JAC Volume 15 Issue 3

This paper arose out of our shared interest in Aristotle, and, particularly, in our shared surprise that Aristotle’s attitude toward the rational and irratio­nal were not what modern theories and practices of teaching writing had led us to expect. The theories and practices of modern composition too often assume a strict antithesis between the processes of the irrational (imagination and creativity) and those of the rational (reasoning and argumentation). In most departments, for example, creative writing is taught separately from composition; even the staffing and training for such courses is generally handled outside of the composition program. Literature is taught in separate courses, and there is deep hostility toward incorporating it in composition courses, since it is assumed that literature must be handled in a different manner from non-fiction. The dominant taxonomies of discourse (such as James Kinneavy’s A Theory of Discourse or Walter Beale’s A Pragmatic Theory of Rhetoric) make imaginative discourse a different aim or category from rhetorical or argumentative discourse; hence, textbooks strongly influ­enced by such taxonomies generate different paper assignments and strate­gies for imaginative writing as opposed to argumentative. One sees the opposition of rational and irrational particularly in the teaching of writing strategies. Composition programs and textbooks tend either to separate personal writing from persuasive writing or to abandon one in favor of another (see Kate Ronald). Argumentation textbooks tend to ignore or denigrate those strategies of writing which emphasize the imagination (such as clustering, mapping, or free-writing); process-oriented textbooks (ranging from Peter Elbow’s Writing With Power to The Norton Guide to Writing) ignore, denigrate, or give short shrift to argumentation, reasoning, and research. Perhaps most significant to us is that so many of our students—both undergraduates and teaching assistants—are obviously proud when they announce that they are bad at reasoning, adding something along the lines of, “I’m a creative person.”

The rational/irrational split is ubiquitous and has come to seem common sensical, but we were surprised to find that the split is not made by Aristotle. We looked at other philosophers and rhetoricians after Aristotle, and our exploration convinced us that the modern version of the rational/irrational split is both unnecessary and destructive. As indicated above, the conse­quences of this split are not merely theoretical—the assumed antithesis of the aims and processes of argumentation (persuasion, reasoning) and imagina­tive discourse (self-expression, creativity) puts writing teachers in the unhap­py position of making a choice or compromise between the inclusive and free-form methods of imaginative writing and the supposedly rigid and conflictual methods of traditional rhetorical training. We have come to believe that this unhappy position is the result of an unnecessary misunder­standing, that classical rhetoric and numerous philosophers suggest richer ways of imagining the processes of argumentation, and that various class­room practices enable teachers to weave the creative and critical functions back together.

Aristotle and Imagining

Many precedents for integrating imagination and argumentation exist. First, prior to the Puritan mistrust and the Enlightenment denigration of creativ­ity, the imagination was always part of traditional rhetorical training. Clas­sical rhetoricians like Quintilian, Cicero, and Aristotle make the ability to envision and convey vivid images one of the most important parts of effective rhetoric. More significantly, Aristotle’s discussions of the imagination (De Anima, Nicomachean Ethics) emphasize the role it necessarily plays in deliberation. Second, numerous philosophers of mind make the ability to imagine an absolutely necessary skill in the process of analytic thinking and the ability to invoke the imagination of the reader a necessary part of argumentation. That is, they do not see reasoning and imagination as opposed, but always already integrated. Third, recent philosophers of ethics and practical reason emphasize the degree to which ethical behavior relies on the ability to empathize, to imagine what it would be like to be someone else. And such developments in philosophy point to the ways that philosophers insist that the strategies of imaginative discourse are, in fact, part of the processes of thought and argumentation in philosophy.

