Perceptions of Discourse: the Revolution in Assumptions

Copyright © 2014 by Dorothy Naor.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014911302

ISBN:      Hardcover            978-1-4990-3836-1

                Softcover             978-1-4990-3837-8

                eBook                  978-1-4990-3835-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

From the Meaning of Meaning by C.K. Ocgen and I.A. Richards, Introduction by Umberto Eco, Copyright @ 1923 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, Preface coyright @ 1989 by Umberto Eco, English translation copyright @ 1989 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Miffin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

From The Meaning of Meaning: The Study of the Influence of Language Upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism by CK Ogden and IA Richards © October 10, 1985. First published 1923 by Routledge & Kegan Paul. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Books, UK.

Rev. date: 12/12/2014

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

612001

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 Historical Background

Chapter 3 The Inquiry Into Traditional Terms

Chapter 4 Components Of ‘Matter’

Chapter 5 The Meaning Of Meaning

Chapter 6 The Terms Of Traditional Transmission

Chapter 7 Communication: The Beginnings Of Current Assumptions

Chapter 8 Aristotle’s Rhetoric: The Influence Of Current Questions On Interpretation

Chapter 9 Preliminaries

Chapter 10 The Traditional Rhetoric Of Aristotle

Chapter 11 The Operating Mechanics

Chapter 12 ‘Inferences,’ ‘Reasons,’ And ‘Invention’

Chapter 13 Aristotle’s Rhetoric: Arrangement

Chapter 14 Conclusion: Traditional To Current

Appendix Summary Descriptions Of Traditional Translations Of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.

Works Cited

Acronyms

My deepest thanks to Jerome Mandel for reading umpteenth versions of the manuscript that eventually became this book, to the Library of Congress for its stocks, and especially to Bruce Martin who made a study room available for the 10 years or so that I lived in Washington, allowing me to have large numbers of books on my shelves and the quiet needed to concentrate. And Special thanks to my family for their patience and love, and particularly to my beloved spouse, who had the patience for so many years to see this study develop finally into a book.

Dorothy

A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing—a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B.

Kenneth Burke. Permanence and Change (49)

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Questions at Stake

WHERE DO PRESENT assumptions about discourse come from? When did they begin? Who originated them? What assumptions preceded them? What distinguishes present assumptions about discourse from former ones? How do the differences influence the questions addressed to texts? How do the latter influence the interpretation of prerevolution nonfictional prose texts?

These are the questions this book addresses, and answers respecting formal uses of nonfictional discourse and a revolution in assumptions that began in the 20th century in the United States. The details of what occurred and its impact on our reading of prerevolution texts will furnish food for thought for those engaged in the language arts, composition, communication theory, linguistics, and others.

Not all the questions are new. The first three (Where do present assumptions about discourse come from? When did they begin? Who originated them?) have had various responses. But most responses of the past 55 or so years presume, a priori, that discourse is—and always has been—the use of language to express and communicate.

Yet, this perception of discourse—our present perception—is scarcely 90 years old, having first appeared in a book published in the 1920s. When in the late 1930s and 1940s its ideas began receiving attention in American colleges, they experienced the beginning of a cultural revolution altering centuries-old assumptions about discourse: what it is, why we use it, and how we use it.

During these years, when revolutionary activity was at its height, the assault on tradition did not escape notice; in these decades, converts to and opponents of the new alike understood the issues involved and their revisionist nature. The same held, albeit to a lesser extent, for the 1950s. But by the end of the 1960s the new perception of discourse—though not yet the institution—had sufficiently taken hold for the revolution to have been forgotten, as though it had never occurred. It has not been redetected since.

Three reasons help explain why the revolution has slipped from memory: one relating to the questions addressed to discourse, a second to terminology, and a third to perceptions of the human make up. The first two I touch now; the third, which requires a longer answer, I defer till the final section of chapter 2.

The Questions

The revolution turned attention to issues unlike ones that had formerly drawn consideration by revising the questions that traditionally had been addressed to discourse. Since A way of seeing is a way of not seeing (as Kenneth Burke so aptly observes), widespread acceptance of the new very nearly guaranteed obscuring the old from sight.

Terminology

Also deterring the rediscovery of either the old assumptions or the revolution is a massive metamorphosis in terminology. The shift from old to new retained much of the prerevolution vocabulary but altered the functions—indeed, the very meanings—of terms intimately related to discourse, e.g., communication, language, expression, thought, idea, subject, and the term discourse itself, to name but a few of a very large band. We and prerevolutionaries use the same words but do not speak the same language. Modern scholarship—by taking for granted that pre-1940’s meanings of terms are identical with our own—has missed important clues to differences of earlier assumptions from our own.

