for posterity.
Burke uses the curious metaphor of writing a book to explain his “purest” form of persuasion, the equivalent of a great courtship. Here, the principle of self-interference is neither imposed by concerns about audience nor by rules, conventions and fears of punishment or disclosure. The restraint required of pure persuasion is entirely self-imposed. An author’s self-interference is in response to the demands of book he is creating, “demands conditioned by the parts already written, so that the book becomes to an extent something not foreseen by its author, and requires him to interfere with his original intentions” (Rhetoric 269). This interference is not so much ethical as aesthetic, and the purity of pure persuasion is the formal purity of “art for art’s sake” more than it is the moral purity of saintliness. That said, Burke attributes to pure persuasion “a high ethical value” (271) insofar as it imposes a different order of obligations on those who experience it, something like “truth for truth’s sake.” The purest forms of argument are dialectic in nature, a working out of ideas that have a momentum and integrity of their own, heedless of the needs and desires of an audience. Just as an art for art’s sake movement often produces art that strikes its audience as indifferent or hostile to its expectations, argument at the far right end of the continuum may enjoy scant success in the marketplace. But like the best works that emerge from an art for art’s sake movement, purely persuasive arguments may eventually enjoy a belated acceptance by audiences, in part because they have changed the way people think about the issue at hand.
In the end, of course, pure persuasion of this sort is not a goal for students of argument so much as it is a tendency within argument, a counter-balance to opposing tendencies toward an exclusive—and all too often predatory—focus on audience. In introducing students to the concept of pure persuasion, we like to remind them of an alternate meaning of the term argument—the “gist” or “essence” of an extended piece of discourse. Looking for the argument, the central point, of any piece of discourse is a habit of mind common to all critical readers. The more complex the piece of discourse we are reading, the more likely it is that the argument we tease out of the prose will be the product of opposing ideas, not an unambiguous thesis or major claim always appearing—where so many of our students have been taught to look—in the last sentence of the first paragraph. A gist is a synthesis of disparate ideas and a joint product of the reader/viewer/listener’s interpretive powers and the properties of the discourse they are interpreting. It is not what remains after one idea trumps another, a trophy or laurel leaf that goes to the victor, it is a creative act, a rhetorical version of the ontologist’s essence. In the end, it is why we teach argument: To complicate our students’ thinking about the world, to help them learn how to withhold judgment (to cultivate the art of “standoffishness”) of their own ideas as well as others,’ long enough to test them against opposing ideas and to respect what emerges from that combination.
Why Students Need Argument
Up to this point, we have offered a definition of argument congruent with our disciplinary imperatives and personal beliefs. In this next section we shift our focus to what students might hope to get out of a writing course concentrating on argument. What unique role does the study of argument serve in the curriculum and in their lives? As we design our courses and our assignments we need to keep that role in mind and to shape our pedagogy around it. In what follows, we will focus on three particularly crucial functions of argument: as a vehicle for teaching the most readily transferable set of skills one might learn in a writing course; as a vehicle for constructing and defending identity; and as a vehicle for ethical reasoning.
Argument and Critical Literacy
While there is no single name for the highly mobile cluster of skills students might learn in a writing course focused on argument, we will refer to them here as “critical literacy.” Critical literacy remains a somewhat amorphous concept, and for reasons we will soon cite, a somewhat controversial one. We will try to stipulate a definition of the term that clarifies our usage of it and minimizes some of its more controversial aspects. In setting out to define critical literacy it seems fair to say that we know more about what it is not than we do about what it is. What it most assuredly is not is whatever was being done in the name of the current-traditional writing curriculum with its emphasis on pre-fabricated forms and dumb readers. The current-traditional curriculum not only did not encourage students to think outside the box, it actively encouraged them to think of everything as a box, even the inherently chaotic, idiosyncratic business of writing. Its apparent goal was literacy in its older sense of minimal competency, albeit ratcheted up to the college level. It did not encourage personal engagement or reflection. It certainly did not offer students much in the way of skills and understandings that might travel with them elsewhere in the curriculum. Few philosophy courses in the university required “process” papers and fewer sociology courses stressed the “description” paper. (Some in our profession in fact favor the abolition of first year writing requirements precisely because they believe that the current-traditional model or some variant thereof remains the dominant model of writing in the profession. If one agrees that they are right about the currency of that model, they have a point.)
Perhaps the key distinguishing characteristic of critical literacy as we understand that term and the one that most clearly distinguishes it from its older, minimalist version, is its emphasis on reflective knowledge, the capacity Coleridge referred to as “knowing your knowledge” versus merely possessing it. In contrast to the demands placed on students writing a sound process paper, consider the challenges facing students setting out to construct a sound argument. They must be able to imagine counter-arguments, anticipate audience response, particularly skepticism and ignorance, and move deftly between claims of truth, reasons that warrant those claims, and evidence that supports the reasons. They must assess the adequacy of the support for their claim and qualify it accordingly. They must learn how to evaluate evidence and how to fairly summarize and question authorities with differing points of view. Perhaps most importantly, students must be prepared to risk their beliefs and assumptions about the world. It is not possible in the arena of argument simply to “plug [in a formula] and chug [out an answer].” Students have to understand issues in the context of an ongoing conversation about those issues, accepting at the outset that, as Stanley Fish suggests above, not all parties to that conversation will accept their beliefs and assumptions at face value.
In the interest of further clarifying critical literacy it might be helpful to contrast it to yet another approach to the teaching of composition that succeeds the current-traditional model. The critical thinking movement in composition was led by people like psychologist Dick Hayes and composition theorist Linda Flower who teamed up to show how problem solving methods could be imported into the writing classroom. They were among the first in the field of composition who, in Janet Emig’s famous phrase, treated writing in a fully developed way as a “mode of thinking” and helped people see how the acquisition of writing ability entails higher order reasoning. But while the critical thinking movement was useful in helping the discipline move past current-traditional approaches, it did not cultivate reflective understanding in the same way that critical literacy sets out to do. Moreover, the problem-solving skills it focused attention on were taught as if they were value free, a set of skills not unlike those required to solve puzzles. Their value-free assumptions limited their applicability to argument, a genre that often takes us far afield into issues that are value laden and emotionally charged.
One of the easiest ways to distinguish a critical thinking approach to teaching writing from a critical literacy approach is to focus on the notion of problem-solving. Simply put, critical thinking proponents focus on how to solve problems, while critical literacy proponents focus on how to discover problems. One of the most important figures in the critical literacy movement in the 1980s, Brazilian philosopher Paolo Freire, coined the term “problematize” to describe what he set out to do with his educational program in South America. Friere’s work with peasant populations proved to be so controversial that the government felt compelled to shut it down eventually. In the process of teaching basic literacy, Freire was teaching revolutionary politics by causing pre-literate “mythic” thinking to give way to critical literacy. The power of naming situations,
