| English 5011 (Studies in Rhetoric and Composition) is a graduate seminar that
is usually offered once a year as part of the study option in rhetoric and composition in
the English Department's M.A. program. In Spring
1999, this seminar will study the so-called conflict between theory (theoria) and
practice (praxis) in the field of rhetoric and composition. How does theory
inform and shape our institutional practices of writing, reading, and teaching? In what
ways do these practices actually subvert and dismantle theories that define what we do as
writers and readers? How does technology and its contributions to writing and reading
further inform or complicate the theory-practice divide? And in what ways does technology
function as theory and as practice?
To answer such questions—and to raise others—this seminar will survey
(briefly) the history of rhetorical theory, focusing in particular on 20th-century
statements about rhetoric and the discipline we know as rhetoric and composition.
While the general focus of the seminar is on the longstanding dispute between
theory and practice, our more specific focus will be on teaching, technology, and
textuality—how they interrelate and inform each other, as well as how they
problematize each other. Each one of these concepts has in play various theories and
practices, which often conflict and collide with each other or, just as often, these
differences remain hidden and unexamined. At the same time, terms like teaching,
technology, and textuality are fundamental constructs of our educational, interpretive,
and consumerist cultures. The dispute between theory-practice, therefore, provides
an opportunity to re-think the matrix of teaching, technology, and textuality and the ways
in which this matrix is cohesive or divisive.
As such, this course is not a theory course per se, nor is it a methods
course as commonly conceived. Rather, this course is somewhere in between (to invoke a
spatial metaphor) those initiatives (perhaps even somewhere above), for "Practicing
Theory" calls into question both terms as static concepts. What we find in this
questioning—and where we find ourselves—will be the topics of our discussion
throughout the semester, which we will all address more formally in the online anthology
of articles that this seminar will publish later in the semester.
"Practicing Theory: An Anthology of
Articles"
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