Finding Identity in the Canons
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| Fig. 1. Picture of W2 telling stories on video |
The video is ten
or eleven years old. Dad has set up the camera so that Grandpa is clearly the
focus. He is off-center, to the left side of the frame, and he is not the only
one on camera. Behind him sits Mom, and to the right is Aunt Betty, but they
are clearly not the subject of the video. Their attention is on Grandpa as he
tells his stories, which he does in his laid-back way, Arizona drawl like
something out of a Western. He punctuates his points with his hands and (on
occasion) his cane. Dad took this video knowing that he might not get many more
chances to get Grandpa’s stories recorded.
My paternal
grandfather Wayne Weech (he sometimes signed his name W2) died in 2010 from
complications due to prostate cancer. He lived with the cancer for several
years before he finally succumbed, and in that time, my father made a point to
bring the video camera to capture my grandfather’s stories, of which there are
many. My grandfather was always good at telling the stories, and his children
didn’t want them to be lost, in particular because of the way that they consider
these stories to be a part of their family identity.
What is it about
the rhetorical presentation of these stories that links them so closely to both
the identity of my grandfather and the identity of my family? I am particularly
interested in looking at how this question intersects with digital rhetoric:
how do the canons, and in particular the canons as mediated through digital
means (such as digitized family archives) shape family identity? In this post,
I begin to examine connections between the canons and identity. I will look
briefly at all five canons here, though my final aims will eventually center on
memory and delivery, two canons that I think are intrinsically linked to family
storytelling and archiving. In pursuing this question and using my own family
history as a study within it, I take up what Wendy Sharer (2008) suggests when
she encourages researchers to not disregard “the rhetorical practices of family
members and friends” or to place the critical examination of those practices “beyond
the boundaries of valid research” (p. 55).1 I find my own family
stories fascinating, and they make up part of my own identity, but I also see
them as an instance of something larger at work, and I hope to find some
insight into what that “something larger” really is and how it functions. I
don’t pretend that I will find all of the answers (or even most of them).
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| Fig. 2. The Canons |
Invention
In the past few
decades, invention as a canon has been examined within contexts of social
construction, and tying invention to identity is a logical extension of this
examination. In her historical overview of invention, Janice Lauer (2004)
describes the inclusion of questions of social context in invention. She
discusses Bizzell’s inclusion of both “cognitive and social factors” in
invention and LeFevre’s discussion of invention as a “dialectical process”
where speaker, audience, and context act together (p. 100). Krista Ratcliffe
(1999) introduces the concept of rhetorical listening to the process of
invention, a process by which, she indicates, individuals “situate themselves”
among discourse in a performative act that promotes “understanding of self and
other,” responsibility among power relationships, locating similarities and
differences, and accentuating “cultural logics” within which such similarities
and differences function (p. 204). Invention here is a social act, and as a
social act, it positions itself within/out the speaker, acknowledging the
speaker’s relational position to audience and context. Invention, when viewed
in this way, grows out of identity.
Individuals invent in ways that are connected to their backgrounds, including
cultural, racial, gender, and family backgrounds.
Arrangement and
Style
Arrangement and
style are also easily tied to identity, and both are frequently revisited by
rhetoricians. While memory and delivery in particular have traditionally had a
spoken-word element to them, arrangement and style can easily be adapted and
discussed in terms of writing. Prior (et. al., 2007) notes that rhetorical
discussions in (at the very least) the first half of the twentieth century
focused almost entirely on these two canons. A crucial element of arrangement
is the establishment of a speaker’s authority. Speakers must craft their
arguments in ways that employ ethical appeals that make them more trustworthy
and reliable in the eyes of their audiences. While a speaker can do this
unethically (pun intended), fabricating a persona in order to deceive an
audience, I would argue that to do this effectively, the speaker should draw on
their true background, knowledge, and experiences. Similarly, while style has
in the past often been consigned to the Strunk-and-White grammar-centric usage
of the term, recent examination of the term has done much to expand it to what
could include elements of identity. I do not mean to disparage the importance
of one’s artful use of grammar and mechanics as a key aspect of style, but as
Ray (2015) has noted, style can and should be determined by such varied
components as genre, language, and even the voice of the speaker (p. 139). The
standard “academic” style emphasized in English classes is but one of many
possible styles dependent on varying rhetorical situations. The situation
determines the style, and the situation is made up of individuals of different
backgrounds whose identities influence both how discourse is crafted as well as
how it is understood.
Memory
With the canon of
memory, the question of how the canons influence identity (and family identity
in particular) becomes murkier, if only because memory itself as a canon has
only recently been resurrected as an area of study according to Kittle Autry
and Kelly (2012) in their introduction to the “ArchiTEXTure” issue of Enculturation. They note that in the
digital age, a text lives beyond its initial “inception and reception,” and
considering a text’s sustainability (in other words, how people will remember
it) is an important question. This particular issue of Enculturation is interesting in that it includes proceedings of the
2012 Computers & Writing Conference, of which one of the keynote speakers
was Anne Wysocki, whose address, Kittle Autry and Kelly explain, was
particularly focused on memory, but due to technical issues, is not included. A
review of Wysocki’s keynote (Smith, 2012) describes Wysocki’s description of
how with the proliferation of technologies—from the printing press on through
modern digital technologies—memory has shifted from the Classical notion of
carrying all public culture to emphasizing individual “experiences and
perceptions.” Memory is distinctly individual and tied to the self.
