Lauer, Janice.  Invention in Rhetoric and Composition.  West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2004. Print.

Chapter 1 – Introduction and Overview:  L. notes in the introduction the focus of the book and then continues to define invention a couple of different ways: as a solution to the “problem of finding subjects to write about and of developing these subjects” as well as something that “provides guidance in how to begin writing, to explore for ideas and arguments, to frame insights, and to examine the writing situation” (1).  She also notes that invention is the only canon of rhetoric that directly addresses the content as well as the process of creation.

L. concedes that there are some differing interpretations about what exactly rhetorical invention encompasses: exploratory activity, argumentative development, research of materials, the development of intertextual support for argumentation, etc.  Scholars also debate whether invention is social or individual as well as to what extent invention is affected by social, political, and economic conditions.  Scholars also debate whether invention is hermeneutic (involved in interpretation and critique of new texts) or heuristic (finding materials to produce new texts) or both.  The problem of inventional epistemology lies in the question of whether invention creates new knowledge or only allows for the discovery of arguments and materials that support or convey judgments already reached elsewhere by other scholars/critics.

Lauer’s work also considers the different takes on inventional pedagogy.  These questions revolve around whether invention is an art that can be taught or a natural ability to be nurtured.  Further, the problem of heuristics (are they effective, which ones, why?) is also wrapped up in questions of the role of invention in pedagogy.

Chapter 2 – Definitions:  This section will best be served with a list.

1. Invention – in the Aristotelian sense, this term mean the examination of alternatives: different ways to begin writing and to explore writing situations; diverse ideas, arguments, appeals, and subject matters for reaching new understandings and/or for developing and supporting judgments, theses and insights; and different ways of framing and verifying these judgments (6-7).
2. Kairos – the right moment; the right place.  Inherently tied to dissoi logoi or the two contradictory propositions on every matter.  This means that kairos would play into the process of arguing for one of the two sides or dissoi logoi.
3. Topoi – the topics or lines of argument and categories of information that were effective for persuasion.
4. Epistemic – the construction of knowledge through discourse
5. Heuristics – the study of the processes of discovery.  Heuristics operate in tandem with intuition, prior consciousness, and act as guides, not outcomes.
6. Intertextuality – the interdependence of texts as sources of their meaning.
7. Signifying practices – the means by which a community produces and analyzes meaning.

Chapter 3 – Historical Review: Issues in Rhetorical Invention :  L. identifies three strands or takes on invention in the Greek era:

1. Sophists: the sophists embraced a concept of invention that emphasized kairos, and subscribed to a dissoi logoi epistemology (or relativist/constructivist perhaps).
2. Plato’s views on invention:  In the Pheadrus, Plato identifies four different things that can initialize discourse: 1) inspiration of the muses; 2) dissonance between two speeches; 3) kairotic adaptation to the souls of an attendant audience; and 4) love.  Epistemologically speaking, people have differed on whether Plato considered invention a mere heuristical process or if invention served as a space for creating knowledge via inquiry and reasoning wherein dialectic led to discovery or a “rhetoric of inquiry.”
3. Invention in Aristotle:  A. saw invention as useful through the use of the common topoi, the special topics (epideictic, forensic, deliberative), the enthymeme, and deductive and inductive treatments of the example (19).  Aristotle also employed the process of stasis to come to discovery.  Scholars have also argued about the epistemological in A.’s treatment of the topoi in invention arguing that – much like Plato – the topics served as ways to discover new knowledge and ways to call back into relevance already extant knowledge.

L. discusses the Roman take on invention via specific textual considerations:

a.   The Rhetorica ad Herennium advocated the use of status to see if the issue at stake was       conjectural (an issue of fact), legal (the law), or juridical (rightness or wrongness of an act).

b.   Cicero’s work in De Oratore and De Inventione note the importance of status and of the        topoi.    Cicero’s writings also highlight his own “probable epistemology” that revealed rhetoric’s               preeminent position over philosophy in ancient Rome.

c. Overall, the Roman rhetoricians emphasized status and topoi in the invention process.  According to L., invention was “largely viewed as finding support for judgments and material for sections of the text” (28).

L. next considers the second sophistic, medieval and renaissance era.  L. notes that the 2^nd sophistic – so known because of the emphasis during this period on decoration, ornamentation, and eloquence – produced few advances in rhetorical inventional theory and relegated invention to ceremonial discourse.  The death of much relativist epistemology occurred as a result of the spread of Christianity’s doctrine of universal, Divine truth during the medieval period.  This resulted in the use invention by scholars to provide scriptural exegesis via the hermeneutic.  Invention was further marginalized in the renaissance era when it was relegated to vernacular texts, banished by Ramus from the rhetorical canon to take a place in the sphere of logic (scientistic discourse), and relegated by Bacon to heuristical activity for discovering the already known (and therefore anti-epistemological).

L. claims that the 18^th and 19^th centuries did little for rhetorical invention.  Because of the predominance of common sense realism, the probable or relativist epistemologies were considered anathema (except by Giambattista Vico, who retained a classical sense of rhetorical invention and probabalism).  In the 19^th century, the turn toward Romanticism – and the intuition and inspiration of the human spirit – again diminished the importance of rhetorical invention by stressing the personal as fountainhead of motivations to write.  In summa, this period saw the common sense realists relegating invention to the domain of logic while rhetoric was assigned to the act of communication.

In the section on pedagogy, L. begins by noting that rhetorical instruction has long been based around four pedagogical practices/assumptions: natural ability (provide encouraging contexts, motivating assignments, and extensive feedback but little instruction in composition), imitation (provide readings and examples as models for invention), practice (daily writing assignments that are often decontextualized), art (strategies and guides for invention were provided, knowledge is used as a guide to activities like rhetoric).

Chapter Four – Issues over the Nature, Purpose, and Epistemology of Rhetorical Invention in the Twentieth Century

This chapter chronicles the reemergence of rhetorical invention in the literary discourse-specific English department of the 1960s.  Interdisciplinary trends and contexts in the early to mid 20^th century set the scene for the reemergence of rhetorical invention in the second half of the century.  Working from Burke’s pentadic criticism and via I.A. Richards communications work on the contextual basis of meaning, some scholars began to consider symbolic language use not as a mode of knowledge, but as a mode of action.  This questioned the very heart of Cartesian and common sense epistemology.  Later scholars like Toulmin and Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca questioned the validity of formal reasoning and formal logic, creating new inroads back toward probable epistemological stances (and their attendant discursive manifestations).  Perelman’s work chastised Ramus’ banishment of invention from the rhetorical by restoring invention and disposition to an audience-specific, context-dependent role in the creation of texts.  After describing the revival of rhetorical invention in English department scholarship during the 1960s (74-5), L. describes the ongoing conversation – begun in 1967 with Robert Scott’s article “On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic” – about the knowledge creating / truth creating nature of rhetoric (76-7).  In the next section on “New Invention Theories in Rhetoric and Composition” L. describes new methods developing post 1950 in rhetorical invention scholarship:

1. Prewriting:  arguing against the “rhetoric of the finished word,” prewriting advocates characterized this process as one of self-discovery and self-actualization.
2. Classical invention:  these theories of invention emphasized status, the special/common topoi and the appeals in the creation and development of a written argument.
3. Tagmemic invention:  Stressing imaginative discovery, these strategies of invention used epistemological heuristics to explore how we come to know something and to encourage writers to move beyond the known.  This method allowed for the exploration of a subject from multiple perspectives (particle, wave, field), and also to consider the variation and contrast in the subjects being considered. 
4. Cognitive invention:  Flowers and Hayes’ work described that the goals of writing actually dictated the invention process (not the knowledge). 
5. Non-Rational Invention:  These theories of invention were characterized by intuitive and non-systematic inventional practices (86).  This viewed writing as a heuristic / invention method that actually encouraged further thinking. 
6. Burkean invention:  A late 70s, early 80s revival in pentad as invention heuristic, consubstantiality, and identification as invention strategies. 
7. Invention as hermeneutic:  This took invention work as a place to help writers interpret texts already written as opposed to using invention as a heuristic to construct new knowledges.  Mallioux noted that this method, “provides histories of how particular theoretical and critical discourses have evolved because persuasion always takes place in changing contexts of disputes” (92). 
8. Specific studies:  Lauer (1967), Emig (1971), Winterowd (1973), Berthoff (1972), D’Angelo (1975), Underwood (1980),

Finally, in the section on invention from the mid 1980s – the New Millennium L. considers how social construction, deconstruction, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and cultural studies challenged many of the precepts upon which rhetorical invention theory were built.  Some of these complications posited that writers are often written by language, invention is a social act, local knowledge bears on inventional activity, and how cultures and discourse communities affect rhetorical invention.  Considering the socially constitutive nature of invention, L. highlights how Bizzell and LeFevre linked the inventive act with broader socio-cultural processes revealing how social constructions of knowledge bear on the inventive process creating several versions of social invention (invention can occur within the self, with previous generations, in discourse communities, with imagined audiences, with evaluators, with collectives and with social contexts).

Considering  the poststructuralist, deconstructivist, and postmodern, L. notes that Berlin’s work (among others) highlights how the inventional work of rhetoric considers the subject as a construction of various signifying practices.  The study of the production and reception of those practices in a rhetorical context is inventional because it can allow for the discovery of the how language is being used in any particular historical moment (105).  Further deconstructive theories describe how discourse is constitutive or reality, language creates knowledge, agency is distributed, and the writer isn’t an autonomous self.  These theories of invention find their most postmodern articulations in Vitanza’s work on paralogy: a process of tracing outsider thought through to the modes, or social codes, that produce and represent the world (106).  Cultural theorists and compositionists with an interest in cultural studies have encouraged invention that considers how the structuring of multiple subjectivities (race, class, and gender for example) create positive analysis.

Chapter Five – Issues over Invention Pedagogies

L. notes that much of the research on rhetorical in vnetion in the 1960s and 1970s focused around the desire to understand how to better equip students with the tools to meet the tasks of selecting subjects, framing theses, and getting ideas and arguments to support their theses (120).  In order to weigh in on the question of heuristic vs. hermeneutic, in this chapter L. presents multiple different invention strategies and asks the following questions: 1) is this pedagogy designed to help writers to create new knowledge (epistemic) and reach new insights and judgments? Or is its purpose to help writers to find and deploy existing information and lines of argument to support theses or judgments already known? (123).  She also considers which of the four conceptions of writers/rhetoric (natural ability, practice, art, and imitation) these pedagogies fall into and how formulaic (algorithmic) or trial and error (aleatory) their procedures are.  The later portions of this chapter consider invention in multiple contexts: WAC (137-8), visual rhetoric (141-2), online invention (139-40), feminist inventional practices (142), and pedagogies of deconstruction, cultural studies, and postmodernism (142-5).