarterly Journal of Speech editor Raymie McKerrow, Michael Steudeman for his contributions, and the two anonymous reviewers for their enduring encouragement and constructive suggestions
Notes
1. Library of Congress. “Morrill Act: Primary Documents of American History.” Virtual Programs and Services, Library of Congress; http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Morrill.html.
2. Maxine P. Atkinson, “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Reconceptualizing Scholarship and Transforming the Academy,” Social Forces 79 (2001): 1217–30; Ernest Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997), 1990.
3. In 2010 a summer conference at the University of Puget Sound was entirely devoted to methods for teaching rhetorical criticism. The conference attracted both senior and junior rhetoricians, and generated rich conversations about rhetorical pedagogy, yet precious little time was spent on what might be called a “student turn to the productive.”
4. The Internship is part of Intellectual Entrepreneurship, an inter-collegial consortium of the Colleges of Communication, Liberal Arts, Fine Arts, Natural Sciences, Law, Education, Pharmacy, and the Schools of Information, Engineering, Business, Public Affairs, and Social Work, and in the portfolio of the Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement.
5. Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 41.
6. Maria Goretti, “Vico's Pedagogic Thought and That of Today,” in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), 555, n. 7.
7. Vico, Study Methods, 13. See also Vincent Bevilacqua, “Vico, Rhetorical Humanism, and the Study Methods of Our Time,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58 (1972): 75.
8. Vico, Study Methods, 14.
9. Karl R. Wallace, “Topoi and the Problem of Invention,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58 (1972): 387.
10. Mark Backman, “Introduction,” in Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery, by Richard McKeon (Woodbridge, CT: Oxbow Press, 1987), xxiii.
11. Charles W. Kneupper, “A Modern Theory of Invention,” Communication Education 32 (1983): 46.
12. James Berlin, “The Transformation of Invention in Nineteenth Century American Rhetoric,” The Southern Speech Communication Journal 3 (1981): 293. The belletristic movement, in short, demoted rhetoric to a managerial art of style by “relieving” it of its functions of discovery.
13. Robert L. Scott, James R. Andrews, Howard H. Martin, J. Richard McNally, William F. Nelson, Michael M. Osborn, Arthur L. Smith, and Harold Zyskind, “Report of the Committee on the Nature of Rhetorical Invention,” in The Prospect of Rhetoric: Report of the National Development Project, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 228–36.
14. Louise Wetherbee Phelps, “Institutional Invention: (How) Is It Possible,” in Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, ed. Janet M. Atwill and Janice M. Lauer (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 64.
15. Wetherbee Phelps, 68.
16. Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
17. Burke, 18.
18. Burke, 14.
19. The essays excerpted here are also available at https://webspace.utexas.edu/cherwitz/www/ie/kern.html#pregrad
20. Giambattista Vico, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1944), 132. In his Study Methods Vico discusses the allure of scientific advancements in pharmacology, astronomy and exploration. He writes, “All these things were entirely outside the narrow range of the science of the Ancients; modern science throws a flood of light upon them.” Vico, Study Methods, 10.
21. Rene Descartes, “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences,” in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 3–48; “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 49–108. See also Mikhail Lifshitz, “Giambattista Vico (1668–1744),” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (1948): 396; Michael Mooney, Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 21. Stephen Toulmin argues that the Cartesian program was well-received due to an intellectual climate wracked by political instability and the Thirty Years’ War; “for the time being, that change of attitude—the devaluation of the oral, the particular, the local, the timely, and the concrete—appeared a small price to pay for a formally ‘rational’ theory grounded on abstract, universal, timeless concepts.” Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 75.
22. Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole explicate the Port-Royal Logic, adapting Cartesian ideas into a system predicated on geometric methodology. Logic or the Art of Thinking, trans. Jill Vance Buroker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5. Port-Royal was instrumental in the pedagogical transformation of the Enlightenment. Vico's responses to Rationalist pedagogy often target Arnauld specifically, as when he describes the “pernicious practices” of “introducing philosophy to children barely out of grammar school with the so-called logic ‘of Arnauld,’ full of rigorous judgments concerning matters of the higher sciences, remote from vulgar common sense.” Vico, Autobiography, 123.
23. Mooney, 89.
24. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Translated from the Third Edition (1744), trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961), 381.
25. Lifshitz, 396.
26. Yvon Belaval, “Vico and Anti-Cartesianism,” in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), 79.
27. Vico, Study Methods, 77. See also Arnauld and Nicole, 6.
28. Mooney, 20.
29. Stephen Toulmin, “Descartes in His Time,” in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 125; John D. Schaeffer, Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 160.
