Ethical Issues in College Writing

261 Pages·1999·1.242 MB·English

by  Fredric G. Gale, Phillip Sipiora, James L. Kinneavy

Ethical Issues
College Writing
IN
STUDIES IN COMPOSITION AND RHETORIC
Vol. 1
PETER LANG
New York • Washington, D.C./Baltimore (cid:127) Boston (cid:127) Bern
Frankfurt am Main (cid:127) Berlin (cid:127) Brussels (cid:127) Vienna (cid:127) Canterbury
Ethical Issues
College Writing
IN
E D I T E D B Y
Fredric G. Gale, Phillip Sipiora,
and James L. Kinneavy
PETER LANG
New York (cid:127) Washington, D.C./Baltimore (cid:127) Boston (cid:127) Bern
Frankfurt am Main (cid:127) Berlin (cid:127) Brussels (cid:127) Vienna (cid:127) Canterbury
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Ethical issues in college writing /
edited by Fredric G. Gale, Phillip Sipiora, and James L. Kinneavy.
p. cm. — (Studies in composition and rhetoric; vol. 1)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching—Theory, etc.
2. Report writing—Study and teaching (Higher)—Theory, etc. 3. Rhetoric—Moral and
ethical aspects—Study and teaching. 4. College teaching—
Moral and ethical aspects. I. Gale, Fredric G. II. Sipiora, Phillip.
III. Kinneavy, James L. IV. Series.
PE1404.E84 808’.042’0711—DC21 97-17932
ISBN 0-8204-3072-2
ISSN 1080-5397
DIE DEUTSCHE BIBLIOTHEK-CIP-EINHEITSAUFNAHME
Ethical issues in college writing / ed. by Fredric G. Gale, Phillip Sipiora,
and James L. Kinneavy. −New York; Washington, D.C./Baltimore; Boston; Bern;
Frankfurt am Main; Berlin; Brussels; Vienna; Canterbury: Lang.
(Studies in composition and rhetoric; Vol. 1)
ISBN 0-8204-3072-2
Cover design by Lisa Dillon
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council of Library Resources.
© 1999 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York
All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
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Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents
Foreword The Ethics of Ethics ix
David Bleich
Chapter 1 Ethics and Rhetoric: Forging a
Moral Language for the English Classroom 1
James L. Kinneavy
Chapter 2 Legal Rights and Responsibilities
in the Writing Classroom 21
Fredric G. Gale
Chapter 3 Ethics and Ideology in the English Classroom 39
Phillip Sipiora
Chapter 4 Doing English 63
W. Ross Winterowd
Chapter 5 Ethics, Ethos, Habitation 75
James Comas
Chapter 6 Encountering the Other:
Postcolonial Theory and Composition Scholarship 91
Gary A. Olson
Chapter 7 Ethos and Ethics:
Ancient Concepts and Contemporary Writing 107
Rosalind J. Gabin
VI Table of Contents

Chapter 8 Ethics, Rhetorical Action, and a Neoliberal Arts 137
Kathleen Ethel Welch
Chapter 9 The Hermeneutics of Suspicion and
Other Doubting Games: Reclaiming Belief
in the Writing of Reading and the
Reading of Writing 155
C. Jan Swearingen
Chapter 10 Ethos, Ethical Argument, and
Ad Hominem in Contemporary Theory 183
James S. Baumlin
George H. Jensen
Lance Massey
Chapter 11 A Rhizomatic Ethics of Interpretation 221
David L. Erben and Kelli Erben
Notes on Contributors 237
Index 241

Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Michael G. Sullivan and Maureen D. Ivusic of
the University of South Florida for their efforts and editorial skills in
bringing this manuscript from the dark of night to the light of day.
They have been consummate professionals in painstakingly preparing
a manuscript that came to them in many forms. Any remaining errors
are those of the editors.
Frederic G. Gale
Phillip Sipiora
James L. Kinneavy
Foreword

The Ethics of Ethics
David Bleich
This book is about how faculty members in English and in writing,
after a long drink of identity politics and social construction, are broach-
ing a subject that reconsiders individual subjectivity in the context of
the social and political awareness painfully established in our curricula.
Sometimes the essays will imply that ethics is a new accent given as a
substitute for the existing ones; but that is not the case. The subject of
ethics is broached in this volume as an addition-for-today to the dis-
cussions about writing that have gone on for generations. I offer this
caution only because of my fear of academic habits: when a new ac-
cent appears, too many people treat it as “the answer.”
I direct readers immediately to James Comas’s citation of the aca-
demic “stock market” (first formulated by Northrop Frye, with differ-
ent elements):
. . . the key terms of composition studies boom and crash in an imaginary
stock exchange; ‘social constructionism,’ for example, has reached its peak
and has begun to taper off; ‘hypertext’ and ‘webbed’ classrooms may be in
for a slight flutter; but the ‘political’ stocks are still bearish. . . . .while
‘ethics’ appears to be a good short-term investment it is not yet clear whether
its performance is likely to continue into the long-term. Perhaps . . . ethics
will [experience an] . . . unprecedented explosion in growth; or perhaps
. . . we are witnessing . . . only an ‘irrational exuberance.’ (76–77)
Neither Frye nor we think our interests vary with the same unpre-
dictable movements as the stock market; nor do most of us think the
term “capital” is more than a cute metaphor, which Comas also dis-
cusses in regard to cultural, political, and professional value. Comas’s
use of this figure in his approach to the work of Kenneth Burke sounds
the change from 1957 to 1997. The West’s victory in the cold war
has given market and capital vocabulary (thinking, discourse, or rheto-
X The Ethics of Ethics