Underlying many of the prerevolution functions and meanings of terms is the old psychology. Although I postpone explaining its relevance till later, this much can be said for the moment: these three—(1) the present lack of familiarity with the old psychology, (2) unfamiliarity with the former meanings of terms, and (3) unfamiliarity with the questions that prerevolution theory addresses to discourse—have effectively effaced from our collective memory the former assumptions that constitute a large and important segment of our cultural history and along with the assumptions the revolution itself.

The Nature of the Revolution and Its Source

In describing the episode as a cultural revolution I use the phrase advisedly. The alteration was not merely an instance of progression—as, say, automobiles and trains superseding horse-drawn carriages. Such transformations can, and do, modify perceptions and assumptions. The changeover from horse-drawn vehicles to mechanized ones, for instance, fostered new perceptions about the speed at which one could travel, the time it took to travel from one place to another, the kinds of roads needed to travel on, and, in general, opened up new mental and physical vistas and dimensions. But while conceptions of how one traveled and everything related to it altered, the concept of travel did not.

Contrarily, notions about discourse, the phenomenon I treat, did. The change in assumptions did not involve a progression in the physical implements one discourses with, as from pens to typewriters to computers, or in a progression of any other kind. Instead, the transformation utterly refashioned—without necessarily advancing—perceptions of what formal discourse constitutes, why we use it, and how we use it. The changeover, in short, was revolutionary, not evolutionary. It was the product of a specific theory promoting a totally new conception of discourse; intensive effort helped put it across.

The source of the new ideas was a book first published in 1923: The Meaning of Meaning, by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards. The two men propounded a new perception of language and of the communicative act, inclusive of what we verbally communicate, why, and how. In the process of introducing a new conception of communication, the two men refashioned the nature of prose. Poetic discourse also received attention, but only embryonically in the latter portion of the final chapter of the book. Richards, in additional works through the 1930s, reiterated the canon for prose inscribed in Meaning and developed its nascent poetics into a comprehensive theory.

Subsequent theorists modified and further amplified various aspects that Meaning introduced. But no one has altered in any consequential way the doctrine it originated for prose, namely that we use language to express and communicate, that the material expressed and communicated is information, feelings, perceptions, etc., and that the means of communicating these is by saying things about a subject (i.e., about a referent).

In Ogden and Richards’ hands, nonfictional prose discourse becomes the use of language to express and communicate references to referents, the references often being colored, the two men advise, by emotive and attitudinal tinges.

Prerevolution theory was ignorant of referential uses of language; it had no need for them. Why, will be seen in chapters 4 and 6, which touch on prerevolution discourse mechanics.

Prominent among the disseminators of principles much the same as Meaning’s doctrine in the late 1930s and 1940s were the New Critics, General Semanticists, and Richards himself—through his books, his work at Harvard, and his energetic association with the education community.

The revolutionaries, believing their theory superior to the old in every respect, fought hard to supplant it. They won—almost overnight in literary studies, gradually in other disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. By the mid 1970s the new assumptions had become the establishment. They remain so today.

A significant consequence of the revolution, I have said, is its influence on the interpretation of texts. And the reason for this is clear: interpretation is a function of the questions that we address to texts; these questions, in turn, are merely the application of our assumptions to a given purpose.

The explanation of what the former assumptions consist of, what questions they give rise to, and the differences of both these from their present counterparts requires the remainder of this study to set out, but a slight intimation of what is involved can be given now.

Present Assumptions:

In our day, nonfictional prose discourse is the use of language for two main purposes: first and foremost, to articulate and communicate a feeling, attitude, opinion, or perception, viewpoint, etc. about a subject; discourse is also used to evoke sentiments, emotions, etc. in the hearer/reader. The means for accomplishing both these aims is that of saying things about the subject; the things said about the subject articulate (i.e., express), in turn, the message to be communicated.

Additionally, since formal discourse intends not merely to communicate but also to do so effectively, the mechanics consist not only of what to say but also of how to say. These mechanics lead naturally to two questions that we consciously or subconsciously address the production of a prose discourse: What to say to articulate the feeling, opinion, attitude, perception I want to express about the subject? and How to say it to get it across? Language is active, in other words, from beginning to end.

