1. Constituencies: those who participate in disciplinary communities.
2. Exemplars: what a discipline "studies." They are related to Kuhnian "paradigms," which he describes as "concrete puzzle-solutions." Exemplars in the humanities (literary studies, in particular) may be texts; they help define "subject matter," and they exist in a mutually constitutive relationship with the next element.
3. Methodologies/practices: strategies used to "explore" exemplars.

The relationship between methodologies and exemplars is mutually constitutive, indeed, somewhat tautological. A methodology helps solve a problem in, or asks a question about, an exemplar; and an exemplar embodies solutions and answers. Conflicts concerning literary canons are contests over the choice and character of the exemplars that define the discipline. While exemplars in the humanities may be particularly well defined in the form of texts, the methodologies that secure them can range widely from the tacit to the explicit. One example of an explicit methodology is Roman Jakobson's formalist analysis, which consists in determining the conceptual oppositions that are (by this theory) the source of a poem's form. This methodology reflected modernist assumptions about meaning, context, and form; and, in keeping with the tautological character of exemplars and methodologies, it also privileged and thus secured lyric poetry as important disciplinary content (or subject matter) in literary studies.

Many humanistic traditions have fostered far less explicit methodologies for securing exemplars. Kuhn observes that a paradigm as a "puzzle solution" can "replace explicit rules" to secure the stability of a discipline (175). Especially disciplinary traditions that privilege "taste" depend on the habituation (or enculturation) of constituencies to recognize an exemplar's "inherent" truth and/or beauty. This interpretive stability is thus achieved by maintaining the homogeneity of the constituency, by both controlling access and thoroughly training new "entrants" to embody the community's values and practices. While the relationship between methodologies and exemplars is variable, and thus ambiguous, the distinction, I think, is worth making because it discloses what a disciplinary community believes can be assumed, habituated, and taught.

Though Young did not use the terms "exemplar" and "methodology," his 1982 "Concepts of Art and the Teaching of Writing" is largely a comparison of John Genung's and Aristotle's notions of rhetoric's exemplars and methodologies. By Young's account, Genung's concept of rhetoric is basically belletristic, structured by the binary opposition of creativity to skill, which Genung describes as "mechanics." Rhetoric, on the other hand, is "literature in the making," according to Genung, "concerned, as real authorship must be, not with a mere grammatical apparatus or with Huxley's logic engine, but with the whole man, his outfit of conviction and emotion, imagination and will, translating himself, as it were into a vital and ordered utterance" (in Young 130). Thus, rhetoric's "exemplar" is the creative spirit, the source of the literary canon without being strictly equivalent to it.

The methodologies (or practices) franchised by Genung are found at two extremes of the trivial and the sublime. In keeping with the belletristic tradition of taste, Genung maintains that what is most important about creativity cannot be made explicit by way of teachable methodologies or practices: "the work of origination must be left to the writer himself [sic]" (in Young 130). Rhetoric may "treat of those mental habits and powers which give firmness and system to his [the writer's] suggestive faculty" (in Young 130-31). In other words, accounts or theories of creativity may be within the province of rhetoric to the extent that they affirm and reproduce literary values. Knowledge that more directly enables discourse production is restricted to rules, in the domain of "skills." Thus, the "subject matter" of rhetoric remains sublime to the extent that it is literary; its methodology, on the other hand, is trivial to the extent that it is explicit.

In these terms, rhetoric's exemplars are defined by practices that can hardly be other than social. Rhetorical art is calibrated to performances that change over time, and its principles become "mechanical" skills only when they are extricated from temporal contexts. In other words, by Young's and Aristotle's definitions, arts must always be in the process of being revised. Rhetoric has "subject matter" in the conventional sense only to the extent that as an art it restricts its focus to specific practices. To the extent that social practices are dynamic, however, even a restricted focus would not produce the kind of stable subject matter we identify with traditional disciplines.

The attempt to determine an exemplar for rhetoric appears throughout Enculturation's discussion of rhetoric and composition, bearing witness to the shaping force of some of the same oppositions that guided Genung's notion of rhetoric. Frequently, "composition" stands in for "skill," whereas "rhetoric" is identified with subject matter or disciplinary content. The discussions of Christine Farris and Krista Ratcliffe suggest that these oppositions have special force in the institution of first-year writing. Indeed, first-year writing would appear to be defined by the reduction of the study of discourse practices to the level of "skill", a reduction that would seem to both a symptom and cause of excising the study of discourse from social practices. When this happens, in the context and terms of the institution as it is, the subject matter of rhetoric, more or less, disappears. Farris says as much in the following observation: "Hope for rhetoric can lie beyond the first-year English composition course; concepts like rhetorical situation and genre start to make sense when students in writing-intensive courses examine how other disciplines and professions engage in specialized practices." She does not uncritically accept this institutional "differend," pointing to efforts to redefine the province of discourse studies by Debra Dew and David Russell. As Farris notes, Dew has suggested that composition be "retooled as 'rhetoric and writing studies,' a 'disciplinary content' course," and Russell has argued that writing courses take as their subject "'the role of writing in human activities.'" On the whole, however, Farris's analysis points to the conceptual and institutional obstacles to dismantling the subject matter/skill opposition.

At base, the concept of art is relatively simple: it is concerned with determining the generic features of social practices in order to engage those practices. From this perspective, the rhetoric/composition distinction has relatively little meaning, for however either term is defined it may be the subject of art if it is related to social practices. I do not mean to set up art as a kind of orthodoxy against which other interpretations of rhetoric/composition should be evaluated. I do suggest that the concept of art may redefine, or at least productively complicate, some of the terms that have determined our attempts to interrogate and explain the distinction between rhetoric and composition.

Notes