value of style as a common language while maintaining its status as marginal in working toward broader recognition. FitzGerald intimates that both moves are necessary in forging a unique place for style in the field, betwixt and between other disciplinary forces and interests.
A similar move in situating style as liminal is made by Keith Rhodes, who argues, on the one hand, for an “aesthetics of style” that he sees as “persuasively influential” but also recognizes, on the other hand, as “problematized by the conserving and regressive power of monologic forms of art.” Thus Rhodes suggests that having an “art of writing,” with style at the center, remains elusive, on the margins of the field, as we hesitate to embrace an aesthetics that includes nonlinear or affective influences. Rhodes thus demonstrates the complicated aspect of style as a lingua franca for composition studies.
Style as Research
In his essay for the collection, Mike Duncan shows how the traditional research paper reflects the centrality of style, especially in the way research “leads to increased control over many styles” and serves as “a door to a multitude of other demanding styles.” Yet Duncan sees competing aspects of the genre as well, connecting some parts of research to the destabilized aspects of style that have historically rendered it powerless, ineffectual: “The generic research paper simultaneously displays all the weaknesses of a rhetoric reduced to ornament.” In his focus on research, however, Duncan not only relegates style to the margins it has traditionally occupied but resurrects it as a vital part of research, showing how the research paper genre can function as “a mastery of style, a way of arguing.” How does this “stylistic dance,” to use Duncan’s words, happen? He intimates, much like Warner (2005) does, that research is located in many sites of inquiry, what Warner calls a “multicontextual space of circulation, organized not by a place or institution but by the circulation of discourse” among publics and counterpublics (p. 119). It is significant, then, that Duncan locates the very centrality of research in a contested space where style is part of a freely circulating discourse within a traditionally constrained genre.
In her look at style as research, Nora Bacon argues for a similar move in academic writing, showing the way it reflects variation between normalized styles and those that deviate from the norm and thereby demand our attention. In analyzing academic writing whose “style is sometimes ugly, sometimes lovely, sometimes almost invisible,” she includes excerpts that “serve as counterexamples to the idea that academic writing is dry, dull, objective, passionless, or merely utilitarian.” Bacon illustrates the way style draws us in, demanding our attention, by quoting from philosopher Elaine Scarry: “The boy copies the face, then copies the face again. Then again and again. He does the same thing when a beautiful living plant—a violet, a wild rose—glides into his field of vision, or a living face: he makes a first copy, a second copy, a third, a fourth, a fifth.” Bacon uses Scarry as an example of style that calls attention to itself, a move Warner acknowledges: “Public discourse craves attention like a child. Texts clamor at us. Images solicit our gaze. Look here! Listen! Hey!” (p. 89). Bacon shows how academic styles that we might consider most central are, paradoxically, often those most on the margins, centrifugal, dispersing, and as such, capturing our attention by deviating from the norm.
Style as Science
Jonathan Buehl begins his piece in the collection with some assumptions about the centrality of style in science when he writes that “specific stylistic foci are often required by programmatic mandates or pedagogical objectives.” In terms of science, we normally think of style as normalizing, yet Buehl, much like Warner’s counterpublic discourse, moves the intersection of science with style to the margins: “Scientific discourse is difficult and ‘strange’ for many students—even students in scientific fields.” Contrary to conventional wisdom, Buehl says this movement is positive because “by reading, writing, and writing about scientific prose, students engage unfamiliar discourse, which encourages them to apply newly learned strategies.” Buehl’s call for “defamiliarization” is the opposite of the impulse toward transparency or clarity usually associated with scientific discourse. Buehl thus works against a notion mentioned by Warner—that “a clear style results in a popular audience” (p. 138)—and instead embraces the kind of defamiliarizing language Warner sees as central to counterpublics and a nonnormative style.
Style as Assessment
Star Medzerian Vanguri exemplifies the paradox of style in her chapter on scoring rubrics in composition classrooms. Vanguri’s study reflects the way style remains at the margins, sometimes undergoing a reversal of sorts: “We are more specific about those aspects we value least … while we are less specific about the qualities we value most.” Vanguri goes on to explain the paradox she outlines: “Qualities like eloquence, rhetorical appropriateness, and tone are less quantifiable when placed into the context of a rubric than are the qualities we value least about style—mechanics, sentence structure, documentation, and word choice.” Style is thus centralized—and marginalized—at the same time. Style as assessment becomes a lens through which we see a reversal of ideology at work. In the end, we need to see the juxtaposition of the center and the margin to understand what we value most.
The examples here offer just a few of the many ways in which the paradox of style plays out in the pages of The Centrality of Style. The collection places style at the center of the field. Many of the chapters work within the liminal space in which style serves as both a centralizing and decentralizing force in rhetoric and composition. Clearly, the authors and editors have made an invaluable contribution in their collection by exposing the paradoxical nature of a canon that continues to play a vital role in our disciplinary history.
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin. (Michael Holquist, Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Farmer, Frank. (2008). Composition studies as liminal counterpublic. JAC 28(3-4), 620-34.
Habermas, Jurgen. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. (Thomas Burger, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Johnson, T. R. (2003). A rhetoric of pleasure: Prose Style and Today’s Composition Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann-Boynton/Cook.
Warner, Michael. (2005). Publics and counterpublics. New York: Zone.
Introduction to the Centrality of Style
Mike Duncan and Star Medzerian Vanguri
University of Houston-Downtown and Nova Southeastern University
In the classical era, Aristotle’s Rhetoric places style in Book III, almost as an addendum, despite the Rhetoric’s recognition of the centrality and power of metaphor to the persuasive enterprise. Cicero realized the inexorable link between form and content, particularly in his Orator to Brutus, but in the later Roman empire, his idea of style was simplified into imperial ornamentation, having had already settled into one of the five rhetorical canons. Style remained an auxiliary to rhetoric and persuasion for over a millennium, save occasional questionable revivals, such as the Ciceronian movement in the Renaissance that stressed only using the Latin words present in Cicero’s work to achieve an imitative mastery of his style, and the later Ramist reduction of style to tropes and figures only.
In the last hundred years, however, the nuances of lexis have enjoyed a different sort of theoretical attention. In particular, studies on sentence structure, paragraph structure, diction, rhythm, tone, genre, visual rhetoric, and document design have grown exponentially in the last fifty years, paralleling the increased specialization of the academy and theoretical study of instruction in rhetoric and composition. These studies, in total, have greatly expanded our understanding of how language works rhetorically
