Composition: History & Theory: 1865 - 1899
Textbooks
Description
Robert J. Connors in “The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse” (1981) pinpoints 1872 as the beginning of the rise of the modes of discourse in pedagogy due to the publication of Samuel Newman’s Modes of Discourse. Connors describes Newman’s work as more than just a classification system of discourse. It was a conceptualizing strategy for teaching composition which focused on Narration, Description, Exposition, and Argument. Connors examines the adjustments that scholars following Newman made that kept the modes popular (Alexander Bain, Richard Green Parker, George Quakenbos, etc.) until their estrangement in the 1940s (right on the heels of ideological rhetorics such as cognitive psychology, expressionism, and social-epistemology). Connors traces the teaching of composition by beginning with what he calls “belletristic” or “fine” writing popularized by Hugh Blair (1790-1860) and his focus on Letters, Treatises, Essays, Biographies, and Fiction. Connors calls this focus “aristocratic” and then explains that a shift in the structure of higher education (after 1860, and from a “preponderance of smaller colleges to a preponderance of larger institutions with more varied and scientific curricula”) called for a “new sort of educated man,” which meant an educated man of common stock (446). Essentially, Connors sees the movement from the small, aristocratic classrooms of the pre-Civil War colleges to large post-Civil War institutions with Freshman English courses as directly paralleling the popularization of the modes because the modes fit with “the abstract, mechanical nature of writing instruction at the time” (453). Although there were a few single-mode textbooks during this time period, including Buck’s Expository Writing , Baker’s The Principles of Argumentation , and Maxcy’s The Rhetorical Principles of Narration , the modes caused a development away from writing as conveyed through argument and style—toward writing that was primarily interested in emulating forms. By the end of the nineteenth century, “The Big Four” textbook writers including Barrett Wendell, John Genung, Adams Sherman Hill, and Fred Newton Scott were all using modes as controlling forces in their books, except Wendell.
Date of Upload
3/13/09