Abstract

In the name of writing, academic battles are waged over disciplinary boundaries, institutional budgets, accredited curriculum, and faculty priorities. In the name of writing, students are hailed into being in the midst of these pathological contests and often suffer the immeasurable effects of a system that markets morality, manufactures mediocrity, and sells more textbooks than most disciplines combined. It is the purpose of this study to identify and trace the one concept in current rhetoric and composition theories that most effectively manifests the pathology at work in the "industry" of composition studies. The concept of ethos yields a particularly rich and often disturbing view of the current state of writing instruction. The focus of this study is on the link that binds ethos and virtue such that morality and subjectivity have become inextricably bound together. Moreover, its basic concern lies in the fact that current composition pedagogy continues to teach about ethos without questioning this link. This study of ethos not only examines the traditional link between morality and the 'individual,' 'the self,' or 'the ethical subject'; but, it also discerns the ethos of a field of inquiry that perpetuates that link. In short, this study of ethos moves from individual to field, from 'subject' to community of discourse. The methodological aim is to traverse the terrain of ethos from tradition to countertradition. The goal is to create a disturbance in the ethos of rhetoric and composition by revealing the logocentric nature of its ethos as a field, and by disclosing its investment in an individual ethos wedded to a logic of morality and responsibility. When we teach writing, we teach a way of being, and that way of being bears investigation