ric, for those who prefer other terms) a different authority. There is
less irony in this metaphor now: it seems more literally true. Aca-
demic life is an arbitrary market; stocks of ideas go up and down as
people “buy into” them; the only cause is getting “rich” for some and
a job for others, in both cases winning the competition for being “in”
or “au courant.” To have values—to hold principles and convictions—
is coming to seem a luxury just as having capital is a luxury. These
conditions were less in evidence when Frye wrote. Comas turns to
Burke: to one who, when New Critics wrote with solemn certainty,
wrote with celebration and interest, and not in pursuit of utter
certainty.
Burke wrote about motives, performance, and took some pleasure
in confounding taken-for-granted pairs of concepts like act and scene.
His writings could not add up to a dogma; as a result, he now has
students rather than disciples.1 Comas looks to Burke to learn how to
cope with uncertainty, and perhaps to do this coping without leaning
on the national obsessions with capital, without following fads, with-
out assuming the overwhelming mercantile mentality that is reaching
outlandish proportions even in academic life.
Comas may also be saying that we finally are going to stop thinking
of ourselves as either writing teachers or English teachers alone. We
ought finally to resist disciplinary boundaries and, regardless, light out
for territory that is already occupied. Comas and the other contribu-
tors to this volume say that the interest in ethics is a call for self-
evaluation and for engaging the subject in ways that honor the tradi-
tion of writing represented by Burke whose metaphorical inventiveness
is part of the substance of his communication with us, as Comas cites:
have we become accustomed to dwelling with what Burke will call “the
Scramble, the Wrangle of the Market Place, the flurries and flare-ups
of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, the wavering like of pres-
sure and counterpressure, the Logomachy, the onus of ownership,
the Wars of Nerves, the War”?
Comas’s turn to Burke, not an argument in a traditional sense, is a
gesture of appeal to authorize the feeling that Burke expressed or
shared in his uses of language, his rhetorics of commitment and pur-
pose. Perhaps Comas rejects the idea that expressions of feeling and
commitment are “investments,” a term most academics now use to
describe what ought to be called principle, devotion, loyalty, or belief.
Jan Swearingen makes belief her point of entry into this reconsid-
eration2 of how to introduce ethics into the subject of writing, lan-
guage use, and rhetoric. Her discussion of belief and leaps of faith
David Bleich XI

tries to teach us that our own vocabularies are helping to do us in.
From one standpoint, it may appear as if she is advocating religious
values. If you are religious, her perspective would welcome you; but
that is not, I think, the main movement of her essay, which is, rather,
this:
There are Western academic paradigms such as dialogues and hermeneutics
that have emphasized interactional and collective models of mind, discourse,
self, and meaning. These, however, have often held a minority position in
relation to the practices of skepticism, and programmatic doubt, and
hyperindividualism that since Descartes have dominated Western academia
and its values. (157)
In this grouping, I take special note of Swearingen’s relating of
doubt to individualism. To put the matter in more experiential terms,
the habits of doubt are to her part of the social style of combat and
argumentation. If you doubt others, you tend to argue with others; if
you have an open mind, with the attempt to believe, you will ex-
change thoughts with others. The approach of “belief” as Swearingen
is advocating it, is an interpersonal posture not characteristic of the
academy. If the teaching of writing and language use is the issue, and
if scholars of this subject show the habits of individualism themselves,
how will it be possible to teach the subject of writing any differently? If
these scholars only say that the subject is dialogue, interaction, and
cooperative enterprise, but don’t enact these values, how can they be
taught? Swearingen explicitly relates “belief” to “conviction and rea-
soned action” (159). This is an appeal for the change of our states of
mind rather than for a kind of belief that merely accepts blind faith or
superstitious belief. One practical result of this state of mind is the
authorization of emotional contents and genres, a project that, un-
doubtedly, Burke’s work was approaching but did not reach.
At this juncture Swearingen discusses something perhaps only one
or two other contributors mention—the question of “women’s ways of
knowing” (160–61). Swearingen’s emphasis on belief alludes to the
feminist project, whose set of values other contributors approach
through abstraction and, in some cases, euphemism. She presents a
commentary (a reading?) on Christa Wolf’s novel Cassandra in which
the heroine’s perspective is an alternative to the “Hellenic understand-
ings of language and religion” (162). Swearingen also urges us toward
viewing the feminist perspective as bringing values to academic life
that do not dissociate thought from experience, spirit from body. By
removing the censorship of this strand of thought in classical Greek