The Art of Form, The Art of Argument

For this week’s readings, we again find new ways of thinking about argumentation and form. A departure from the annotated bits and pieces of Geoffrey Sirc’s “Box Logic,” both Peter Elbow and Barry Kroll still do maintain the sense of exploration, withholding of certain connections, and experimentation with forms that Sirc proposes. I also think that both Elbow and Kroll want to recapture the art of writing and rhetoric in the twenty-first century, just as Sirc wants us to imagine composition literally and our own roll as designers. For me, Peter Elbow’s “The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization” enacted the type of dynamic “itch and scratch” that he proposes as the differences between a visual understanding of form and a temporal understanding. This long article kept me reading until the end because of Elbow’s voice and the narrative he tells. In many ways, I think Elbow makes a great point in noting that readers are stuck experiencing texts in time, which means some visual metaphors (such as “sign-posting” in essays or thesis statements providing a “map” for readers) DO seem to fall short, particularly in the type of article-length papers we write in graduate school.  Particularly challenging is his re-imagining of “cohesion” and  “coherence,” which we often think of as logical and linear (“do all my points make sense in the order in which they appear?”), but Elbow wants us to think of us part of a pull that draws your reader through your own thinking process (or a cleaned up version of it). He writes,

“Current notions of cohesion points to local links between individual sentences or sections. Links are good; they grease the skids, but they don’t pull. I’m interested in what we might call dynamic cohesion – where we’re pulled from element to element. Current notions point to global semantic webbing that make readers feel that all the parts of a text are about the same topic. That’s valuable (and not easy). But I’m interested in dynamic coherence where the parts of the essay don’t just sit together because they are semantically linked; rather, we feel them pulled together with a kind of magnetic or centripetal force. Dynamic cohesion and dynamic coherence create the music of form” (633).

His illustrations of music and the type of dissonance and consonance that pulls the listener into the experience of rhythm and melody in time are useful. They remind us of the oral nature of speech and what is lost when we attempt to visually ramify a text through bullet points, outlines, and the dreaded five-paragraph essay. The oral nature of language is highlighted when Elbow states that the most common way that “writers bind words and pull readers through a text” is through Narrative (634). Particularly helpful for me in my own writing is his point that narrative can be personal stories, yes, but it can also be a mode of narrating our own thinking that is similar (though in some cases less personal) than the exploratory essays we just completed.

Elbow’s notion of “writing straight into our perplexity” and then narrativizing it is also helpful. This is a more sophisticated version of Allyn & Bacon’s “wallowing in complexity,” which in that textbook strikes me as a prewriting exercise. Elbow suggests we think about how this kind of rhetorical strategy can be employed in our own writing to accomplish that “itch and scratch” effect. One strong support of such a style that asserts something, for example, and then amends it, or takes us forward only to redouble back or even repeat, is that is can help elucidate very complicated arguments for readers. I have noticed yet again this semester in reading theory for our Contemporary Theory course that some of the most enjoyable theory to read uses sign-posting and also is able to create a dynamic pull through sentences and concepts that allows one idea to be stated, then restated, then explained and  clarified further, and etc. At the end of his article, Elbow concludes that we can in FACT use BOTH the visual and the temporal in even our most erudite in academic writing, and I think this is proven when we look at some of our favorite critics and writers in general.  Elbow’s version of “having your cake and eating it too” is as follows:

“If we start with thesis statements and introductory mapping, we seem to undermine the possibility of building an essay out of perplexity. This is most obvious in clunky five-paragraph essays and wooden textbooks. But it’s not that simple. Consider the case of narrative and how we are sometimes pulled along powerfully by the unfolding of exactly what we know it coming. And the time-binding power of good music is not destroyed if we’ve already heard it many times (though too many times too recently can be a problem). So, too, we CAN in fact be riveted by the dynamic energy of an essay that starts off announcing its claim and structure” (648-649).

Elbow has encouraged me to really encourage my students to try out different forms for their argumentative essays this unit (we’re very early in the unit, so this seems like a viable option). He has also made me think about the form of my own writing, which I feel is missing that voice that Elbow emphasizes toward the end of his piece. I am not going to persuade people with my stellar logic and organization (I’m just not that organized), but it’s possible that I could learn to be more purposefully creative with how I arrange my thoughts and develop an authorial voice.  

To move to Barry Kroll in “Arguing Differently,” I think this article does a wonderful job of further clarifying the concept that James Kastely in “From Formalism to Inquiry: A Model of Argument in Antigone” introduced us to last week. For one thing, Kroll uses a lot more practical examples of how he organizes his semester-long class on “arguing differently,” including the types of difference approaches he teaches (conciliatory, integrative, and deliberative), as well as readings that might accompany such approaches. Last week, many of us may be thinking that trying to get English 1000 students to focus on Antigone for an entire semester would be hard for those of us who don’t study Greek Tragedies that often and also for students who perhaps we can’t even get to read The New York Times. So, Kroll offers a model that is not based on literature but rather makes students focus ultimately on the value in different kinds of argumentation for different situations. Most importantly, it seems to help students grasp the complexity of problems, answers and arguments in general in virtually every aspect of their life. Even if students just walk out of the class with more of an awareness, I would consider such a course a success. Naturally, this type of course would require a commitment, just as “Box Logic” does, to take the time to develop this type of thinking and writing for students new to the whole game. I’m wondering if there are textbooks or readers that have this kind of focus on “arguing differently” that would make designing this course even easier.