Katherine Gossett's Thesis on Memory--"The Forgotten Canon"

The following are the first two chapters of:

THE FORGOTTEN CANON: MEMORY IN A DIGITAL AGE
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A University Thesis Presented to the Faculty
of
California State University, Hayward
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By
Katherine E. Gossett
December, 1998

"I. The Rhetorical Tradition

Classical rhetoric has been called the "most complete critical system that has ever been devised for the analysis and production of discourse" (Welch, "Classical" 3). Although there is no definitive origin of rhetoric, its concepts and practices can be found in treaties from antiquity to the present. It has survived "2500 years [of] attacks and misrepresentation, accommodated the views of the strictest constructionists and most liberal interpreters, and managed to remain pertinent to Western rhetorical theory despite fundamental cultural transitions from orality to literacy to electronic technology" (Reynolds, "Issues" 1).
At the heart of classical rhetoric are the five canons: invention (inventio, heurisis), arrangement (dispositio, taxis), style (elocutio, lexis), memory (memoria, mneme), and delivery (actio, hypokrisis). If rhetoric is the discipline, then each canon is a sub-discipline. Together, they provide a structure that allows us to study, analyze and generate discourse (Welch, "Ideology" 270). Separately, each canon may be studied, expanded on, and practiced to the exclusion of the others. It is the very malleability of these canons that has allowed rhetoric to survive and flourish through the many cultural transitions of the past twenty-five centuries.
The use of rhetoric as a tool is first evidenced by the works of Korax and Teisias around 500 BCE, which was then passed down to the ancient Sophists (Ueding and Steinbrink 11). Later, this tool was taken, refined, and codified by rhetors like Aristotle, Aspasia, Cicero, and Quintillian. These rhetors used the canons to fashion great oratories for political, legal, or civic purposes. During the medieval period, rhetoric "disintegrated into highly specialized disciplines" (Vickers 238). The process of invention was relegated to scientific discovery, arrangement and style became mostly grammatical in nature (when they were addressed at all), memory became the "noblest of all these, the basis for all the rest" (Carruthers 9), and delivery all but disappeared.

As the humanists searched for knowledge and enlightenment during the Renaissance, the canons were reunited to form a complete process of inquiry, discovery, and creation. The reintegration of the canons lasted until the Industrial era when the canon of invention, as the precursor to scientific theory, exerted its dominance (Yates 369). "This disintegration," wrote Vickers in 1988, "has persisted until our time, although we may now be seeing the beginnings of a second renaissance in rhetoric" (215). Unfortunately, Vickers may have been a bit premature in heralding this second renaissance. Return to TOC

II. The Fourth Canon
Wresting Memory from the Rhetorical Tradition
Although rhetoric remained popular as a pedagogical tool from the 17th to the 19th century, each discipline that made use of rhetorical practices continued to focus on specific canons, producing "unconscious, imbedded, implicit, partial, or oversimplified versions of the canons . . . [thus promoting] a truncated version of the five classical canons" (Reynolds, "Issues" 2). Most of the rhetorical systems that emerged during these centuries easily adapted invention, arrangement, and style, but usually deleted the more problematical canons of memory and delivery.

A standard explanation for the removal of memory and delivery from the five canons relies on a simplistic idea that the burgeoning power of writing made memory and delivery less relevant because those two canons are said to be more powerful in orally dominant cultures. (Welch, "Reconfiguring" 19)
In the mid-19th century, rhetoric found a home within the Belles Lettres movement and flourished through the end of that century. In the early 20th century, however, with the rise of the "composing-as-tool" metaphor at such institutions as Harvard and Yale, rhetoric fell into disuse and was relegated to the speech and communication departments (Grierson 22). The canons of invention and style remained prominent, arrangement and delivery received marginal treatment, if at all, and memory was dropped from the textbooks (Reynolds, "Issues" 3). Rhetoric remained in this state until Edward J. Corbett wrote his groundbreaking book Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student in 1965.
In his article, "Memory Issues in Composition Studies," John Frederick Reynolds gives Edward J. Corbett the dubious honor of being "classical rhetoric's best-known and most distinguished modern advocate," as well as being one of the most instrumental scholars in wresting memory from modern rhetorical studies (4). "Ironically, in all editions of his influential book (1965, 1971, 1991) Corbett revived the canon of memory only long enough to dismiss it, defining it as 'memorizing'" (4). Corbett's only mention of memory in all of his editions is as follows:

