Hey all,

Well, another semester is upon us and here we go with ENG 230 Advanced Composition...Mahoney-style.

The title of this course, "Public Pedagogy: Managed Discourse and Available Means," signifies that this course has a rhetorical bent and is interested in how discourse is "managed," controlled, and manipulated in our current world. The rhetorical approach of this class means that we will be looking at the social and political contexts of discourse and will inquire into how we can intervene in this context.

This blog will be part of the little experiment we have going. As you can see, you have entered a "conversation" that has continued over the course of several semesters. We will be talking about writing as an on-going conversation all throughout this class. In his book The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, Kenneth Burke, a literary and rhetorical scholar, gave us the following metaphor of a “parlor” to highlight the conversational nature of knowledge making and, I would argue, writing:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument, then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him [or her]; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself [or herself] against you, to either the embarrassment of gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress (110-111, brackets mine).

So, let the conversation begin...I'm looking forward to our little rhetorical salon...Welcome!!!