Former Assumptions:

By contrast, in the old scheme discourse is a means of working an effect in the hearer/reader (effects as arousing or calming an emotion in the hearer/reader, making him/her see, believe, etc.).

The agent for accomplishing this is not language. Rather, there are two separate agents: propositions and images. The choice of which to employ depends partly on the immediate effect intended and partly on the vehicle (e.g., prose, poetry, or fiction) used to gain one’s ultimate end.

Language, rather than being an implement for working an effect in the hearer/reader, is the physical medium for communicating the propositions or images and for making them effective.

As a result of this division in labor, two sets of questions are involved: (a) What effect to work in the hearer/reader? How to work it? and With what class of propositions or images to do it?; (b) What words and style to use to clothe the propositions or images in? Language is active only in the last of these.

The preceding undoubtedly raises more questions than it provides answers for. This much can be said, however: the reader who searches a text for the attitude, perception, opinion, etc. that a text reveals through ‘what it says’ and ‘how it says it’ looks for—and finds—things in the text distinct from the reader who seeks from it ‘what effect it endeavors to work in the hearer/reader,’ ‘how it does it’ and ‘what it works it with.’

In essence, the reader who applies the one set of questions to a text and the reader who applies the other set, when reading one and the same book, are not reading the same text. Proof that this is so is not lacking in these pages.

The Subject and Its Handling

Terminology

Two components stand at the core of the investigation of assumptions: terminology and the questions addressed to discourse. All the consequences of the revolution on interpretations of texts stem from the one or the other.

Terminology is essential to understanding former assumptions, which, in turn, have to be known in order to perceive the innovations that created the new assumptions. Two chapters explain the terms that enable seeing the innovations instituted by Ogden and Richards.

The amount of space devoted to terminology is not without cause: no one-to-one translation suffices to reveal prerevolution meanings of terms. We are dealing with a contextual gap in which meanings reflect cultural conventions no longer familiar to us. The situation is very like the one Bronislaw Malinowski describes in asserting the futility of mere translation to impart the sense of tribal languages.

What I have tried to make clear by analysis of a primitive linguistic text is that language is essentially rooted in the reality of the culture, the tribal life and customs of a people, and that it cannot be explained in the broader contexts of verbal utterance. (305)

Erwin Panofsky in Studies in Iconology makes a similar point about conventions, using as illustrative example the custom of one man doffing his hat to another. Neither an Australian bushman nor an ancient Greek, he observes,

could be expected to realize that the lifting of a hat is not only a practical event with certain expressional connotations, but also a sign of politeness. To understand this significance of the gentleman’s action I must not only be familiar with the practical world of objects and events, but also with the more-than-practical world of customs and cultural traditions peculiar to a certain civilization. (4)

The circumstances in our case are no less complex than those described by Malinowski and Panofsky. Yet no terministic screens exist that research cannot dispel. The results of my own researches on former meanings of terms are presented in chapters 4 and 6. They explain the meanings of the key terms that Ogden and Richards battle.

Chapters 5 and 7 show how Ogden and Richards transform these same terms, first by eliminating their former functions, then by replacing them with ones still current today.

The floorplan of the inquiry.

The inquiry is divided into two parts: part I responds to the questions Where do present assumptions about discourse come from? When did they begin? Who originated them? What assumptions preceded them? What distinguishes present assumptions about discourse from former ones?; part II responds to the remaining two questions, How do the differences influence the questions addressed to texts? How do the latter influence the interpretation of nonfictional prose texts?

Part I shows what happened, part II exhibits a major consequence of the event: the influence of assumptions on the interpretation of texts. The latter is exhibited (a) by comparing prerevolution readings and postrevolution readings of a single text, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, (b) noting the differences of the one set of interpretations from the other, and (c) tracing these differences to the questions that each set addresses to the text.

The Rhetoric is particularly suited to the purpose, first of all because of its subject: discourse. Additionally, it is well-known and is accompanied by a large fund of prerevolution and postrevolution interpretations and commentaries that enable observing the influence of the questions addressed to texts on their interpretations.

To return to the floorplan, a quick chapter by chapter rundown shows the sequence in which the inquiry progresses.

