Spinning like a Kite: A Closer Look at the Pseudotransactional Function of Writing.

Abstract

A quarter of a century ago, Lloyd Bitzer initiated what would become a critical conversation in rhetoric with his description of a situation. Embedded in this conversation was the issue of a situation's and its relationship to genuine rhetoricality, for in setting out the parameters that define a real situation, Bitzer makes reference to unreal situations that only appear to be and argued that neither the fictive situation nor the discourse generated by it is rhetorical (11). A few years later, Richard Vatz's well-known response to Bitzer countered that no situation can have a nature independent of the perception of its inter preter ... and that the reality of a situation is not objective but rather depends on the rhetor's desire and ability to create it (154). The debate has recessed, but in this paper I wish to argue that the issue of what constitutes a genuine exigence continues to pose a vital challenge to fields such as writing. I will begin with the premise that the ubiquitous rhetorical-writing classroom encourages unauthentic writing.1 Given certain commonsense constraints on writing instruction, writing curricula invite what has been called pseudotransactionality or the illusion of transaction (Tamor and Bond). I then broadly sketch two ways in which the writing field has reacted to the issue of pseudotransactionality. The first type of reaction, which I label denial, either presumes that students are engaged in genuine transactions or else trivializes the obstacles to transactionality engendered by classroom exigen