ABSTRACT
American historical rhetoric and composition studies have found straightforward connections between these ancient and modern fi elds, easily accepting that an obvious historical continuity joins two traditions devoted to shaping discourses. Certainly both fi elds analyze texts as examples for imitation and as aids to invention. Both might equally be said to take up exemplary texts as instances of individually stylized and elocuted structures, and as sources of multiply discovered meanings, in keeping with turns to hermeneutics in rhetoric and to thematic readings in composition studies.1 And both fi elds share guiding precepts. From a formalist perspective they are the “texts themselves” within a larger system. Each fi eld allows us to derive meaningful explanations of invention in the service of a point, of variously effective forms or arrangements, and of appropriate style and its linguistic elocution, a “voice,” and the gestures and conventions of presentation. And both treatments of creating and interpreting discourses also rest on audience awareness, situated paths to the minds (and many think unfortunately, to the hearts) of situated audiences and readerships. Thus in the recent collection, The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition, Richard Graff and Michael Leff patiently argue that the teaching of speech and of writing share not only a “history” but enduring motives for academic attention in a Tradition in which they include canonical rhetorical theories. They claim that rhetoric and composition share a pedagogic imperative, if one whose defi nitive import is often overlooked in historical rhetoric studies. This mutuality is grounded in a history that is “not just…the outward sign of some philosophical position or…a self-standing theory but…evidence of what teachers actually did in their classrooms” (26).
