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Centrality of Style, The - Группа авторов Perspectives on Writing

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Greer

       Making Style Practically Cool and Theoretically Hip

       Keith Rhodes

       Jim Corder’s Generative Ethos as Alternative to Traditional Argument, or Style’s Revivification of the Writer-Reader Relationship

       Rosanne Carlo

       Teaching Style as Cultural Performance

       Chris Holcomb and M. Jimmie Killingsworth

       Inventio and Elocutio: Language Instruction at St. Paul’s Grammar School and Today’s Stylistic Classroom

       Tom Pace

       The Research Paper As Stylistic Exercise

       Mike Duncan

       Part Two: Applying Style

       Introduction to Part Two: Applying Style

       Mike Duncan and Star Medzerian Vanguri

       Style in Academic Writing

       Nora Bacon

       Tracking Interpersonal Style: The Use of Functional Language Analysis in College Writing Instruction

       Zak Lancaster

       Multimodal Style and the Evolution of Digital Writing Pedagogy

       Moe Folk

       Voice, Transformed: The Potentialities of Style Pedagogy in the Teaching of Creative Nonfiction

       Crystal Fodrey

       Fighting Styles: The Pedagogical Implications of Applying Contemporary Rhetorical Theory to the Persuasive Prose of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays

       Luke Redington

       Style and the Professional Writing Curriculum: Teaching Stylistic Fluency through Science Writing

       Jonathan Buehl

       Toward a Pedagogy of Psychic Distance

       Erik Ellis

       What Scoring Rubrics Teach Students (and Teachers) about Style

       Star Medzerian Vanguri

      Foreword

      Paul Butler

      University of Houston

      The Centrality of Style presents readers with a paradox. The editors begin with the convincing argument that style must be regarded as central to the discipline of composition studies. Indeed, the collection’s rich diversity of chapters reasserts the prominent place of style in the field from different perspectives, historical moments, and theoretical and pedagogical approaches.

      Yet despite the book’s claim of style’s centrality, it makes an equally forceful case—which may appear contradictory at first—that some of the most exciting new ideas in stylistic study have emerged not from the center but the margins of the field—and the margins’ intersections with other disciplines, ideas, cultures, and sites of inquiry.

      The paradox inherent in the tension of seeing style as both central and marginal is not new to those in rhetoric and composition. Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) has described a similar phenomenon in discussing the clash of language’s unifying, or centripetal forces, and their counterpart—the dispersing, or centrifugal forces that often disrupt prevailing norms. In public sphere theory, critical theorist Michael Warner (2005), borrowing from Jurgen Habermas (1989) and others, depicts an identical discordance in the tension between publics that dominate social discourse and their counterpart, a culturally less powerful, oppositional group, called a counterpublic, which constantly works against that dominance even as it maintains, says Warner, “at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status” (p. 119). With respect to counterpublics, Warner says it is the oppositional aspect of their style that “performs membership” (p. 142).

      There is no question that The Centrality of Style navigates the push and pull of these kinds of oppositions in compelling new ways. The real question is, How does the volume manage to position style in the field as what Frank Farmer (2008), borrowing from anthropologist Victor Turner, calls a liminal counterpublic, emanating from the break or rupture of the public-counterpublic relationship that somehow exists “betwixt and between” the two? How, in other words, does style’s very centrality depend on its marginalization, lack of power, and sometimes “renegade” status (Johnson, 2003) both inside, and outside, the field?

      Some answers to that question, and paradox, can be found in this volume. While there are many examples throughout the collection, here are some of the representative concepts that suggest even larger ideas in The Centrality of Style and show the current push and pull of style’s liminal status in the field.

      Style as Lingua Franca

      In his article in this volume, William FitzGerald argues that “[s]tyle has become a contemporary lingua franca,” and he gives evidence of the centrality of style historically, in popular culture, and in what he calls “the return of the figurative.” Yet even as he restores style to a pivotal location in composition and rhetoric, FitzGerald makes a parallel move of relocating style at the periphery—marginalized, he says, by the continuing struggle of the figures of speech for disciplinary legitimacy and for

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