Part I, chapters 1-8. Following the present introduction, chapter 2 begins with a historical sketch showing that something new was in the air during the late 1930s and 1940s; the latter portion of the chapter explains the relevance of the old psychology to the investigation. Chapter 3 introduces the investigation of terminology. Chapters 4 and 6 examine the former meanings of key terms—chapter 4 of terms relating to the material communicated, chapter 6 of the terms constituting the mechanics of transmission. Chapters 5 and 7 exhibit the origin of present assumptions about discourse—chapter 5 shows the Meaning of Meaning’s role in inaugurating new assumptions about the material that discourse communicates, chapter 7 shows the beginnings of today’s assumptions about the communicative function of discourse. Chapter 8, which is transitional, analyzes five postrevolution interpretations of Aristotle’s Rhetoric; the analysis shows that despite differences of one interpretation from the other, each reading can be traced to one and the same set of questions addressed to the text.

Part II, chapters 9-14. The main aims of these chapters are: (a) to exhibit the questions that prerevolution interpretations address to the Rhetoric; (b) to show that these differ radically from postrevolution questions; and (c) that as a result of this difference, prerevolutionary interpreters and postrevolutionary interpreters, though treating one and the same work, do not, in essence, read the same text. Hopefully, you will find the exercise as revealing and as stimulating as I have.

+To summarize, then, the topics centered on in this volume are broadly two, corresponding to the two part division: first, present and former assumptions about what discourse is, what it is used for, and how it is used; second, the power that the questions addressed to prose texts exert on interpretation.

A few additional remarks regarding procedure are warranted.

1.  Stylistics is omitted as a separate subject of the investigation, because stylistics plays no essential role in the revolution of assumptions. Yet, a fair notion of the role that prerevolutionary pedagogues and critics assign stylistics and how (in general terms) they presume that it carries out its office emerges in chapter 6 from the examination of the terms of transmission (i.e., the terms expression, language, and communication).

2.  Because English-language terminology is a key factor in the investigation, I cite from relatively few foreign-language sources. The single consistent exception is English translations of the rhetorical works of the ancients. In the few instances in which I quote other prerevolution foreign-language sources, I prefer prerevolution translations, when available.

3.  My intention when citing recent interpretations of prerevolution theory is not to criticize but is either (a) to lead to a better understanding of our own assumptions or (b) to highlight their differences from prerevolution ones. My discussion of assumptions—former and present—avoids taking sides. The issue at stake is not right-wrong, correct-incorrect but rather assumptions and their influence on our reading of texts.

Scholars—current and traditional alike—not infrequently take a ‘more intelligent (or sophisticated, or wiser) than thou’ attitude towards the past, particularly with those in the past with whom they disagree. Such an attitude is counterproductive I believe; it tends to dismiss out of hand issues incongruous with one’s own expectations rather than to grapple with them. A.J. Smith observes that our concern with the past does not demand that we underwrite its evaluations, only that we understand them (243). Understand[ing] them has been my objective.

4.  To conclude this chapter are a few conventions for terms central to the investigation.

Traditional and Current: I use the terms traditional and current interchangeably with the terms prerevolution and postrevolution; the former two in fact reflect the situation more accurately than the latter two, which I retain only because of syntactical needs, and which when used are to be taken in the sense of traditional and current. The terms prerevolution and postrevolution imply a definite moment in time, whereas the actual transition can be dated only in terms of its beginning (late 1930s) and terminal point (the decade of the 1970s, when the new became the institution). Within this time span, the actual moment of transition in assumptions varies from academic discipline to discipline and from individual to individual. I use the term classical interchangeably with traditional, and, occasionally, in instances when prerevolutionary seems infelicitous, employ traditional as a noun; the same holds for current.

The sources that I draw from to reconstruct traditional assumptions include the ancient rhetorical manuals and, additionally, works in various subjects dating from the 16th century through the 1960s.

Belletristic and Nonbelletristic: In discussing discourse I have opted for the terms belletristic and nonbelletristic—not because I want to be quaint but because these two seemed less problematic than other pairs for the chronological span and issues covered. Even so, certain restrictions of my own apply: the term belletristic I reserve for productions that we now normally comprehend under the term literature (i.e., poetry, fiction, drama); the term nonbelletristic includes oratory and comprehends everything that traditional theory designates as literature except poetry, fiction, and drama.

Rhetoric: The term rhetoric has accumulated enough definitions from Aristotle till the present to fill a small volume. I do not add to the stock. Here I merely advise that in these pages I do not use the terms rhetoric and discourse synonymously (some of the sources I cite do, however). Nor, do I use the term rhetoric in the sense now implied by the phrase the history of rhetoric. Rather, I reserve the term rhetoric for the classical art that teaches the mechanics of invention, disposition, and elocution (or style), which is not the art that current rhetorical textbooks and theory refer to when employing these terms. What former intentions with the terms are remain to be seen. One thing can be said, however: present functions designated for the terms invention, disposition, and style—often described as finding arguments (or ideas), arranging them, and expressing them—bear no resemblance to the classical ones.

