Do Students Need To Respect The Voice Of Others?

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Fish would undoubtedly quarrel with particulars here. But I hope that he and others in our profession will agree that such a general framework provides a far richer conception of rhetcomp studies than his, entirely within his parameters of academic inquiry.

That it provides the basis for a whole curriculum-full of legitimate applications to politics, public rhetoric, and especially literature; and that it presents yet another moral imperative: to defend the development of these abilities against their destruction by the stupefying sound-bite discourse of contemporary politics and mass media.

For one example, take Fish's opposition to teaching students "to respect the voice of others," an opposition I have said that I share in regard to this goal's more naive formulations. However, schemas devised by cognitive Shoes Online ...
... and developmental psychologists include a progression from egocentric, ethnocentric, or sociocentric psychology to what Piaget termed "reciprocal" thinking, which enables us to see things from others' viewpoints when we can in fact learn something useful by doing so.

Rhetcomp pedagogy applies this progression in approaches like Rogerian argument and Peter Elbow's "believers and doubters," in which students are obliged to identify with their opponents' viewpoint in spoken or written arguments, prior to critiquing it.

And the same principle permeates modernist literature, epitomized by Proust in the coda of The Past Recaptured: Only by art can we get outside ourselves, know what another sees of his universe, which is not the same as ours and the different views of which would otherwise have remained as unknown to us as those there may be on the moon.

Here art for art's sake is not the formalist aesthetic endorsed by Fish and the New Critics, but, again, a moral imperative to expand our mental horizons beyond what Walter Pater, one of Proust's mentors, termed "that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us".

So would Fish perhaps acknowledge that evolving from a self-centered viewpoint to one capable of empathizing with that of others whose views may be "coherent and persuasive" is Discount Shoes a moral and aesthetic virtue—as is the resulting capacity to transcend racial, gender, class, party, or nationalistic prejudices, and to "experience compassion for the sufferers" Would he further acknowledge that pedagogy in rhetcomp and literature might conceivably provide effective means for expanding these capacities My aim here has not been to play "gotcha!" with Fish, but to urge him to write another entire book to fill the significant holes in his reasoning in this one—an invitation that I sincerely hope he will accept.