Composition: History & Theory: 1700 - 1799
Rhetoric and the Revolution
Description
According to Albert Kitzhaber’s Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900 (1953), rhetoric instruction before the American Revolution was seen as superficial and more as a duty for and by tutors. Due to the political environment, however, this attitude toward rhetoric changed, and oratory and debate increased in importance. Soon these areas had their own texts and trained professors. Literary societies dealt with literature and composition (these are basically what we know as Greek organizations today).
Robert Connors, in Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy (1997) explains how early composition-rhetoric courses consisted of reading and analyzing model essays, memorizing figures, tropes, and forms, writing and reciting “fortnightly rhetoricals” on abstract topics (8). Evaluation of students’ essays was mainly oral, during student-teacher conferences and in front of the class. Classes of 35 students were typical. Connors also notes that women in America were taught rhetoric and composition for the first time in 1790 at the Young Ladies Academy in Philadelphia, but the oral component was “extremely circumscribed” (40). This attitude continued through the 1800s until the women’s movement slowly won women public speaking rights. Female orators who spoke before mixed audiences faced protest, even in commencement speeches.
Date of Upload
3/13/09