The substance of style: Invention, arrangement, and paralogic rhetoric in the composition classroom

This dissertation explores the intersection between the rhetorical canon of style and current post-process approaches to writing. Because most contemporary theories argue for a social and interpretive definition of discourse, writing scholars and teachers have increasingly sought some means for describing and enacting textual practices derived from those principles. Indeed, current theories like paralogic rhetoric, as formulated by Thomas Kent and based on the ideas of philosopher Donald Davidson, argue that writing cannot be taught or learned, at least in the usual senses of those words. Traditional rhetorical theories, however, are based on practice and are directed toward textual creation. Consequently, determining the ways in which classical stylistics might be interjected into twenty-first-century writing classrooms provides some opportunity for creating a theory of stylistic rhetoric that is both pragmatic and interpretive. If stylistics is a study of the elementary patterns of language and of language use, then it is a small matter to argue that both reading and writing depend on how, when, and why language users make choices using stylistic principles. Rhetoricians from Isocrates to Cicero, Kenneth Burke to Jeanne Fahnestock have theorized and enacted a stylistics that while often overlooked, may provide theoretical rigor as well as pragmatic effectiveness. This stylistic theory posits traditional schemes and tropes, including metaphor, listing and repetition, as strategies that writers tactically employ to generate and organize discourse and to engage readers intellectually and emotionally. By constructing writing situations as choice-based and contextually delimited, the principles of a stylistic pedagogy reveal opportunities for student-writers and others to gain the right to speak and to be heard through writing; in the very act of writing, the writer simultaneously creates and enacts the authority necessary to engage and to affect the material world, including other human beings.