In many ways, this argument for integrating imagination and reason begins with Aristotle, since he is conventionally used as the basis for a taxonomy which distinguishes argumentation from literature. The simplest version of this interpretation, represented in Beale and Kinneavy, comes from this odd insistence that literature could be subsumed under Aristotle’s discussion of the epideictic. For reasons which are obscure to us (and involve a more convoluted reading of the organizational scheme behind The Art of Rhetoric than can be explained here), this imposed taxonomy came to be used to insist that what Aristotle says about argumentation does not apply to literature (see Jeffrey Walker). While this imposed taxonomy has led to some interesting work being done on the relationship of literature and the epideictic, it is not grounded in Aristotle’s own organizational scheme, and it has led to the odd insistence that literature does not persuade—a conten­tion which has been sufficiently debated elsewhere (especially by Wayne Booth and Kenneth Burke).

A more complicated use of Aristotle involves his epistemology. Because his Nicomachean Ethics is conventionally translated as distinguishing the rational and irrational parts of the soul, it may seem that he is an authority for distinguishing the imaginative and logical parts of the mind. However, “rational” is a late medieval word, with roots in Latin. It has come to mean a process of thinking which is generally defined by what it is not: it is not emotional; it is not intuitive; it does not use the imagination. On the affirmative side, it makes categorical distinctions; it uses logical processes that give one certainty; it is grounded in discrete and easily identifiable facts.

“Logos” is considerably more complicated than the translation “rational” would indicate. Although it is clear that it initially meant something along the lines of “pick up,” it came to mean something else. Classical scholars are in general turmoil about exactly how to express that revised meaning. Hugh Tredennick’s definition is:

Logos means a process of thinking; it is opposed to knowledge which comes without any process or procedure. This latter kind of knowledge (alogos) may be a result of divine inspiration, intuition, or the vegetative part of the soul. Aristotle says that the ability to notice likenesses which enable us to create metaphors, for example, is something which cannot be learned because it is not a process; “it is the token of genius” (Poetics xxii 16). Similarly, we do not learn to breathe through some set of instructions; it is something we always know how to do. Hence, one problem with attributing the rational/irrational split to Aristotle is that the term "logos" is not effectively translated by the narrower term “rational”.

In addition, Aristotle does not consistently divide the mind on the basis of an opposition of processes of thinking—on other occasions his division of the parts of the soul is made on some other basis. The first time in the Ethics that Aristotle does divide the soul into the two parts, the logos and the alogos, he is discussing motives for behavior. Logos is further divided into two parts: a person might behave a certain way by choosing that behavior (will), or by simply doing what one has been told by an authority such as one’s father, tradition, or laws (obedience to authority). Alogos also consists of two parts: some things one does without any consciousness (the nutritive part of the soul which keeps one breathing, digesting, and so on); some things one does because of appetitive desires (e.g., eat, drink, copulate). These four catego­ries are not opposed in regard to choice—Aristotle is clear that there is a kind of continuum among them. Will is purely choice and one has no choice regarding the nutritive functions of the soul, but one has some choice in regard to authority and appetite. One might choose to obey or not; one might choose to fulfill a desire or not; each of these areas is potentially an arena for deliberation. As Aristotle says, the irrational (alogos) part of the soul is “in some sense persuaded by a rational principle” as is indicated “by the giving of advice and by all reproof and exhortation” (27). In short, the emotional appeals so popular in rhetoric show that the appetitive part of the soul is subject to some movement by the use of logos. The alogos is potentially shaped by the logos.

The reverse is also true: the logos is shaped by the alogos. For Aristotle, one of the most important parts of the good life is the ability to deliberate well: the good individual is the one who is always able to choose the good action in the various circumstances which confront a person. We deliberate about things in our control; we deliberate about things when we cannot be certain about the correct answer. Ethical choices are within our control (given certain constraints), and we can never be certain about the correct answer in them. We need to know how to deliberate well, and good deliberation necessarily involves taking our emotions into consideration. Emotions are important in deliberation in two ways: we frequently deliberate about emotions (such as whether it is appropriate to be angry); our emotions help us to make the most prudent choice.

