Johnson and Elbow commentary on Rhetoric vs. Literature

As a student immersed in both professional communication and English, I find both Johnson and Elbow’s articles to be fascinated reads. They moved me with hope for future collaboration of two fields— rhetoric and literature—which authors argue are not so foreign from one another. These articles have great importance for our particular classroom; as soon-to-be teachers of writing, my classmates and I can gain valuable insight from the concepts, ideas, and “wishes” Johnson and Elbow convey.

Johnson writes: “…as a rhetorician” I cannot be considered a scholar, nor can my work be regarded as a valid contribution to the humanistic enterprise of English departments, unless my colleagues in literary specialties can construe what I’m doing as having something to do with the concerns of literature and nothing to do with the teaching of writing or with a pedagogical theory in composition” (23). As true as this rings within the aforementioned disciplines and the University, this statement is unbelievably unfortunate. I find myself in complete agreeance with Johnson and Elbow when I ask: “How are these two fields not related?” If I have taken just one thing from Dr. Barnett’s ENGL 852 Rhetoric and Professional Communication, it is this: rhetoric is indeed prevalent across many disciplines today. The reason for the portrayed disconnect and the generated negativity; however, dates back to its Aristotelian conception. Rhetoric, in its evolution, has increased its representation as a bad rap; it is the “whore child” of literature or composition, the lesser between itself and philosophy. Johnson states that “the divorce between rhetoric and literary studies is a righteous separation founded on considerable incompatibilities in aims and substance; (22) however, if rhetoric is the counterpart to dialectic and the mediating force bringing groups in to dialogue, how is it so distant from literature, if literature is in many ways the documentation of dialogue? Are these aims not compatible?

I established another connection with a different MAPC course, ENGL 856: Workplace Communication, in Johnson’s commentary on the them-vs.-us creed. In Dr. William’s course, we have discussed how identification influences the dynamics and relationships within a workplace. Congregation, for example, is important as it implies an “us” perspective, whereas segregation implies one of “them.” George Cheney mentions this congregation vs. segregation in his article “The Rhetoric of Identification and The Study of Organizational Communication,” and he quotes a passage from Burke: “Only those voices from without are effective which can speak in the language of a voice within” (Burke). This quote speaks to the importance of congregation (we) and segregation (me), and it suggests that the voice within is the loudest; therefore, no other voice can convince the loudest without the loudest voice already having some predisposition of believe. This “Burkean identification,” as well as the concepts addressed in Cheney’s article, is evident in the divorce between rhetoric and literature.

Elbow also reiterates this distance and “mediate[s] for a moment on the two essential dimensions of language use that [he] has been implying” rhetoric and poetics. In one sense, language is rhetorical…” (471). If Elbow can identify the ways in which language classifies as rhetoric, how are these two fields still disconnected? Johnson touches on this question in using a theme of interrelatedness in conjunction with a pluralist definition of literacy. He writes: “A pluralist definition of literacy can develop from the identification of these kinds of correspondences—from the recognition that learning to write is a function of learning to interpret, that learning to interpret is a function of learning to write, and that both learning to compose and learning to assess meaning are functions of learning to read texts” (24). I think we, as students of professional communication and writing, can infer yet another connection and find resemblance of these teachings within another field—communication studies.

In the final note, Johnson credits Wayne Booth for his comment on the aims of rhetoric. Booth says: “What we say matters, and it matters how we say it” (Johnson, 25). This saying is quite similar to McCombs and Shaw’s classic communication theory of agenda setting that states while “the press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, it is stunningly successful in telling readers what to think about” (McCombs and Shaw). Agenda setting theory is based on the notion that press decisions lead to a transfer of salience of issues to users. It seems that this same transfer is taking place between the divorced fields—rhetoric and literature. Johnson and Elbow both discuss the constant sway of importance and dominance of one field over another, and I cannot help but to wonder if this divorce is larger than it seems.