Memory can also
be tied to archival work. Gesa Kirsch and Liz Rohan (2008) describe the value
that archival work has in connecting individuals to community and cultural
memory and the ways in which such research can “resurrect the memory of
historical actors” (p. 6). A full section of Kirsch and Rohan’s book focuses on
voices that have historically been oppressed or silenced in some way, its
chapters addressing how archival work gets at rediscovering memories and voices
that have previously been silenced. These memories together make up cultures,
families, individuals. On a smaller level, Jody Shipka (2012) has written about
the question of what gets archived at all, tying this to memory in her ongoing project
of collecting artifacts and archives of individuals who might otherwise be
forgotten. From both a cultural, a family, and an individual standpoint, then,
memory is distinctly tied to what is remembered and how it is remembered,
including those stories that are seen as foundational to that culture, family,
and individual. The archive, then, is a rhetorical act of remembering.
Delivery
Delivery, the last
of the canons, is similar to earlier canons in that it can easily be connected
to an individual’s identity. In the classical sense, delivery is the “how” of
what is said, usually referring to how speakers stand, what intonation they
use, what gestures they make, and so forth (Prior et. al., 2007, p. 4). Prior
suggests that with the proliferation of digital technology the very term “delivery”
could be replaced with the term “mediation” in that technical texts allow for “detours,
delegations, and hybrids”:
What
mediations, what kinds of detours, might delivery of a text involve? Do we
write a text to be read silently, read aloud (as a speech), recorded on a DVD,
or performed by various groups of actors on a stage? What typeface do we use?
What color? Do we deliver the document on paper, on the screen, or in some
other medium? If on paper, by mail or by hand? If by hand, do we do it
ourselves or do we have someone else do it? Do we synchronize the delivery with
some other event? Or perhaps we deliver it (think espionage; think, like Erving
Goffman, 1974, of the stratagems of con artists) by allowing others to find it
in another place. Do we need to deliver the text first to an intermediary
(editor, publisher, boss) for review to get it out to a public of some size? Or
do we want the text to be distributed in encrypted formats to a small select
distribution list? Or do we divide up the delivery of the message so that the
chances of illicit use are limited? (Think about systems to deliver the
authorization codes for nuclear weapons.) As these questions begin to suggest,
delivery seems to encompass two related but distinct types of issues: mediation
and distribution. (p. 6-7)
Delivery, then is
complicated in a digital environment because of the myriad of options that
exist for actually delivering discourse.
With all these options comes an opportunity for delivery to be influenced by
and influence identity. In his discussion on “recovering” delivery, James
Porter (2009) lists five areas in particular in which digital technology
enables and invites a closer examination of delivery. Porter describes the
first of these five areas, “Body/Identity,” as “concerning online
representations of the body,” including “gestures, voice, dress, and image, and
questions of identity and performance and online representations of race,
class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity” (p. 208).
It All Comes Back to Family
All five canons,
then, can be tied to identity, family or otherwise. I am particularly
interested in memory and delivery and how the way in which we remember my
grandfather’s stories and the digital ways in which we continue to deliver
those stories to each other continues to build and reinforce those identities. With
this rhetorical base, I now can move on to examine our archives themselves and
see how they elaborate and complicate these ideas.
I want to conclude
by briefly discussing the question “How is this Computers and Writing?” I wonder
if it isn’t something that could be just as easily included in some other
category of Rhetoric and Composition. Is this project specifically suited for
C&W? I could take the easy argument that in some way, Computers and Writing
is as broad a field as Rhetoric and Composition itself and encompasses many of
the same elements.
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| Fig. 3. My overview of C&W as drawn on a white board in class |
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| Fig. 4. Newly archived family video on Facebook |
1 I should mention that where possible, I have tried to use Open Access sources. Since this project is about my family, they should have a right to be able to read it if they choose. I think I have been largely successful; however, there are some significant disciplinary sources such as Porter or Ratcliffe whose ideas do tie in even though they are not Open Access. As this project develops, I plan on developing more strategies for how to work those types of sources into my own project.↩
References
Kirsch, G., & Rohan, L.
(2008). Beyond the archives: Research as a lived process. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press. Retrieved from http://site.ebrary.com/id/10695253
Kittle Autry, M., &
Kelly, A. R. (2012). Introduction to the special issue: Computers & Writing
2012, ArchiTEXTure. Enculturation, 14. Retrieved from http://enculturation.net/architexture-introduction#1
Lauer, J. M. (2004). Invention
in rhetoric and composition. West Lafayette, Ind. : [Fort Collins, Colo.]:
Parlor Press ; WAC Clearinghouse.
Porter, J. E. (2009).
Recovering delivery for digital rhetoric. Computers and Composition, 26(4),
207–224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2009.09.004
Prior, P., Solberg, J.,
Berry, P., Bellwoar, H., Chewning, B., Lunsford, K. J., … Walker, J. (2007).
Remediating the canons. Kairos, 11(3). Retrieved from http://technorhetoric.net/11.3/binder.html?topoi/prior-et-al/index.html
Ratcliffe, K. (1999).
Rhetorical listening: A trope for interpretive invention and a “code of
cross-cultural conduct.” College Composition and Communication, 51(2),
195–224. https://doi.org/10.2307/359039
Ray, B. (2015). Style: An
introduction to history, theory, research, and pedagogy. Anderson, South
Carolina: Parlor Press.
Sharer, W. B. (2008). Traces
of the familiar: Family archives as primary source material. In G. Kirsch &
L. Rohan (Eds.), Beyond the archives: Research as a lived process (pp.
47–55). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Retrieved from http://site.ebrary.com/id/10695253
Shipka, J. (2012). To
preserve, digitize, and project: On the process of composing other people’s
lives. Enculturation, 14. Retrieved from http://enculturation.net/preserve-digitize-project
Smith, C. (2012, June).
Review of keynote ~ Anne Frances Wysocki, “Grounding spaces for recollecting.”
Retrieved March 12, 2019, from http://www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org/2012/06/11/keynote-anne-frances-wysocki-grounding-spaces-for-recollecting/
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