Conventional usage of the term “imagination” is fairly broad—encompassing emotions, aesthetics, creativity, as well as the specific capacity to create (rather than perceive) images. We have been using the term in such a broad capacity, but such usage is relatively new. Prior to the Romantics, the term “imagination” tended to denote fantasy (or phantasia), that is, the mind’s capacity to create images which may or may not exist in the external world. In other words, these images may present or represent—they may be images with no referent in the real world because they have never existed (such as centaurs) or have not yet existed (such as David Duke elected President) or images which did happen but which were not actually perceived by the person (such as the Lisbon earthquake). For the sake of argument—that is, because it makes our argument most difficult—we will use this earlier, and narrower, definition of imagination: a mental capacity to create images which one has not actually perceived.

Aristotle’s discussion of the phantasia is closely connected to the ques­tion of will. In De Motu Animalium, Aristotle argues that one’s ability to will is dependent upon one’s ability to imagine the thing for which one wills, or, in Martha Nussbaum’s paraphrase of Aristotle, “objects of desire cause motion precisely by being seen as the sort of thing that is desired” (279). It is because we can imagine what it would be like to conquer Sparta that we can will ourselves to do so. The interdependence of argumentation and imagina­tion are clearly demonstrated in Rhetoric, when Aristotle discusses the role of pathos in public demonstration and when he makes several lines of argumentation depend upon likenesses (the quality of “genius” at the heart of metaphor). When Aristotle defines and categorizes the various lines of argument, he relies heavily upon drama and poetry for examples—Euripides, Theodectes, Sophocles, Sappho, Aeschylus, and Homer. Aristotle’s drawing on these various realms for examples throws further doubt on imposing the literature versus argumentation opposition on his text; if Aristotle had not thought of literature as persuasive, then it would have been very odd for him to draw on literature for examples of persuasive arguments.

Other philosophers have made the imagination a necessary part of reasoning. David Hume, for instance, makes imagination the ability to recall impressions, albeit a kind of weaker image of true impression, and he categorizes that faculty under the general category of “thoughts or ideas” (10). Hume’s paean to the imagination suggests an almost Aristotelian connection between imagination and will: before we can believe something, we must be able to imagine it. Hume writes:

Such a connection between imagination and will suggests that the role of the writer is to get the reader’s imagination to work on the writer’s behalf, that any effective piece of discourse (scientific, rhetorical, or imaginative) will function by causing the reader to imagine. The importance of imagina­tion to reading has some interesting implications: (1) teaching students to be good readers (even critical readers) means strengthening their capacity to imagine; (2) such a cognitive theory (one that makes thinking and imagining simultaneous) means talking about strategies of the imagination when teaching students persuasive writing; (3) such a view of the cognitive process also implies a different way of thinking about the constant advice of using clear and vivid images. We would like to elaborate briefly on this final point.

The fact that advice to use clear and vivid images is widespread suggests that we already have some sense of the role that images do play in persuasion, that teachers of writing already have some sense that the process of reading is itself dependent upon readers being able to imagine the world of the writer. The persistence of this advice points to one of the oddest ironies of certain conventions in rhetorical theory—that those traditions most firmly committed to the imagination versus argumentation opposition also represent themselves as firmly in the tradition of classical rhetoric. Yet, that tradition has always insisted that metaphor is part of rhetoric and that the ability to produce metaphors is a kind of creative and imaginative genius. In other words, the classical tradition in rhetoric has always made the ability to imagine (as a writer and reader) a necessary part of the process of persuasion.

Recent Philosophies of the Imagination

Another piece of advice which is virtually ubiquitous in teaching argumen­tation is to be as fair to the opposition as possible. In an attempt to follow the advice which we give students, we should now obey our own dictum. And the issue is: if the imagination and argumentation are not necessarily opposed, why do so many people assume that they are? We have several answers to that question. The first, and most trivial, is simply that most of us are familiar with texts such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric through translations done by people strongly influenced by logical positivism. A second, and less flippant, answer is that the major theorists of discourse, like Kinneavy and Beale, insist that imaginative discourse involves a different aim and different strategies from deliberative or argumentative discourse because the aim of reflective (or poetical or literary) discourse is not to persuade, but simply to re-present effectively the author’s highly personal view of a particular world. The third reason for the tenacity of the rational/irrational split, which will be discussed later, is that there is considerable confusion in literary circles about the relation of reason and objectivity.

