no meaning. Let us reveal this connection between framing, rhetoric and drama more slowly, and
then come back to the place of drama in Moffett’s universe of discourse. It is clear that framing
operates in theatre: there is an edge between the performance by the actors and the space in which
the audience sits or stands. That line or frame can be transgressed, but the transgression, for
whatever function, is always consciously made. There is also framing in time in that a play lasts for a
particular amount of time, during which there is a suspension of disbelief (unless you are watching
Brecht or Brechtian-style theatre) or, more positively, a willingness on the part of the audience to
engage with the fiction. So formal theatre is highly framed in space and time, and also institutionally
in that it involves going to a theatre; it is a social occasion. But even informal theatre, carried out on
a street or in a small show by children for parents and friends (and thus close to play) is framed by
space and time. There may not be a curtain or even a line on the ground, but the performance is
separate from the current of everyday life and demands a different kind of attention.
The point about this diversion into drama and rhetoric is that Moffett’s conception is deeply
rhetorical in the sense that dialogue and exchange are at the heart of the English project, but that
the additional dimension or act of framing is underplayed by Moffett. It would fit well with his
overall conception, but like much of the book, the ideas flow sequentially but not always
systematically.
Another connection between the conception of speech and drama at the centre of English activity is
Moffett’s statement “I am asking the reader to associate dialogue with dialectic” (p82). Bypassing
the nuances and complexities of the etymologies here, the connection between dialogue in everyday
discourse and the oppositional, ideological dimensions of dialectic is an important one in terms of
abstraction, and specifically with regard to argumentation (which, as a mode of operation in a
rationalist universe, is closely allied to the rhetoric of persuasion). What Moffett is implying, I think,
is that everyday exchanges, however seemingly insignificant, are indicative of larger dialectical
moves: the to-ing and fro-ing of everyday exchange is like the puntal and contrapuntal rhythms of
dialectic. Moffett does not expand on this connection, but it is fairly clear that everyday speech has
all the hallmarks of drama and dialectic in more consciously framed worlds: the dramatic/dialectic
level informs everyday speech, and provides the humanist framework within which discourse
operates. From thence, the natural curriculum movement is from dialogue to vocal monologue to
written monologue and then on to the other forms of written discourse. In English curricular terms,
it makes sense; is exciting; and is difficult, for students, in making those transitions. In cognitive
psychological terms, the sequence is Vygotskian. In rhetorical terms, the addition of speech and
drama to the panoply of written forms that derive from Bain - and the demonstration of the
connection of speech and drama to those written forms - is a brilliant move that re-connects
‘English’ to the rhetorical tradition, re-making rhetoric for the needs of the contemporary English
classroom.
The section on rhetoric
Embedded (a key term for Moffett, even though he was reacting against sentence combining and
embedding) in the chapter on drama and speech is a section on ‘Rhetoric’. At first, Moffett seems to
see rhetoric as “the ways in which a person attempts to act on another” (p115). It appears that he
thinks that “the tremendously important art of manipulating other people” (ibid.) - let’s call this,