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Оглавление2 Exploring Networked Process in James Berlin’s Cognitive Maps
A critique of any theoretical system is not [merely] an examination of its flaws or imperfections. It is not a set of criticisms designed to make the system better. It is an analysis that focuses on the grounds of that system’s possibility. The critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal, in order to show that these things have their history, their reasons for being the way they are, their effects on what follows from them, and that the starting point is not a (natural) given but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself. [. . .] Every theory starts somewhere; every critique exposes what that starting point conceals. [. . .] The critique does not ask “what does this statement mean?” but “where is it being made from? What does it presuppose?
—Barbara Johnson1
In the 1980s, James Berlin was, luckily for us, pre-occupied with the connection between rhetoric(s) and writing process(es). I say “luckily” not because he necessarily got it right and certainly not because everyone agrees that he got it right, but because his classifications provide us such a rich vein of scholarship to mine. In other words, Berlin’s classifications had and continue to have “effects on what follows from them.”
The grounds of Berlin’s work in the 1980s are various theoretical formulations of rhetoric and writing. Hindsight indicates a trajectory in these theories that brought about both the advent of post-process in the 1990s and the notion of networked process. In each of these theoretical formulations, Berlin provides different “cognitive maps.” The maps are offered in keeping with Fredric Jameson’s conclusion that the political component of theory ought to provide cognitive maps so that we may “begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and [thus] regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion” (Postmodernism 54).13 A reading of Berlin’s maps, as well as a reading across these maps, can help to chart the landscape that gave rise to networked process. Moreover, to critique his maps is to begin to (re)draw the landscape yet again.14
Because the map does necessarily precede the inquiry, the map will in large part determine the nature of the inquiry and its findings. It cannot be otherwise.15 The map of this critique, then, pre-occupied as it is with Berlin’s cartography and yielded landscapes, seeks to illuminate the nature, function, and relationship of the following networked process sites: the subject who writes (students and teachers), rhetoric(s), writing processes (curriculum and pedagogy), composition classrooms, the disciplinarity of rhetoric and composition, and the broader culture. The developing map of networked process, which this critique constitutes, can be reasonably expected to “find” knowledge regarding the subject who writes and the webbed relations within which it is implicated.
Berlin’s Cognitive Maps
The following works, which were published across an eight-year span during the 1980s, are particularly salient for a fuller conceptualization of a networked process map. They attest to Berlin’s attempts to understand the relationship among writing processes, rhetorics, teachers, students, disciplinarity, and culture:
1. “Current-Traditional Rhetoric: Paradigm and Practice” (co-authored with Robert P. Inkster), 1980 (referred to as “Current-Traditional” throughout this chapter);
2. “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories,” 1982 (referred to as “Major Theories” throughout this chapter);
3. Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges, 1984 (referred to as Writing Instruction throughout this chapter);
4. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges 1900–1985, 1987 (referred to as Rhetoric and Reality throughout this chapter); and
5. “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” 1988 (referred to as “Rhetoric and Ideology” throughout this chapter).