30. Vico, Study Methods, 37.
31. Stephen H. Daniel, “The Philosophy of Ingenuity: Vico on Proto-Philosophy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 18 (1985): 238.
32. Vico, Study Methods, 24.
33. Donald Phillip Verene, Vico's Science of Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 219. Linking the concept to metaphor, Vico praises as ingenious “the student's specifically philosophic faculty, i.e., his capacity to perceive the analogies existing between matters lying far apart and, apparently, most dissimilar.” Vico, Study Methods, 24.
34. Mooney, 151.
35. June T. Fox, “Giambattista Vico's Theory of Pedagogy,” British Journal of Educational Studies 20 (1972): 28. Fox suggests that ingenium remains necessary as a source for novel thought and interdisciplinary bridge building: “Without its use and without its cultivation, the domain of the humane studies is scorned, and the significant knowledge which only this domain reveals remains unknown.” 32.
36. Ernesto Grassi, “The Priority of Common Sense and Imagination: Vico's Philosophical Relevance Today,” trans. Azizeh Azodi, in Vico and Humanism: Essays on Vico, Heidegger, and Rhetoric, ed. Donald Phillip Verene (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 30.
37. It is important to note here precisely what the IE Internship is not. First, it is not a recruitment strategy. While the name itself suggests an emphasis on preparation for graduate school, the program is fundamentally inductive; as a result of being encouraged to think critically about their lives and ambitions, many interns ultimately decide against post-graduate study. Second, the Internship is not “service learning.” Explicating the benefits of such programs, Valerie C. McKay and Jeremy Estrella argue that these “present faculty and students with multiple opportunities to communicate about the relationship between course content and community service.” Valerie C. McKay and Jeremy Estrella, “First-Generation Student Success: The Role of Faculty Interaction in Service Learning Courses,” Communication Education 57 (2008): 358. They claim additionally that the advantages of integrating social and academic experiences are particularly significant for first-generation students; thus service learning initiatives buttress ongoing retention efforts in higher education. It is not clear, however, whether McKay and Estrella's study actually “expand[s] on our understanding of social and academic integration” or simply reifies the two as separate concerns (368, emphasis added). What distinguishes the Internship from conventional service learning is that the latter almost inevitably reproduces academe's problematic foundational assumptions; service learning, as the name indeed reflects, remains a product of an institutional tradition that compartmentalizes—classroom learning is different from community service; academic experiences are distinguishable from “real life” experiences. Richard A. Cherwitz and E. Johanna Hartelius, “Making a Great ‘Engaged’ University Requires Rhetoric,” in Fixing the Fragmented Research University: Decentralization with Direction, ed. Joseph Burke (Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing, 2007), 274.
38. Vico, New Science, 266. This passage is central to Vico's contention that Homeric poetry did not stem from one individual, but rather evolved through the poetry of the Greek people themselves: “the Homeric poems, having been regarded as works thrown off by a particular man, a rare and consummate poet, have hitherto concealed from us the history of the natural law of the gentes of Greece.” 274.
39. Vico, Study Methods, 71.
40. Vico, New Science, 124. See also Ernesto Grassi, “Critical Philosophy or Topical Philosophy? Meditations on De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione,” trans. Hayden V. White, in Vico and Humanism: Essays on Vico, Heidegger, and Rhetoric, ed. Donald Phillip Verene (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1990), 9; Mark T. Williams and Theresa Enos, “Vico's Triangular Invention,” in Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, ed. Janet M. Atwill and Janice M. Lauer (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 199.
41. Vincent Bevilacqua, “Vico, ‘Process,’ and the Nature of Rhetorical Investigation: An Epistemological Perspective,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 7 (1974): 168.
42. Bevilacqua, “Vico, Rhetorical Humanism,” 81.
43. See, for example, John Hagaman, “Modern Use of the Progymnasmata in Teaching Rhetorical Invention,” Rhetoric Review 5 (1986): 22–9; Richard L. Larson, “Some Techniques for Teaching Rhetorical Invention,” The Speech Teacher 21 (1972): 303.
44. Carolyn R. Miller, “Aristotle's ‘Special Topics’ in Rhetorical Practice and Pedagogy,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 17 (1987): 64, 65.
45. Walter Jost, “Teaching the Topics: Character, Rhetoric, and Liberal Education,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 21 (1991): 5.
