Carruthers' The Craft of Thought and Implications for the Composition Classroom

In this post, I'm going to trace out, Carruthers' foundational ideas on memory and invention and then place those in juxtaposition with how memory's relationship with invention seems to play out in central theories within our field (such as critical pedagogy). Ultimately, I want to suggest that Carruthers provides as way for us to complicate how we understand memory in our society and suggests that memory's role in creation is both downplayed and flattened in theories of writing such as those evident in critical pedagogy.

In Chapter One, "Collective Memory and memoria rerum," Carruthers suggests that memory is the "mother of all muses." By this, Carruthers means that memory, although it appeared near the end of the "five" parts of rhetoric, actually comes in much earlier as invention, Carruthers suggests is contingent on our memory. Carruthers traces classical Greek teachings on memory to suggest that memory was not taught for the purposes of mindlessly repeating information on exams but rather instead to give students a way to invent from memory. Memoria, Carruthers suggests, "is most usefully thought of as a compositional art. The arts of memory are among the arts of thinking, especially involved with fostering the qualities we now revere as 'imagination' and 'creativity'" (9). The distinction between how we currently think about memory in our teaching of composition was interesting to me because much of the earliest writing in critical pedagogy railed against teaching techniques that relied upon memory.

Of course, the cultural place of memory has now shifted so we might raise a question whether or not the Greeks' notion of cultural memory is relevant for us--would work for our means of teaching critical thinking or invention; yet, after reading Carruthers, I'm wondering if we can't better make use of a notion of memory as a means to invention within our own curriculum as we certainly seem to hold the parallel values as those lauded by Carruthers. How, though, would/could we draw from these without bumping up against the flattened vision of the role of memory now more pervasive in our culture. And one other quick point before moving on further in Carruthers' book: I've always been curious about how memory, in our contemporary contexts, is dealt with much differently in other disciplines. I remember in linguistics, for example, a professor who once gave a lecture on memorizing all of the information in our area within our field. "You'll need to do this to be a professor," he'd say. At the same time that I took that class, I was also enrolled in 701 and so I struggled with what he said; yet, I don't disagree that learned material or "memorized facts" are indeed deeply interwoven with "subject matter" classes such as linguistics or history, etc. I think Carruthers' text gives us a way to see this learning as having important and cultural outcomes and that's why I'm wondering about how we might hold onto some of this today even given the cultural shift in our sense of memory.

In her next section of Chapter 1, "Locational Memory," Carruthers details this shift in how we think about memory in our societies. She states that the Latin word, inventio, has come into English in two ways. The first of these ways means "to invent" or "to have an inventive mind" (i.e. to be creative) yet, the second is "inventory". Carruthers posits that this etymological relationship reveals something important about how the Classical Greeks thought of invention: you must have inventory to create and invent.

Again here, we can see how this idea present in Classical society could be used to trouble some of the current approaches to teaching composition in our field. If we choose to "wallow in complexity" or present texts to our students in ways that highlight their ambiguous nature, I'm afraid that we're losing some rich potential for a shared sense or "memory" of this text as a tool for invention. This is not to say that we still don't use memory to invent; I think Carruthers would say we perhaps always are. Yet, it suggests that because we are not attuned to this relationship, because we don't value it, we can't make the best use of it even given the way that memory has culturally shifted in our culture.

In the next two sections of her text, Carruthers distinguishes her sense of locational memory from a different sense of memoria that centered on memories that only referenced what had happened in the past. She then goes on in the next section of her text, to tie the concept of inventio with that of intentio (15). Here, Carruthers explains that the concept of intentio was bound to a sense of "charity" in monasteries and that this notion then bound emotion to facts in our mind. Intentio was bound to location and we were only able to access these in tandem with one another. This then leads Carruthers fourth section "Like a Wise Master Builder" where Carruthers explains that architectural features of buildings served as a means of invention and not simply retrieval. Carruthers argues that at the same time as locational memory and our inventions of them are private in that they are built in the networks of our minds, they are also public and civic due to the fact that all buildings contained similar building materials (21).

The importance of locational memory is interesting here not only because it demonstrates how our material conditions shape our thoughts but because it, as Carruthers' chapter aims to, displays that concepts which we in our field have thought of as dangerous or opposed to critical thinking actually have a history that is aligned with it. That is, although the notion of locational memory isn't in use today, perhaps we should attempt to re-think some of these historical relationships as a means to push our thinking about concepts like memory in different directions that could support the social aims of composition. But then I wonder about the actual possibility of this given, as I mentioned before, our differently situated place of memory.