Throughout these works, Berlin insists that teachers become more reflexive about the ramification of their classroom practice for themselves, their students, their institutions, and the larger culture. The following challenge, one among many, is perhaps most representative of the “felt” dissonance that compelled him to this scholarship.16
The numerous recommendations of the “process”-centered approaches to writing instruction as superior to the “product”-centered approaches are not very useful. Everyone teaches the process of writing, but everyone does not teach the same process. The test of one’s competence as a composition instructor, it seems to me, resides in being able to recognize and justify the version of the process being taught, complete with all of its significance for the student. (“Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories” 247)
Throughout these works, Berlin calls teachers to raise the stakes. His article, co-authored with Robert Inkster in 1980 (“Current-Traditional Rhetoric: Paradigm and Practice”), addresses the issue that would capture his intellectual and emotional energies for years to come: “we need to scrutinize carefully the epistemology implied by our practice in the teaching of composition” (14). More urgent, as illustrated in the above quoted passage from “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories,” Berlin ties the need to scrutinize the epistemology of practice directly to teachers’ competence, while in Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century in American Colleges, his appeal expands to invoke a professional, teacher ethos and to foreground teaching as an ethical obligation. “One of the purposes of this study,” he writes, “has been to convince writing teachers of their importance. [. . .] Most students [. . .] learn what we teach them. For this reason, it is important to be aware of what we are teaching, in all its implications. [. . .] We owe it to our students and ourselves to make certain that we are providing the best advice that we can offer” (91–92). By 1987’s Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985, however, Berlin asks teachers to consider the implications of teaching beyond students’ personal welfare: “Our decision, then, about the kind of rhetoric we are to call upon in teaching writing,” he says, “has important implications for the behavior of our students—behavior that includes the personal, social, and political” (7). In “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” Berlin’s agenda is even more emphatically articulated as he writes: “It should now be apparent that a way of teaching is never innocent. [. . .] A rhetoric cannot escape the ideological question, and to ignore this is to fail our responsibilities as teachers and as citizens” (492–93). An abiding issue for Berlin, then, involves the responsibilities and obligations that teachers of writing can fulfill only by appreciating distinctions among rhetorics and their attendant writing processes.17
Berlin makes the connection between rhetoric and writing process explicit in yet another call for teachers of writing to understand the implications of their practices, as explained in his 1984 monograph, Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges. Rhetorics are, he writes, multiple, varied, and changeable, characterized as “the codification of the unspeakable as well as the speakable. No rhetoric [. . .] is permanent, is embraced by all people, or even by some one person or group, at all times. A rhetoric changes” (1). The connection between rhetorics and writing processes, he says, has to do with the underlying assumptions of a specific rhetoric, for these determine
how the composing process is conceived and taught in the classroom. What goes into the process—the way in which invention, arrangement, and style are undertaken, or not undertaken, as is sometimes the case—is determined by the assumptions made, and often unexamined, about reality, writer/speaker, audience, and language. Each rhetoric, therefore, indicates the behavior appropriate to the composing situation. Beyond that, it directs the behavior of teacher and student in the classroom, making certain kinds of activity inevitable and other kinds impossible. (2)
There exists, then, at all times multiple rhetorics. In teaching writing, any sort of writing, we must inevitably use some process to teach the student, although notions of what constitute this process vary and emanate from both formal theory (institutionally legitimized) and informal theory (lore). Rhetorics have historically been concerned with notions of rhetorical situation/reality, speaker/writer, listener/reader, and language/discourse, while theories of writing process have variously addressed how the elements that constitute a writing process correlate with the elements of a particular theory of rhetoric. It is the relationship between rhetorics and processes that prescribes, or, according to Berlin, ought to prescribe, teaching and learning. Writing processes, then, represent material instantiations of theory and practice.
“Current-Traditional Rhetoric: Paradigm and Practice”
It is interesting to note the pastiche quality of James Berlin and Robert Inkster’s definition of rhetoric. Initially, they borrow Richard Young’s characterization of paradigm, a term that functions to allow/disallow what comes into the discipline, what is taught/not taught, what problems are deemed worthy/unworthy of inquiry, and what research is/is not valued for development. On the authority of “Abrams, Kinneavy, and other scholars,” Berlin and Inkster add the elements of the communication triangle—reality, writer, audience, and discourse—all of which must be reasonably justified for an “adequate conception of rhetoric” (2). Commenting on the recent emergence of alternative conceptions of rhetoric, they suggest that all these conceptions share a common feature: “the way in which the writer, the reader, and their relationship are imagined” (14).
But while the external components of current-traditional rhetoric are known, Berlin and Inkster write, the philosophical assumptions that underlie it are not so obvious. Their goal, then, is to explore current-traditional rhetoric, particularly its philosophical assumptions. The most important of these is epistemology, which, they say, involves “concepts of the mind, reality, and the relation between the two” (1). They then trace the epistemological assumptions of the current-traditional paradigm to assess its contribution to an adequate conception of “the rhetorical process,” which, they maintain, must account for the elements of the communication triangle: reality, writer, audience, discourse. “An adequate method of instruction in writing,” they write, “must give a prospective writer a conceptual framework that encourages exploration of each of the elements in the communication triangle in the attempt to bring forth discourse” (2). Changes in the way these elements of the communication triangle are imagined occasion further changes to “the way meaning is seen to occur and to be shared,” changes that are epistemological and thus carry profound ethical, social, and political ramifications (14).
