The evolution of invention in current‐traditional rhetoric: 1850–1970

Abstract

In its classical formulation, invention is the canon that provides a rhetorician with more or less systematic procedures for finding argu- ments appropriate to the rhetorical occasion that faces her. In most of the composition textbooks written by influential nineteenth-century teachers of writing, however, invention is either greatly transformed from its classical guise or is slighted altogether. By the end of the nineteenth century most popular composition textbooks written in the vein now described as current-traditional treat invention as a means of systematically delimiting an area of thought in order that the writer may handle its exposition in discourse with maximum clarity. 1 In what follows I trace the evolution-or better, devolution-of the inventional procedure recommended by influential composition texts written during the last half of the nineteenth century, and follow its course into our own century. The term evolution is of course metaphorical; however the continuity and development of the inventional tradition I am tracing is remarkably homogeneous. The first-generation authors in the tradition-Alexander Jamieson, Samuel Newman, H. N. Day, and Alex- ander Bain are among the best known-cite and use the work of British rhetoricians George Campbell or Hugh Blair, while members of the second generation-John Franklin Genung, Adams Sherman Hill, Bar- rett Wendell, Fred Newton Scott, and Joseph V. Denney-generally acknowledge at least Bain, Genung, and Day. And after 1900 until about 1940, Wendell and Scott and Denney are the authoritative names in the tradition; they are as routinely cited in early twentieth-century textbooks as were Blair and Campbell in nineteenth-century works. Early nineteenth-century American school rhetoric is an amalgam of classical and eighteenth-century discourse theory. No American rhetoric text had yet succeeded in creating a satisfactory blend of the epistemological rhetoric formulated by George Campbell in his influen- tial Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) and the Ciceronian rhetoric imparted by such popular works as John Ward's System of Oratory (1759).2 Alexander Jamieson's popular Grammar of Rhetoric and Polite Litera- ture (1818) nicely represents the confusion of traditions which obtained in the early part of the century.3 Jamieson opens his treatise with a discussion of language which is an imitation of Hugh Blair's treatment of 146

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