But a closer examination of the claims and practices of philosophers suggests that the assumption that imaginative discourse has a different and more personal intention and, hence, a different set of rhetorical strategies from argumentation is misguided. The strategies appropriate to reflective or poetical intentions are supposed to be a personal voice, poetic language, and narration, but philosophers like Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor attribute those intentions and strategies to public discourse.

Arendt, for example, says that the nearly ideal public realm of the Athenian polis did not shun individuality. On the contrary, “The public realm... was reserved for individuality; it was the only place where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were” (The Human Condition 38). She goes on to insist that the diversity created by the aggregate of particular points of view is absolutely necessary to an active public sphere:

For Taylor, any ethical argument must involve the personal precisely because it is the personal which must be convinced: “You will only convince me by changing my reading of my moral experience, and in particular my reading of my life story, of the transitions I have lived through—or perhaps refused to live through” (73). Thus, Taylor argues, the essay and the novel have the same basic beginnings—in the development of an “inner nature” which is highly personal and individuated. Taylor summarizes Montaigne’s inauguration of that theme:

The point, of course, is not to get lost in some purely idiosyncratic vision, but to find a method to bridge the personal and the communal, to find the communal in the personal and vice versa. This is one of the functions which numerous writers have attributed to the imagination, as when Coleridge defines in the Biographia the imagination as “the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation” (qtd in Rose 354). Paul Ricoeur speaks of our relation to written texts in terms similar to those of L.A. Richards—as expanding our worlds—as bridging the gap between self and other by con­necting our singular predicates with common meanings, thereby allowing the imagination to work (37). He describes writing and reading as dialectical, as simultaneous processes of distancing oneself from the text while appropriat­ing it, in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s terms, and making the strange familiar (43).

Thus, one of the most important strategies which taxonomists of dis­course attribute to non-argumentative writing—the personal, individuated perception of a particular world—is one which philosophers make a neces­sary part of the public sphere and argumentation. But one can even go further—such philosophers also make narration a necessary part. As in the above quote, Taylor continually insists upon seeing moral decision-making as involving transitions; thus, arguments regarding ethics must be narratives. “Practical reasoning,” Taylor says, “is a reasoning in transitions. It aims to establish, not that some position is correct absolutely, but rather that some position is superior to some other. It is concerned, covertly or openly, implicitly or explicitly, with comparative propositions” (72). Reasoning must be presented in transitions and narratives because of our very sense of self: “But this is to state another basic condition of making sense of ourselves, that we grasp our lives in a narrative” (Taylor 47).

Here we should mention one other interesting quality about modern philosophical discourse: the strategies within the discourse do not follow the rules which taxonomy-based curricula set for our students. In all but one very narrow school of philosophy, philosophers argue using personal experience, narratives, metaphors, and, perhaps most interesting, issues and examples drawn from and about literature. Thus, modern philosophical discourse itself demonstrates the error of thinking that argumentation is unconnected to the imagination or works of literature. Like Aristotle, modern philoso­phers regularly draw examples from literature in order to discuss reasoning and persuasion—such discourse itself presents a model for connecting argu­mentation and literature.

Objectivity and the Imagination

Defenders of argumentation, like ourselves, talk a lot about reasons, and some (like Habermas and Nussbaum) even go so far as to talk about Reason. The assumption is generally made that Reason is logocentrism in a prettier dress—that reasons, Reason, and obsession with objectivity are one and the same. Thus, it appears that one must reject reason and the teaching of reasoning if one does not want to be a logical positivist. But there is, at the heart of this controversy, a misunderstanding about objectivity.

To talk about objectivity is to make a certain kind of claim, and, in general, there are three kinds of claims that people might make by using the term “objectivity”: ontological, epistemological, or rhetorical.