Their method begins with an examination of the current-traditional paradigm’s historical origins, which, they say, will “provide a useful background” (1). They then proceed to examine four contemporary textbooks, using a cognitive map that entails reading the epistemological concepts of mind, reality, and the relation between the two across the communication triangle: reality, writer, audience, and discourse. They employ in this methodology a heuristic, which they explain is one of three available processes by which to work through any sort of cognitive or creative act. Placed along a continuum—algorithmic/heuristic/aleatory—the three available processes range procedurally from the algorithmic process, a strictly rule-governed process that produces predictable outcomes, to the aleatory process, which is completely random and produces unpredictable outcomes. The heuristic method, which is not a compromise between the poles but occupies “a wide middle ground of activities that are neither wholly rule-governed nor wholly random,” entails “a systematic way of moving toward satisfactory control of an ambiguous or problematic situation, but not to a single correct solution” (3). While Berlin and Inkster’s methodological benchmark draws upon the heuristic perspective, they incorporate the continuum itself into their interpretive matrix. This then becomes the underlying field by which they interpret the relation of reality and writer that constitutes the epistemology of the current-traditional paradigm.
They apply the heuristic continuum to assess the ongoing argument in English departments regarding what can and cannot be taught in the composition class. Those who take the position that “stylistic correctness or facility” is the proper classroom content assume the algorithmic position on the continuum, while those who would teach composition as an act of genius occupy the aleatory (13). The paradox, according to Berlin and Inkster, is that both poles of this binary share “epistemologies [that] are wholly consistent with one another” (13). I make a point of this because Berlin alters this interpretation in his 1982 article, “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories.” In claiming that the underlying epistemologies of those who equate composition with stylistic correctness and those who equate it with genius are consistent, Berlin and Inkster’s assessment is based, quite naturally, on the terms by which they define epistemology: the mind, reality, and the relation between the two. From the perspective of “the mind,” then, the two poles are consistent, in that both the algorithmic and the aleatory assume that knowledge is located “outside” of the individual mind. In the algorithmic view, knowledge is constructed to the point of reification, while in the aleatory, knowledge is “found.” What this continuum elides and what Berlin later attempts to correct with a more social orientation, is the emphasis on the individual mind, autonomous and unconstrained by outside forces.
Also related to their claim of algorithmic/aleatory epistemological consistency within the current-traditional paradigm is Berlin and Inkster’s purpose to not only “dissect the paradigm, but to evaluate it, to make some statement about its adequacy for shaping a contemporary rhetoric” (1). The value of freshman composition had been and continued to be contested not only within the English department but also in the academy and beyond. Berlin and Inkster place responsibility for this crisis directly on a faulty rhetorical paradigm and, indirectly, upon those who remain intellectually entrenched within it. There is, then, a concern for reshaping notions of writing process and effecting change in the classroom. This article indicts the current-traditional paradigm as dangerous “to teachers, students, the wider purposes of our educational enterprise, and even our social and human fabric” (14). This goal—remapping notions of writing process and effecting change in the classroom in order to secure the space of the freshman composition course in the academy—permeates Berlin’s work.
“Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories”
In response to recent articles attempting to distinguish various approaches to teaching composition, Berlin in this article contrasts his theoretical approach with that of accepted wisdom that says since the elements of the composing process—writer, reality, reader, language—are uncontested, differences in composing processes must issue from the degree of emphasis given the elements. Berlin says this is a contention with which he “strongly disagree[s],” for “from this point of view, the composing process is always and everywhere the same because writer, reality, reader, and language are always and everywhere the same” (765). It is quite clear to Berlin that since it is common “to speak of the composing process as a recursive activity involving prewriting, writing, and rewriting, it is not difficult to see the writer-reality-audience-language relationship as underlying, at a deeper structural level, each of these three stages” and thus determining the sort of instruction that is or is not prescribed for each activity (765). “Pedagogical theories in writing courses,” he maintains, “are grounded in rhetorical theories, and rhetorical theories do not differ in the simple undue emphasis of writer or audience or reality or language or some combination of these” (765). They differ, he says, in the way writer, reality, audience, and language “are conceived—both as separate units and in the way the units relate to each other” (766). Perhaps I overlook some subtlety, but I do not believe that a change in the emphasis on any specific element precludes a difference in how it is conceived, unless Berlin is claiming that the difference is legitimate only if it is explicit.18 I believe that the elements do, indeed, make a difference, and that, in fact, Berlin’s methodological practice throughout these works depends upon that difference.