The fourth part of rhetoric was memoria (Greek, mneme) concerned with the memorizing of speeches. Of all the five parts of rhetoric, memoria was the one that received the least attention in the rhetoric books. The reason for the neglect of this aspect of rhetoric is probably that not much can be said, in a theoretical way, about the process of memorizing; and after rhetoric came to be concerned mainly with written discourse, there was no further need to deal with memorizing . . . There will be no consideration in this book of this aspect of rhetoric. (38)
Corbett's easy dismissal of memory as "memorizing" in 1965 is a shame, but his continued dismissal of this canon in his 1971 and 1991 editions is disturbing and confusing, especially given other scholars' writings on the subject (not to mention his own later discussions on this topic).
The continued excising of memory from rhetoric, according to Welch, can be directly attributed to the success of Corbett's book and the "textbook tradition" ("Reconfiguring" 19). Most textbooks are based on tried-and-true material, not exciting or breakout theory and research. Generations of students, some of whom have become the instructors of today, have been weaned on this truncated version of the canons, and have further contributed to the emasculation of rhetoric. Contrary to this tradition, however, Welch argues that "memory [does] not wither with the growing dominance of writing; rather it changes form. With the increasing empowerment of writing, memory [simply takes] on different attributes" ("Reconfiguring" 19).

Restoring Memory to the Rhetorical Tradition
Just as scholars previously labored intensively to wrest the fourth canon from the study of rhetoric, new and emerging scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition have begun laboring to restore the canon to the fold.

"How greatly we misunderstand when we reduce ancient and medieval memoria to 'memorization'" (Carruthers 1). In The Book of Memory, Carruthers states that in ancient times, memory was the central canon upon which all the others were based. In order to have invention, you must first have thoughts, or memory. To have arrangement, you must recall, or remember, your arguments and place them in the most logical order. To add style to your argument requires a knowledge and application of stylistic and grammatical rules, and finally, to deliver your argument well, you must remember it. Carruthers is not alone in her supposition.
In 1966, Frances A. Yates wrote her masterful analysis of the fourth canon The Art of Memory, in which she traced memory from Aristotle and Cicero to Descartes and Leibniz. Beginning with Latin and Greek sources, she also showed that memory was much more than memorizing. John Frederick Reynolds summarized Yates' opening chapters in his article "Concepts of Memory in Contemporary Composition."

Yates traced complex, multiple, interrelated notions of rhetorical memory to antiquity. The classical art, she explained, had involved much more than memorizing: It had included improving the memory (2), imprinting on the memory (3), memorizing in order (3, 7), making memorable (9), holding in memory (12), retrieving from memory (34), delivering from memory (6), and preserving in memory (45). Memory, she noted, had been viewed in antiquity as being critical to invention (5, 12, 34, 45), arrangement (3, 4, 7), style (8), and delivery (6, 7). Memory was the loci of the topoi for Aristotle (31), and the connection to the divinity of the soul for Plato (36, 37). Memory was the custodian of all of the parts of rhetoric to the author of the Ad Herennium (5) . . . the "groundwork of the whole" to Plato (37). (246)
In addition, Yates provides a detailed examination of the two types of memory defined by the author of Ad Herennium: the natural memory, "that which is engrafted in our minds, born simultaneously with thought," and artificial memory, that which is "a memory strengthened or confirmed by training" (5). The Ad Herennium further states that "A good natural memory can be improved by [training the artificial memory] and persons less well endowed can have their weak memories improved by the art" (5). Yates goes on to trace the significance of training the artificial memory from antiquity to the sixteenth century, and concludes that:

The serious investigation of this forgotten art may be said to have only just begun. Such subjects do not have behind them, as yet, an apparatus of organized modern scholarship; they do not belong [in] the normal curricula and so they are left out. The art of memory is a clear case of a marginal subject, not recognized as belonging to any of the normal disciplines, having been omitted because it was no one's business. And yet it has turned out to be, in a sense, everyone's business . . . The artificial memory as part of rhetoric belongs [in] the rhetorical tradition. (389)
While both Carruthers and Yates provide thorough, insightful studies into the art of memory, it must be said that both of their works deal clearly with the history of the art (Carruthers with medieval scholasticism, Yates with ancient, medieval, and renaissance scholasticism) and cultures that were predominantly oral in nature. The need for an excellent memory is clear in cultures whose communication is primarily oral, and whose scholarly canon was available only to a select few. Yet in an age of literacy and secondary orality, when the cultural and scholastic canons are made available to entire populations in millions of books, on the Internet, and through the World Wide Web (WWW), what does memory mean?"