46. Jost, 6.
47. Michael Leff, “Up from Theory: Or I Fought the Topoi and the Topoi Won,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 36 (2006): 208.
48. For example, Joanna Wolfe describes her instructional methods with literature and composition students. The objective reflected in her commentary, which is representative of a common pedagogical design, is to introduce students to disciplinary academic conventions: “The inventional strategies I discuss are meant to help students acquire the rhetorical forms and cultural equipment to communicate their ideas to other members of the discipline.” Joanna Wolfe, “A Method for Teaching Invention in the Gateway Literature Class,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 3 (2003): 402. In short, Wolfe uses specific techniques to teach students the kind of invention that will align them with academic standards. Similarly, Donald Lazare outlines his “theoretical attempt to develop a taxonomy of patterns of political argumentation, as well as a practical attempt to provide students with interpretive heuristics for understanding and evaluating the arguments they encounter every day in media of news, opinion, and entertainment, in peer discussion, and in mass-mediated electoral and legislative politics per se. Donald Lazare, “Invention, Critical Thinking, and the Analysis of Political Rhetoric,” in Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, ed. Janet M. Atwill and Janice M. Lauer (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 133.
49. Jost, 12.
50. J. David Fleming, “Becoming Rhetorical: An Education in the Topics,” in The Realms of Rhetoric: The Prospects for Rhetoric Education, ed. Joseph Petraglia and Deepika Bahri (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 100. Fleming's project aligns with mine: first, he critiques that the rhetorical discipline “sweeps pedagogy under the rug.” J. David Fleming, “The Very Idea of a Progymnasmata,” Rhetoric Review 22 (2003), 113. Second, he urges rhetoricians not to reduce classical pedagogical models to perfunctory exercises, “rudimentary checklists for writing school essays,” (“Becoming Rhetorical,” 94), or “pedantry and busy work.” “The Very Idea,” 113.
51. Barbara Warnick, “Two Systems of Invention: The Topics in the Rhetoric and The New Rhetoric,” in Rereading Aristotle's Rhetoric, ed. Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 108.
52. Zagacki's and Keith's discussion of topical invention and scientific paradigm shifts is here instructive by analogy. They suggest that, while scientific topoi are “requisites for doing science, revealed in the communicative choices and the persuasive tactics employed by scientists,” scientific revolutions are instigated by the innovative manipulation of generally accepted topics, and, in turn, give rise to new topics. Kenneth S. Zagacki and William Keith, “Rhetoric, Topoi, and Scientific Revolutions,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 59–60.
53. Wallace, 394.
54. Carolyn R. Miller, “The Aristotelian Topos: Hunting for Novelty,” in Rereading Aristotle's Rhetoric, ed. Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008),141.
55. Vico, New Science, 74.
56. Verene, Vico's Science, 93.
57. Verene, Vico's Science, 158.
58. Vico, New Science, 49.
59. Jay Satterfield and Frederick J. Antczak, “American Pragmatism and the Public Intellectual: Poetry, Prophecy, and the Process of Invention in Democracy,” in Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, ed. Janet M. Atwill and Janice M. Lauer (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 160.
60. Satterfield and Antczak, 154.
61. Vico, Study Methods, 19.
62. Vico, New Science, 215–16.
63. Isaiah Berlin, “A Note on Vico's Concept of Knowledge,” in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), 375. See also Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 48–52.
64. Nola Heidlebaugh calls this the “phenomenology of the moment: Possibilities are not lying in wait to be found; they are, in fact, made present because of the moment, invented out of the press of counteropinions, time, necessity, and linguistic possibility.” Nola J. Heidlebaugh, “Invention and Public Dialogue: Lessons from Rhetorical Theories,” Communication Theory 18 (2008): 45. Heidlebaugh also notes, “Conceptualized within a rhetoric of the possible, invention is not tied to the actual, the already there; rather, it focuses on the new, the innovative.” 39. Invention is the deliberate process of mining the details of a given situation to discover and utilize inherent potential. In the interns' essays, the link between innovation and possibility is quite evident; the uncertain circumstances of not having precise instruction precede a moment of palpable enthusiasm.
65. Jost, 7.
66. Ramsey Eric Ramsey, “Listening to Heidegger on Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 26 (1993): 266–76.
67. Thomas B. Farrell, “Rhetoric in History as Theory and Praxis: A Blast from the Past,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 41 (2008): 335.
