Humanistic Knowledge-Making and the Rhetoric of Literary Criticism: Special Topoi Meet Rhetorical Action

Abstract

This article examines the power of special topoi to characterize the discourse of literary criticism, and through emphasis on rhetorical action, it sheds light on the limitations of topos analysis for characterizing research articles in disciplinary discourse more generally. Using an analytical approach drawn both from studies of topoi in disciplinary discourse and rhetorical genre theory, I examine a representative corpus of 21st-century literary research articles. I find that while most of the special topoi recognized by Fahnestock and Secor and Wilder remain prevalent in recent criticism, contemporary literary critics tend to draw on only a select subset of those topoi when making claims about their rhetorical actions. The topoi they use most often— mistaken-critic and paradigm—help identify the ways knowledge-making work is undertaken in literary criticism, a discipline often considered epideictic rather than epistemic. But what the special topoi do not capture is precisely the distinctly motivated, actively epistemic character of this disciplinary rhetoric. Based on these findings, I suggest that special topoi must be seen as functioning in the context of the rhetorical action undertaken by literary research articles. These articles undertake not simply persuasion but the particularly humanistic act I refer to as contributing to scholarly understanding: a rhetorical action worth attending to for scholars of disciplinary discourse, because it is deliberately more concerned with practice than product.

Decanonizing the curriculum: English degree requirements in Canadian universities today, and the promise of a method-focused degree

“…Or perhaps, to the contrary, University of Alberta’s customizable degree signals faculty members’ deliberately decanonizing conviction that the field of English studies is, in contemporary professional practice, precisely an undefined territory. While we acknowledge the attractions (and the philosophical point) of an undefined degree, we would point to evidence that English studies is defined, in professional practice, by patterns of argument (Fahnestock and Secor, 1991; Wilder, 2012), methods and motivations (Banting, 2023; Linkon, 2011; Thieme, 2017), and threshold concepts (Corrigan, 2019) that structure not only what professors do in their research but how they expect students to perform (Wilder, 2012). There is structure to English studies, even in the absence of a canon.…”

“…Removing all requirements implies that any one course may stand in for the whole learning experience expected of an English Major—or at least that, having taken any handful of eighteen or twenty English courses, one is sure to have experienced the gamut. This metonymic relationship of the course to the degree may in fact reflect current pedagogical practice, to the extent that we frequently expect similar performances of first-year students as of fourth-year students (the same sorts of essays, just shorter); or that feminist critiques, for example, have purchase in relation to any set of assigned readings; or that the governing assumptions and threshold concepts of literary studies (Banting, 2023; Corrigan, 2019; Heinert and Chick, 2017; Linkon, 2011; Wilder, 2012) are latent but typically unexpressed in every course (see also Banting, 2014). What a canonized structure did for the English degree was assert that there was a substantial body of material to be covered and that department experts agreed on it to some imagined extent.…”