Narrative Topic and the Contemporary Science Essay ... - JAC Online

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The Contemporary Science Essay 121 science in a fuller, more complete, and more human way. To be literate in such a dialogic context means to know and write in two ways at once: as scientists following a careful methodology and as storytellers making what we learn understandable and significant to others. It also means discarding overly mechanical applications of modal paradigms as we select readings for WAC courses, showing our students instead how writers such as Eiseley use narrative to help their readers experience and interpret scientific discoveries. Perhaps this move away from mode-oriented concepts of form can best be accomplished by re-thinking the motives behind the uses of narrative in the modem science essay. Masters of this form-Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks. Lewis Thomas, Loren Eiseley, and others-provide us with texts we can use to give our students a new place to go when the straight lines of conventional scientific method either block or limit the complexities of their subjects. Notes National University of Singapore Singapore lBerlin, in his essay on John Genung, and Connors, in his essay on the modes of discourse, both argue that an oversimplified and mechanical notion of Alexander Bain's modes came to dominate late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American composition teaching. Kinneavy argues for replacing modes, which are descriptive of written products, with an emphasis on the more organic and rhetorically situated notion of aims of discourse. Britton and his colleagues used their research into British secondary school writing courses to argue that the function rather than the form of an assignment was far more important to the learning of students. D' Angelo was the frrst composition theorist to argue that what mode-oriented teachers were calling "patterns" were actually functioning as Aristotelian topics in the writing of most of the professionals whose essays were being used as models in composition courses. 2Even the better quality WAC readers suggest this reliance on superficial classification by mode or surface patterns. For example, Fields of Writing presents its readings under headings such as reflecting, arguing, reporting, and explaining, with the social and natural sciences and humanities functioning as subdivisions under each heading. There is little attention to how different communities and disciplines might have very different ways of presenting the results of these discourse processes, and not much is said about how these processes might produce different forms in a single text. WAC readers with more traditional readings from the "classics" of different disciplines, such as Cyndia Clegg's Critical Reading andW riting Across the Disciplines, are usually more interested in providing content for student writing than they are in getting students to use textual forms generatively. Forms of textuality in relation to writers' aims are given little attention in Clegg's methods of inquiry approach to WAC.
122 Journal of Advanced Compositiol.l 3Forexample, Debra Joumet of the University of Louisville has delivered several excellent papers on Oliver Sacks and science essayists in general at the 1987 MLA and 1988 CCCC conventions, and I have published articles in the Journal of Advanced Composition and Freshman English News on similar topics. 4Eiseley devotes a good deal of space to these current controversies in The Immense Journey. sEiseley carries his defense of "mystical" reflection and storytelling a step further in Lost Notebooks when he argues that straight science can address "how" but not "why" questions: "By the nature of things we are denied a scientific answer to the question Why? We can only accept the universe as given and proceed to examine how it seems to operate. Scientists toy successfully by observation to answer the question How? Upon the Why? scientists can only speculate" (106). Works Cited Berlin, James. Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges. Carbondale,IL: Southern lllinois UP, 1984. -. "John Genung and Contemporary Composition Theory: The Triumph of the Eighteenth Century." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 2 (1981): 74-84. Britton, James, et al. The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18). London: Macmillan Education, 1975. Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969. Clegg, Cyndia Susan. Critical Reading and Writing Across the Disciplines. New York: Holt, 1988. Comley, Nancy R, ed., et al. Fields of Writing. New York: St Martin's, 1987. Conners, Robert. "The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse." College Composition and Communication 32 (1981): 444-55. D'Angelo, Frank 1. A Conceptual Theory of Rhetoric. Boston: Little, 1975. Eiseley, Loren. The Immense Journey. New York: Random, 1957. -. The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley. Ed. Kenneth Heuer. Boston: Little, 1987. -. "Silent Bones and Fallen Kingdoms. " Natural History 96.6 (1987): 20,22-27. Gould, Stephen Jay. The Flamingo's Smile. New York: Norton, 1985. Havelock, Eric A. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1963. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Kinneavy, James L. A Theory of Discourse. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice,1971. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. London: Methuen, 1982. Plato. Gorgias. Trans. W.C. Helmbold. Indianapolis: Bobbs, 1952.
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