68. Bevilacqua, “Vico, Rhetorical Humanism,” 81.
69. Robert J. Weber, “Toward a Language of Invention and Synthetic Thinking,” Creativity Research Journal 9 (1996): 355.
70. Vico's list of the principles of the New Science illustrates his realization of the formal similarities among popular maxims: “There must in the nature of human institutions be a mental language common to all nations, which uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human social life and expresses it with as many diverse modifications as these same things may have diverse aspects. A proof of this is afforded by proverbs or maxims of vulgar wisdom, in which substantially the same meanings find as many diverse expressions as there are nations ancient and modern.” Vico, New Science, 25; see also 105–6. Note furthermore how Vico synthesizes his observations to discern that disparate early cultures arrived at similar views of divinity: “For the heavens were observed as the aspect of Jove by all the gentile nations the world over, to receive therefrom their laws in the auspices which they considered to be his divine admonishments or commands.” 117. Vico concludes: “From the foregoing we gather that the first laws everywhere were the divine laws of Jove. So ancient in origin is the usage which has come down in the languages of many Christian nations of taking heaven for God.” 117.
71. Wallace, 389.
72. William F. Nelson, “Topoi: Evidence of Human Conceptual Behavior: Philosophy and Rhetoric 2 (1969): 5–6.
73. Michael Leff, “Topical Invention and Metaphoric Interaction,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 48 (1983): 223.
74. Elbert W. Harrington, “A Modern Approach to Invention,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 48 (1962): 375.
75. Wallace, 390.
76. Mark T. Williams and Theresa Enos, “Vico's Triangular Invention,” in Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, ed. Janet M. Atwill and Janice M. Lauer (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 199.
77. Vico, Study Methods, 47.
78. Williams and Enos, 200. Making a similarly hopeful and compelling argument, Johnson and Kasarda claim that “the major advances of the future are more likely to emerge from interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary research within universities—inquiries at the intersections of disciplines—and through interuniversity/private sector knowledge networks of scholars and researchers that span international boundaries.” James H. Johnson Jr. and John D. Kasarda, “Jobs on the Move: Implications for US Higher Education,” Planning for Higher Education 36 (2008): 28.
79. Joshua Gunn, “Refiguring Fantasy: Imagination and Its Decline in US Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 46.
80. Karen Burke LeFevre, Invention as a Social Act (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 34. Erik Juergensmeyer and Thomas Miller illustrate the utility and necessity of social invention in the context of conflict mediation and public deliberation. Specifically they characterize collaborative inquiry among diverse stake-holder communities as a mode of civic engagement. Erik Juergensmeyer and Thomas P. Miller, “Mediating Differences,” in The Public Work of Rhetoric, ed. John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), 232–33.
81. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson, “The Tradition of our Subject,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 17 (1931): 320–29. Hudson's emphasis on the topics, a subject addressed earlier in the essay, illustrates his classical orientation. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson, “Can We Modernize a Theory of Invention?” Quarterly Journal of Speech Education 7 (1921): 325–34.
82. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson, “The Field of Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech Education 9 (1923): 170, 178. See also Everett Hunt's eulogy of his Cornell colleague in “Hoyt Hopewell Hudson,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 31 (1945): 271–74.
83. Everett Lee Hunt, “General Specialists,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 2 (1916): 253–63; “Rhetoric and General Education,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 35 (1949): 275–79; “General Specialists: Fifty Years Later,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 17 (1987): 167–76. For a reception and discussion of Hunt's program, see “A Symposium on Rhetoric and General Education,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 35 (1949): 419–26; “Rhetoric and General Education: A Symposium Continued,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 36 (1950): 1–9. For a treatment of Hudson's and Hunt's collaboration to establish the legitimacy of rhetoric in the Ivy League, see Jim A. Kuypers, “Hoyt Hopewell Hudson's Nuclear Rhetoric,” in 20th Century Roots of Rhetorical Studies, ed. Jim A. Kuypers and Andrew King (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 71–102; Theodore Otto Windt, Jr., Rhetoric as Human Adventure: A Short Biography of Everett Lee Hunt (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1990), 43–90; “Everett Lee Hunt and the Humanistic Spirit of Rhetoric,” in 20th Century Roots of Rhetorical Studies, ed. Jim A. Kuypers and Andrew King (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 1–30.
84. Thomas Sloane, On the Contrary (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 33–47, 278–83.
85. Charles W. Kneupper and Floyd D. Anderson, “Uniting Wisdom and Eloquence: The Need for Rhetorical Invention,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 321.