We are now ready to move on to the next chapter, which discusses the reasons for the revolution, the dissemination of the new doctrine, and the relevance of the old psychology to this study. The consideration of these prepares the way for the investigation (a) of terms and (b) of assumptions that will occupy our attention through the remainder of Part 1.

For it is the assumptions which give rise to these wrong questions which chiefly lead us astray, assumptions we may not know that we are making, assumptions that are no more than analogies convenient for one sort of purposes allowed by inadvertence to guide us in other undertakings to which they have no relevance. . . .

I.A. Richards, Interpretation in Teaching (51)

CHAPTER 2

Historical Background

Aftermath: The 1980’s Language Enterprise

THE LATE 1930s and 1940s disseminated the new ideas about language and discourse; several decades passed, however, before academia assimilated them. When this finally occurred in the 1980s, language and discourse became prominent objects of inquiry and theory.

Developments in linguistics since the 1950s illustrate what happened in a single field. The mid 1950s saw the beginnings of psycholinguistics, the latter 1950s introduced transformational linguistics, the 1960s sociolinguistics. New boughs continued to sprout. Their profusion in 1983 prompted Roy Harris to remark:

The terminology of language studies nowadays suggests a disciplinary fragmentation of bewildering extent and complexity. Linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, biolinguistics, philosophy of language, anthropological linguistics, phonetics, language pathology and computational linguistics are all ready to stake an academic claim to some part… of what has become a very broad territory indeed (Foreword to Approaches).

Scholars in other fields have also noted the singularity of the phenomenon.

Teun A. Van Dijk observed in 1985:

One of the most conspicuous and interesting developments in the humanities and the social sciences… has undoubtedly been the widespread, multidisciplinary attention paid to the study of discourse . . .

This trend, he relates, began to take shape in the early 1970s, after some scattered attempts in the late 1960s, in such disciplines as anthropology, linguistics, semiotics, poetics, psychology, sociology, and mass communication research. He further notes that characterizing the concern with discourse is a shared interest for various phenomena of language use, texts, conversational interaction, or communicative events (Preface to the four volumes, reprinted in each).

Also recognizing the unprecedented scholarly interest in language and discourse were John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey, editors of the Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs. Published in 1987, it represents a cross-section of scholars from a broad range of fields. The three men advise that the common denominator underlying the essays is the

rhetoric of inquiry, a new field that stems from increased attention to language and argument in scholarship and public affairs. (ix)

And Walter H. Beale in 1987 asserted that language and discourse have become major, even dominant foci of every discipline, every field of inquiry that is in any way concerned with human action (2).

The situation was otherwise in 1948; that year, Rudolph Flesch attributed the paucity of bibliographical references and documentation in his Art of Readable Writing to lack of scholarship in the field: I can only plead that the subject of scientific rhetoric is in its infancy and that experimental evidence is scattered and ill-assorted; to this he parenthetically added, "(Until 1948 Psychological Abstracts didn’t have a special section on language and communication)"¹ (xii).

So much has happened since then that it is hard to believe that as late as 1969 it could be said, The psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic enterprise, as formal disciplines, are at the present time of their development at a stage far less advanced than the comparable personal, subjective enterprise attained by the average individual who has developed communicative competence (Leon A. Jakobovits 17), or that in 1970 it could be maintained, Our present knowledge of language and language learning is still in its infancy; we are involved in an interdisciplinary and open-ended enterprise (Carl A. Lefevre xvii).

The Late 1930s and the 1940s: Change in the Air

The upsurge of scholarly interest in language and discourse that began in the 1980s, and which has not since diminished, originated in the assumptions about language and discourse promulgated by the revolution.² The source for these assumptions, I have said, is The Meaning of Meaning. One of its authors, I.A. Richards, helped spread its theory. On the foundation laid by Meaning and other of Richards’ works through the 1930s all the rest arose.

But the fact that anything arose at all is due in good part to the climate receptive to new ideas and the endeavors to propagate them that characterized the late 1930s and 1940s. Three causes contributed to this climate: the restructuring of the educational system in the United States; the interest that World War II generated in communication; and the advent of a new psychology (or psychologies) that revised perceptions about the nature of human kind. I comment briefly now on the readjustment of the educational system. The discussion of psychology comes up in section 2 of this chapter, and of communication in chapter 7.