While Berlin maintains that composing processes are grounded in rhetorical theories of writer, reality, audience, and language, he contends that the differences between composing processes are explainable by “diverging definitions of the composing process, itself,” specifically in the way each element is characterized (765). The focus should be each composite definition, which presents “a different world with different rules about what can be known, how it can be known, and how it can be communicated” (766). To achieve his goal of explaining how and why teaching approaches differ, Berlin situates the “writer, reality, audience, language relationship” (765) as underlying each element in the activity of composing: prewriting/writing/rewriting. Together, this matrix represents an “epistemic complex” that determines the pedagogy prescribed for each composing process activity: invention/arrangement/style (766). He then organizes and analyzes each of the four dominant pedagogical groups—Neo-Aristotelians/Classicists; Positivists/Current-Traditionalists; Neo-Platonists/Expressionists; New Rhetoricians/Social-Epistemic—according to this “epistemic complex.”
There are subtle but significant differences between Berlin’s descriptions of underlying assumptions in this article and that in “Current-Traditional.” In “Current-Traditional,” Berlin makes epistemology an explicit element in his coding, characterizing it as involving “concepts of the mind, reality, and the relation between the two” (2). This conception of epistemology is thus firmly grounded in the cognitive. Because he describes epistemology in terms of one mind and one reality and their relation, he suggests tacit individuality. In “Major Theories,” however, epistemology enters the coding matrix through his notion of “epistemic complex,” which represents the composite of the “writer-reality-audience-language relationship” (765) underlying and influencing each element of the composing process (prewriting/writing/rewriting). All of these, he writes, present “a different world with different rules about what can be known, how it can be known, and how it can be communicated” (766). Another related difference between the two articles is the way in which reality itself is evaluated. Epistemology in “Current-Traditional” foregrounds the mind; in this article, it appears that Berlin distances himself from a cognitive emphasis and its tacit individuality and folds epistemology into ideology by placing greater emphasis on reality.
In “Current-Traditional,” characterizations of reality were analyzed according to an epistemic continuum said to represent “the processes one may follow in working through any kind of cognitive or creative act” and which range across algorithmic, heuristic, and aleatory positions (3). Berlin equates the assumptions of the binary fields, algorithmic and aleatory, as having consistent, but erroneous, epistemological assumptions, and he recommends the heuristic process as providing the best rhetoric. But what is significant to the present discussion is that Berlin’s continuum foregrounds the writer, so that, again, his entree into the epistemological equation comes by way of the individual. In “Major Theories,” Berlin, although ostensibly continuing to champion a notion of the “heuristic” perspective, displaces this continuum in his view with an analogy to Richard Rorty’s difference between hermeneutic and epistemological philosophy:
For the hermeneuticist truth is never fixed finally on unshakable grounds. Instead it emerges only after false starts and failures, and it can only represent a tentative point of rest in a continuing conversation. Whatever truth is arrived at, moreover, is always the product of individuals calling on the full range of their humanity, with esthetic and moral considerations given at least as much importance as any others. For Current-Traditional Rhetoric truth is empirically based and can only be achieved through subverting a part of the human response to experience. Truth then stands forever, a tribute to its method, triumphant over what most of us consider important in life, successful through subserving writer, audience, and language to the myth of an objective reality. (777)
The “heuristic” position of the continuum has thus previously been depicted as the process of choice for an individual involved in “any kind of cognitive or creative act.” The “hermeneutical” position that Berlin now describes, where truth is located in “the product of individuals calling on the full range of their humanity, with esthetic and moral considerations given at least as much importance as any others,” allows Berlin to make an explicit social and political overture, a sign, if you will, of positions yet to come.19 For the time being, however, Berlin justifies the compromise of “truth” and thus “the mind/cognition” and, tacitly, the “individual” as the basis for changing his notion of epistemology toward a greater social and political orientation.
Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges
As Donald Stewart notes in the foreword, Berlin urges us to ask why we think what we think, why we teach what we teach, and why we think that what we teach is important. That we are unable to answer these questions is due to never having asked the questions of ourselves. Even if we have asked them, he argues, we lack the historical knowledge necessary to inform a significant reply. Berlin continues to argue for rhetoric’s consequences for human behavior, but he now contends that it is in the composition or communication class where students are “indoctrinated in a basic epistemology, usually the one held by society’s dominant class, the group with the most power” (2). Teachers in these courses thus have a great responsibility, which he says explains why throughout history, rhetoric enjoyed a central role in students’ education. Why now, since the late nineteenth century, Berlin questions, is the value of rhetoric courses so contested, despite their often being one of the few required courses in the curriculum? He proposes to answer this through an examination of both the noetic fields informing the rhetorics taught and their place in the larger culture. It is also his intention, to study how noetic fields determine how a composing process is conceived and taught.
To get a sense of how noetic field figures in his cognitive map, it is important to understand how he now describes rhetoric: “A rhetoric is a social invention [. . .] the codification of the unspeakable, as well as the speakable. [. . .] In any social context, furthermore, there are usually a number of rhetorics competing for allegiance” (1). Relative to rhetoric’s propensity for change and conflict, Berlin explains that
[r]hetoric has traditionally been seen as based on four elements interacting with each other: reality, writer or speaker, audience, and language. Rhetorical schemes differ from each other, I am convinced, not in emphasizing one of these elements over another. Rhetorical schemes differ in the way each element is defined, as well as in the conception of the relation of the elements to each other. Every rhetoric, as a result, has as its base a conception of reality, of human nature, and of language. In other terms, it is grounded in a noetic field: a closed system defining what can, and cannot, be known; the nature of the knower; the nature of the relationship between the knower, the known, and the audience; and the nature of language. Rhetoric is thus ultimately implicated in all a society attempts. It is at the center of a culture’s activities. (2–3)
This notion of rhetoric is considerably enlarged from previous conceptions, where in “Current Traditional,” rhetoric provides a framework for instruction designed to encourage “exploration of each of the elements of the communication triangle in the attempt to bring forth discourse (2), and in “Major Theories,” a rhetoric is determined by the conception of its units (writer, reality, audience, and language) “both as separate units and in the way the units relate to each other” (766). Now Berlin’s conception of rhetoric subsumes these characterizations and expands to assume its place at the very center of culture. It is a bold claim. Berlin justifies it through the adoption of the notion of noetic field.
Berlin borrows the term noetic field from Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, pages 317–334. It is meaningful, I think, that the heading at the top of page 317 reads “Crisis in the Humanities,” since part of Berlin’s goal is to argue the legitimacy of the composition course. I extrapolate from this passage in Ong the notions that apparently influence Berlin to embrace noetic field as appropriate to his burgeoning enterprise.
Ong writes that noetic structures “have held together man’s [sic] life world,” so that it is through the changes of these structures that he attempts to explain changes in the humanities that may have been, he says, previously obscured “or guarded and not always advantageous” (318). Further, the failure to grasp these changes may be due to our inability to adequately discern the interrelatedness of the study of humanities and other human responses to actuality. The principal agents of change in the humanities, those altering noetic and psychological structures, are attributable to the growth of knowledge in four areas. The first has to do with the atrophy of traditional puberty rites, where paradoxically, the importance of the rite was assumed, even though that importance could not be described prior to experiencing it. Relevance could be apprehended only after the rite was experienced. If, Ong asks, “the humanities function as an initiation rite, an induction, an entrance into some area, what area are we to choose?” (322). Learning proceeds from the known to the unknown, so the student must be placed in a space described as “one where the lore of the culture is centered” (322). Berlin would appear to answer Ong that the composition course can provide students this rite of passage, but to so argue, Berlin must situate rhetoric, indeed, place it “at the center of a culture’s activities” (Writing Instruction 2–3).