To make ontological claims about objectivity (or to refer to something as being ontologically objective) is to claim that it exists in the same manner whether or not humans recognize or acknowledge it—that it has some sort of Real existence outside of human perception. The disease of AIDS, for instance, will continue to kill people, regardless of whether or not humans acknowledge its existence or pretend that it only affects a small number of people. The question of objective ontological status gets very troublesome with aesthetic or ethical standards—are they there regardless of human perception and outside of human standards? For Stanley Fish, for instance, any sort of philosophical or ethical system which suggests that any kind of standard exists objectively is a form of “foundationalism,” and foundationalism is always anti-rhetorical, formalist, and archaic.

The second way to use the term objectivity is as a claim about epistemol­ogy. That is, to call a statement, standard, or object objective is to say that it has a particular (although consistent) effect on human perception. Thus (if one believes in the possibility of objective perception), the statement or standard has ontological objectivity, and people either automatically perceive or can learn to perceive the true status of the statement. People who claim that it is possible (and desirable, for that matter) to have objective perception generally talk in terms of stripping away one’s emotions, values, and imagination in order to make the mind a passive object which merely receives sense data. In common parlance, such a stance is a requirement for rationality.

This kind of objectivity has received the most attention, and many discussions of objectivity in general concern the question of whether or not a person can perceive objectively. Particularly since continental philosophy turned away from positivism, philosophy of science began talking in terms of paradigms, and philosophy of language became philosophy of mind, the answer to the question appears to be a clear negative: that epistemological objectivity is impossible. Claiming to believe in objectivity, or rationality, now seems as quaint as asserting the world is flat because the issue seems so utterly settled. At this point we simply want to mention two questions about epistemological objectivity which have not been answered, despite the apparent consensus: first, if complete epistemological objectivity is impossi­ble, is it useful as a goal? Second, does the impossibility of epistemological objectivity prove the impossibility of ontological objectivity?

The third kind of objectivity is rhetorical. To refer to something as rhetorically objective is to say that it has (or should have) a particular status in argumentative situations. An objective statement, in this sense, immedi­ately produces conviction in the listener because it seems to carry a kind of force that transcends (or undergirds, depending upon one’s metaphors) human discourse itself. Chaim Perelman has persuasively argued that rhetorical objectivity is not inherent in the discourse itself, but is typically a result either of ethos or audience, and a similar argument has been made by Thomas Kuhn. Unfortunately, rhetorical objectivity has been so discredited that many people now conclude that any form of objectivity is impossible, that rationality assumes an impossible objectivity, and that any discussion of reason therefore begins on quicksand.

But numerous philosophers of discourse describe a form of rationality and argumentation which does not require the ability of a person to stand outside her own interests, to ground her arguments in rhetorical objectivity, or to forgo any emotional involvement in the question at hand. As men­tioned earlier, people like Arendt and Habermas insist that particularity of viewpoint is actually necessary for public argumentation. More important, numerous philosophers insist that emotional involvement is actually neces­sary. Taylor, for example, says that “We aren’t full human beings in this perspective until we can say what moves us, what our lives are built around,” and “The constitutive good is a moral source. . . that is, it is something the love of which empowers us to do and be good” (92, 93).

We must be emotionally involved in the issue, we must be able to convey our emotions and how we came to them, and, at least if we are going to persuade someone, we must get that other person to share our feelings. Taylor says, “I can only convince you by my description of the good if I speak for you, either by articulating what underlies your existing moral intuitions or perhaps by my description moving you to the point of making it your own” (77). Thus, philosophers assign to argumentation the strategies and aim which composition textbooks often assign to imaginative or creative writing.

There is another feature of the imagination, or the capacity to imagine, which Taylor and others have argued is an “inescapable feature of human life” and a necessary component to any discussion of ethical questions—that is the ability to imagine what it is like to be someone else (Taylor 47). In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt attributes Eichmann’s inability to behave ethically to his inability to empathize with the Jews—he simply could not imagine what they were feeling. Nussbaum insists that empathy specifically and emotions generally are a necessary part of virtue and therefore of ethical reasoning: “And it isn’t just that sometimes we need the emotions to get to the right (intellectual) view of the situation; this is true, but not the whole story. Neither is it just that the emotions supply extra praiseworthy elements external to cognition but without which virtue is incomplete. The emotions are themselves modes of vision, or recognition” (79).