Between the two great wars, American secondary schools and colleges transformed from being a system of higher education for the privileged few to being a system of education for the masses.

Increase in school population was not peculiar to the 20th century (see Charles F. Thwing, A History of Education in the United States Since the Civil War, 11-12), but the change from the early decades of the 20th century to the 1940s was qualitative as well as quantitative, affecting the entire structure of education by altering the relationship of high school to both elementary school and college.

John H. Fisher points out that "Between 1910 and 1935 the educational habits of our nation changed… it came to be assumed that all children would go on to high school. From being principally a transitional, screening agency, designed to prepare a select group of students for college work, it became principally a terminal agency with its own raison d’etre (Prospect" 3-6). See also Raymond Walters (29-50); Homer P. Rainey (61-68); P.F. Valentine (esp. 5-7); Edgar M. Draper (esp. 507-17); Harry G. Good and James D. Teller (446-75); Edgar W. Knight (3-6,)

The secondary school, formerly a stepladder to higher education, became at one end in the new order a continuation of elementary school and at the other end the termination, for many students, of formal education. As General Education in a Free Society (an influential Harvard report) relates in 1945: one consequence of the gradual change… in the whole character of the high school and in its function toward American society is that

instead of looking forward to college, three fourths of the students now look forward directly to work. Except for a small minority, the high school has therefore ceased to be a preparatory school in the old sense of the word. In so far as it is preparatory, it prepares not for college but for life.³ (8)

These circumstances called for the revision of educational goals and curricula; this, in turn, furnished an opening for broaching new ideas. A channel for disseminating them was provided by general education programs; colleges had widely instituted these to fill the void left by secondary education which, in preparing students for life, had stopped preparing them adequately for higher education.

Propagation.

The Meaning of Meaning, which is avowedly didactic, found willing ears among educators, teachers, and scholars. Not everyone who read it approved its message, and many of those who did approve did not fully understand the theory it propounded. Yet the book was in demand. Its popularity during the period is attested to by its seven editions and several reprints between 1923 and 1945; its influence on the education community is evident from its numerous acknowledgements.⁴ The impact of its innovations on this community in the late 1930s and early 1940s is assessable also from the recognition given to one of its authors, I.A. Richards, to which I return in a moment.

By the 1930s others, too, were spreading the message. Active in the campaign during these years were General Semantics and the New Critics. Both were concerned to revise assumptions about language and discourse, but differed from one another in their immediate aims. The New Critics centered on a given kind of discourse, applying the new theory of language to its expressive and communicative uses in belletristic texts. General Semanticists, rather than dealing with one or another kind of discourse, focused on the characteristics of words and their uses, primarily with respect to their nonbelletristic functions.

Among the more influential of the New Critics were Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren via their textbooks on literature, particularly Understanding Poetry.⁵ Among the more notable individuals of the semantics movement were Alfred Korzybski and his disciple and influential exponent, S.I. Hayakawa; Richards, too, was a major force in gaining acceptance for his views. Through his work at Harvard, his participation at conferences on English, and his close association with committees introducing pedagogical reform he helped much to effect the change in assumptions.

Kenneth Burke was also among the avant-garde. His influence on freshman-composition theory and pedagogy, however, is more apparent from the 1960s and 1970s than it is in the earlier period.⁶

Semantics.

Alfred Korzybski was the first of many to follow Ogden and Richards in insisting on revising perceptions of language and its uses. Similarly to the authors of Meaning, he was concerned with verbal communication, with how words function, with the question of meaning, and with its interpretation. His magnum opus, Science and Sanity, containing a theory of General Semantics, was published in 1933. While it did not cause the waves in education circles that the Meaning of Meaning did, a textbook, Language in Action, published in 1941 by a Korzybski disciple, S.I. Hayakawa, became widely popular, and for two decades influenced scores of college freshmen and their teachers.⁷ The result of such activities was that by the mid 1940s ‘semantics’—a new term for most prior to publication of Language in Action—was well on its way to becoming a household term in General Education courses and college English departments.

Korzybskian principles about language and discourse were, per se, much the same as Ogden and Richards’. But the two schools approached the subject from different attitudes. Korzybskian emphasis is on the adverse effects of language and verges on the melodramatic—an attitude that possibly contributed to the 1940 response of one opponent of the new. Mortimer J. Adler, in his popular How to Read a Book,⁸ does not believe that recent books on semantics would… prove helpful to learning how to read a book. In his opinion most of them are useful only in showing how not to read a book. They approach the problem as if most books are not worth reading, especially the great books of the past, or even those in the present by authors who have not undergone semantic purification. Adler declares this approach wrong. The right maxim, he says, is like the one which regulates the trial of criminals. We should assume that the author is intelligible until shown otherwise, not that he is guilty of nonsense and must prove his innocence (116).

