Wistful and Admiring: The Rhetoric of Combination

Abstract

In the opening sentence of the preface to the second edition of The Writer’s Options, Daiker, Kerek, and Morenberg refer to the “composing process,” 1 and there is, I think, a useful distinction to be made here. If the composing process refers to the quirks and behaviors, the observable drama of a writer’s work on a text, the combining process refers to an intellectual activity, perhaps an activity of the imagination, that is sometimes linguistic and sometimes rhetorical. The purpose of this paper is to examine the outlines and the potential of a combinatory rhetoric, a rhetoric of combinations. While The Writer’s Options allows for such a rhetoric (and I want to suggest that it is, at least potentially, a radical rhetoric), I am not sure that it teaches it overtly. But, as Emerson reminded the American scholar, “One must be an inventor to read well” and, by reading well, to free a lesson from its educational package.

The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar must needs stand wistful and admiring before this great spectacle. He must settle its value in his mind.

— Emerson, “The American Scholar”