Thursday, September 7, 2006

LeFevre, Invention as a Social Act

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Studies in Writing and Rhetoric Ser. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Invention as a Social Act is a landmark book on rhetorical invention. Lefevre introduces "a more adequate terminology" for rhetorical invention, complicating commonplace associations between the "generation of ideas" and the Platonic view of invention as inside-out, wrought from a transcendent interiority moving toward pure forms. Lefevre is clear about individualism having a proper place, but she contends that it is "overdone" and that the solitary, inspired inventor (rel. to Emersonian self-reliance; seed metaphor; and invention as private episode) is inadequate for its neglect of environmental factors constitutive of thought and language.

Lefevre sets up contrastive terms early on: narrow-broad, rhetorical-general, and reflective-dynamic (5). Reflective invention relates to copy theory; dynamic invention relates to inquiry and the creation of something new. She explains why composition studies, in the 19th and 20th centuries, favored the Platonic view: the influence of literary studies (15), Romantic figure of the inspired writer (17); and capitalism and individualism (19). In an effort to complicate the Platonic view, she proposes a continuum running across four views on invention (we might consider these as scalar): Platonic perspective, internal dialogic perspective, collaborative perspective, and social collective perspective.

George Herbert Mead on invention as collaboration: gesture, attribution or interpretation, and response or adjustive reaction (62). Before the final chapter (implications), Lefevre works through an extended consideration of the relation between thought and language.

Limitations of the Platonic view:

• "A Platonic view of invention leads us to favor individualistic approaches to research and to neglect studies of writers in social contexts" (23).
• "A Platonic view depicts invention as a closed, one-way system" (24).
• "A Platonic view abstracts the writer from society" (25).
• "A Platonic view assumes and promotes the concept of the atomistic self as inventor" (26).
• "A Platonic view fails to acknowledge that invention is collaborative" (29).

Terms: Bateson on skin and boundedness (29), Tillie Olsen's "leech-writers" (30), dialectical process (35), deep temporal structures (41d), Aristotle and social context (45), Moffett's categories of discourse (reflection, conversation, correspondence, publication) (48), systems of invention (50)*, daimonion (56), idealogue v. dialogue (56), Sullivan's "supervisory patterns" (57), tagmemic invention (Young, Becker, Pike) (58), Elbow's "safe audience" (61), Lasswell's resonance and vibration (65), copy theory (95), Piaget's "autistic thought" (102), Vygotsky on "knot" (118) and "cloud" (119), Lasswell "ecology of innovation" (126), Gage on "stasis" (138).

"This study argues that rhetorical invention is better understood as a social act, in which an individual who is at the same time a social being interacts in a distinctive way with society and culture to create something" (1).

"Invention becomes explicitly social when writers involve other people as collaborators, or as reviewers whose comments aid invention, or as 'resonators' who nourish the development of ideas" (2).

"More particularly, composition theory and pedagogy in nineteenth and twentieth century America have been founded on a Platonic view of invention, one which assumes that the individual possesses innate knowledge or mental structures that are the chief source of invention" (11).

"To understand rhetorical invention, it is useful to restore this double meaning of 'action' and think of the act of invention as having two parts: the initiation of the inventive act and the reception or execution of it" (38).

"[Laswell's] 'clustering' of creative thinkers has led some to conclude that creativity is not merely a chance manifestation of biological or psychological factors, but is subject to environmental influence" (66).

"Applying this continuum to existing inventional theories allows us to see that composition has favored Platonic and internal dialogic views of invention, and that while the field has begun to acknowledge some collaborative aspects of invention, it has neglected others and has virtually ignored a collective view" (94).

Related sources

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine, 1972.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.

Lasswell, Harold D. "The Social Setting of Creativity." In Creativity and Its Cultivation. Ed. Harold H. Anderson, 203-21. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959.

Posted by Derek Mueller at September 7, 2006 8:57 AM to Writing Technologies