Hayakawa nevertheless defends his policy: he should be distressed, he says, if his readers found in this book only negative injunctions, but does not deny that negative injunctions do in fact make up most of the contents:

If the emphasis seems mainly to be on what not to do, it is only because a book on how to stay healthy cannot as a rule even begin to tell us what to do with our health when we have it." (xiii)

And while it is true that he has indicate[d] even if briefly, some of the positive values, his treatment of the positive is sufficiently cursory that the ultimate impression is of the hazards that one is constantly exposed to from words.

Ogden and Richards do not deny the tyranny of language (6), and affirm that words are at present a very imperfect means of communication (5). But although they are as aware as Korzybskists that words deceive us (8), and "that it is perhaps hardly realized how widespread is the habit of using the power of words not only for bona fide communications, but also as a method of misdirection, and that the naive interpreter is likely on many occasions to be seriously misled (18-19), they, in contradistinction to Hayakawa, believe that the cure lies in a positive approach, and say so: with the exception of chapter 9 where they discuss that derivate use of Meaning to which misdirection gives rise, their book, they announce early on, treats bona fide communication only" (19).

Notwithstanding the differences in attitude between the two schools, both consequentially contributed to altering perceptions in several areas. The most important of these were conceptions about what we verbally communicate and how; subordinate to this were conceptions about the nature of language, its role in discourse, about the question of meaning, and about its interpretation. By teaching a generation to find how words behave (Chase 7), the two schools share much of the responsibility for introducing the United States to current assumptions about language, language function, language mechanics, and, ultimately, about discourse itself.

The negative approach, however, was not conducive to developing belletristic uses for language. Hayakawa, like Ogden and Richards, recognizes two categories of communication: the transmission of reference to a referent, and the transmission of attitudes, feelings, etc. or the evocation of the same in others. The second category of communication Ogden and Richards entitle emotive language (see, e.g, 10, 82, 123), Hayakawa affective communication (186-212). Hayakawa, as is customary for him, plays up its deleterious side: it should be pointed out, he says:

that fine sounding speeches, long words, and the general air of saying something important are affective in result, regardless of what is being said. Often when we are hearing or reading impressively worded sermons, speeches, political addresses, essays, or ‘fine writing,’ we stop being critical altogether, and simply allow ourselves to feel as excited, sad, joyous, or angry as the author wishes us to feel. (187)

He throws a sop, as it were, to the appropriateness of affective language for belletristic discourse (194, 204-07, 258-61), but omits the manner and method, believing it more urgent to impress the reader with the dangers that affective communication exposes one to.

Contrarily, Ogden and Richards see also positive applications for emotive language, among them poetry. As with Hayakawa, they affirm that emotive language stands for nothing whatever, and has no symbolic [i.e., referential] function, and that it serves only as an emotive sign expressing our attitude… and perhaps evoking similar attitudes in other persons, or inciting them to actions of one kind or another (125).

But while Ogden and Richards are as outspoken as Korzybskists on the traps for the unwary that emotive language lays, they are equally enthusiastic about its salubrious effects. Their outlook leads them to propose a new perception of poetry, which they declare to be an art of words, its means emotive language. Richards, in other of his books, develops the seeds sown in the Meaning of Meaning into a comprehensive theory in which poetry becomes a form of expression whose method is emotive language and whose aim is the communication of experience.

Brooks and Warren, in shaping Understanding Poetry, appropriate huge chunks of Richards’ theory: every leading principle in their textbook (e.g., the communicative nature of poetry; its proper material; close reading and its product: an explication of the total meaning), every influential criterion (e.g., irony; complexity; maturity), every single taboo—whether with regard to poems (e.g., sentimentality; appeals to stock responses) or with regard to their interpretation (e.g., message-hunting)—has its locus in one or more of Richards’ books.⁹ By contrast to Brooks and Warren, Hayakawa generously, even gratefully, acknowledges Korzybski as his mentor. Brooks and Warren barely nod in passing at the man who fathered their poetics. Yet they in a way repay their debt ten-fold. For, their textbook reached a far larger audience than any single work of Richards’, and Understanding’s success spread, in turn, key elements of his poetic doctrine rapidly and widely, till they became, so to speak, the law of the land.

