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

The Contemporary Science Essay 113
that students should be asked to use these forms to generate content, as topics,
or places to go for new ways to express content.
But we need to take D' Angelo's cue a step further if we are to resolve the
WAC problem as I have described it. In A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth
Burke supplies the theory we need to complete this shift from mode to topic.
Burke replaces Aristotle's definition of topics as places to go for traditional
information and conventional wisdom with a more psychological perspective.
For Burke, all discourse, scientific or literary, occurs within a dramatic
context. As interpreters or critics, we do not search out intentions as if they
were static entities, existing separate from human conceptual and social
processes. Rather, Burke asserts, we must look at intentionality as a dynamic
social-psychological process, with human agents working their ideas out
within vital dramatic contexts in which texts take on the colorings of writer,
discourse community, and other texts. Burke's pentad is his way of describing
the writing and reading of texts as a process of shifting dramatic
perspective, alternatively focusing on individual, social, contextual, and
psychological perspectives.
The concept of plural textuality, of each text containing within itself
elements of other texts, is relevant to the practical perspective on texts that
teachers need to consider in WAC courses. To demonstrate my point, I will
single out one writer, Loren Eiseley, because he is representative of an
expanding group of writers whom I shall call •• science essayists." These
writers can help bring plural texts into the WAC course because their texts
combine the textual paradigms of the sciences and humanities. That is, they
combine scientific vocabulary and inductive and deductive logic with frequent
moves into narration and description and the use of literary figures and
schemes. It is as if these professional scientists, in striving to translate science
for the educated layperson, have been driven by context and purpose to create
hybrid or plural texts.
Several contemporary science essayists (Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver
Sacks, Lewis Thomas, for example) base their texts on a marriage of story and
exposition, and composition theorists recently have begun to analyze the
complex ways that expository and narrative forms interact in these science
essays.3 This formal interaction affects readers in complex ways, turning the
scientist's reliance on a discipline's body of knowledge, vocabulary, and
methodology into the stuff of story and myth. For example, Gould and
Eiseley transform the history of evolution into an adventure story parallel in
emotional impact and literary imagination to the Genesis story in the Bible.
Such writers are, in effect, re-making our collective psychology by providing
an emotional base for the sober deductive and inductive findings of science.
Perhaps Gould's and 'Eiseley's combination of forms is the surface
representation of deeper and equally new ways of thinking. For these science
essayists, story has become a way of knowing and inventing material, a place
to find content and structure. Imagine Loren Eiseley hard at work on a field