Rhetoric has always understood the importance of emotions to persuasion, and it has also always promoted a connection between style and the emotions. We tend to forget, however, that, even when rhetoric was most narrowly defined (in, for example, the medieval handbooks on preaching or letter writing), rhetoric was made the realm for the study of imagery, for the skill of perceiving and creating vivid images. In other words, rhetoric has always been a realm for the education and exploration of the imagination.

Fostering the Imagination Through Teaching Research

Of course, the history of rhetoric is not univocal, and there have been numerous theories of discourse which separate emotions from argumenta­tion, particularly in those theories most influenced by the Enlightenment. Thus, for some rhetoricians, one considers emotions only in the final stages of the writing process, when polishing an argument for stylistic consider­ations, ornamenting the piece, or adding emotional appeals. But such a denigration of the processes of the irrational tends to arise in theories of composition which are strictly linear; the problem, thus, is not in teaching argumentation because it is linear, but in teaching any aspect of writing as though it were linear. Instead, the richer theories of discourse discussed above suggest that we perceive writing and thinking (and reading, for that matter) as recursive and dialectical—processes which involve the whole person, one’s irrational (often characterized as emotional) side as well as the rational one, and which necessitate a dialectic between the individual and a community. As Suzanne Benack et al. argue, “A dialectical model of knowledge is likely to foster creativity . . . because it represents the process of thinking as creative” (205). Bennack et al. summarize this model as fostering “develop­mental transformation . . . occurring via constitutive and interactive relation­ships” (202).

There are several schools of modern composition which have empha­sized recursive and dialectical approaches, and which have promoted teach­ing and writing strategies which value community, the personal, and holistic methods of writing and assessment. As C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon say, “The governing spirit of the writing workshop is the modern rhetorical perspective . . . where individual creativity, the energy of personal statement within a community of interested readers, is more valuable than timid or enforced capitulation to hackneyed thought” (104). Responding to the “call for a shift in the identity roles offered in the classroom,” such teachers allow for what Robert Brooke calls “underlife” behaviors that may seem to “be in conflict with accepted ways of thinking and acting” (150, 141).

One of the most effective, and probably most popular, methods for encouraging a dialectic between the personal and the community is to use collaborative writing groups. As Jerome Bruner eloquently maintains, negotiations with others help us to define our reality, and “we know far too little about learning from vicarious experience, from interaction” (68). Ann Ruggles Gere suggests methods of awakening the imagination by group interaction when she says that students learn “when they challenge one another with questions, when they use . . . evidence and information . . . . when they develop relationships among issues, when they evaluate their own thinking” (69).

While we heartily endorse such practices, we think it unfortunate that they are often represented as a rejection of classical rhetoric or philosophy, or that they are often coupled with an unwillingness to teach argumentation, reasoning, or research paper writing. While we bemoan a tendency among some programs to ignore the imagination, we also criticize programs which denigrate reasoning. However, we would suggest that the work of such people as Michael Polanyi, Mary Warnock, and Ann Berthoff indicate methods for engaging in what Warnock calls educating the imagination and intelligence together (202).

It seems to us that a tendency to separate intuition or emotions from "reason" particularly leads to problems in the teaching of research and analysis, and our experience indicates that these problems include dull writing, writing blocks, and plagiarism. The solution to these problems is suggested in Polanyi’s definition of imagination: “our conceptual imagina­tion, like its artistic counterpart, draws inspiration from contacts with experience” (46). The terms “experience” and “reflection” run like threads through the works of many writers who refuse to make the rational/irrational split—experience and reflection upon it are the methods whereby emotions and critical thinking are connected.

