Part One
Select one set of authors from this list below and describe how Author B's work reflects either a response to, a disruption of, a continuation of, or a reframing of Author A's arguments:
- Author A = Lauer ; Author B = Berthoff
- Author A = Beaugrande ; Author B = LeFevre
- Author A = Young, Becker, and Pike ; Author B = Brummett and/or Scott
- Author A = Young, Becker, and Pike ; Author B = Emig
- Author A = Brummett ; Author B = Harpine
At risk of sounding repetitive, please remember that IC's are brief (~2 single-spaced pages) but that in spite of their brevity, I'll be looking for depth and breadth in your writing—that is, I'll be looking for you to demonstrate that you are beginning to grasp each theorist's overarching argument while also noting its nuances and intricacies, which will inevitably surface when you try to hold their ideas accountable to someone else's. This means that you'll want to demonstrate your skill with writing an analytical summary, considering the methodology or organization underlying each of their arguments, forwarding key terms or concepts that are important to the conversation you are constructing, and providing and citing salient examples from each text. Please include the MLA citation for your readings and use in-text (parenthetical) citations throughout your IC where needed.
Part Two
Conduct a series of searches for the two authors you discussed in Part One by combining their surnames with relevant keywords (e.g., Lauer and invention, Harpine and rhetoric, Emig and learning, Berthoff and process, etc.) in some of our online bibliographies and research tools. Here are the tools I recommend:
- Bedford Online Bibliography for Teachers of Writing, 7th Edition You can search this as you would a database, using Boolean (and/or) operations. You can also check out its other features, and try other kinds of searches.
- Composition History/Theory Timeline with Sources The best way to use this tool may be to simply browse selected decades on the "Timeline" (i.e., 1950s through 2010s). But feel free to browse other of its features.
- CompPile Be sure NOT to select the "not" box if you DO want the database to search for the name or keyword you have identified. Feel free to search broadly by entering in only minimal information. When in doubt, check out the "glossary" so that you can see what term(s) CompPile may assign to your keyword.
- "Writing Matters: Rebecca Moore Howard Bibliographies" The best way to search Howard's tool may be to click on a series of topics and then browse the resulting bibliography for your author and/or a combination of your author with your chosen keywords.
I don't expect you to spend hours on this activity; just give yourself some time to try on several searches, i.e., several different combinations of surname + keyword, and take plenty of notes so that you can really observe how each tool works. Here are some questions you might observe as you search: What combinations yield results, and which ones do not? What might be the causes of any roadblocks or redirects? What additional functions does each tool have that distinguishes it from the others, aside from just the search function that you employed? What can you learn about the tool (i.e., reading the "About" pages or observing how the rest of it works) that can help you understand its purpose, organizational schema, or infrastructure (and theoretical or institutional biases) that might contribute to why your searches yielded the results that they did? And how do those search results either fit with or disrupt the position-ing of the theorists you came away with from Part One? In other words, does their placement, dis/appearance, or frequency from these search tools—or their dis/association with certain topics when they do show up in these search tools—reveal any surprises?
Feel free to consider the affordances and limitations of one tool over another, or how they might work together. Feel free, also, to consider what kinds of reading practices or historical queries each one encourages, or obscures. And finally, feel free to consider what other kinds of critical or imaginative possibilities you note in using these tools.
You may write up these findings in any way that makes sense to you, i.e., in prose discussion, by making a chart/table/grid, in list or outline form. I won't place such formal requirements on Part Two of this assignment, since I intend for it to be an additional exploratory task, nor am I looking for you to write very much. I just want you to report on the experience in a useful way.
Submission
Please bring a hard copy of IC #1 to class on 9/4. I will make time to discuss them so that you can share some of your results with each other before I collect them.
Overall, we'll be interested not only in understanding more about rhetoric's imperative in theories of invention in composition—which is an incredibly rich conversation all on its own—but also in understanding the role of this theoretical turn in our ongoing discussions of the field.
Do well but have fun with it,
-Dr. Graban