The second area of knowledge growth involves the romantic cultivation of the unknown, which, Ong writes, is the consequence of “an overload of organized knowledge” (324). The result is that “consciousness of the unconscious is [now] a permanent part of our thinking” (325). The remote, the formless, the “vaguely limned areas of human consciousness” are now part of our noetic field and are as reflectively organized as the rational knowledge that preceded it. Recall that now part of Berlin’s description of rhetoric is that it is “the codification of the unspeakable, as well as the speakable” (1).
The synchronic present is the third area, the place where “knowledge of the past thus bears in on us to define the here and now, where all ages meet” (326). Due to the overload of knowledge and a demand for relevance, the past has been diminished as the present assumes greater distinction, a “stampede,” Ong writes, that “may prove self-annihilating if it crowds out first hand knowledge of the past by neglecting the linguistic and other tools that make such knowledge possible” (327). From this, Berlin justifies his approach to historiography and its particular relevance to the field as an aid in legitimizing its claims in the academy and in the culture.
The fourth area, the anthropologizing of knowledge, however, might have been particularly significant to Berlin. Referencing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s work, Ong says that de Chardin’s purpose was to anthropologize actuality through an interpretation of the world through the interpretive lens of the phenomenon of man [sic]. It is the business of the writer, Ong concludes, “to take hold of the maximum in the tradition and transform it as completely as possible” (332). This transformation “entails anthropologizing because it centers history not in the movement of material and the redefining of political boundaries, but in the human consciousness and in the patterned shifts in personality structures which in great part determine the externals of cultures and of history and at the same time are determined by these externals” (334).
This is the crux, then, of what Berlin wanted to accomplish with the use of noetic field: the relationship between rhetoric, reality, human consciousness, and culture or that which, as Ong says, has “held together man’s [sic] life world” (318), a relationship that renders rhetoric far more fundamental than Berlin has thus far ever claimed. While he insists that noetic fields should be viewed relative to their position in larger social structures, it is likely that Berlin stopped using the term after this publication because it is too imbricated in humanism and its concomitant focus on individuality, autonomy, and transcendence to serve his ideological purpose.
Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985
Although Berlin’s purposes in writing this monograph are multiple and broadly conceived, I contain my discussion to his cognitive mapping of rhetorics and writing processes. This work represents a significant departure for Berlin, as his cognitive map is now drawn in a distinctly different manner. He has abandoned the use of noetic field and resumed the use of epistemology. Significantly, he has also now explicitly included ideology and added literacy as factors in his interpretive matrix. Apparently at a point of transition in his conceptualization, Berlin becomes more difficult to interpret, in part because there is a dissonance between his composite conceptualization and his need to produce a system of classification.
Part of Berlin’s purpose in this monograph is to counter monolithic notions of rhetorical theory that continue to prevail in English departments, which have been indifferent to innovation. To this end, he states: “In considering the rhetorical theories of the period, I have chosen epistemology rather than ideology as the basis for my taxonomy, doing so because it allows for a closer focus on the rhetorical properties—as distinct from the economic, social, or political properties—of the systems considered” (6). Electing to use ideology as the primary coding would have required using a strategy of deduction, which would not, therefore, have produced the taxonomy that Berlin wished to accomplish. Interestingly, Berlin comments more than usual on his taxonomy, noting that the three categories—objective, subjective, and transactional—are not monolithic, as “each offers a diversity of rhetorical theories” (6). Further, he provides the caveat that “this taxonomy is not meant to be exhaustive of the entire field of rhetoric, but is simply an attempt to make manageable the discussion of the major rhetorics I have encountered in examining this period” (6). Perhaps Berlin is experiencing some ambivalence about a taxonomy in light of his more complex cognitive map.
Nevertheless, while the rhetorical properties continue to consist of “the nature of the real, the interlocutor, the audience, and the function of language” (7), Berlin now variously interprets rhetoric as “the production of spoken and written texts,” as part of “the indispensable foundation of schooling” (1), and as “a diverse discipline that historically has included a variety of incompatible systems” (3). Rhetoric’s goal, literacy, is defined as “a particular variety of rhetoric—a way of speaking and writing within the confines of specific social sanctions” (3–4), while it functions as an intermediary “between the writing course and larger social developments” (5).
