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

A quarter of a century ago, Lloyd Bitzer initiated what would become a critical conversation in rhetoric with his description of a rhetorical situation. Embedded in this conversation was the issue of a situation's "reality" and its relationship to genuine rhetoricality, for in setting out the parameters that define a "real" rhetorical situation, Bitzer makes reference to "unreal" situations that only appear to be rhetorical 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 rhetorical 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 rhetorical 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, rhetorical writing curricula invite what has been called "pseudotransactionality" or the illusion of rhetorical 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