A brief overview of invention...

As promised, all of the readings for this week seemed to complicate our sense of invention in some interesting ways. For me, one of the most useful purposes of the readings for this week is that I am beginning to see how these readings are inter-linked more clearly than before. For example, Hawhee's discussion of the middle seemed to capitalize on our earlier discussions around audience and Lauer's chapters discussed the ways in which Toulmin and P & O-T's notion of argument helped lead up to the renaissance of discussions of invention in our field.

While Lauer's text complicated our sense of audience through offering a historical overview of the many different ways to see invention's nature, purpose and epistemology, and tracing the ways in which these have been present or absent in our field, most interestingly since the 60s, Hawhee's writing troubled the ways in which we have come to see invention and works to discuss this through her concept of the "middle" and in light of postmodern theories. Hawhee's idea of the middle, as stated above, trouble the ways in which we see invention happening in relationship to the inside and outside and thus her writing has some relationship to Arabella Lyon's notion of rhetoric, which is coming from a feminist position. Lyon offers us the idea of negotiating rhetorical approaches to invention with hermeneutic approaches to invention. By tracing the ideas of Gadamer and Mailloux, Lyon suggests that rhetorical reading is one way in which we can see distinctions between the rhetor (or speaker) and the reader. Whereas Hawhee's work seeks to clarify then, where invention comes from and to trouble and loosen these divisions through the notion of a middle, Lyon seeks to look at the process of invention itself to complicate traditional divisions between production and consumption; writing and reading. For Lyon, who is engaged in revisionist dialogues, this notion of invention becomes one that lends itself to more inclusion.

I know that this is not an exhaustive overview by any means, but for this sake of moving on, I'll have to come back to these ideas in more detail through and in relationship to other concepts.