Hayakawa’s textbook—fluent, immediate, hard-hitting, as pedagogically astute and as dogmatic as Brooks and Warren’s—achieved the same for Korzybskian semantics.

Understanding Poetry is widely recognized for its inculcation of a whole new way of reading poetry. Yet, in the overall scheme of things, this was the lesser of its accomplishments. For, its handling of poetry together with Language in Action’s handling of nonbelletristic language constituted, without doubt, two of the most extraordinarily influential instruments during the 40s and 50s for outmoding the old ideas about language, communication, and discourse and for instilling the new ones that we embrace till today. Both streams, the New Critical and the semantic, contributed greatly during the late 1930s and 1940s to altering perceptions of language and conceptions of what discourse communicates, why, and how.

Richards’ Crusade.

Richards, too, as I have said, played an influential role in bringing about change. On the nonbelletristic front he targeted the education community’s assumptions about language and communication. By 1940 his endeavors had become sufficiently well-known for Time magazine to print 2 1/2 columns about him; the piece was occasioned by his participation in the annual Reading Conference in Chicago.

Omitting the fact that Richards had been but one of more than 40 speakers to address the conference, Time reported that about 2,000 teachers from Midwest schools and colleges met in Chicago for their third annual Conference on Reading, and turned then to Richards:

A number of first-rate thinkers have been worrying about the subject for a good 15 years. On hand at the Chicago conference was one of the keenest of them: Ivor Armstrong Richards, Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, collaborator with C.K. Ogden on the famed Meaning of Meaning (1923).¹⁰ (July 15, 1940, p. 60)

From the professional literature of the period, Richards appears to have been ubiquitous in his crusade—impossible, of course. But he certainly was prominent, and his endeavors were an important factor in disseminating the message that he and Ogden had inscribed in the Meaning of Meaning, and which he repeatedly reiterated in other of his works.¹¹

Semanticists and other avant-gardists, not all of whom had ties with education per se, but all of whom were intent on educating the group that each addressed, naturally recognized Richards as one of their own. Korzybski in 1933 included the Meaning of Meaning in his extensive list of sources. Hayakawa, in his Selected Bibliography in Language in Action, added also other of Richards’ works: Science and Poetry, Practical Criticism, Philosophy of Rhetoric, and Interpretation in Teaching. Kenneth Burke in the first edition of Permanence and Change (1935) acknowledges special indebtedness to Ogden and Richards: "For this present work, my debts to the writings of other men are more numerous than I could hope to acknowledge. But in particular I should mention The Meaning of Meaning, by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, with its supplements by Crookshank and Malinowski, and its fertile appendices."

Yet more lavish praise of Ogden and Richards came from Stuart Chase—a well-known writer on social issues, and a Korzybskian in attitude. His Tyranny of Words, published in 1938 (two years before Language in Action), includes a chapter on Korzybski, followed by one on Ogden and Richards, citing the three as pioneers in the field:

Three human beings to my knowledge have observed and reflected upon the nature of meaning and communication for any considerable period… C.K. Ogden, I.A. Richards, and Alfred Korzybski. . . .

Offhand, Chase remarks,

one would expect libraries full of books analyzing linguistic situations, and chairs of semantics in every university. Yet Richards said in 1936 that no respectable treatise on the theory of linguistic interpretation was in existence."

Chase additionally regrets that There are few if any professional students or teachers of semantics (16-17)—a situation that in 1938 was on the threshold of change, due in no small part to Hayakawa’s Language in Action, which in 1939 had a trial run.

A 1941 CE review of Language in Action exhibits equal enthusiasm for Hayakawa’s textbook and for the new ideas about language sweeping the education establishment. The opening paragraph of the 1 1/4 page commentary states: The most directly usable single piece of material that has yet been placed in the hands of teachers as a result of the growing ‘movement’ in semantics is Mr. Hayakawa’s slender textbook which the Book-of-the-Month Club is distributing this month… The book is at once an eye opener for those who have but scant or hazy knowledge of the new light that has been thrown upon language in the spirit of modern science. The reviewer, Lawrence H. Conrad, advises that the book is a revised and improved form of the experimental ring binder edition that served as an awakening document for many thousands of college students (315-16).

In the 1941 edition, Hayakawa—never one to beat about the bush—bluntly states that his purpose is

not only to acquaint the reader with some elementary facts about language such as are revealed by modern linguistics, anthropology,