Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition by Winifred Bryan ... - JAC Online

Reviews 203
pedagogically useful articles that have been published in composition in this
country in the last twenty-five years." How they determined what or whom
to select and omit, how they decided on their system of classification, we must
determine ourselves. The editors explain only that they' 'eased the difficulty
of making choices by adopting some rather arbitrary guidelines": they
limited the number of articles on each subject and the number of articles by
one author, excluded excerpts from whole books, and occasionally chose an
article because it had never been anthologized.
This lack of historical context is particularly disturbing given the target
population of readers: gmduate students and novice teachers. They, especially,
need to understand our history and how this text is, at least tacitly, one
history of the field. Those of us who have been around for the past decade or
so have a decided advantage: we can' 'read" some of the history between the
lines--the stops and starts, the fads and flourishes ofT -units, heuristics, new
and old rhetoric, revision, collabomtive learning, and writing across the curriculum.
We know the centers of "influence." But the novice who knows
none of this needs a more explicit introduction to the history (indeed, the
histories) of the past twenty-five years. This version of Sourcebook dehistoricizes
and decontextualizes our history of the past twenty-five years. It does
not take into account, for example, the social climate that gave rise to basic
writing programs or how they subsequently fell, only to be replaced, in many
situations, by the unchecked rise of testing and evaluation.
What we do, how and why we do it, is largely determined by social and
political forces. A "sourcebook" should provide access to some of those
sources that shape our pedagogies, theories, and their underlying ideologies.
It seems to me that in editing such a collection, the editors themselves must
come forward and clearly articulate their positions, their agenda, their
purposes, their conception of "the writing teacher." Here is the gap that
needs to be filled, the kind of history-the kind of sources-that all writing
teachers need to know. Perhaps Tate and Corbett will confront such issues in
a third edition.
Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition, Winifred Bryan Homer (New York: St.
Martin's, 1988,462 pages).
Reviewed by William A. Covino, University of Illinois at Chicago
In recent years, prominent philosophers, rhetoricians, and literary critics
have reassessed the relevance of classical rhetoric to modem pedagogy,
presented competing versions of classical theory, and recast classical rhetoric
in postmodem critical theory. Clearly, the time is right for a textbook that

204 Journal of Advanced Composition
takes into account these new understandings and broadened conceptions of
classical rhetoric, once defined mainly in terms of the formulaic Ad Herennium.
Unfortunately ,Professor Homer has decided not to write that book. She
does, however, give students her understanding of the relationship between
standard classical terms and the standard elements of modem academic
writing-an understanding that offers students "a vocabulary for talking
about writing," along with practice, examples, and readings.
The twenty-page "Introduction to Classical Rhetoric" that begins the
book presents two major uses forrhetoric in Antiquity: (I) as a demonstration
of the "duty of world citizenship," and (2) as the "road to wealth, power, and
influence. " The debate over whether rhetoric is a moral force or a tool of
personal ambition continues today, and Homer seems to respect both sides:
she says, on the one hand, that "through rhetoric, we must continue to
examine moral values and to question right and wrong," and on the other, that
"it was [and is] nothing less than imperative for anyone who aspired to a
position of influence to learn ... the art of rhetoric" (4,2). Thus, Homer's
introduction recalls the discussion begun by Callicles and Socrates in the
Gorgias; she asks students to understand that "skill with spoken and written
language still brings power" (2), while they consider the different kinds of
power that rhetoric can afford.
Throughout the text, Homer introduces potentially unfamiliar terms
associated with classical rhetoric (such as Gorgias, hypocrisis, inventio),
along with their correct pronunciation. These terms are further defined in a
glossary, illustrating Homer's contention that an "acquaintance with classical
rhetoric and the great philosophers who conceived it is part of literacy in
its fullest sense" (xi). This association of literacy with the inculcation of a
canonical lexicon recalls classical Roman schooling, certainly, and it also
enters the current debate about "cultural literacy" on the E.D. HirschI Allan
Bloom side.
Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition is divided into five parts, corresponding
to the canons of Roman rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory,
and presentation. The largest section (seven chapters) treats invention and
includes an interesting emphasis that will be less apparent to writing students
than to teachers who identify invention with exploration and discovery.
Homer does not feature invention-as-exploration, as Aristotle does in the
Rhetoric, choosing instead the Roman identification of invention with
organization or arrangement that we find in the Ad H erennium and the more
formulaic works of Cicero. For instance, in the first of two chapters on
"Discovering Ideas," Homer presents "definition" as "the organizing
principle of a full-length essay" (89); she presents "classification and
division" as "ways of clarifying a subject for a reader" (99), and equates
them with partitio, which is-as Homer says elsewhere {ll}-also a Roman
canon of arrangement. The readings that conclude both chapters on the topics
of invention present the topics as the organizing principles of finished

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discourse. After this substantial attention to invention as arrangement, Horner
follows the Ad Herennium by keeping quite brief (about twenty pages) the
section explicitly devoted to arrangement
At times, Homer's attempts to propose correspondences between classical
rhetoric and modem writing seem imprecise or forced. For instance, in a
chapter in the section on invention, she presents description and narration as
modem forms of "inartistic proof," after explaining that, for Aristotle,
artistic proof comes from "outside sources." Thus, because description and
narration record outside events, they are modem species of inartistic proof. It
is probably more accurate to define Aristotle's inartistic proof as evidence
unmediated by rhetorical strategy. It follows that description and narration
are certainly not inartistic; as Homer says, description is "controlled by the
writer's overall purpose," with details selected and arranged deliberately.
Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition is a very conservative book, both in its
conception of classical rhetoric and its inattention to innovations in composition
theory and pedagogy. Professor Horner gives substantial and longstanding
advice on narrowed topics, thesis statements, topic sentences,
comparison and contrast, cause and effect, and logical fallacies in the
chapters on invention; she adapts the seven-part Roman arrangement to the
essay in the section on arrangement; and she gives definitions and examples
of eleven tropes and six schemes in the section on style. Also, she summarizes
library basics in the section on memory (proposing that libraries and databases
are modem memory banks); and she illustrates standard formats for
academic writing in the section on presentation.
In short, Homer's concentration on Roman technical rhetoric (setting
aside less systematic and more philosophical classical rhetorics) corresponds
with her focus on the technical elements of college writing--elements whose
dominance continues to be questioned by those for whom discourse is an
epistemic process rather than an assemblage of relatively fixed parts.
The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field,
Stephen M. North (Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton, 1987,403 pages).
Reviewed by Karen I. Spear, University of South Florida at St. Petersburg
Shortly after it was published, Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge
in Composition came up in conversation with a candidate for a rhetoric and
composition position at my university. The candidate, fresh out of graduate
school, commented that the book would be a lot better if it didn't have such
a strong thesis. I played it cool but wondered whether thesis writing had
become passe and I had simply missed the revolution. Since then, the book