As Berthoff says in Reclaiming the Imagination, “Studying perception and the apprehension of reality is a way to reclaim the imagination as the forming power of the mind” (4). One especially powerful way to have students reflect on their experience is through teaching methods of ethnog­raphy. If, for example, students are assigned sections of James Spradley’s The Ethnographic Interview that concern the selection of informants and the conducting of interviews, they can then be encouraged to select informants for some topic connected to local issues. Before meeting with the informants, they need to write introductory letters requesting interviews, to conduct background research, to compose questions, and to anticipate potential problems. These activities require considerable amount of writing, and students generally wish to use peer groups to draft such material. The outcome of the actual interviews may cause students to reconsider the results of their background research, or to do additional research, or to conduct additional interviews, or to revise questions. In short, the students experi­ence research as a moving negotiation between what one once knew and what one is learning. Written material also becomes a method of creation, as well as a record of experience from which one draws for reflection.

Using ethnography for the purpose of freeing students from harmful dichotomies is well-supported. Mary Louise Pratt discusses the advantages and the dilemma of ethnographic writing as both a process and product—with the “scientific position of speech [as] that of an observer fixed on the edge of space, looking in and/or down upon what is other. Subjective experience, on the other hand, is spoken in the middle of things” (32). Patricia Clough argues that using ethnography for social criticism threatens positivist no­tions of data-collection and breaks down the opposition between public and private (136-37). Linda Brodkey recommends the use of interviews in a narrative as a questioning or critique of culture as well as a rendering of experience (46). As James Clifford writes in “On Ethnographic Allegory,” the writer must impose a coherence “as alter ego, provoker, and editor of the discourse” (106). Paul Rabinow recommends in his interdisciplinary ap­proaches the infusion of imagination into research by anthropological writing—a dialogical, potentially Bakhtinian textualization (243-46). He also emphasizes the writer’s need to be self-conscious about style, rhetoric, and dialectic in producing an anthropological work (244).

James Zebroski has explored the ways that ethnographic writing encour­ages the blurring of teachers’ and students’ roles. All become researchers and learners as the community members selected as subjects are the experts. The class ethnographies become the texts, and discussion and analysis centers on the contradictions and connections with the readers’ own world views or “propriospects,” to use the ethnographic term. Since, in this type of course plan, the students’ topics may be individually selected or conducted in pairs or groups, there is a tremendous variety of material for the class to consider when it gathers to work on generating topics or questions, to analyze results, and to publish products in different stages of completion. Studs Terkel’s Working functions especially well as a model, but experience has shown that students benefit from also reading such authors as Shirley Brice Heath, Joan Didion, John McPhee, and from reading interesting samples of previous student work.

Through the sort of individualized instruction this ethnography can provide, students can learn to build imaginatively on their research. They can take what is significant in the social, conventional setting of an interview and interpret in terms of their existing knowledge. They must find relevant connections between the subjects’ experiences and their own perceptions, and escape, at least for a time, narrowly egocentric ways of viewing the world. Personal biases and mere opinion themselves become a focus of critical thought; thus, a student’s own feelings about the topic are not ignored or denigrated, but become part of the research. As Polanyi argues, “into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known” (xvii).

Such methods open students to a diversity of discourse, they make a place for individual as well as collaborative writing, and they thereby accom­plish what John Trimbur advocates from Habermas’ work: challenging students (and ourselves as teachers) to “open gaps in the conversation through which differences may emerge” (614). Students in collaborative groups, no matter what their task, must constantly negotiate their roles in the group as well as fulfill their assigned tasks. In this complex social setting, the students must draw on experience, must become emotionally as well as intellectually involved in the work of writing. They enter into an act of literacy by relating their personal knowledge to a public discourse.

Ethnography and group work are, obviously, not the only methods for weaving together critical thinking and the imagination. Much modern philosophical discourse models ways of drawing in literature and literary strategies which do not necessitate students writing literary criticism but passionate arguments, while rhetoric’s traditional interest in metaphor indicates another realm which could be productively explored by students and teachers. Reasoning can and probably should be taught by pedagogies which pay close attention to feelings, to narrative, to character, and to images. In short, our point is that it simply is not logical to exclude works of the imagination or processes and strategies of imaginative writing from courses teaching argumentation, and it demonstrates a sad lack of imagination to think that one must choose between reasoning and creativity.