On "Rhetoric" and "Composition"

John T. Gage UNIVERSITY OF OREGON

Describing anything like a stable relationship between rhetoric and composition is virtually impossible, since the terms themselves have a variety of meanings and applications. Anyone who presumes to assert what the relationship really is or ought to be is looking for trouble. An attempt to review the meanings of these terms, such as the one I am about to undertake, will not be justified by the possibility of fixing or circumscribing the field of "rhetoric and composition," as it is now popularly known. The best that we can hope for is a better understanding of what that field might entail, if it truly combines two fields, rhetoric and composition, related to each other in some meaningful way.

Terministic Screens

Of the two words, composition has the more stable contemporary meaning. Roughly, it means the teaching of writing in school, as in the phrase "the composition curriculum." However, that meaning must be qualified (and here the trouble starts) by observing that it is rarely used to describe the teaching of so-called creative writing, which is most often seen as a separate enterprise, as in the phrase "the composition and creative writing curricula." Not only does the term composition thereby take on the implicit meaning of "non-creative writing," but its definition will have to be smoothed over with additions like the teaching of expository writing or the teaching of nonfiction prose writing. For those composition teachers who view the process they teach as creative (as most do) or who see it as entailing processes shared by creative writers, such a qualification will not do. This association of composition with a presumably lower order of writing (the school theme) and its subsequent separation from the scope of rhetoric as an intellectual and belles-lettristic tradition may well derive from the influence of Alexander Bain textbook English Composition and Rhetoric: A Manual ( 1866), in which rhetoric revolves primarily around a theory of figurative language and composition around a theory of paragraph construction, both treated psychologically (see Horner, Mulderig). The association of composition with such a limited pedagogy contrasts to today's pedagogical practices, in which a wider range of approaches prevails, even if the product is (loosely) circumscribed by the nonfiction essay. Already we are seeing that a single term, composition, in fact stands for different concepts and that those concepts are not necessarily compatible. Even though the term is equivocal in reference to what kind of writing is taught in composition, there is relative agreement about its reference to teaching. The agreement is by no means universal. It should be noted, for instance, that the phenomenon of teaching writing in school (as a separate discipline), despite its European intellectual traditions, is primarily American. The Oxford English Dictionary does not include this meaning, familiar to every American English teacher. So, while European students would be familiar with the idea of writing compositions, they would be generally unfamiliar with the idea of composition as a subject separate from other subjects. The use of the term in nineteenth-century American education is almost exclusively in the sense of a subject to be studied and practiced separately from other subjects. But when Edgar Allan Poe wrote his essay entitled "The Principle of Composition" ( 1846), the term  implied no reference to teaching; it meant composition as the activity of writing. And the kind of composition that it referred to was exclusively what is called creative writing now. Classical sources for using composition in any of these senses are scarce and inconclusive. A rhetorical treatise by Dionysius of Halicarnassus ( first century B.C.) is traditionally entitled De Compositione Verborum, but compositione is the Latinization of σύνθεσις, meaning, among other things, arrangement or order, so the treatise might as well be called On the Arrangement of Words ( Roberts8-9). It appears from Butler's translation of Quintilian ( first century A.D.) that Book X, chapter 5 of the Institutio Oratoria concerns "composition," but Quintilian does not use the verb compono there but scribo, meaning "to write." Quintilian is addressing the question of how the theoretical knowledge of rhetoric he has discussed in the first nine books can be acquired and he distinguishes writing, reading, and speaking as three possible ways. So what strikes the translator as "composition" is in fact a list of exercises in writing, such as translation, paraphrase, and imitation. There is no equivalent of composition, in the general American sense, in classical rhetoric, unless it is rhetoric itself, although the prescription of particular written exercises (the progymnasmata) is roughly equivalent to one sense, that of practicing exercises in writing. Compositio was commonly used in Roman rhetoric to refer to one of the stages through which a student or rhetor proceeds in the creation of a text: inventio, dispositio, dictio, compositio. In such a schema, according to Aldo Scaglione, compositio, also called structura, is the Greek σύνθεσις, which studies the relationship or, rather, the structural order of the parts of the sentences, hence primarily an aspect of syntax . . . but seen from the rhetorician's particular vantage point, namely one which transcends the grammatical criteria of recte dicere to rise to the level of bene dicere. ( Scaglione24-26) The term composition, in this case as in Dionysius, refers to only one aspect of rhetorical activity, and not at all to what we think of either as "composing," or "composition. "The various meanings discussed here all fall within one or another of the categories devised by Louise Wetherbee Phelps to encompass the "three levels of subject matter" that form composition as a contemporary discipline. These are: