THE RHETORIC OF PLEASURE: Prose Style & Today's Composition Classroom

If you haven't heard about this, the information for the National Day of Writing, sponsored by the National Gallery of Writing is here.  Today, October 20, 2009, is the the Opening Day.  In celebration everyone may contribute something of your own to the site.

In my case, I've decided to talk here about a book that not only deals with writing, but about teaching writing, written by our friend (2003; Boynton/Cork Publishers, Portsmouth, New Hampshire).  Among his extensive, hands-on experience with teaching and writing is what he's learned as Director of the Writing Program at Tulane University.  Moreover, he's a very good writer himself, as I can vouch for, having read work of his that is neither academic nor pedagogical.  At the same time, I can also vouch from personal observation the energy and enthusiasm with which he approaches writing and with which he teaches his students to effectively communicate as writers.  His classes are his number one priority.  You know this is true because of  the very many hours he spends on them every week: planning, preparation, reading and critiquing his students' papers, following up on their work, answering their questions, providing advice and assistance that is directed to their individual writing challenges. (There's a reason he's received  numerous teaching awards; he's also passionately involved in the music communities of New Orleans and gives a great deal of time to them, including his own broadcast jazz program, Jazz From the Market, on WWOZ.  He goes to the gymn -- definitely gets away from the desk and out of the office.)

His students have to work equally hard. They write, critique, revise, re-write, constantly. The class isn't about your personal traumas and problems, it isn't about 'self-expression' and it is not journaling.  The class is about your writing problems.  TR's methodology is fairly based on classically tested, effective methodology, i.e. what the Greek Rhetoricians studied, taught and practiced, provides joy, rather than punishment.

A premise of The Rhetoric of Pleasure is that the 60's*** were about "pleasure and the quest for the infinite." As part of the greater dismemberment backlash of everything the "60's" seems to represent for those who prefer a controlled, confined order, our culture was manipulated to value instead, an empty, anxious  super-consumerism. Along the way, shopping and buying replaced "Rhapsode" as the social objective of activity and of discourse.

The foundation of TR's methodology, then, is the long list of the Rhetorcians' pre-Socratic stylistic devices, which his students need to learn. They learn by, first, assigned engagement with 3 - 5 of these devices in their papers, then later in the term, with their own choices of the devices in their papers. He teaches rhetoric as its ancient, original objective: powerful medicine, i.e. magic, healing magic. As illustration he cites Chrysippus, a Stoic, who wrote The Therapeutikon, also known as The Ethikon. This heals the student of her writing incapacity, which leads to effective communication in other modes. In simpler words, the students learn how to say what they want to say so others can understand what they want to say.

From now on this is me speaking, what I thought about while reading TR's book, not necessarily what TR writes or advocates in terms of the classroom. The review linked to above describes TR's methodology and what he advocates with greater expertise, wider experience, than I can.

Most programs designed to teach students the basic competencies employ an industrial methodological approach: a rigid construction of dry concepts without context (raw materials) are drummed into the students (the industrial machinery) to turn out the repetitive, contextless 5 paragraph essay (the product). These students are generally the most unpopular to teach, who have the least contact with their school's English Department's most experienced and passionate lovers of literature and writing, as these students' lack of competencies are judged unworthy, meaning incapable, of such pleasures. Often they are shunted off to the adjuncts and teaching assistants, who in turn, are often the least experienced and skilled in teaching anything, much less what they have been students of so recently themselves.

The Rhetoric of Pleasure advocates a methodology that employs the most elegant, sophisticated thinking and writing devices with the students who have the fewest competencies in writing. Instead of being punished for their lack of perceived compentency, by denial of writing and literary pleasure, they are provided personal, (generative) hands-on experience of the joy, the pleasure of communicating effectively, with writing.  TR gives his students the intellectual respect of expectation that they can learn what he is teaching, and the results of their end-of-term papers show that they do learn it.

Across our national culture, vitality of social discourse has been displaced by ignorant outrage, debasement of language and meanness. This makes communication among diverse groups impossible. The healing magic of language has been leached out by our anxious fixation upon a social status ranked in spiritually valueless buying of things, and that we are falling from our rank on the consumption ladder. There is no pleasure, much less 'there' there.

Our inability to communicate with others pits us all against everyone else. Instead of coming together to practice joy, as in dance, music, language, art, we prefer to come together in hatred directed to some Other – howling at the other candidates in an election campaign, at sports events, chasing down a woman from another 'race,' beating and raping her as a group activity. We have become a nation of two year olds, perpetually frustrated into tantrums because we lack language skills – the very capacity that so many insist is the great divide between souless animals and ourselves, divinely ensouled by god -- that we cannot communicate effectively even with ourselves. We lack the words, the grammar, the devices that basic literacy provides to evaluate or think effectively.  This has been fostered at least since the days of Reagan when the words for offices and jobs officially changed, allowing then, governance by Big Lie effectively to turn government into an oppressive, exploitive force that exists only for the corporations' benefit

Thus students arrive at the university sadly lacking in capacity, and then are punished for not possessing what they've been denied, by college courses designed to make them miserable in course of supposedly being taught 'to write.' Kind of like Lou Dobbs theory of parenting: beat the child until the child submits, i.e. until the student produces a 5 paragraph essay repetitively signifying nothing but an arbitrary minimum of spelling and grammar errors, with a thesis sentence and concluding sentence. Anyone (like me) who has had to read and grade these end of term essays knows this means punishing the reader equally with the student.

Beyond this, professional writers, with fiction or non-fiction, will find from TR's book useful and fresh ways of thinking about their own work.  Though the book deals seriously with the many theoretical designs popular among teachers of literature and writing, the author knows these theories so well that he can play with them, and we play with him. The parts of it that deal with language as healing medicine will be particularly interesting for writers whose mode invokes that transcendent, the Romantic, the Fantastic.

Words in intentional form can create two different kinds of language magic, generative or arrested magic. These two forms of language magic are in oppositional and complementary relationship.  At this time we as a national people have lost both forms of language magic.

Arrested magic is static and rote learned; it is not of the person, but from outside. Arrested magics are of the community; within them reside cultural identity, its persistence and transmission through a community's generations.  Examples of arrested healing language are community verbal charms, prayers, incantations, scriptual snippits worn as amulets and charms, eaten, hung on doorways.

Generative magic comes from within the individual, is controlled and directed by the individual purpose. It creates, it moves both the practicioner and the world around her.  These are what enrich the great trove of a community's language and culture, which keep it vital, growing and changing in a healthy manner.  Examples of generative healing magic are sacred songs and chants created by the individual healer or patient.

Anyone who has experienced a healing from a long illness knows there is no joy like this, a return from our exile as a member of the large community of friends, family, work, the world. Someone who has not been able to write effectively, and has now proven to herself that when she needs to she can do this experiences a joy quite like this. The more members of our community that have this capacity, the more joyous our polis becomes, the more pleasure each of us finds a capacity to experience.

*** TR is rather too young to have been in the thick of what we think of these dys as the 60's.  What he's contrasting, among other things, is the energy of exhuberant joy that prompted and infuses Louis Armstrong's writing -- he carried a typewriter with him everywhere -- which so influenced Kerouac and later, others, like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, who became iconic 60's writers. So many (particularly masculine) aging writers and their more contemporary colleagues look back at this era with passionate nostalgia, as so many of the same writers look back to Hemingway with passionate nostalgia -- despite their diametrical opposition in technique and even objective.