JAC Volume 12 Issue 2

Kenneth Burke said he wanted the Rhetoric of Motives to "lead us through the Scramble, the Wrangle of the Market Place, the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, the wavering line of pressure and counterpressure, the Logomachy, the onus of ownership, the Wars of Nerves, the War." For the last several years, writing researchers have been examining the texts of the Barnyard and discovering that the animals, once they get out of school, sure do write a lot--all the time, it seems. And the things they manage to do and avoid doing with words are mind-boggling. This collection of essays continues the Barnyard project, the study of discourse in the professions, and thus joins other books on the farmhouse shelf: Odell and Goswami's Writing in Nonacademic Settings, my own Worlds of Writing, Barton and Ivanic's Writing in the Community.

The more we learn about working writers' texts, the more they seem to multiply, divide, and procreate, threatening to topple over and bury us after papering desks, offices, hallways, and whole skyscrapers with endless miles of printouts. This book, however, is not about their quantity but about their constructive and coercive power, the way they create our communities, organize our professions, direct our scientific research, initiate newcomers, socialize novices, control our professional relationships, impose new technologies, and even define our mental health. Texts, it seems, write us. Can the self survive their tyrannical power? Probably not. Certainly not, according to Foucault, whose name never appears in this largely cheerful account of textual coercion.

The essays are grouped in three categories: Textual Construction of the Professions, the Dynamics of Discourse Communities, and the Operational Force of Texts. The first section, about the way texts shape the perspectives of academic disciplines, includes historical studies of science writing and medieval letter writing as well as analyses of some contemporary texts, among them the review article in biology and the case study in management theory. Bazerman offers a careful analysis of Joseph Priestley's History and Present State of Electricity (1767), which he shows how that compendium, by presenting a progressive historical account, furthered communal and cooperative work in electrical investigation--partly by ignoring local struggles. Greg Myers argues that the story-telling and style of the science review article motivate readers to continue the story and thus shape future research. Applying the terms and techniques of literary criticism to nonliterary texts reveals the constructive power of such discourse.

Applying the terms and techniques of argument analysis to the texts of literary criticism, however, reveals something quite different. Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor in a not-to-be-missed, deadpan essay offer "some tentative observations about the nature of literary argument." In looking for the special topoi of literary criticism, they find "an assumption of despair over the condition and course of modern society which we shall call the contemptus mundi topos. . . . Critics seem to expect a woeful nod of tacit agreement whenever they mention the alienation, seediness, anxiety, decay, declining values, and difficulty living and loving in modern times. Consequently, works which directly express such despair are highly valued. . . . In none of the articles we examined did we find any work praised for optimism." Just what our undergraduates have been telling us for years. Then they confirm more undergraduate suspicions: "Ultimately all the topoi we have discussed reduce to one fundamental assumption behind critical inquiry: that literature is complex and that to understand it requires patent unraveling, translating, decoding, interpreting, and analyzing. Meaning is never obvious or simple for, if it were, the texts under scrutiny would not be literature and therefore would not be worthy of unraveling, interpreting, decoding, etc. Obviously, here we stumble on an endless circularity in literary criticism, the characteristic which creates the complexity which justifies it. We are led to ask, 'Do we have literary criticism because literature is complex, or is literature complex because we have literary criticism?' We cannot resolve this circularity; we can only point to its existence."

The second group of articles focuses on "enrollment activities." Four case studies reveal what selected outsiders--two philosophy students, a graduate student in a rhetoric program, undergraduates in an introductory sociology course, and members of a jury--must learn in order to construct texts that will merit the attention of outsiders. Schwegler and Shamoon, in their study of sociology instructors' responses to student texts, conclude not too surprisingly that "student texts that met with the approval of the instructors were shaped almost completely by the assumptions and constraints of the discipline." Lest we feel smug about the textual openness of our own field, Carol Berkenkotter, Thomas Huckin, and John Ackerman offer an account of Nate, "The Initiation of a Graduate Student into a Writing Research Community." As Nate learns to write like he is supposed to, before our very eyes turning into a social science research writer, we too are initiated into the empirical research methodology of the Carnegie Mellon program. The authors conclude by asking the right questions about Nate's transformation: "To what extent are the issues that concern composition teachers subsumed by the agendas of mentors as they join powerful research or scholarly enterprises, such as the one that we studied? How will the increasing graduate specialization in rhetorical studies and educational research affect the development of the canon within composition studies?" How indeed? Nate offers the last word: "I just need to do it for no other reason than you have to know something from the inside before you can fairly criticize it." This is not the sort of argument we like to make with teenagers as they consider inside experiences with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. We tell them that such experiences can have permanent consequences; so perhaps we should at least tell Nate (or let Foucault tell him) that in learning to write the way Carnegie Mellon requires, he is learning to produce Carnegie Mellon knowledge.

The nature of the knowledge argued for in this volume is in the form of qualitative research, largely case studies. The researchers focus on a carefully limited instance--say, the instructions to a jury in an Indiana tort case or the business plan of a new company--and then generalize and theorize from their findings. Readers are thus subjected to extraordinary leaps up and down the abstraction ladder; fine-grained analyses of local instances lead to sweeping conclusions about the human/technological interface or the relationship of rhetoric to science and culture. Sometimes these swoops seem underwarranted, as in the study which asks us to accept conclusions about a "three-dimensional sociocognitive model of literacy" based on the texts of two male philosophy professors and two female freshmen writing about paternalism--with no recognition of gender differences.

The third group of articles, about the operational force of texts, takes us out of libraries, laboratories, and schoolrooms and into the War of Nerves, where things start to hurt, where an incomplete manual on how to use a studgun leaves a man dead, where conflicting fields of argument result in the accident at Three Mile Island and the disaster of the space shuttle Challenger. The memos warning of both of these incidents, well before they happened, have served me over the years to convince agency writers that commas and usage aren't the problem, that writing isn't just what's on the page. So the presence in this volume of Herndl, Fennell, and Miller's thoughtful and thorough analysis, "Understanding Failures in Organizational Discourse," makes this volume especially valuable for writing consultants. The final article in Textual Dynamics, another very limited case study, proves yet again the book's premise: the role of texts in the creation of social reality. Lucille Parkinson McCarthy analyzes one psychiatrist writing one diagnosis of one child, using the classification system set forth in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, third edition. Both the selection and the analysis of evidence are determined by DSM-III's biomedical model and evaluative framework; if Eddie exhibits eleven of the nineteen criteria for Attention Deficit Disorder, he has it. Thus, any information about Eddie that doesn't relate to the nineteen criteria is selected out. The definitional stature accorded DSM-III and its structuring power for clinical diagnoses, psychiatric research, and the education of psychiatrists surely constitute a discourse regime. The conclusions to be drawn from Eddie's story are chilling indeed--another instance of Logomania, Burke would say.

The Barnyard without doubt is an amazing place, and Bazerman and Paradis are to be commended for a fine volume that adds so much to our knowledge of it and of the ways in which texts create professions, create writers, even create disasters. For the implications are inescapable: This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a text.